16. Dachau; Brugges; Good Friday

Wednesday 15 April.  Munchen.  Notes:

Italy and Germany: where poplar trees were meant to grow.

Germany is weeks behind spring's advance in Italy.  Daffodils just coming up here.  It must be two or three weeks behind even England.

Thomas: "If you break the law I will put you in jail."

Finished reading the Passion narratives Tuesday.

Dachau today.  Munchen in Bavaria (Bayerische), colorful and new. 

Early German art to Dürer yesterday at Alte Pinakothek, history of art from religious objects to art for people, big saints, big people.  Netherlands realism vs. Renaissance in Italy.  Do they meet in Germany?

Hotel room: hundred yards or so from station.  Outside room is neon hotel light across the street, just like the movies.

"Moonlighting" on TV in German, before was "Three Musketeers" and "Odd Couple."

Raymond Mayer, Jesuit who spoke out against Hitler.

210,000 dead at Dachau.  30,000 prisoners liberated.  Robert had a lot of questions!

Thought today: I try to be too much like Christ and not enough like myself.  That's why I'm always trying to pray for everyone, trying to solve the problems of violence in the world, wishing for a global solution.  I can't forgive everyone, I can't pray for everyone, it's not possible.  Christ can.  Perhaps I can work on asking him to pray for me and forgive me.  He knows everyone's needs, I do not.  But try to work on understanding his forgiveness, as well as his power.  (It is his, not mine.)

 German hard to understand, though perhaps I am just used to seeing and hearing French (and romance) so often over the years, never German.

 Love those 20 letter long German words!

 Painful, but constructive financial chat with Cathy last night.  Progress!

 Friday 16 April, Good Friday.  Munchen to Brugge, Belgium.  Hotel: Brugge Zuid Novotel, Chartreuseweg 20.8200, Sint-Michiels, Brugge. 

 Good Friday.  17 April.  10:15 a.m. Novotel, Brugge, Belgium.  Thomas and I are in the room.  Everyone else is eating breakfast downstairs.

 Thought: Jesus says, "Come to me all who are weary and want rest."  I never thought of myself as needing or wanting rest, but I see now, perhaps it is a weariness from mental and spiritual anguish as much as physical.

The idea occurred to me the other day that a lawyer such as myself is engaged in the modern equivalent of the shoe maker or factory worker of prior generations.  I am engaged in an intellectual service industry which is now more of a bureaucracy (commercial) than a champion of justice.  I am a day laborer in the garden, nothing special.  I pay the price not so much in physical hardship.  I have little of that.  I pay instead in time devoted to my work.  All of this is simply by way of saying that, in the late 20th century being a lawyer is nothing special.

But, to the first point, I'm making progress.  I think I can at last see how I do need the peace of Christ.

I was thinking just before I opened this book how tomorrow or Sunday or Monday I'll open all the mail and plug my computer back in, balance the check book and become familiar with my keyboard once again.  I will have grown out of practice; and how, looking at the trees, nature, my relationship with simple nature, is the only thing I keep up day by day (together, I hope, with my relationship with Christ; but that is a more evolving relationship). 

Noted: I think I've come to see how to have a personal relationship with Christ.