“The sacredness of the everyday,” was the answer that tumbled out. I didn’t expect to say that. I didn’t know I had even thought that line. But there it was. I was an appreciative observer of the sacredness of the everyday.
Turning to Noelle I asked, “Was that line used at one of the museums yesterday in connection with one of the Dutch painters?”
“No, I think you used that term when we were watching the milkmaid pour from her pitcher.”
“That’s right. Her simple act seemed so pristinely noble.”
“You said she was reflecting the sacredness of the everyday or something like that.”
She nodded toward the dish of small Gouda samples. “Did you try the cheese? Gouda is made in the Netherlands. In the south. It has more of a mild taste than sharp. Some varieties taste a little smoky to me. You should try some. It’s going to be more distinct than what you would find at home.”
I still was basking in the thought about the sacredness of the everyday. Every day unfolded with moments when the eternal seemed to touch the temporal. Light overcame darkness. Hope triumphed over despair. Nothing here in the earthly realm changed. But God somehow touched people, places, and moments, and the everyday became a glimpse of heaven.
“It’s like Corrie and the Hiding Place,” I said to Noelle, ignoring her offer of cheese. “Or the tulip fields. Or even the painting of our little milkmaid. Common, yes. Unsuspecting, yes. But so beautiful. Like a glimpse of heaven out of the corner of your eye.”
Noelle leaned back and examined my expression.
“The sacredness of the everyday,” I repeated since she obviously wasn’t on the same track I was on. I had left her standing on the platform and was riding this train of thought as far as it would take me.
She didn’t say anything. That was one of Noelle’s traits I was coming to appreciate. She was good at just being. She didn’t require a lot of details or explanations. Nor did she offer many of the same. But her actions and her words matched up.
Noelle was a living example of the sacredness of the everyday.
With a slow-rising grin she said, “You are learning to be Dutch, Summer. You say what you think, put it out there for discussion. That’s how we do it.”
I didn’t know if I was ready to put a lot of my thoughts out there for discussion, but this one clear thought comforted me. The sacredness of the everyday. God allowed us little glimpses of heaven here on earth.
“Noelle, do you have any paper? I need to remember this.”
“I think so.” She rifled through her purse and pulled out a small flip notepad. Adding a pen in the other hand, she said, “Go ahead. I’ll take notes. What do you want to remember?”
I reiterated the thoughts about the sacredness of the everyday and how these glimpses of beauty are moments when the eternal breaks through into the temporal.
“Got it,” Noelle said, reading the notes she had taken.
“Here’s my other thought. Write this down too, will you? Is it possible that planted inside each of us is a yearning for heaven? Is that why we’re drawn to beauty and sacredness whenever we find it in temporal things?”
Noelle tore off the pages from her notebook. “Your thoughts, my friend.”
I looked at what she had written and felt warmed. With so much of our communication being via e-mail, it had been a long time since I’d seen Noelle’s familiar, slanted cursive writing. In all our years of exchanging thoughts, we’d never had this luxury of completing the thought and writing it for a personal hand-off
I would treasure this simple piece of paper. Not so much because of my formulating thoughts that were recorded there, but because Noelle had written them and then handed the paper to me.
“Now, to complete your moment of personal enlightenment, I still think you should try some of this cheese.”
“Okay, which one should I try first?”
Noelle stuck with her original suggestion of trying the Gouda.
I chewed the small square slowly and thought of the young, grateful woman who had sat across from me at the farm. The taste of the soft, mild cheese was similar to the simple jack cheese I bought at home by the pound. Although the Gouda had a deeper flavor. A broader aftertaste.
“Do you like it?”
I nodded. What I liked more than the taste of the cheese was that all my senses were involved. This seemed to be a high value for Noelle and Jelle, as I had learned from my meals with them. Food was not for wolfing down so you could run out the door refueled. Meals were for conversation and fellowship. Food was for enjoyment and discovery of tastes and textures and lingering sensations on the palette.
The Gouda certainly left a lingering sensation on my palette. We moved on to a more-intense-flavored white cheese followed by a cracker. In five minutes Noelle had led me on a circular tour of Dutch cheese, and we were back where we had started, by the refrigerated case with the Gouda.
In the same way she didn’t ask me at the museum which painting I liked best, she didn’t ask for an evaluation of the cheeses. The experience seemed to be simply for the opportunity to observe, taste, and appreciate.
I wanted to cap off the moment somehow. I had just experienced a sampling of God’s immense creation. My mind was in a place of appreciating the Lord’s everyday goodness, even in such things as stinky cheese and light coming through a store window. I felt the need for the equivalent of an amen to this everyday act of worship.
What sufficed for the moment was the use of the nutcracker and a single, perfectly balanced walnut. It cracked right down the middle. The nutmeat fell into my hand, and with that, my sense of taste seemed to say, “Amen.”
Noelle collected a few things in the shop to buy. I didn’t. Again, I didn’t want to carry heavy items around with me all day. She seemed used to doing this sort of shopping and walking, which once again explained why she was decidedly fitter than I.
Then I glanced at the nutcracker. The sun had moved, or perhaps it was I who had moved the nutcracker out of the direct path of the light. The metal no longer lit up with that hint of the sacred that had captured my thoughts when we first entered the shop.
I wanted to remember that. It wasn’t the nutcracker that was holy. It was the touch of the eternal that bathed the utensil with light. It was the momentary reflection of that light that made the common tool beautiful.
In a way that I still can’t explain, I felt as if I understood what it was like to be an ordinary nutcracker. I was nothing out of the ordinary. But whenever the eternal touches me, I know that I warm and maybe even glow a little. I am one of God’s everyday women. But He makes me sacred.
We were about to leave the store when I stopped and thought for a moment. “Just a minute,” I told Noelle and went back to buy the nutcracker.
We left the lovely stinky cheese shop and strode across the wide-open market square.
“You liked that little nutcracker, didn’t you?” Noelle’s voice was sweet and motherly.
“Yes, I did. It reminded me of one my mom had. She used to bring it out every autumn along with a special wooden bowl that she filled with nuts. It was a big deal whenever we got to use the nutcracker to crack our own walnuts and almonds.” I knew the memory was simple, but it made me feel close to my mom, and that was what made it golden.
“You had a wonderful mom,” Noelle said.
“Yes, I did.”
“I remember something you wrote about her years ago after one of your miscarriages, something about waiting with empty hands.”
I nodded. “I remember writing to you about that day. It was a huge moment for me. I think I was only twenty-four. I thought God had abandoned me.”
As we walked across the open square, I reminisced about how my mom had come over to our apartment with a batch of fresh-baked cookies. She had looked into my eyes and said, “Summer, I know you are carrying this loss as if it is yours alone to bear. But you were not meant to carry such a heavy burden. Give it back to God and keep giving it back until you
have no more grief in your heart to hand over to Him. Then wait and see what gift He places in your empty hands.”
Noelle summarized the memory for me by saying, “And now, all these years later, we know what God placed in your empty hands. Six children.”
I shook my head. “No, not six children.”
Noelle stopped walking and looked at me. “Did I count wrong, or did you only rent those scrub-faced children every year to pose with you and Wayne for your Christmas cards?”
I smiled. “No, they’re all mine. I claim each and every one of them. But the true answer is that after the first two miscarriages, God placed in my empty hands a third miscarriage.”
Noelle’s expression turned somber. “I forgot about the third one.
“That one was the hardest, I think. By that time no one really entered into the grieving with me. One friend told Wayne and me it was time for us to take a hint or get a clue or something along those lines. He and his wife had two children, and they hadn’t experienced a miscarriage, so he didn’t know what he was saying. But my point is, after double sadness God gave me more sadness. After that, He gave me joy.”
“Joy times six,” Noelle reminded me.
“Yes. Double what I had lost.”
Our conversation concluded just as we arrived at the front of the New Church at the far end of the town square.
“I wanted you to see inside,” Noelle said.
After the feast for my eyes and an awakening of my thoughts toward all things majestic that I had experienced at Saint Bavo, I couldn’t wait to see the inside of the large church in Delft.
An entrance fee was requested. Noelle paid for both of us in the sectioned-off entrance, where a modest selection of books was offered in several languages.
We walked through a wooden door and entered the huge, open sanctuary. I was prepared to be awed.
Instead, I was stunned. Shocked. The cavernous church was void of any art, color, or decorations.
My jaw had dropped. “What happened?”
“What happened to what?”
“This church. It’s vacant. Where’s all the amazing art? Those used to be stained-glass windows, right? The sun should be coming through the colored glass and giving this huge space some joy. Everything in here is the color of stone gray.”
“This is what happened in the Reformation. Do you remember what I said about the iconoclasts? The riots during the Reformation rid churches like this of anything that could be misunderstood as an object of idol worship.”
“Wow.”
“I know. It’s a stark difference to what we saw in Haarlem. That’s why I wanted you to see this.”
I felt angry. “Who were these iconoclasts? Were we looking at their faces yesterday at the Rijksmuseum?”
Noelle said that she wasn’t up on her Dutch history, that we could buy a book on our way out, and it would help explain that era. “Although, each author will add his opinion of history, so it depends on which author you read and how he spins the details.”
“Why would anyone strip away all that is uplifting and beautiful?”
“I’m not sure we can understand how out of control religion was during that era. The poor were trying to buy their way to heaven. The crafters of all that was ornate were trying to outdo each other in creating religious imagery. I’m sure it was complicated.”
At times like this I realized how limited my knowledge and view of the world and of history were.
“You know,” Noelle added, “to put in a good word for the reformists, they could be viewed as well-meaning purists. They were trying to direct worshipers away from the material trappings and help them focus only on God, who is invisible and cannot and should not be represented in man’s likeness.”
“True, but what about everything I was just saying in the cheese shop? Art and beauty are what give us those glimpses of the eternal.”
“And what happens when the art becomes the object of the worship instead of the One the art is supposed to represent?”
“Then the art was overdone, or at least the meaning attached to the art was allowed to be overemphasized. Obviously, it got out of control.”
Noelle quickly countered. “So the art was too good? Is that what you’re saying? The beauty was too convincing?”
“No, the art and beauty were what became tangible. Visible. We hold on to what we know and what we can see. Not what is out there in the eternal realm.”
“And that should be an acceptable excuse for the corruption?”
“No, of course not. The focus of the worshipers got off center. Obviously.”
“And what a good thing that never happens today.” It was easy to detect the subtle bite of sarcasm in Noelle’s voice.
I didn’t have a retort for her. I had listened to Noelle and Jelle talk like this a few nights ago with a volley of questions and no sense that a final answer was needed. With Wayne, closure on a topic was important. Rarely did he and I leave an issue “out there on the table,” as Noelle called it, to keep pushing it back and forth. Wayne and I liked conclusions.
In a small way I was beginning to understand the cultural mind-set that had startled me on the canal tour yesterday. “Officially tolerated” was the term the canal guide had used for the government’s position on the questionably moral activities available in Amsterdam.
The moral and religious pendulum had swung so far to the right and left in generations past. Did this generation, still recovering from the horrors of World War II, prefer any option that favored peace?
I took a seat in one of the plain wooden pews and looked around. Noelle sat beside me.
“It’s complicated, isn’t it?” I stated.
“More than you or I know. If you really want to bend your mind with some history, think about where the Puritans came from before they landed on Plymouth Rock.”
“Do you mean the pilgrims?”
“Yes. The pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock and became the forerunners of the rights of religious freedom in the U.S. Do you know where they came from?”
“England.”
“Originally, yes. But many of them fled England due to religious restrictions. They came here. Literally. To Delft. That first group of pilgrims sought religious freedom here in Delft for twenty years or so. When they weren’t able to worship the way they wanted, they sailed from Delft back to England, and in England they boarded the Mayflower and sailed to America.”
“I never knew that.”
“If you can believe this, I did a report on the pilgrims when I was in high school, and that’s where I learned some of this. It was long before I ever imagined I would come to the Netherlands.”
“Why did you write the report? I mean, what prompted your interest?”
“My dad’s side of the family can trace back to an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower?
“Really? So you may have an ancestor who actually came to this church while living in Delft.”
Noelle’s eyes widened. “I never thought of that.”
“You could be related to someone who sat right here in this pew hundreds of years ago.”
Now her facial expression definitely was sober.
With a sweeping gesture at our surroundings, I said, “What have we learned in all these centuries? I mean, where is the balance in all this?” My voice echoed in the cavernous sanctuary.
Noelle didn’t respond.
“There has to be some way to balance the opulent misuse of money, power, and materialism in Christianity and yet not go all the way to this stark, depressing vacantness.”
“Well, when you find that balance, be sure to enlighten the rest of the world. It’s a problem that never has gone away.”
“I know. I just never saw it as clearly as I have since I’ve been here. They threw the daddy out with the bathwater.”
“Did you say ‘daddy’?”
“No, I said ‘baby’ At least that’s what I thought I said. Isn’t that what I said? That’s what I meant. They t
hrew the baby out with the bathwater.”
Noelle looked up at the solemn, gray, arched ceiling. She drew in a deep breath.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “Give me a minute, okay?”
I got up from the pew and left Noelle to her thoughts. I assumed she was pondering her puritanical roots. Or perhaps she still was mentally tossing back and forth the thoughts on materialism and art.
Content to wander a bit by myself, I wound my way back to the English-language books for sale in the narthex. Against my earlier mandate not to fill my shoulder bag with souvenirs, I bought a book on the Reformation.
I didn’t have to wait long for Noelle. She joined me, and we stepped outside into a sprinkling of airy raindrops. We moved to the side of the church and stood under a narrow overhang where we buttoned up our coats.
Noelle looked up at the thin clouds sailing high above us. “This will pass.” Without looking at me she said in a firm voice, “I finally did it, Summer.”
“Did what?”
“I…”
I placed my hand on her arm and moved around so my open expression was readily in view.
Noelle lowered her gaze from the sky and looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I asked God to enable me to forgive my dad.”
I looked at her with a steady gaze, encouraging her to keep talking.
“I’ve been thinking about this ever since the tour guide’s talk at the Ten Boom house. I have no relationship with my father because I have not forgiven him. I’ve never felt I was able to forgive him. Not on my own power. Not by my own emotions.”
She drew in a wobbly breath and flicked a runaway tear from her cheek. “And then you went and said what you did, and I felt like a javelin pierced my heart.”
“What did I say?” I tried to recall how our back-and-forth conversation had gone inside the church. Had I offended her? Wasn’t the ebb-and-flow style of opinion sharing exactly what Noelle said the Dutch favored?
“You said they threw the daddy out with the bathwater.”
“I still think I said ‘baby’”
“No, you said ‘daddy’ and that’s what went through me, because that’s exactly what I did. I started my own rebellion at eighteen, and I threw my daddy out of my life. That whole part of my life has been as stark, gray, and vacant as the inside of the church where we were just sitting. In my own puritanical sort of zeal, I threw out everything.”