Household of Faith
Dodge
Ball and Disrupted Plans:
Our Month in Europe
By
Bruce Young
For a month during the summer of 1996 we traveled across Europe – my wife Margaret and I, our four children,
plus a friend of our then teenaged daughter – all of us laden
with backpacks and armed with Eurail passes. It was an often
wild and arduous adventure, intricately and cheaply planned (at
least in theory) by me and encouraged and jumped into eagerly
by my wife, a trip labeled as crazy by some of our friends. We
wanted our children to experience Europe and thought this would
be a great opportunity, since Margaret’s parents headed the new
mission in the Baltic states and since we needed to be in London
by late June to help run BYU’s Study Abroad program in
click
to enlarge  |
Crossing
the Baltic Sea |
We started our European tour in St. Petersburg,
We learned many lessons during our month on the European continent. We learned that we loved each other and could depend on each other despite all the rigors of travel – and despite the fact that our tight budget required the most economical of meals, often bread, Boursin cheese, and yogurt for days on end. (Despite complaining at the time, my children now consider bread and Boursin a special treat.)
Challenges and Disrupted Plans
We also learned that challenges and disrupted plans, however
painful or frustrating at the time, leave some of the best memories.
We experienced some literal breakdowns. A night train that was
supposed to take us from Rome to Marseilles broke down before reaching its destination and dumped
us at the last stop in
click
to enlarge  |
The
van that took us into the Alps |
Other disruptions led to memorable experiences in Venice. On the hot and humid day we first arrived, we were turned away from a hotel and sent to another location to meet a woman who could accommodate us. We had to drag our belongings several blocks through the streets of Venice until we met Rosa Pasetti, a lovely older lady who knew no English. (We got by on a combination of my wife’s Spanish and the very little Italian I knew.) Signora Pasetti’s greatest gift to us, besides her smile and a room with three beds, was the kind offer of cold water when she saw how hot and tired we were. Later in Venice we were fined for accidentally taking a boat going the wrong direction on the canals but ended up, as a result, crossing the bay on a glorious moonlit night. It was one of the most romantic evenings my wife and I have ever experienced, even though we had five kids with us.
click
to enlarge  |
Our
daughter Kaila among the ruins of Rome |
I encountered a different kind of disappointment in Paris. I had reserved five days for us to spend there, one of the cities in which I had served during my mission, and was eager to have my family experience the glories of Paris and get a little taste of what I had known as a missionary by attending a local ward on Sunday. The children, however, were jaded and worn out from a few too many museums, castles, and cathedrals and, though they put up with most of what I wanted them to see, could tolerate only an hour and a half in the Louvre (“Oh, gee, the Mona Lisa – wow!”). And unfortunately on Sunday, I was unable to persuade them to attend a local Church meeting.
The Best Memories
This disappointment only underscored the other lesson we learned from that month crossing the continent: that the best memories – better than the museums and castles, even better than the disasters that turn into blessings – come from people. I’m thinking of regular people, living their ordinary lives –people that tourists, unfortunately, are too often insulated from. We had several opportunities, sometimes because our plans were disrupted, sometimes because chance or our unusual style of travel brought us together, to form bonds with people we met only briefly or to catch vivid glimpses into their lives. With these bonds and glimpses came the reminder that we are all brothers and sisters, across barriers of language, culture, time, place, and experience.
Some of the most memorable encounters came in the Baltics, especially Lithuania. In one Baltic city, as we visited a small but beautiful old church, we started talking with the young man who was running the gift shop and who spoke excellent English. After we explained we were from Utah, he said, “Yes, the Jazz!” (The Jazz had made it to the playoffs that year.)
In Lithuania we attended the organizing of a new branch in Klaipeda, a city in which Hitler had once given a speech and that, in the years surrounding World War II, had gone back and forth between German and Soviet control. In another Lithuanian city, Kaunas, I walked in the old Jewish ghetto and thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a Jew who grew up in this city in the early twentieth century and later became a French citizen and an important philosopher. I thought of the horrific persecution endured by Jews in the Baltics and of Levinas’s assertion that it is in welcoming and serving others that we become truly human. I also thought of his reminder that, in the face of every other person, we encounter a call to service and responsibility and see, as if written in each face, the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Inhumanity
Our experiences in Lithuania often seemed linked to this very theme: the contradiction between our responsibility to treat others as brothers and sisters and the terrible abuses we human beings have often inflicted on each other. In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, we visited the KGB Museum, formerly the headquarters of the Soviet secret police. There were no tours available in English when we arrived, and so a man who spoke some German volunteered to take us through. He pointed out a room where prisoners were tortured, the walls padded so that no one outside the room could hear the screaming. Our guide said in rough-hewn German, “Viele Menschen tod – tod!” (Many men dead – dead.) He had me touch his collar bone to feel where it had been broken. He had himself been a prisoner in this building.
click
to enlarge  |
Inside
the KGB Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania |
We also visited the Holocaust Museum in Vilnius, where we saw objects from the death camps, along with photographs and reproductions of letters and other documents. On one of the walls was a copy of a document produced by those running one of the camps, listing inmates who were killed. As we looked at the list, we joined a short, gray-haired man wearing a tee shirt and round wire-rim glasses. At first we took him to be an ordinary tourist like ourselves. But then he turned to us, pointed to one line on the document, and said, “Number 29. He was my father.” Again the evils inflicted by some human beings on others became vividly real and personal to us.
In an essay titled “The Trouble with X,” C. S. Lewis writes about the gifts that God has given us – “a rich, beautiful world,” “intelligence to show [us] how it can be used, and conscience to show [us] how it ought to be used” – and his grief at seeing us misuse those gifts: “Every vile thought within [our] minds,” “every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His spirit more than it grieves ours” (God in the Dock 152, 154).
The scriptures describe God’s grief even more poignantly. Enoch does not understand how a perfect, divine being can weep: “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” The Lord answers:
“Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;
“And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood” (Moses 7:29, 32-33).
click
to enlarge  |
On
a bridge in Venice |
As we traveled through Europe – especially as we became vividly aware of the suffering and evil that so many had experienced – we gained a new appreciation for what the gospel of Jesus Christ offers. Now free and in many ways making great progress, the Baltic nations still suffer some after effects of Soviet domination, including deep antagonism many non-Russians feel toward the ethnic Russians who still live there. This problem has troubled some branches of the Church. But the Savior’s teachings, though difficult, still offer the only real solution: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:44-45).
Finding a Universal Language
The time we spent in Europe also gave us great hope. We met wonderful people: devoted LDS missionaries and members; kind strangers like Signora Pasetti and, earlier in our trip, members of a German Christian missionary group who carried some of our bags as we ran to catch a train in Hamburg. In Vilnius our children helped create one of our most memorable encounters. My wife’s parents arranged to have us stay in an empty apartment in a high rise building on the outskirts of the city. The building was one of a cluster of such buildings occupied by working class people. Given the time of year and our northern location, the days were long – it didn’t get dark until about 1:00 in the morning. Margaret and I were ready to relax in the apartment, but our children ventured out onto the playground of the apartment complex and found Lithuanian children to play with. Except for a tiny bit of shared Russian and English, they had no common language. Yet they knew at some level that they were brothers and sisters, and, instead of worrying about their differences, they chose to enjoy the universal language of dodge ball. They played for a couple of hours, until after 11 p.m.
click
to enlarge  |
Signora
Pasetti |
From our month in Europe we came away with a strongly affirmative answer to the questions recorded by Nephi: “Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea; and that I rule in the heavens above and in the earth beneath . . . ?” (2 Nephi 29:8).
Though, like Nephi, we “do not know the meaning of all things,” we know that God “loveth his children,” wherever they live and whatever their history or condition may be (1 Nephi 11:18). We do not believe he is pleased with the hatred many of his children feel towards each other, even if this hatred is a response to wrongs others have done. “The love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men” is, in truth, “the most desirable above all things” and the only hope for this troubled world (1 Nephi 11:22).
Our month in Europe taught us many lessons and allowed us to meet a few of our brothers and sisters whose paths crossed ours. As we think back on the museums, castles, and cathedrals, the breakdowns and disrupted plans, the grueling walks and the dodge ball games, we especially treasure our memories of the people we met, their beautiful, unrepeatable faces, the kinship we felt with them, and the love that can redeem and reconcile and transcend all distances and differences.
