Water: Mother of Many Names

Abstract

Water: Mother of Many Names Julia Spicher Kasdorf In Zurich, across the Limmat river and the street that runs along it, behind a low arcade of shops, up a flight of stone steps, stands the Grossmünster, an enormous Romanesque church with round‐topped Gothic spires. Beneath it stretches a cobblestone square named for Ulrich Zwingli, the pastor who trashed the place in 1524. With the blessing of city council, Zwingli and two other priests supervised workers and tradesmen who removed sacred objects that were suddenly considered idols: paintings, altar decorations, votive lamps, carved choir stalls, and the organ. They also oversaw the scraping of frescoes from the great church's interior walls. At the top of those steps, on the edge of that square, I paused, having just made my way up from the train station. Before that, I had walked through the sleek, silent, cement‐walled air terminal at Zurich, and before that I had endured an overnight flight in economy class that originated in the loud, chaotic airport at Philadelphia, a flight for which I had not dressed warmly enough, and during which I'd slept little. I blinked in the July morning light. A few tourists milled around the entrance of the church, posing in front of its great bronze doors, snapping pictures. Nothing stirred the silence but a few tourists and some pigeons. Could this really be it? For two years I had wondered whether the sight inside this mother church of the Swiss Reformation would strike me as powerfully as it had the first time I saw it. Often I had returned to this place in my mind, describing my first visit to friends like a rehearsal for this return. Here, something surprised me to tears. After a long, difficult marriage—you make your bed, you lie in it!—after a final separation in 2005, after two moves in two years, in the dead center of my life, I had arrived at this place, more weary than I realized, a mother with a small child on another continent, and wept. A raw nerve is one way to enter history. I have searched for words to describe what I felt then. I have read histories of this place to help me make sense of the moment when I first encountered the effaced Madonna and Child in a niche built to hold holy water during Catholic times. Unable to explain those feelings to myself, I have instead formed a question: How do people resist spiritual ruin in a world of so many ruined things? Compelled to return to this place, I have wondered about the moral consequences of memory. I claim feeling as both motivation and method in this quest: feelings, not emotions. Consider emotions to be the raw, biological functions of the human nervous system, such as terror or sexual attraction that race through the body, and that neurobiologists now track with scientific instruments. Feelings involve emotions but are more complicated because they also draw on memory, experience, and cognition. Feelings produce highly personal forms of intelligence that involve self‐consciousness and thought in addition to the bodily instincts of the organism. Maybe scientists are just now finding ways to describe what Shakespeare wrote in King Lear more than 400 years ago: Gloucester, physically blind, nonetheless sees people and circumstances more clearly than the King. When Lear asks the source of his insight, Gloucester replies, “I see feelingly.” All I could see that July morning in 2009, as my eyes burned in the sunlight, was the most immediate way to enter history: through the ruins that remain. Construction of the Grossmünster began around 1,100 on this spot. Near this site in 286, according to legend, Felix and his sister Regula were beheaded for refusing to offer sacrifice to Roman Emperor Maximian. As Christians, they could honor none but the one true God. It is said that the martyrs picked up their heads and walked a short distance from the river's edge to a spot where they stopped to pray; then, they stretched out there for burial. According to the story, quite a few others carried their heads up from the river also...