Dave Allen, the dry Church-poking Irish comedian would end his routine with the retort: ‘Good night and may your God go with you.’
I never questioned growing up that my God was a Catholic God.
Until I had a disagreement with my Jesuit-run school and ended up at my local Protestant school.
I, of course, took my dogma with me.
Which should have earned me a beating for telling them in religion class that they were all wrong.
But it didn’t.
I also found myself regularly in a Protestant kirk which broadened my understanding of Christianity.
And guess what, I didn’t burn.
And nor did Martin Luther after the firebombing of the Frauenkirche in Dresden in the Second World War.
Luther, the Father of the Reformation, was a proud Saxon.
Although pride being one of the Seven Deadly Sins, it might be better to revise that to Son of Saxony.
And his permanence in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche gave the Dresdeners strength in the immediate days after the bombings.
And in the forty years afterwards under Communist rule.
The Frauenkirche was eventually rebuilt just as it was before the bombings.
Dresden rebuilt
And I had the privilege of hearing the pastor of the church tell us about standing at the pillars with his father and him telling him that it would.
The resourceful Dresdeners asked their citizens to send them their wedding photographs to help them see what it used to look like.
And the son of one of the English bombers built the orb that sits on top of the Frauenkirche now. Nice touch.
Read how Dresden rebuilt itself in my review of the city which was known as the Florence of the Elbe and is again https://jimmurtytraveltraveltravel.com/dresdens-renaissance-martin-luther/. And visit https://www.dresden.de/en/tourism/tourism.php.
MEET YOU AT YOUR PLACE OF WORSHIP
