When I arrived at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava in August 1993, I thought I knew Slovak. I was wrong. What I knew was a basket of words and phrases from the peasant language of my paternal grandparents from around 100 years ago. Now I was expected to speak on a university level. And I didn’t have an ear yet for contemporary spoken Slovak. As I stumbled around in this challenging language, accustomed to my own complex forms of English expression, I felt condemned to baby talk. For the first year, I taught entirely in English. I had an audience because following liberation there was an enormous hunger to acquire this world language. I also studied Slovak intensively. By my third year I could lecture fluently enough in Slovak.
Pastoral experiences in Slovakia at the beginning were little because of this limitation in language. It is one thing to speak more or less fluently and it is quite another to understand the subtleties of a native speaker deploying the language quickly and idiomatically. Since pastoral care really begins with careful listening and cautious probing to see that one has actually understood, I remained handicapped despite steady progress in the language. Often I had to awkwardly intervene and ask whether I had understood X, Y or Z. Without the unconscious informal tools of communication of native speakers, such explicit questioning was too often an embarrassing conversation stopper. So I did what I could pastorally for the first several years, and that was to preach, and to teach about preaching and about the liturgy.
One of my first sermons in the Slovak language was on the good Shepherd text of John 10. Woodenly projecting my very American-style into the Slovak language was often amusing, especially when I dramatically announced in Slovak to the congregation on this occasion, “You are not dumb sheep!” My point, of course, was that they are smart sheep, who know the voice of their Shepherd and don’t go after the voice of a stranger. But I’m afraid the point was lost with my clumsy expression.
But I got better at this and became able to speak spontaneously to church groups, though not without linguistic misadventures. There was a rather risqué billboard popular at the time for sunscreen with semi-exposed bikini bottoms illustrating various degrees of tanning. The caption read, “Everyone has their own factor,” i.e. their own degree of sunscreen strength needed. You could use this expression to say something like, “To each their own.” And so I used it in front of a church audience to the snickering of the teenagers who found the risqué reference very funny in front of their elders still formed by the puritanical years of Marxism-Leninism (one of the few things pietists liked about that bygone regime).
By the first semester of my third year I was feeling confident enough to lecture spontaneously rather than from a prepared manuscript. It was the final meeting of the class and my summation of the course. The lecture moved to a kind of dramatic rhetorical finish when I said (or thought I said), “And you, as future preachers of the word of God…” The word for preacher is kazetel, but what I said was kazitel. And to my great surprise the students interrupted my lecture then and there with a roar of prolonged laughter. Befuddled, I had no idea why. What I had said with the wrong word, kazitel was, “And you, as future destroyers of the word of God…” I had many other such mishaps in language, too numerous to recall, and almost always involving some sexual faux pas.
My mentor, Julius Filo, was chair of the Department of Practical Theology. He had spent years in Geneva with the Lutheran World Federation and was very keen on liturgical renewal in Slovakia. He was author and promoter of a modernization of the Agenda updating church rituals. But his proposed modernization experienced the most extraordinary backlash. Communion was typically celebrated four or five times a year and when it was celebrated, it was prefaced by a lengthy service of confession and absolution after the sermon which consisted in a series of questions and answers. I thought upon experiencing this that it was rather profound and in principle provided for serious self-examination. I remembered how this had been my mother’s childhood practice at her Slovak-American church in Streator Illinois!
But following the model of the LBW, Filo moved confession and absolution to the beginning of the service and abbreviated the form dramatically. The motive was in part to encourage more frequent communion. A colleague on the faculty in Church History had a fiery temperament -- with reason. He had been betrayed by a cowardly fellow student during the Stalin years, expelled from the theological faculty and after release from prison drove a tractor on a collective farm for another decade before he was permitted to finish his seminary education. You might say he had a chip on his shoulder as a result. And he furiously opposed Filo’s revision of the confession of sins and absolution. I patiently tried to understand what was behind his ferocious objections, more rage than reason, which was making life miserable in the church and on the faculty. It finally came out that he was worried that it’s a long time from the beginning of the service to communion and in between he might have a sinful thought. I was dumbstruck. I have sinful thoughts on the minute!
Although I did learn to sing the beautiful Otče naš (Our Father) in the minor key typical of Slavic liturgical music, I never acquired competency in liturgical leadership. This involved a great deal of training for chanting; for example, the gospel in its entirety is sung. But I was able to teach students to think about what they were doing liturgically. For example, I once asked the students why they believed in the sacrifice of the mass. They were indignant. “We are not Catholics, we are Lutherans!” “Why then,” I asked, “do you face the altar when you chant the words of institution? To whom are you speaking/singing?” Another time I was teaching the history of doctrine through the patristic period and I could see that my students were bored and uninterested in the topic. So I hit upon a dramatization. I told them that from now on every week I would come to class in the role of a classical heretic and I would give ten American dollars to any student who could refute me. That was a barrel of laughs. I can still see the grimaced frustration on the faces of my young theological jocks when my Arius or Nestorius or Pelagius bested their orthodoxy and left them tongue-tied in defeat.
More seriously, my kind of pastoral engagement and care for their learning came to them as a breath of fresh air. Typical instruction was that the professor provided a typescript of his lectures and when students came to class, he would simply open to the daily lesson and read it. I could see on this model why students could avoid attending class all semester and still show up to pass a perfunctory oral examination. Students were astonished when I gave them reading assignments as homework and expected discussion in class! But most of them liked it and actually attended. I was greatly assisted every year by a student with competency in English to back me up in the classroom, and who often translated my lectures into better Slovak than I was able to.
I gradually learned that my faculty colleagues were at each other’s throats, a simmering conflict between those who had cozied up to the communist regime and the so-called “prison pastors” who had suffered for their resistance. I once endured a three hour meeting of the academic council filled with angry and irrational arguments, as it seemed to me, about nothing at all. When I asked a trusted colleague what that was all about, he simply replied, “That one has blood on his hands.”
Even more discouragingly, the faculty colleagues were desperate for recognition after so many years of isolation and humiliation under the Marxist regime. They took this need for recognition out on the students, who in their eyes were not sufficiently grateful nor deferential. It seemed to me that they resented this new and upcoming generation, free in a way that they had never been. Indeed, it seemed to me that they needed more from the students than they were willing to give, complaining about them constantly. I had become so popular with the students as a result of my pastoral care approach to teaching that I was beginning to be the object of envy on the part of these colleagues, who found occasion to attack my American dress (cardigan sweaters rather than a three-piece suit!) and other such substantive faults on public display in my persona.
But I developed a working relationship with Igor Kišš, an unforgettable personality whom lovingly described as a “naïve narcissist.” He was a man without resentment or bitterness but a live and in living color example of the extraordinary need for recognition in those who had suffered lifelong repression and humiliation for Christian conviction. Kišš had been in line to become the chief systematic theologian but got himself in trouble with the authorities, probably manipulated by others on the faculy, and was banished to a small congregation near the Tatra Mountains. There he continued his scholarship on Luther’s social ethics and after liberation was reappointed to the theological faculty. When Julius Filo left to become the general bishop of the church, Kišš became the Academic Dean in his place. It was in this capacity that I became a “partner in crime,” so to speak, with his attempts to modernize the curriculum. I would come to him with ideas which he would initially scoff at, but I knew how to back off until a little bit later he would produce the same ideas as if they were his own. And I would repeatedly joke with him, “You are the brains, I am the muscles.” On a return trip to Slovakia several years after I had left, I visited him just before he died. He begged me to take his book on social ethics back to America to have it translated and published. I made no promise because I knew the effort and expense would not be worth it. Tragically, a judgment not on his effort, but on the repressive circumstances in which he had lived and worked.
Julius Filo as mentioned, was elected bishop of the church after the third year of our stay and thus my mentor left the faculty. He needed to delegate responsibilities and he laid upon me the role of student pastor. I very reluctantly accepted this responsibility, fearing (rightly!) that my cultural distance would make effective pastoral conversation an on-going trial. While the students loved me and forgave my inadequacies generously, I do not count my time in this role as very successful. The students were young adults between the ages of 18 and 23; their hormones were raging. How was I to negotiate sensitive questions about sexual behavior?
I found funding several times to take a busload of students on a trip, once to Wittenberg, Germany and another time to Auschwitz in Poland. On the trip to Germany we stayed overnight in inexpensive lodging. But the students were raucous until late in the night. I finally stepped out of my room and screamed spontaneously in Slovak, “Quiet! You are making so much noise that not even the devil can sleep!” On the way home, we got into a traffic jam because of freezing rain on the highway. The students had snuck beer on board the Soviet era bus without a restroom. As we were stalled on the road, one young lady came up to me and said, “I can’t make it anymore.” She ran out the door into the field. Thank God, she returned before the bus rolled on.
The trip to Auschwitz by contrast was quite somber. In their education under Marxism-Leninism, they had been taught that the primary victims of the death camps had been Communists. It was new information that the primary target had been the Jews. In fact, most of 120,000 Jews in Slovakia were driven in rail cars to nearby Auschwitz, Slovakia being the only nation which actually reimbursed the Nazis for the cost of transportation. All this was new information in the 1990s, although throughout the country one could see abandoned and desecrated synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. My teaching point was Emil Fackenheim’s so-called 914th commandment, “Thou shalt not give Nazism a posthumous victory.”
I also tried to teach the fruits of the post-Vatican II Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, which included sponsoring interactions with Catholic seminarians. This was very challenging, because in the time after the Reformation, more than 70% of the Slovak people were Lutheran, until around 1670 when the Counter-Reformation struck violently. Bitter memories of this haunted the imagination of Lutherans; crude suspicion of the Catholic Church was endemic. But my habilitation was written on Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, successfully defended in the Slovak language and I was awarded the status of docent for it. It was published as a book in Slovakia under the title, The Future of the Church: What the Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Should Mean for Us. But I suspect it has not been popular there on any side.
Another bridge I tried to build even less successfully was the historic enmity between Slovaks and Hungarians. For centuries Slovakia had been colonized by the Hungarian Empire with all the indignities incumbent thereunto. (My own grandfather recalled to us how he was beaten as a child in school when the Hungarian teacher heard him speaking in Slovak). So I arranged for a delegation of Hungarian Lutheran seminary students in Budapest to visit us in Bratislava. It was a fiasco for the same reason of a continuing Hungarian assumption of cultural superiority.
In my ministry to the students, I sought opportunities to bring them into our apartment for evening discussions or classes. A memorable but also painful example of this occurred on the night when NATO began to bomb Serbia. Our faculty had students from the former Yugoslavia, where some 100,000 Slovak peasants had emigrated three centuries before after the defeated Turks vacated, leaving rich farmland in need of reclamation. In my class that evening was a student from the town of Novi Sad. When the class had formally concluded around 9pm, I got the unusual request from the students that they could remain for a while to watch CNN on my television. Only when I turned it on, did I grasp what the interest was. The student from Novi Sad shrieked when the reports of bombing there came across the television. We handed him our phone as he desperately tried to call his parents. I was entirely skeptical of this attack engineered by the Clinton administration, so it seemed to me, to change the subject from Monica. I was also never more ashamed of being an American.
In spite of my inadequacies, the pastoral nature of my teaching and the personal care with which I taught was blessed and touched the lives of many. When we made the decision to leave Slovakia, we felt very guilty. The resistance of the old guard to the young generation was painful and I had become the object of their resentment. The farewell the students gave me was extraordinary; indeed, one year later when I returned to give a guest lecture at the faculty, it was boycotted by the professors under the pretext of having an important meeting scheduled at exactly the same time. The students filled the auditorium, and knowing that their cheering would be heard in the faculty meeting; they demonstrated like delegates at a political convention cheering a returning hero.
I had told them on leaving that they needed to endure, that nothing would really change until the old generation died off, that the scars of 45 years of Marxism Leninism on top of the previous decade of Fascism would not heal overnight. I cultivated many relationships among the students which have lasted to this very day. I am proud to say that two of my best students are now established theologians at the faculty. I follow with delight on Facebook the pastoral ministries of many of my former students. When I lived there, the Sunday services were sparsely populated, mainly with babushkas. Today with joy I admire the photographs and videos of well populated church services with intergenerational congregations.
When I left the students presented me with a drawing, made by one of their artists, of the parable of the sower on the soil of our campus with the signatures and best wishes of the students beneath. They blessed me for sowing the seed and I am blessed to see those seeds come to fruition. In my six years there I learned to be a pastoral teacher. Soli Deo Gloria!