Passion and Pandemic: Oberammergau's Story

Passion and Pandemic: Oberammergau's Story

Passion and Pandemic: Oberammergau's Story

It’s a small village in the Bavarian Alps, but it has a testimony of Divine protection that has inspired the world. Oberammergau in 1633 was a place inhabited by a mere 600 souls when soldiers returning from the Thirty Years’s War brought with them the black death. Small isolated Oberammergau initially was able to protect itself from the plague by sealing itself off from the world – that is until a newly married villager, unable to find work, slipped past the guards. He returned with the bubonic plague. 84 people in the village died of it. That’s 14% of the population.

Gathering in front of the parish church, the villagers prayed for deliverance – and they made the Divine a promise. Standing in front of the church’s crucifix, which still hangs there today, they vowed that if God would stop the plague they would reenact the last week of Jesus’s life once every decade as a thank offering. From that day on, no one in the village died from the plague. In 1634 the first Oberammergau Passion Play was performed in an open meadow near the village. In 1680 they began to hold it at the beginning of each decade. That’s a promise they have kept for 388 years!

Though Pandemic travel restrictions forced the 2020 performance to be postponed, the cast is preparing for the rescheduled Passion play in 2022. It is a fitting reminder that our own times are not quite as unprecedented as they seem and that Divine help is still to be sought. When it comes we should be equally ready to carry on the testimony for the generations that follow us.

And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over Jordan, that the Lord spake unto Joshua, saying, Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man, And command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place, where ye shall lodge this night. Then Joshua called the twelve men, whom he had prepared of the children of Israel, out of every tribe a man: And Joshua said unto them, Pass over before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of Jordan, and take you up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according unto the number of the tribes of the children of Israel: That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever. And the children of Israel did so as Joshua commanded, and took up twelve stones out of the midst of Jordan, as the Lord spake unto Joshua, according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel, and carried them over with them unto the place where they lodged, and laid them down there. And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood: and they are there unto this day.” – JOSHUA 4:1-9

An Opportunity to Learn, Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

A Word for Our Time

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: "Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents."

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors - anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

- C.S. Lewis

Coronavirus and the Sun
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A Lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Fresh air, sunlight and improvised face masks seemed to work a century ago; and they might help us now. (read more)

Mere Christianity
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The contents of this book were first given on the air, and then published in three separate parts as The Case for Christianity (1943), (*) Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1945). In the printed versions I made a few additions to what I had said at the microphone, but otherwise left the text much as it had been. A "talk" on the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should not sound like an essay being read aloud. In my talks I had therefore used all the contractions and colloquialisms I ordinarily use in conversation. In the printed version I reproduced this, putting don't and we've for do not and we have. And wherever, in the talks, I had made the importance of a word clear by the emphasis of my voice, I printed it in italics. (click to read)

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