The Bells of Lübeck

Dust still lingers from the Force of the Royal Air

Dust and broken bells, cracked open on the floor

How loud they must have been, the clinging, the ringing, the silencing of prayer

A broken town, broken church… broken at the core

An innocent for innocents,

Child’s blood sets the score

Still they fall, still they shatter, still they break

Time doesn’t change in the chamber of the broken

Broken bones, broken homes, in a city that still aches

The pain exposed through a heart left wide open

Psychotherapy in motion,

Art of the unspoken

Mary turns to her son, who’s nailed on the cross

With him are his followers, in a city of flames

1942 are added to the mother’s loss

Heart torched, body scorched - faithful bloodstains

God has fled, God is Dead!

Only grief remains

Still she stands in the square of Lübeck

Alone, an old woman in a city grown new

With a dead son, a gone God, and a heart still in wreck

She worships the history we will never get through

Exposing the broken

Every a human dies anew

I wrote this in response to my visit to St. Mary’s of Lübeck. My core course, Mythos and Logos, spent several days in Germany and visited both Lübeck and Hamburg. St. Mary’s of Lübeck was one of the first places we went to and one of the most compelling ones.

Lübeck has a rather traumatized history. It was by no means a military city during WWII; however, the Allied Forces used it to target German moral. The Royal Air Force heavily bombed the city in March of 1942 (I believe it was actually the night of Palm Sunday) and killed many innocent civilians. The Allies carried out this tactic several other times throughout the war, but Lübeck was the first target.

As a result of the bombing, the bells of St. Mary’s fell from their towers within the church and crashed into the ground, shattering it and themselves. The bells remain where they fell as a memorial to the innocents who died during the bombing.

After the war, the church was restored but never returned to the house of God that it once was as many Europeans left the Christian religion. When I went, I saw it more as a piece of cultural significance than of worship or ritual.

The choice to leave the broken bells as they were during the restoration process was a choice to remember the sorrowful history in which the city underwent. For me, viewing the bells exposed the human experiences of guilt, remorse, death, sorrow, helplessness, significance, and value. I saw the bells as a form of psychotherapy that allowed the city to visualize the brokenness that with which it grew.