Tuesday, March 19, 2024
This morning we woke up with a problem. Ian has really been struggling with allergies since Holland. Veroniek had cats, and Andrew and Dasha have a dog. It’s his eyes and his nose and his asthma. I’ve been sleeping close to him to help him through the nights, but the problem this morning was that his rescue inhaler ran out. Yesterday I stopped by a pharmacy, but it’s a prescription med here. I called our doctor back home, but they can’t send a prescription overseas. Everyone was recommending that we take him to a clinic, but that takes time and is very expensive.
I hopped online to see if there was a walk-in clinic close to us, and an ad popped up for a service called Doctors SA. You punch in some information, and they said you could have an online visit in as little as ten minutes. It seemed too good to be true, but I went for it anyway, and in 10 minutes I was on a video call with a guy who looked like he was on vacation somewhere. We told him what we needed, and in five minutes we had a prescription sent by email. A bit later we went to the pharmacy and get his new inhaler. It was a tender mercy.
In the afternoon we went to the totem of Trier. It’s one of the oldest cities in Germany and there is a church there that claims to have the bones of the apostle Matthias, who replaced Judas after he died.
The scriptures teach us that he was with Christ from the beginning, but he was only called as an apostle after Judas betrayed Christ and hanged himself. He is important to us because his calling as an apostle teaches that Christ clearly established a church, with a leadership and organization that was intended to continue after His death. Tradition says that Matthias preached the gospel in Aethiopia -- which could be modern-day Georgia or Northern Africa. Some traditions say he was stoned in Jerusalem, others that he died of old age, and others that he was beheaded by an axe. That’s why he is often represented holding an axe. There is a marker in a castle in Georgia that says his bones are buried there, but (again) tradition says that Helena, the mother of Constantine, had his remains split between Padua in Italy and Trier in Germany, and that’s where we some him.
As with most relics like this, I’m not sure if these are really his bones, but the place felt sacred to me. His remains are in a crypt in the church, and it was one of the most beautiful I’ve been in. It is dark and lonely and has a kind of mysterious beauty about it.
We were also happy to see that the Abbey of St Matthias is on one of the German Ways of St James. I felt connected to the many pilgrims who have been through there. Imagine, if you hiked from Trier to Santiago (as many pilgrims have) it would be at least 1,195 miles. That makes our planned Camino of 500 miles seem like nothing. As always, I’m inspired by the devotion of those pilgrims who have gone before us.
On our way out of Trier we drove by the church of St Paul, which is the oldest Christian church in Germany, and the Porta Nigra, an awesome Roman gate.
Ian got carsick on the way home and threw up.
We spent the evening packing and getting ready for our journey to Switzerland tomorrow.