After our return from the Swedish forests I searched for the website that I vaguely remembered. It wasn't that hard to find. Typing 'Swedenborg' and 'Denmark' quickly got me to Den Nye Kirke, the New Church. Two things stood out. It was a typically amateurish home page, and it really was about Swedenborg.
I didn't understand what the website was representing. At this moment I wasn't doing research, I was only following a hunch. Let's see where this leads. It was unclear who was behind the site, or who had written the pages. No person was coming forward to talk about Swedenborg. That was probably good, I thought. No guru, no big teacher. In general the site came across as clean and innocent.
On the page for events, I read the address where these people apparently held meetings. Stellavej 14 in Copenhagen. That was not too far away. A picture showed a large lecture hall with chairs. I imagined it was some kind of a conference center.
Underneath the picture were the words, 'Lay service every Sunday at 11:00. All are welcome.' I did not understand these words. They sort of glanced off my mind. I did not ask myself what the hell a lay service was. I also wasn't really sure that 'all are welcome' included me.
One Sunday in late August I resolved my hesitation.
"I am going to visit this Swedenborg place today," I told my wife. "You want to come?"
"Oh no! You check it out first. They might be crazy." We had both been drawn into Swedenborg's books and were both attracted to the calm rationality in the midst of weird New Age topics. However, New Age was New Age, and Swedenborg was definitely New Age. My experience in Holland in the early eighties had brought me into plenty of contact with crazies. Like attracts like, as they say. These Swedenborgians could very well turn out to fall into that same category.
"OK, that's what I thought, too. I'll go alone," I smiled.
"Where is it?" Tatiana asked.
"It's in one of the southern parts of Copenhagen, the part that is almost impossible to pronounce: Rødovre." Neither of us were native Danish speakers, so we had fun with this word. Properly speaking, following the phonetic guidelines for Danish, none of the consonants in this name were pronounced. Some were voiceless, some were replaced by glottal stops. I'm not kidding.
"Uh-eh-oohu," I tried. "Ghuh-eeeh-oooahuuh." I felt that a long slow pronunciation was both funniest and most accurate. Yet somehow a Danish speaker was able to say the word Rødovre quickly and smoothly. My wife didn't even try. She recognized the place name as one of the stops of the local red trains running into Copenhagen.
"OK, OK, you go. Now!" she said.
"Uh-eeh-oohu," I answered. "Yuh-eh-ooaha…" We were both laughing now. "That's one way to keep the foreigners out: locate your church in a part of town no one can pronounce," I joked. A foolish remark. Little did I know.
I found Stellavej in a quiet residential area of Rødovre. It was a dead-end street, only a few hundred meters long, mostly free-standing villa houses with gardens, and some apartment blocks all the way at the end. When I arrived I first drove past the entrance to the street, craning my neck to see if I saw anything that looked like a meeting building. I just saw ordinary houses. So I stopped the car and decided to park around the corner on Vedelavej. In case I needed to make a quick getaway. I didn't want them to see my car or license plate. I imagined there'd be something like 10-20 people at least in the conference center. How many of them might be crazy?
I entered Stellavej on foot and pretended to be out for a Sunday morning stroll. Certainly I was not heading for a secret meeting in a secret building. I gathered that if I didn't like the look of the place I could still turn around and go home. I walked all the way to the end of the street, looking at all the houses. Nothing. I couldn't find the place. Nothing that even remotely looked like a center. I started walking back, and took out the piece of paper with the address. Maybe the street number would help. Stellavej 14 it said on my web printout. I found a house with number 6, the next one was 8, then there was an apartment building with two entrances, numbers 10 and 12. Then the street ended. There was no number 14.
Later, in America, people would tell me, 'Yes, that is the New Church in a nutshell.' I was going through another hologram experience here, an experience that contained the essence of Swedenborgianism in the world. But this morning I just felt confused. I had checked the date, I had checked the address, why couldn't I find it? If there really was a gathering somewhere around here wouldn't I see people arriving? I looked around. The street was empty.
Then I remembered from my days as a newspaper deliverer, when I had first arrived in Denmark, that sometimes the entrance is at the back. I had often stumbled around in the middle of the night in some villa area, looking for the mailbox of a house. Only to discover that their front door was not facing the street, but was facing the back yard. It was a feature of Danish architectural design. I'm not kidding.
Following this spur of inspiration I made my way into the garden area at the back of the apartment building, feeling like I was trespassing on someone's private property. There, all the way at the back, I indeed found number 14. It was an entrance to four floors of apartments, the door was unlocked and there was a list of names inside at the foot of the stairs. I studied the list.
There was no mention of the New Church.
I went back out. My watch said that it was 10:55, mere minutes before this supposed meeting. I saw no people anywhere. I felt only a little disappointment, more about having come all this way than about missing the event I couldn't find.
"OK, let's go home," I said quietly.
On the right side of the entrance to number 14 was a narrow concrete stairway that led down to the bicycle cellar underneath the apartment complex. I looked at it. There were no signs anywhere, no sandwich board, no metal plaque on the wall. Brown leaves from the previous autumn had pooled at the foot of the stairs. I stopped and hesitated. What did I have to lose?
I walked down the gray steps.
At the bottom, hidden from view, was a white wooden door badly in need of paint. In the middle of the door was a black nameplate. It said Den Nye Kirke. I had found it!
I tried the handle. The door was locked. So I carefully knocked. At this point I would not have been surprised if there was no one there. I expected that I would in fact knock a few times and then still be on my way home.
But the door opened. Such a small thing. Someone opening a door.
An elderly lady with white-gray hair looked at me, her face one big question mark of surprise. I guessed they didn't get too many visitors, or at least not many that had the detective and tracking gene active in their genome.
"Yes?" she asked.
"Uh… I'm here for the Swedenborg meeting?"
Her eyes lit up. You've got to be kidding me, someone found us. I was already seeing the celebration that would go on later that day, the beer would flow, roasted pig on the spit, because someone had found Stellavej 14. The first time this had happened since World War II.
But she still hadn't said anything. "Uhm, have I come to the right place? Swedenborg?" I asked. She looked very frail, but her eyes were bright and sharp. She was dressed in matching blue and pastel-pink, homely clothes. No uniforms or anything suspicious, I noted.
"Come in, I was not expecting anyone. Come in. Sorry, yes this is the New Church," she recovered and without much further hesitation I was ushered into a very small hallway where I had to bend my head not to hit the neon lights that were fixed to the ceiling. The basement ceiling was only two meters high. My height was 196 cm. As I entered I noticed a smell. It was a very recognizable, distinct smell, which I would later meet again and again in New Church buildings all over the world: the smell of moldy old books.
"This is the first church Sunday after the summer holidays," she informed me. "It's just me and Joachim here. That's my husband. I am Elvira, by the way." We shook hands.
I relaxed a bit. There was clearly no threat here. In fact, it might be that I was the one who came across as a bit of a threat. So I hastened to explain why I had come.
"My name is Stephen Muires. I have been reading Swedenborg for the past year, and saw your website. So I decided to come by." We spoke in Danish.
Elvira smiled and was past the shock of greeting a visitor new to the premises. "Shall we speak English?" she asked in perfect English. "I am from Ireland, and I grew up in Wales."
"Oh no, Danish is fine." My Danish was good. "But hard to find this address," I laughed. "I almost left again."
"Oh yeah, we know. We have been talking about getting a board outside. But things move so slow in a church," she was openly exasperated as she shared this. I would learn much later that the talk of getting a sign had been going on for a minimum of ten years already. If she'd told me this that morning I would have supposed she was making a joke. She rattled on a bit. "Do you live near here?" she asked.
"Yes, in Hundige, near Greve. Twenty minutes from here." She recognized the place names. Apart from this question, which was probably asked to make some sense of a visitor having turned up at all, she did not ask me anything else about myself. I was relieved about that. I had come and expected to sit at the back of some lecture or something. Now it seemed I was the only person here.
I asked her what was going on here today. I really had no clue.
"Well, we're having a lay service. That's a church service," she repeated, well aware that I was not a church goer. She sounded a little apologetic, but also firm. This was what they did, no discussion. "My husband is reading."
I had no idea what she meant with that, so I just nodded. Reading? "Am I the only one here today? Are there other people?"
"Oh yes!" Elvira was quick to assert. "It's just close to summer. We are not many, but there are three families. Our own kids also come."
This was all vague, but I didn't care. "What about Swedenborg? What do you do?"
Elvira took a breath. I didn't know what was going on for her. Since it was now well past 11:00, she said, "Can we take that later?" I nodded. She pointed me at the glass door to the main room. Some organ music had started up. I carefully walked in and tried to orient myself.
It was a church set-up with five or six rows of folding chairs. The photo that I'd seen online had made the hall look much bigger than it was in reality. At the far end was an altar of sorts with candles. Elvira walked in behind me and sat down on one of the chairs. I chose a chair somewhere in the middle. A small, gray-bearded man with round glasses was standing behind a narrow pulpit. He wore a red bandanna around his neck and had a sailor's cap on. He looked friendly enough, but didn't acknowledge me as I sat down. When the organ music stopped I saw that Elvira stood up and held a small red booklet in front of her. I was confused. What was going on? Then the organ started up again, apparently a pre-programmed instrument, and Elvira started singing. The man at the pulpit also attempted to sing along, but missed many notes. I realized that I was supposed to stand up too and sing. OK, I thought, just play along.
After the hymn we sat down. The old man started intoning some text that he was reading from papers in front of him. He spoke a real authentic form of Danish, which was actually very nice. He seemed a bit flustered, which he covered by being extra serious. It didn't occur to me until much later that the reason he was flustered was that there was a newcomer in the hall. He didn't know how to handle that. He had a glass of water standing next to him and sipped it occasionally to soften a nervous cough. He was small in stature, and the image he created in this cellar was of a fairytale dwarf lecturing to other dwarfs.
The text was stuff from the bible and also excerpts from Swedenborg. It was a long text, a sermon apparently written by someone else a long time ago. But it kept mentioning Swedenborg's concepts and books. OK, I thought, I am not sure what he's talking about, or what the point of any of this is, but I like the fact that somehow Swedenborg is being integrated full time.
During the lecture-sermon I studied the altar. It was the one object in this basement that stood out. A cube made out of glass, about one meter high, on a low wooden platform. Inside the cube a large blue glass-blown sphere, semi-transparent and filling almost the whole altar. That was it. No symbols or decoration. Only this pure shape, a construction made of glass. It was very eye-catching.
The service finished with one last hymn. Almost 45 minutes had passed. There had been no jokes, no engaging personal talk. I had grown aware of the uncomfortable folding chair I was sitting on, very aware of having had to exercise my attention span to stay with the proceedings. Of course I also felt completely out of place, not belonging here.
The three of us filed out, back into the entrance hall. The man came to say hello, introduced himself as Joachim Jørgensen. He was much more at ease now. The three of us chatted for a few minutes. It was apparently over and since they didn't tell me anything else I assumed I was heading home.
Joachim mentioned a few things about the New Church. Their son was a minister in Colchester, England. There existed something called Bryn Athyn. I wasn't sure I caught the name right that first time, it sounded Welsh. But it was in America, they told me, and had a beautiful old cathedral. They showed me what it looked like, pointing at a picture on the wall. This was all new information for me, and I couldn't do much with it. A cathedral? We have lots of cathedrals in Europe. What's so special about another one?
"What about all these books here?" I motioned toward the wall that was lined with book cases.
"The Writings," Joachim said. Did I hear a capital 'W'? "We have many books in Danish. An old minister in Copenhagen is working right now on translating the Arcana. But most of our books are a little old, as you can see." He took one out and showed me yellowed pages, old-fashioned fonts and crumbling spines. The book he held was printed in 1902.
"I can smell that they are old," I said with a smile.
"Ha, I keep telling them that!" Elvira exclaimed. "It stinks down here. We are so used to it, we don't notice."
Joachim shrugged, "This book is older than I am. The older we get, the smellier we become. My father used to say that. He was an alcoholic." He said this in a very dry tone of voice.
For people on the far side of 60 I thought they had a remarkable sense of humor and brightness. I could relate to them. Especially Elvira, who did most of the talking during this first visit, was clearly holding herself in check, bursting at the seams wanting to tell me a hundred other things, and ask a hundred questions. I could not reconcile the constricted format of the service I had endured with the spirit shining out of these two old folks' eyes.
I said goodbye. I made careful note of the fact that they had not sold me their religion, they had not asked for contact information, and they had not asked for money. None of these topics had even come up. It was this fact that ensured I went home with a good feeling about the morning. I was left in freedom. My wife had wanted me to check out if this was some fanatic Christian sect, and I guess I had found something quite the opposite: an unorganized, amateurishly set up, hard-to-find and apparently very small group of people that knew about Swedenborg.
And I liked Joachim and Elvira.
(From Ordained: Part I Denmark by Stephen Muires, web: .com)