A Mission
I ended up in Switzerland for the first time not as a destination but as a waypoint. On my way to an Olympic football match in France with a friend, I found myself eager to save money with a flight to Geneva rather than my destination of Lyon, France.
This incredible place, living in my dreams for years—the birthplace of Calvinism, home to world-changing conventions and treaties that have shaped the course of world politics and policy. Yet I arrived here as if it were a sidenote to something else.
As the plane descended over the Alps, Mont Blanc rising above the cloud cover, I already knew this was a special place, even though I also knew I’d be leaving it in a few hours.
There is much to Geneva. I won’t pretend that I know it in any non-superficial way. But having lived in my mind for so many years, I now found myself as if stepping onto a movie set with a mission to be accomplished.
First among them was John Calvin’s church.
The Start of A Movement
In a time when anyone who did not strictly adhere to the doctrine of the Catholic Church was at best shunned from mainstream society, and at worst doomed to a fiery end tied to a wooden pole in front of family and friends, Geneva was a refuge. Only a handful of miles from France, where the Inquisition raged, Calvin preached in this church that this was all madness.
In retrospect, we may now see all this for what it was—powerful men using the excuse of religion for their own advantage as they established rule over the continent and in their vast empires overseas. And places like Switzerland were a thorn in the side of this plan. It remains, to me, a wonder how this small and isolated little country escaped destruction.
It was a dangerous stance, Calvin’s. And to see the grey, simple stone church where he began a movement that even today forms the basis for a mainstream belief was a “moment” for me. I’ve had them before—in a ditch at Antietam, where thousands men died in a suicidal charge at the rebel army, and in the grassy fields near Arnhem, where Operation Market Garden unraveled and the Allied army was hopelessly pinned down by the Germans, prolonging the war for many more months.
Similarly, the course of history was changed in this rather unassuming (by European standards) stone church. It paled in comparison to the cathedrals of France and Spain, with their awe-inspiring grandeur designed to strike the fear of God in you as you approached and entered them. It reminds you that the Swiss, for hundreds of years, have remained seperated for what their neighbors were up to—or at least managed to stay separated from it all.
Geneva was a complicated home to this movement. It was a place that boasted a neutral stance, yet sometimes burned Catholic men and women in the same way that, in France, you might suffer an equal fate for believing the other way.
Today
But here in Geneva today, I walked the streets, gazing into the windows of posh shops and watching the people go about their lives. In this city that speaks four official languages, I was centuries removed from all that.
The city is and looks old, having cleverly avoided the torment of two world wars and countless continental ones before that. And for those few hours, I soaked it all in—the fancy watch shops, the crystal-clear mountain lake, the mountains surrounding it all. And then I was off. As quickly as it all began.
