220 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT Switzerland today. Officially, he is not a member since membership is defined geographically. He tries to maintain contacts, but states: Normally I couldn’t belong to this church, even if I continued to, so… at least, for the statistics of the church. So, I’m not officially member of this church, even if I would say that the Reformed understanding of belonging to the church is perhaps more spiritual… than only this dimension of being… uh… administratively {laughs} part of the, or member of the church. Um…… so, I think, I dis~, yes, the feeling, the context, the relationships with the church are still… they increased, so to say, with the church, the regional church in general, because before, as all Reformed, I lived everything inside of my own parish, and the horizon was almost closed at the end of its limits, um… while from here, as far as I was not in a geographical parish, um… I had also… yes, I, I had the impression to be part of this wider regional… church. And I was also looking for some contacts with the authorities of the… of this Landeskirche, they would say in Germany, anyway, the regional church to which I was belonging, and uh, had contacts with this… the, how would you say it in English, the synod, not the synod, but the executive part of the synod, so the, the council, the synod council.491 BE then explains why he considers it important to uphold such relationships. On the one hand, he feels the need to materialize the reality of his double belonging. On the other hand, he hopes to promote ecumenical awareness in the Reformed Church: I think in order to main~… so, for two reasons, so to say, in order to maintain my own belonging to understand, to make me understand that I’m still belonging to that church, but at the same time also to help them to understand that if I am here, it’s also a way to open the church where I come from to this reality, to this ecumenical, but also this monastic reality, which is surely not a tradition which is normally… uh, part of a Reformed Church, so… Yeah, the idea that my being here was also something for the church in a wider, in a wider sense….492 BE indicates that he tries to visit the Reformed Church whenever he is in Switzerland. 493 TA, who still belongs to the Reformed Church in the 491 BE-1,42. 492 BE-1,44. 493 BE-1,72.
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