Food for thought

‘Essen’ is the German for ‘to eat’. When I went there, I expected the city to be a sort of food fair with stands of cakes, pastries, sausages and Pretzels. This was stupid and I was disappointed; it was the middle of February, it was freezing and not even snowing.
Essen has been bombed and since the war has become a kind of shopping mall the size of a city: people come from all around the Rhine valley to buy their clothes there.
As I was walking in the cold, boring streets, desperately trying to find something worth noticing, I saw the cathedral: one single legacy of history remained there, untouched. I am not usually interested in religious buildings, but it was cold and I was bored, so I came in.
There, in this city where everything pushes the visitor to buy and consume, for the first time I saw Faith. I saw a man, sat on one of these typical 1960s chairs which only exist in churches anymore, his eyes closed, but somehow looking at the big wooden cross, his hands open to the sky, praying. He was smiling and crying at the same time. Shaking but stable. There and elsewhere.
There was something so powerful, so pure, so simple about him. None of these cliché pictures we’re used to with white doves and chubby babies or gory sacrifices.
I could have watched him for hours.
His hair was long, his clothes unclean.
He seemed inhabited by the strength which propelled those who had built the Cathedral 800 years ago. Looking at him, I could see generations and generations of faith and trust. No matter how dirty he was or what terrible or wonderful things had happened to him - his entire being was convinced of the truth of his God. And this made him beautiful.
I had always thought that this kind of belief had been lost through wars, deaths, and all these unexplainable absurdities of history and everyday life. Seeing a man unshaken by doubt, in the middle of this city made ugly by hatred and consumption made me suddenly realize that we were not so different from people in the past. That, even though they didn’t have running water and had no idea that the Earth turned around the Sun, even though they could not know that one day we would have the means to destroy the entire human race, maybe they could get closer to a certain understanding of the human soul.
And that they were seeking truth as much as we are, in their own way.
And I thought that maybe, just maybe, in spite of all our beautiful knowledge and our modern values, we might still sometimes need a God.