Know a Good River?

People often ask, "Have you read any good books lately?" I have another question for you: "Do you know a good river?" I was thinking of this question from Langston Hughes, the African-American poet. He lived from 1902 to 1967. When he was seventeen years old, he went on a trip across the Mississippi River. While on that trip, he wrote a beautiful poem called The Negro Speaks of Rivers. This is what he wrote:

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

In this poem, Hughes is talking about rivers both literally and as a metaphor. And as he makes connections to these rivers, he's making meaningful connections to his past.

This poem talks about the Euphrates and the Congo and the Nile and the Mississippi. It makes me think of a great river that stretches through the Netherlands all the way through Germany and down into Switzerland. It is the Rhine River. Along the Rhine lie a number of cities that tell the history of the Reformation.

Near where the river starts is the city of Basel in Switzerland, where the Reformer Johannes Oecolampadius was active. A little bit further north is the city of Strasbourg. In the time of the Reformation, Strasbourg was a German city; now it's a French city. Strasbourg was the home to Johannes Gutenberg, and it's where the first printing press was put into operation. It was also the home of Martin Bucer, and for a few years, it was also home to John Calvin while he was exiled from Geneva.

A little bit farther north and inland is the wonderful city of Heidelberg. This city has a rich Reformation heritage. It was there in 1518, at the beginning of the Reformation, that the Heidelberg Disputation took place. Bucer was an Augustinian monk in the audience that heard Martin Luther deliver the disputation. Decades later, the Heidelberg Catechism was produced in the city, as Zacharias Ursinus and Casper Olevianus and a few other scholars and theologians penned for us one of the most beautiful documents from the Reformation.

If we go farther north still, we come to the city of Cologne. This city has a bit of a sad story from the era of the Reformation. The Reformation was never quite able to penetrate this German city. It remained true to its medieval Roman Catholic roots and kept up those traditions through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even as other Swiss and German cities were coming under the sway of the Reformation. And that is the story that the Rhine tells us of the time of the Reformation.