Niewekerk

I walked into Dam Square, the concrete glassy with rain and veined with cables feeding voltage to carnival rides and concession stands. Cotton candy, hot dogs, screaming voices. Behind it all, this vaguely black expanse of stone and windows stretched toward the opaque sky.

The Nieuwekerk, literally new church, is a Reformation church. From 1959 to 1980, church renovations were persistent, resulting in a place of worship too expensive to stay open. So it was sold. Wet as it was in the square, I couldn’t image it burning now.

Niewekerk is something of a museum these days, though it was empty when I walked in. Its golden choir gate was impressive, but no one was singing. Occasionally, a vagrant scream, made mute by thick stone walls, broke in through the dusty silence from the city just outside.

A rock concert was being held here the day after my visit. Would they use the wood-carved, ornately filigreed pulpit? How much were the tickets? They still call it a church, though, the new church, a reformation church. And royalty get married here, dignitaries and politicians.

I opened up the doors, and it was loud outside with wind and voices, hydraulic sounds and people selling junk to tourists like me. Tomorrow, in that church behind me, it would be louder still. And how much sound, I wonder, does worship make?

Nieuwekerk was built around 1408. Damaged many times by fire, but always rebuilt, the name is fitting then—Nieuwekerk, new church. In another way, the name has larger meaning. As one of the earliest Reformation churches, Nieuwekerk was built when Oudekerk, the oldest church in Amsterdam, was unable to accommodate the expanding population. But Oudekerk wasn’t originally a Protestant church. The Reformation repurposed it. So Nieuwekerk is the oldest building built for the New Church.

Until the 1980s, the church was in a near perpetual state of renovation, such that the parish could no longer afford it. Nieuwekerk was sold to a Dutch cultural trust and is now home to a museum of fine arts, a concert hall and ceremonial venue for royalty and political figures, things that generate more revenue than prayer alone. But most of the institutional milieu is still intact, the gold-plated choir, the high double pulpit, the graceful and severe glass rose-window, remnants I suppose of religion's inclination toward excess.

For 16 Euros, one can learn the rich history of the Nieuwekerk, the Dutch kings and queens married here, the navel heroes put to rest, the Crusaders and the medieval darkness. After the tour, of which photos can be purchased—but not taken—one can dine in the café. A coffee is three Euros, a Caesar salad around 15. Next to the café, the museum shop sells postcards, posters, diecast models of the church or the pulpit.

I remember, in the church of the Catholic grade school I attended in Washington state, a small wicker basket passing hand to hand on Sundays, filled hand by hand with dollar bills and sometimes change. I remember the church was small, meager, the largest events being Christmas and Easter masses.

I sat in the café, sipping the tiny cup of espresso, watching beads of rain tear down the plate glass windows, watching trucks pull behind Nieuwekerk to unload the equipment needed for tomorrow’s concert. I watched a young couple walk to the box office and purchase concert tickets, but I didn't see how much they cost. And I wondered if the performers would use pyrotechnics.

Westerkerk

An organ pressed into the air its viscous understanding of the grace this place should have, the low and indistinct effluxion raising something in my stomach much like angst. Above me, gold and silver held on angel-back and filigree relief. A funny word to think of in a church, relief. Relief from who or what? Relief from pressure in a place too perfect?

I sat and took stock of the moment, the blue and sunken music washing through the white-walled nave and through my body, cold just like the air outside, dark just like the windows.

It’s possible to pray here, people have before. It’s possible to buy a postcard with a bible verse, a nickle’s worth of paper and a 50 dollar phrase. A bargain at 5 Euros.

Did I mention, on the way out, an optical sensor responsible for opening the bulletproof security door failed to see me? What does that say about Westerkerk? What does it say about me?

Westerkerk was built between 1620 and 1631. Not the first Protestant church in Amsterdam, though certainly the largest, it’s oppressive shadow leans out over the Prinsengracht, border of the historical purlieus of affluence. Westerkerk is 48 meters long, 28 meters wide, and 27.5 meters tall at the vaulted height of its wood-barrel nave. But for its 36 preternaturally shadowy windows, this place is impenetrable, impervious and almost foreboding. Imagine all the prayers fettered by these bricks.

Is it impressive, this early glimpse of something ideal?

Just outside Westerkerk is a small memorial to Anne Frank, a 14 year old girl made famous by her journal, written while hiding during the Nazi invasion of Amsterdam. The office in which she hid with her family was just a couple doors from Westerkerk. Nazis raided and destroyed the office. After two years in hiding, Anne and her family were captured and taken to Auschwitz by the Gestapo. Anne, a well-connected member of the upper-middle class in Amsterdam, would have had to walk in front of Westerkerk wearing a golden star with the word “Jew” written in it. A symbol of her religion. A stigma.

I had to walk in front of this small memorial before entering the monumental and austere Westerkerk. What should I have prayed for inside? A bigger statue of Anne? A stigma of my own?

OudeKerk

Just outside the massive wooden doors, a murky grey cacophony of city noise and wind insisted that I go inside. The weight behind those doors bespoke their history, dense and finely grained, warped with time. I’d learned before that in cities like Amsterdam—where land is a commodity unwilling to be wasted—churches served a double purpose as cemeteries. It makes sense; bury those we lose beneath the very places we go to in our effort to get where we hope they are. Somehow, maybe, putting the dead in a place of worship might give us solace that it isn’t all for naught, this praying that we do.

But the dead, to me anyway, don’t offer hope, at least not hope that I’ll somehow live in some manifestation beyond this one here. They compel me to see myself for what I am: a body, slowly aging, soon decaying, eventually nothing. And that’s the truly forcible thing about Oudekerk, its emptiness, its voids. To imagine all the prayers lost in all the silence. People say Oudekerk is full of life. Is it?

Oudekerk means old church. This place of worship is the oldest one in Amsterdam. Built originally in 1306, Oudekerk was a Catholic church until the late sixteenth century, when the Catholic government was unseated for a Protestant one. Surprisingly, the structure survived the ensuing iconoclasm with minimal damage.

This is one of the richest cultural and historic centers in Amsterdam. Rembrandt designed a room here; the wood-barrel ceilings are actually inverted ship hulls, painted with catholic icons left over from its early days; and some 10,000 of Amsterdam’s citizens are buried underneath the 2500 graves which constitute its floor. It’s dark and cold, marble-walled, drafty and unwelcoming.

People say that sometimes voices of the 10,000 dead can be heard in the loose breezes spiraling through the vast interior, throwbacks, perhaps, to the city meetings traditionally held here. Oudekerk sits just inside De Wallen, the most famous red-light district.

Most of the windows in Oudekerk are either on the southeastern side facing the canal, or their sashes begin well above ground level. Neither the Catholics, nor the Protestants, were willing to confront the prostitutes standing behind glass doors just a few meters from their worship. If Amsterdam is known for anything, it’s legally sanctioned prostitution, and the women working here started working here before Oudekerk was built. Many of them worshiped in nearby churches, just not this one.

To be seen selling their bodies outside the places they prayed would be considered distasteful. Yet a few, very small and very well-hidden windows do exist, near what would have been the deacon’s or the priest’s offices. From these windows, starting around noon every day, churchgoers might catch a glance at the working women next door. Maybe they prayed that someday those women wouldn’t have to sell themselves. Maybe not.

Of course, Oudekerk is no longer a functioning church, and those windows likely bring in more revenue than the ornate and ancient ones stained with biblical scenes just steps away. The survivors of iconoclasm, outlasted still by an industry of sex. One wonders why, exactly, the first parishioners chose this place.

To get inside of Oudekerk I walked through several alleys dotted with cafes and women tapping on their windows, threads of smoke catching my attention from somewhere high above just out of sight. This could be my walk to church each day, I thought. Maybe if I didn’t walk this route, I wouldn’t even need to go.

Noorderkerk

Like so many Reformation churches, the starkness of the walls here gives a sense of the infinite. A sort of fog, interrupted only slightly by the greyer spines of columns rising toward the vaulted arches. Reformation Protestants thought it blasphemous to celebrate material icons the way the Catholics did. They demanded that a church be the place to worship not the depictions of religion, but the tenets of the faith itself. It’s said that’s why the Dutch masters painted workers and landscapes and villages, and it’s how a commercial market for art began. When the affluent clergy could no longer commission works, artists took to village squares to make a living.

So Noorderkerk’s walls are bare, its windows are clear glass, its pews are severe and slight. For a while I sat on one, poring over the graves beneath me, history, like the ghost it is, running up my neck. Looking down, I noticed that many of the tombs were carved or cast with symbols of death, or with icons representing the profession of the person beneath them. Many of them were intricate and beautiful, Baroque interpretations of the lives they covered up. And I thought, maybe the Reformers had it right. Maybe we should be celebrating people with our art. For I have yet to really see a god.

Noorder means northern in Dutch. The northern church. Just south of Noorderkerk is Westerkerk. They were designed by the same man, Hendrick de Keyser—Westerkerk in 1620, Noorderkerk in 1623.

Keyser died in 1621, so his son completed the Noorderkerk, whose portentous brick construction is indicative of both the Reformation demand for austerity and of Keyser’s typical Renaissance approach. Noorderkerk sits along the Prinsengracht, like its southern kin, but on the opposite shore. Aside from a known porter of the Amsterdam admiralty, the buried here are nameless. These tombs are stamped or carved with symbols of craftsmen, farmers, brewers and butchers—commoners.

And I wonder why the walls are bare, why the organ here is wood-clad and the chandeliers are iron-wrought. Maybe it’s our places of worship, too, that typify ourselves.

The Jordaan district in Amsterdam, around the 17th century, was the working-class neighborhood. The city itself was growing rapidly, a flux of immigration and major trade, and those who kept it running filled canal-houses and docked boats near its outer edges, close to the industry they labored for.

A majority of working-class Dutch were either Protestant already, or reforming in the midst of social sanctions and de facto policy. Westerkerk was the major place of worship here, but it began to fill with plebeian congregants, dock-workers and glaziers. Only a few years after Westerkerk’s construction, its demographic shifted.

Noorderkerk was commissioned for the opposite bank of the Prinsengracht, the historical divide of affluence and common-folk, and well north of the Westerkerk, where it would be more practical for laborers. Noorderker’s red-brick façade echoes that of its southern inspiration, but its symmetrical Greek cross and its meager tower betray puritan economy—something absent from the Westerkerk.

Walking to Noorderkerk, I weaved through market after market of homemade crafts, homegrown and homecooked food. And, though the Jordaan is largely gentrified, deeper in these neighborhoods there lingers ghosts of what it used to be, callouses of labor shown through roughshod houses and unkempt parks, through homeless sitting in the weather. Noorderkerk is not the largest church, by any means, so was it really for a growing congregation that it was built?

Sintnicolaaskerk

The only time I walked into a church in Amsterdam and felt akin with the milieu, the blue-black and gold making shadows of the corners where its columns drive up toward the frescoed ceilings; the grand and almost opulently carven alter, thin and lacy; the melancholy statues to personify the pain of being human.

A service was just finishing when I entered Saint Nicholas, and the very few people there to worship knelt in silence while a tourist meandered down the nave, gazing upward unaware and seemingly unnoticed. For a moment, I sat at the end of a long, stern pew near the vestibule, my body sinking back to days of Catholic school in Washington, and I bowed my head as if by habit. I wasn’t praying, though I thought I should have been.

Lining the walls were 14 wood-carved and intricately painted depictions of Jesus Christ suffering and eventually dying, 14 viscerally sorrowful illustrations of human vice. The Stations of the Cross.

As a child I remember, once every year, a mass in which these scenes were modeled one-by-one in silhouette while altar-children walked to each station to frame the carven images with candles. Station one, Jesus is condemned. Station two, he accepts his cross. Station eleven, Jesus is nailed to it. Fourteen, he is entombed. Each of these events, the punctuation in a sentence to suffer and die for the shortcomings of a people.

I was raised a Roman Catholic. I consider myself a Humanist. I am of the mind that, as people, we are ultimately responsible for our fate. So, I suppose, I don’t much believe in fate at all. I believe in dialogues of agency, in criticism, in apologies for things that I’ve done wrong and in moving forward to do right. I don’t believe that we need salvation.

Saint Nicholas Church was built in the late 19th century. Its neo-Baroque and neo-Renaissance influences are betrayed by heavily frescoed walls and ceilings, and by ornately gilded columns and vaulted spines. It is the largest Roman Catholic church in Amsterdam, and the youngest of the “old” churches, largely because the echoes of the Reformation ran so deeply through the Netherlands.

In 2012, its 125th year, Saint Nicholas was raised to Basilica Minor, one of few given pontifical decree. Ostensibly, the decree was granted in recognition of those Catholics who practiced their faith despite the impacts of Reformation. One of the only large Catholic churches of such artistry in Amsterdam, Saint Nicholas attracts thousands and thousands of tourists each year. I imagine that some of them come to worship.

In Roman Catholic iconography, Saint Nicholas is depicted as a dark-skinned man, bald and thin, and usually a bishop. He is generally known for gift giving, often carrying purses laden with gold coins—known, too, as dowry. We might know him better as Santa Clause.

Perhaps because of my history with Catholicism, in Saint Nicholas church in Amsterdam I am struck most by the Stations of the Cross, the illustrations of a suffering man who, it is said, was the savior of those who destroyed him.

The lesson I learned as a Catholic is that we humans are filled with avarice, greed—that we’re malevolent. The lessons taught through examples like Saint Nicholas say otherwise. We can argue that neither Christ nor Saint Nicholas ever existed. Certainly there’s enough embroidery in the stories of either character to be skeptical. But regardless of their veracity, these stories were told by human beings, which suggests to me that, if we’ve got even the impetus for a narrative such as that, we must have some modicum of concern for one another on a grand scale.

I’m a humanist because I’m a human. Sometimes human beings are foul, sometimes polluted and averse. Sometimes human beings are beautiful and kind. When I walk from station to station in a Catholic church—at home or in some distant place—and I let all the sorrow and the suffering into me and take responsibility for it, I find myself wondering why I should do that. I haven’t found an answer to that question, and I take it all the same.