What I (re)discovered at Berget

What I (re)discovered on Berget

Michael Goldhammer, volontär på Berget.

Här ser vi Michael Goldhammer längst till höger på bild, i S:t Davidsgårdens brasrum, tillsammans med två av våra andra volontärer: Monika Hemming och Hermann Dill.

My name is Michael. I am 25 and I am Studying philosophy in the German city Frankfurt am Main. A year ago I applied for the volunteer program of a German organization called Bonifatiuswerk. This is a welfare organization that supports the catholic church in the scandinavian countries and in Balticum. Bonifatiuswerk then sent me to Stiftelsen Berget in order to work there from September to the beginning of December. My job was mainly to prepare food – att laga mat.

Arriving here was, of course, accommodated with a lot of questions and uncertainties. The contrast between my university in Frankfurt and a house of retreat in the countryside in Sweden is stark to say the least. And I was wondering how to keep in contact with my family, how to keep up my studying, how fast I will be able to pick up Swedish and what else I will learn here. And of course I was also wondering about the elephant in the room: How will I be able to deal with silence? All these questions turned out to be circumstantial. Luckily the Swedish language is pretty close to German, the silence is quite supportive for studying and I was able to arrange a few zoom calls with my parents. I even turned out to be a decent cook (tror jag)! Instead with time passing another question arose: What is Berget? Or to be more precise: If a friend asked me – or a teacher or someone in my distant family – what Berget is, what would I tell them? Is there a way to describe this place appropriately? The German idealist Immanuel Kant is known best for his long and complicated texts about the structure and the borders of reason and of judgement. In other words: he is known best for being boring. But one of the most important statements he ever wrote could almost not be shorter: “Sapere Aude!” – Have the courage to think. I am a student of philosophy, but I am certainly no authority on Kant. The one single idea I want to attend to by bringing him up is the concept of “thinking” as something that is not quite unimportant, but also not quite harmless. Thinking, in the eyes of Kant, seems to be something that we cannot do without, or that is at least important to do from time to time – something daring. Sometimes questions turn out to be difficult to answer, because the closer you look at them, more plausible answers come to mind. Stiftelsen Berget for example is certainly many things at once. It is a place of spirituality, a place of community, of prayer and of course of silence. But for me Berget was first and foremost a place where I discovered something that I maybe already knew: The goodness of thinking. So if I would be asked, what makes Berget special as a place and as a community, I would answer this: To be able to sit in the brasrummet – and to think.