24 January 2026
Dear friends,
I write this on Saturday as the ice descends on Dallas. was planning to return on Sunday, but the inclement weather in both Dallas and New York made it wiser to return a little early. This brings the final journey of my sabbatical to an end, with a week left to recuperate, organize my notes, and get ready to return.
What follows will only scratch the surface of this experience and the stories I have to tell about it, but it’s a start.
First, in late December, I had the chance to spend a few days in and around the ancestral family homeland in Polk County, Wisconsin. My sons and I went out on a frozen lake for the first time in their lives, and for me, in many years. The evening light and the small clutches of ice-fishing shacks in the distance made me think of my painter:
Dear friends,
I write this on Saturday as the ice descends on Dallas. was planning to return on Sunday, but the inclement weather in both Dallas and New York made it wiser to return a little early. This brings the final journey of my sabbatical to an end, with a week left to recuperate, organize my notes, and get ready to return.
What follows will only scratch the surface of this experience and the stories I have to tell about it, but it’s a start.
First, in late December, I had the chance to spend a few days in and around the ancestral family homeland in Polk County, Wisconsin. My sons and I went out on a frozen lake for the first time in their lives, and for me, in many years. The evening light and the small clutches of ice-fishing shacks in the distance made me think of my painter:
We spent Christmas Eve and Day in Madison, Wisconsin, where we worshiped at Luther Memorial Lutheran Church. I heard a great sermon there on Christmas Day and the music was powerful.
On January 3, I left for Berlin. Arriving the next day, a Sunday, I went to worship at the Berlin Cathedral, which was very impressive:
On January 3, I left for Berlin. Arriving the next day, a Sunday, I went to worship at the Berlin Cathedral, which was very impressive:
I was very busy in Berlin. I went to the New National Gallery, which is all modern. I had to leave for church, or I’d have explored it for longer.
On Monday, January 5, most of the art museums were closed, so I decided to focus on history. I went to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which has staggering memorials to the victims of the Holocaust as well as fascinating material about the history of the Jewish people in Germany before and since. A quick walk north from there took me to the Berlinische Galerie, housing art made in Berlin or by Berliners since 1870. Many of the artists had had to flee Germany or cease working during the Nazi period because their art was considered “degenerate” by the regime. From there, I walked still further north to the old Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall Museum, an absolutely bonkers collection of photographs, historical items, and huge blocks of text concerning the history of divided Berlin and of the Cold War more generally. This museum, in turn, was a short walk from the Topography of Terror museum, dedicated to the legal and institutional tools the Nazi regime used to control German society and carry out its crimes against humanity. This was both fascinating and, as the name suggests, terrifying in its portrayal of basically normal, conventional people carrying out heinous crimes. I ended the day’s walk with a pass through the heavy, ominous memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate.
On Monday, January 5, most of the art museums were closed, so I decided to focus on history. I went to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which has staggering memorials to the victims of the Holocaust as well as fascinating material about the history of the Jewish people in Germany before and since. A quick walk north from there took me to the Berlinische Galerie, housing art made in Berlin or by Berliners since 1870. Many of the artists had had to flee Germany or cease working during the Nazi period because their art was considered “degenerate” by the regime. From there, I walked still further north to the old Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall Museum, an absolutely bonkers collection of photographs, historical items, and huge blocks of text concerning the history of divided Berlin and of the Cold War more generally. This museum, in turn, was a short walk from the Topography of Terror museum, dedicated to the legal and institutional tools the Nazi regime used to control German society and carry out its crimes against humanity. This was both fascinating and, as the name suggests, terrifying in its portrayal of basically normal, conventional people carrying out heinous crimes. I ended the day’s walk with a pass through the heavy, ominous memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate.
On Tuesday, I got an early start and reached the Gemäldgalerie, where the paintings I was seeking are on display. It’s a big museum, and I turned left at the entrance when I should have turned right, but I got there eventually: Netherlandish Proverbs and Two Monkeys. The first is big and busy (some 115 proverbial sayings are depicted in it), the second is small and relatively simple, but devastating in its own way. The museum is packed with great stuff (this is where I started my side quest for the paintings of Vermeer, even scarcer than those of Pieter Bruegel the Elder), and I was there for quite a long time.
I happened to be quite near the memorial to the Resistance to Nazism, so I stopped there as well. It’s a very thorough and sometimes deeply moving witness to people who sacrificed and risked everything to stand up to evil.
I ended my day with a too-brief visit to the new Museum of East Germany, a fascinating documentation of a largely ignored period in German history. I left in time to go to the Epiphany service across the canal at the Cathedral, but they wouldn’t let me take my backpack into the sanctuary, and I didn’t have a Euro coin for the locker, so I had to skip worship.
The next day, I was off by train to Frankfurt and then Darmstadt. Nici Bremer’s sister Verena and her husband Walter met me at the train, fed me sumptuously (perhaps “snack” means something different in Germany than it does here), and then Verena accompanied me to the Hessian Provincial Museum, where Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Magpie on the Gallows is on display. The museum itself was a trip—collections of fossils, taxidermy animals, armor, a special exhibit on clouds, and a painting gallery—and we made a brief tour of its diverse rooms before finding my target. Verena proved to be a wonderful company for this quest, as we talked about all kinds of paintings. After we left the painting for the third time (I like to see each painting three times before leaving), we drifted toward the door slowly enough that Verena asked, “Do you want to see the painting one more time?” Of course I did, and as we talked about it, I noticed something I’d never seen before: tiny ships, perhaps suggesting the Spanish invasion of the Low Countries in 1568, burning villages as they worked their way up the river. Walter cooked a marvelous dinner, and they gave me a warm, comfortable bed before my departure for Amsterdam the next day.
I ended my day with a too-brief visit to the new Museum of East Germany, a fascinating documentation of a largely ignored period in German history. I left in time to go to the Epiphany service across the canal at the Cathedral, but they wouldn’t let me take my backpack into the sanctuary, and I didn’t have a Euro coin for the locker, so I had to skip worship.
The next day, I was off by train to Frankfurt and then Darmstadt. Nici Bremer’s sister Verena and her husband Walter met me at the train, fed me sumptuously (perhaps “snack” means something different in Germany than it does here), and then Verena accompanied me to the Hessian Provincial Museum, where Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Magpie on the Gallows is on display. The museum itself was a trip—collections of fossils, taxidermy animals, armor, a special exhibit on clouds, and a painting gallery—and we made a brief tour of its diverse rooms before finding my target. Verena proved to be a wonderful company for this quest, as we talked about all kinds of paintings. After we left the painting for the third time (I like to see each painting three times before leaving), we drifted toward the door slowly enough that Verena asked, “Do you want to see the painting one more time?” Of course I did, and as we talked about it, I noticed something I’d never seen before: tiny ships, perhaps suggesting the Spanish invasion of the Low Countries in 1568, burning villages as they worked their way up the river. Walter cooked a marvelous dinner, and they gave me a warm, comfortable bed before my departure for Amsterdam the next day.
The weather, which was unpleasant in Berlin, became a genuine challenge in Amsterdam. I had the chance to meet up for Indonesian food with my friend and divinity school classmate Kyle Rader, now an Episcopal priest in the Netherlands. And I explored the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the small, remarkable Museum of Our Lord in the Attic, a restored Catholic house church from the period when only Protestant worship could be held in public. Amsterdam is obviously a wonderful city, but it probably looks better and is easier to navigate when it’s not covered in ice.
After two short nights in Amsterdam, I was off to Antwerp, Belgium, on January 10, with a break in Rotterdam to see one painting. I had confirmed in advance that the painting I was looking for--The Tower of Babel, in a second, smaller version than the one that hangs in Vienna and which I’ve used in the bulletin—would be on display at The Depot, a conservation and storage facility open to the public, while its home museum was under reconstruction. But either my information was out of date, or the museum was being very technical because all I could see during our ten-minute tour of the painting storage room was a tiny slice of it (though the museum itself was pretty interesting, and it was fun to go “behind the scenes”):
Antwerp, when I arrived, turned out to be a somewhat unexpected highlight. Much of the 16th-century city is preserved. I visited the Snijders and Rockoxhuis Museum and the magnificent Cathedral, which has an English-language Mass on Saturday nights, which meant I got to worship in my native language. On Sunday, January 11, my dear friend Professor Theodor Dunkelgrün arrived from England to explore the city with me. We met at the Magdenhuis, a museum of the city’s former orphanage, where a small portion of the Museum Mayer van den Bergh is on display while the museum is being expanded. In this little six-room space, the museum displayed “Beloved” objects from their collection, chosen not just by museum staff and experts but by local musicians, students, civil servants, businesspeople, and even a pastor. I was there to see Dulle Griet (known in English as Mad Meg), and ended up talking to a Dutch family who informed me that the painting’s subject had been the heroine of a comic book in their youths. We explored the rest of Old Antwerp, including an incredibly well-preserved 16th-century printing house, before catching an evening train to The Hague, where Theo is from and where his parents still live.
This meant that after a comfortable night in a family home, I got a unique tour of a storied city, from its Nazi-era seaside bunkers and its Jewish cemetery to the landmarks of Dutch history, politics, the Holocaust, and the touchstones of my friend’s early life. The largest part of the day was spent at the Mauritshuis, the small but mighty art museum in town which holds a powerful Rembrandt self-portrait, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, and Vermeer’s View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring. I also learned the embarrassing but effective technique for eating cold pickled herring (no photos).
After a travel disruption that led to sharing a cab to Rotterdam with two strangers, we ended the night in Brussels, where Pieter Bruegel lived for the last years of his life, where he is buried, and the home of the second-largest collection of his works in the world. The next morning, January 13, we met a friend of Theo’s, a local professor of classics, who joined us for a tour of the Brussels Cathedral and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. I’ll have a lot more to say about both, but it was perfect to have such knowledgeable companions as we explored the history and the art.
Before leaving the city the next day, I said my morning prayers at Bruegel's monument in the Church of Our Lady of the Chapel, where the enthusiastic Polish guard gave me a rosary and a magnet depicting the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii. And I stopped at the City Museum of Brussels to see a painting by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. That afternoon, I met up with my brother, Dan Dueholm, in Paris. We went to the Louvre, which holds one painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Unfortunately the galleries holding it and the rest of their northern European masterpieces were closed each day we were there. I was bitterly disappointed by this. But we got to see Notre Dame (remind me to tell you my story about it), the churches of St. Germain-des-Pres and St. Etienne-du-Mont, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, which was stunning. Before catching our train to London, we stopped at a Roman-era arena that is still used by the citizens for frisbee games and martial arts.
In London, we accidentally ended up helping to clean up a nativity display (I’ll tell you the story) in the striking 19th-century church of St. Augustine before visiting the National Gallery and the Courtauld Gallery, home to three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder between them. My high school friend Xunhua Wong, who kindly hosted us in her North London home, joined us for the latter. We ended the night at a performance of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Center. The music wasn’t all my favorite, but the quality of the performance was superb.
The next day, my friend took the morning off work, and the three of us went to Windsor Castle, home of the Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting The Massacre of the Innocents. While Windsor holds the original, it’s been much overpainted (turning the children of Bethlehem into animals or packages to make the scene less horrible), and the several copies in other museums give you a better idea of what it first looked like. The castle doesn’t allow photography, so Xunhua took one for the team by breaking the rule (she didn’t get caught).
Dan and I tried to go to choral evensong, a Church of England tradition, at Southwark Cathedral, but the sanctuary was closed for an event relating to the film Hamnet. So they held spoken Evening Prayer in the Harvard Chapel, which we participated in. The next day, I was off by myself to Upton House outside of Banbury. This town is much closer to Birmingham than to London, making it the most remote location for a Bruegel painting anywhere, as well as the furthest north, and also the last new place I’d explore on this whole journey. My time with The Death of the Virgin was limited because the house was only open to tours, but it was a wonderful place.
Back in the city, I explored the Tate Modern with Dan. The next day, we made it back for one last visit to the National Gallery before his week was up, and I went with Xunhua to hear the London Philharmonic Orchestra play, again with astonishing perfection.
On Thursday, January 22, I finally returned to the U.S., landing in New York shortly after 2 PM. I saw some old friends at the apartment where I was being lodged. On Friday morning, I realized that my return flight on Sunday would likely be disrupted, if not on the Dallas end, then on the New York end. So I moved my flight to the last available that day and set off to see the last two stops on my itinerary.
At the Frick Collection, I showed up without a timed ticket and stood at the “standby” line before a total stranger gave me an extra timed ticket for a 10:30 AM entry. Throughout this journey, I have been greatly blessed by the friendliness and generosity of such strangers. The Frick doesn’t allow photos, and unlike my friend, I’m reluctant to break the rule, but I did get to see Bruegel’s Three Soldiers along with three Vermeers and a first-rate Rembrandt self-portrait. I felt a twinge of sadness as I left. I didn’t especially care for Rembrandt when this journey began, but in Vienna, his face caught my attention, and I’d seen quite a few of his works everywhere I went. I realized I would miss that face.
On Thursday, January 22, I finally returned to the U.S., landing in New York shortly after 2 PM. I saw some old friends at the apartment where I was being lodged. On Friday morning, I realized that my return flight on Sunday would likely be disrupted, if not on the Dallas end, then on the New York end. So I moved my flight to the last available that day and set off to see the last two stops on my itinerary.
At the Frick Collection, I showed up without a timed ticket and stood at the “standby” line before a total stranger gave me an extra timed ticket for a 10:30 AM entry. Throughout this journey, I have been greatly blessed by the friendliness and generosity of such strangers. The Frick doesn’t allow photos, and unlike my friend, I’m reluctant to break the rule, but I did get to see Bruegel’s Three Soldiers along with three Vermeers and a first-rate Rembrandt self-portrait. I felt a twinge of sadness as I left. I didn’t especially care for Rembrandt when this journey began, but in Vienna, his face caught my attention, and I’d seen quite a few of his works everywhere I went. I realized I would miss that face.
A brisk walk up Fifth Avenue brought me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of my favorite museums and the place where this whole obsession began. With my brother and my seminary classmate (and Soren’s godfather), the Rev. John Flack, I went back to The Harvesters, a painting that made me think of home and of a world of insight and beauty I’d never known. Now, thanks to you, I know a lot more of it. Not just Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work, and that of his sons, but the whole artistic enterprise connecting them with Vermeer, Rembrandt, El Greco, and Veronese. It’s a world of depictions of faith, daily life, and the workings of the human mind. And around it are so many witnesses to good, evil, beauty, ugliness, and the ambivalent combinations of all of them that make up human existence. I have a whole lot of notes and some great stories to share. This experience has changed my perspectives and given me gifts that will last the rest of my life. Thank you again, and more than I can say, for supporting this time in my life and ministry.
I look forward to seeing everyone soon!
Grace and peace,
Pastor Ben
I look forward to seeing everyone soon!
Grace and peace,
Pastor Ben
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