It was probably day three or four of the retreat when I stood at the edge of a field in the parish village of Leitershofen, looked at a horse, and found myself asking what, really, I was doing there. And you might be inclined to read that kind of question and imagine that I was doing exactly what retreats are so often meant to allow. In a sense that was true; there was a register to the question that was existential, a way in which it might have been the announcement that if I were particularly fortunate a proud and wonderful answer — the sort of thing you might read a blog post to discover — was on its way. But I really was asking it not because I could hear the distant, heavy steps of a profound truth marching ever closer. I also wasn’t asking it because I expected in some Lewisian fashion that the horse would speak back to me even as so much of that part of Germany does evoke something of that ‘through the wardrobe’ magical fantasy land feeling (as long as one doesn’t remember the AfD).
No I was asking because all of a sudden three weeks earlier Keli had graciously offered me a slot on an international retreat, and there I was in quite short order in Germany in the dead of February; because the theme of the retreat, “Bread for the Journey,” — a retreat in Bavaria, mind you, which takes bread about as seriously as Peru takes potatoes — I had just discovered was an entirely imaginative theme, for there would be no actual bread baking of any kind, just thinking about it; because I was delighted by the folks I met, many of whom also had travelled such significant distances, yet much of our days were spent in long, scheduled periods of silence enforced by foreign-accented whispers; because I arrived already quite tired, but somehow struggled greatly to relax. I was disoriented, jet-lagged, a little grumpy, flummoxed.
It is hard to knit things together so that they make a warm, pleasing moral. I’m not sure, for this particular experience, if there’s any such unity or comfort out of all the ups and downs of this unexpected voyage. But, there was one night (that of the last day, the day were supposed to imagine ourselves as baked breads) when Hugh from L’Arche Edinburgh, who had discovered an outdoor chapel whose walls were lined with candles, invited us after dark to sit for a while amidst them. It was below 30 degrees, I wasn’t wearing enough clothing for the conditions, and for a long time there was total quiet. And, I can’t remember if it was Otto the Benedictine or Hugh himself, but one of them asked me if I knew anything to sing. Something you should know about me is I really am not a comfortable singer; I, in particular, hate leading a song. I also have the dubious fortune of a robust but idiosyncratic classical education, so what did I have in my mind but the round, “Dona nobis pacem” but sung with rock-solid, Vox Latina classical pronunciation. I plunged in. Otto joined me. The cold stone walls echoed back at us. He sang it both beautifully and ecclesiastically, that monk from Helvetia, West Virginia somehow there with me at the Exerzitienhaus. For a long time afterword we all shivered in total silence, the shadows in our faces chased by hundreds of little lights.
Things were different after that, even as to this moment of writing I still don’t have an answer for myself or my equine onlooker. So many little things must go just right for a thoroughly protestant Dutch West-Michigander to end up singing a bit of strangely taught “Agnus Dei” in an ice-cold chapel ferreted deeply away in Bavaria. I’m grateful they did.
Jay De Man
