Mindless Miles to Memmingen

After a very cold night—the heat­ing gave out halfway through, which I guess qual­i­fies as another “authen­tic” sort of expe­ri­ence, though authen­tic wouldn’t have involved any heat­ing in the first place—we trudged off along the canal again. Bor­ing as ever. Added to this Andrew seems to have caught Zeke’s cold (we’d appre­ci­ate your efforts to pray it away!). So far I’m hold­ing steady in good health.

About an hour and a half away from Iller­tis­sen we ducked into the town of Altenstadt as it seemed to be about church time. We were only ten min­utes late—we just hap­pened to be in the wrong town. Iller­tis­sen and Altenstadt form a two-point parish and iron­i­cally enough today’s ser­vices were held in Iller­tis­sen. In our expe­ri­ence, both today’s and exten­sively in the past two years, Euro­pean churches aren’t big on web­sites, and even if they are they don’t list their wor­ship times. (In Stras­bourg we were told, with some sur­prise, that you’re sup­posed to see the news in the Thurs­day paper. Didn’t you know that?) So we sup­ple­mented our own prayers with some extra hymns and kept along, trudge trudge trudge, down the end­less path. The one plea­sure to off­set the tedium was the weather—finally warm and sunny. For all that it really felt like fall for the first time, instead of unsea­son­ably cold sum­mer, prob­a­bly because of the crunch and smell of the leaves under­foot and the slant­ing of the light through late morn­ing and from mid-afternoon on.

Even­tu­ally we did branch off of the canal path, enjoyed some sensory-stimulation in the form of noisy cars zoom­ing around the shoulder-less road, passed some corn­fields, and finally reached the out­skirts of Mem­min­gen… which also seemed to go on for­ever, espe­cially with Andrew sick and me hav­ing a mys­te­ri­ously sore foot all day. Once in town we stag­gered around look­ing for a place to stay. When we finally did we went out in search of food… and that’s when the long-awaited serendip­ity of the day hap­pened. The church just across the way had a mod­ern fresco painted on it, declar­ing that the present-day church of St. John the Bap­tist used to be an Augus­tin­ian clois­ter. We know for cer­tain that Luther came to Mem­min­gen on his own pil­grim­age. So, in other words, Luther slept here! It’s the first Augus­tin­ian clois­ter we’ve seen on our trek so far, so that was pretty cool.

Added to that, Andrew real­ized that the evening mass was just get­ting started, so we were able to par­take in the church’s wor­ship on the day of res­ur­rec­tion after all with our Catholic broth­ers and sis­ters. Happy ending!

Steve Godsall-Myers says:
September 13, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Greet­ings, Not sure what your itin­er­ary is in Mem­min­gen — this is the town where the peas­ants drew up the “12 Arti­cles” in 1525 and probalby hard­ened the posi­tions that were play­ing out in the Peasnt’s War. Per­haps more
’ecu­meni­cal’ — i.e. under­stand­ing dia­logue could have helped back then. The times were dif­fer­ent from ours, com­mu­ni­ca­tion was cer­tainly on another level, but like our times, fears abounded. We keep you in prayers for your daily walks. Peace, Steve Godsall-Myers
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paul sailhamer says:
September 14, 2010 at 3:56 pm
God’s prov­i­dence to the rescue…what a great way to con­clude a Sun­day! Read­ing your “trudge, trudge” ear­lier sec­tion made me think about a pos­si­ble shift in con­scious­ness between Luther’s trip to Rome and your own. I am sure there were many times on his jour­ney that Luther enjoyed the scenery, a visit with a friend in a small vil­lage, what­ever. But his focus was on his des­ti­na­tion: get­ting to Rome. When we travel “in his foot­steps and around his old haunts” our focus is on the jour­ney mush more than the destination…we don’t want it to end…we want to enjoy the trip. Con­se­quently we are dis­cour­aged when it is “bor­ing.” When Luther got to Rome his “pil­grim­age” por­tion of his trip began. Up till then wasn’t he on a busi­ness trip? Let alone the trip back!
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