Triply Blessed

As the rain blus­tered and the wind blew out­side dur­ing our break­fast in the Gasthof, we were found by our com­pan­ion for the day, David cur­rently of Dal­las and for­merly of Indi­ana. He read about our pil­grim­age in the Wall Street Jour­nal and decided to join us dur­ing his trip to Germany—so far the only per­son not already a friend or rel­a­tive of ours who’s joined us. But it’s not too late! Think about it!

Poor David could hardly have picked a less aus­pi­cious day to schlep along. The morning’s weather was hor­i­zon­tally blow­ing rain, it was as cold as ever, and we had our first day of seri­ous ele­va­tion gain—we fig­ure some­where around 1000 m alto­gether. But he was a great sport and great com­pany. We had a good time get­ting to know each other, talk­ing about voca­tion and Alexan­der Men and church life and Luther and other inter­est­ing things.

After look­ing with no suc­cess for a hiker’s hut or even a bus shel­ter to hide in for lunch, we finally gave up and set­tled for a park­ing lot across from the tiny church of St. Stephan in the vil­lage of Gen­hofen; hap­pily the rain had stopped and stayed stopped for the rest of the day. (Lunch was yesterday’s mush­rooms, inci­den­tally, cooked into what would have been soup if the noo­dles hadn’t sucked up all the water—but very good all the same.) Andrew went into the church for a peek and pil­grim pass­port stamp #3. He started to talk to a woman who was there pray­ing. Her first com­ment to him was, “This has been a holy place for a long time.” The church itself is only 500 or so years old, but the spot itself has been a holy place time out of mind. It’s on a lit­tle rise that forms a per­fect tri­an­gle with two other rises in two neigh­bor­ing vil­lages. This area of All­gäu was evan­ge­lized by the monks of St. Gall—the epony­mous Swiss town named for the Irish monk whose charges worked their way up into this part of south­ern Ger­many late in the first mil­len­nium after Christ. Hagiog­ra­phy is a good way to uncover the long-forgotten mis­sion his­tory of Europe. The very old fresco dec­o­ra­tions in black and red inside the church were lively and undoubt­edly highly sym­bolic though we couldn’t deci­pher most of the sym­bols (nor could most church peo­ple, accord­ing to our ad-hoc guide). The art was refresh­ingly medieval, not a touch of the Baroque about it. Even the spindly wooden pews looked as if they were new when Luther passed by.

Then it was just a whole lot more up and down for awhile, accom­pa­nied by more clouds and pas­toral coun­try­side, until we came to a house with walls cov­ered in tiny round wooden over­lap­ping shin­gles (a lot of houses around here are like that—as dis­tinc­tive as the slate shin­gles of Thuringia) that had a line of ver­dant cacti grow­ing along­side it. A woman came out right as Andrew was stop­ping for a photo so I asked if she could refill our water bot­tles. She not only did that but insisted that the three of us come inside for a cup of tea—and so we did. We met Rena’s hus­band Oskar briefly, on his way out the door, and then enjoyed the much-needed tea in her dar­ling kitchen. It turns out that she used to be an Eng­lish teacher, which was great, since we were fairly tired and our Ger­man skills were begin­ning to fal­ter. She told us that the tiny round shin­gles we’ve been see­ing are in fact applied by hand, one by one, which does take a long time—but they will last for­ever; the ones on her house have been there since 1907 and are still in good shape! We were greatly refreshed by the visit and grate­ful once again for the angels that have min­is­tered to us on our way.

The last bit of the 32 km today passed by in a haze of deter­mi­na­tion just to get there already (or at least that’s how it was for me). When we finally got into Schei­degg we said good­bye to David and then plowed on the last lit­tle bit to the Evan­ge­lis­che Pil­gerzen­trum on the edge of town. Here we were wel­comed in by a cou­ple of Dutch volunteers—the place is staffed by rotat­ing vol­un­teers who stay at the place a cou­ple weeks at a time and look after and feed the pil­grims. They bus­tled us in, showed us around, and sat us down to a won­der­ful din­ner. It was par­tic­u­larly nice to be hosted per­son­ally after so many pleas­ant but still basi­cally imper­sonal hotels. We are pil­grims #770 and #771 to pass through—this pil­grim cen­ter has only been open since July 2007—and that put us up to stamp #4 on our pil­grim passports.

Pil­grim­age could be a lonely busi­ness but we were triply blessed today—with David, with Rena, and with our hosts at the Pilgerzentrum.

Just a note: we will be in erratic con­tact until we leave the Alps in about 10 days. Thank you for your patience.

Jennifer Rome says:
September 18, 2010 at 3:32 am
Love and strength to you as you head up into the Alps. I catch up with you a cou­ple days at a time. E is glad for the week­end after her 1st week at school! I hope you have a good week­end too.
Jen
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