Time travelers

Commonweal, June 2, 1995 by Joseph Schickel

A double decker bus heading south to Merano, Italy. Beautiful countiyside--red roofs, vineyards, steeple-centered villages--is seen scooting past the windows as we go through the Rhineland. All shapes and sizes of men and women singers fill the bus. Recent college graduates to folks in their seventies make up this group called Musica Sacra from Cincinnati, Ohio. A chorus of forty-five voices touring and performing from Rudesheim to Rome. Dr. Helmut Roehrig, a vibrant and brilliantly talented music director, is leading the tour. The concerts reflect the great resources of traditional Catholic music, as well as Afro-American spirituals. "Ezechiel Saw the Wheel," "Deep River," Randall Thompson's "Alleluia," Mozart's "Regina Caeli," motets by Maurice Durufle, much more.

Sprinkled among the singers are spouses, friends, and relatives numbering about fifteen--bringing the caravan to sixty in all.

We just stopped and enjoyed a picnic lunch organized by the director's long-time friend and superb host in Germany, Heinrich Gerhard. Rolls, sausage, bread, fruit, cheese, wine, and soft drinks. A gypsy-like scene at the Autobahn rest stop. Clusters of people sitting on the ground in the shade pattern from the trees. The sounds of chatter and laughter mingle with diminishing sausage rolls, fruit, beverages, and the bright color of animated faces.

At six o'clock this morning we gathered for a hearty breakfast of breads, cheese, ham, hard-boiled eggs, orange juice, and delicious strong coffee, served lovingly by an all-seeing mother and alert grandson in the cafe of the Rebstock Hotel in Rudesheim. We carried our luggage down steep flights of stairs to be loaded in the bus in which we are now traveling.

I am a husband, nonsinger, enjoying the tour with my song-filled wife. Yesterday evening, Saturday, was a deeply moving experience for me. We have been in the heart of the Rhine wine country. After lunch, the choir members dressed for performance in their dark pants and skirts and white tops and green cummerbunds. Then they gathered for rehearsal in the hotel arcade. Thirty minutes of intense rehearsal ends with arrival of the bus. We pile in and the motors roar. A frantic check for stragglers. Forward, reverse, forward. The driver threads his way through the lovely narrow, cobbled streets of Rudesheim. We are headed for the village of Kiedrich, nestled in the Rhine valley, an ancient village with a glorious church, Saint Valentinus, dating back to the fifteenth century, with an enclosing wall creating a courtyard between it and Saint Michael Chapel.

The bus gropes its way to the plaza areas outside the church, stops, and the passengers alight. As I write this our host just announced we will soon be entering Austria. The scene outside is dairy farms and the Alps in the distance. The choir members follow the director, who grew up in this village and parish, into the walled yard and proceed to the Saint Michael Chapel. This evening's concert will be in Saint Valentinus.

The nonsingers, looking a bit lost, hang out around the church entry. It becomes evident that a group of local people are in the midst of a prayer service, honoring a wedding anniversary. I circle the church exterior and drink in the form and structure of this ancient stone embodiment of the Catholic faith wrought by a village of 3,000 people, some five hundred years ago. This church was completed just as Columbus set sail for the new world in 1492. After circling around the outside and beholding the structure, sculptured details, and decorative elements, I go inside. The rise and fall of repetitive and rhythmic voices of praying people permeates the wonderful enclosure of faith and mingles with the light and space. I look around and there is a great deal to behold. The space enclosed by the building itself; the images--painted, sculpted--are one fabulous work of art after another. This is not the art world, this is the art of the Christian world. This is the art of the community of God's people. This is the embodiment of a community's vision and its place in the cosmos. These artists, designers, craftsmen, and artisans were certainly expressing themselves, but it was coincidental. They were not conscious, or even less self-conscious of it. They were producing the good, the true, and the beautiful. These artists were concerned with the timeless, the immeasurable, the transcendental--a paradigm very different from that of today's artist, who seeks the timely, the measurable, the relevant, and the momentary.

I find myself shocked, lonely, humbled, yet enchanted and delighted. Shocked to look at our culture and our attitudes in the very midst of God's blinding revelation. I realize we are largely lacking in direct acts of love and gratitude through our culture. We are puffed up about our accomplishments and progress. In that light our "backwardness" as a people shocks me. I am lonely because my whole professional life for fifty years has striven to accomplish--in our time and in a way appropriate to my world--what was accomplished here in this small village in the fourteen hundreds. Lonely because I am experiencing an inner journey that is probably not shared by many of those I am with. Perhaps it is obvious why it is humbling. The real reverence and respect and comradeship I feel with these brothers and sisters of the fifteenth century who are still present in the walls, give me a true sense of both the worth and deficiency of my own work. Why exhilarated and delighted? I am filled with new hope. I see more clearly a new paradigm for the artist. As Thomas Merton has said, "the oldest thing is the newest thing." The Holy Spirit is with me as I rejoice in my ancestors, on whose shoulders we all stand.