The awkward physics of processional hymns

Singing hymns while marching is always a risky undertaking.  The physics of it produces some unwanted and embarrasing complications, and no congregation that I have yet observed, no matter how musical or devout, has surmounted them with any success.  But today a miracle happened.

The good Lutherans of St. Matthäus were invited one Sunday by their Catholic neighbours down the street to take part in a joint-service, with the first half taking place in the Lutheran chapel, and the second in the Catholic.  At half-time, as we processed down the sidewalk, someone in the middle of the train felt moved by the Spirit and began to sing a hymn.  One by one the rest of us joined in, until the whole procession was singing as one.  Well, for a while, anyway.  Strung out along the block as we were, hindered by imperfect human time-keeping and by the finite speed of sound on a windy day, different tempos began developing up and down the line.  The hymn began to wobble like a slinky.  The phase-shifts became so long that the vanguard of the parade would be wrapping up a verse right as those at the caboose-end were just gearing up to start it.  And we knew it.  That awful communal embarrassment that ensues when a group realizes that a spiritual moment has started to collapse, like a failed round of applause that one brave person tries to jump-start but then awkwardly withdraws when no one else joins in, leaving the unapplauded person feeling like a dope.

And now for that miracle I promised.  Too much of a bad thing became a good thing.  The temporal gap between front and back grew exactly long enough that in one magic instant the hymn became a canon!  We sensed it instantly and seized upon it.  We began singing in a round, first in two voices, then in three.  It was flash-mob harmony.  In a positive feedback loop, the resonance grew in strength.  Each mini-chorus could hold down its own part with confidence, and by the time the doors of the Catholic church came into view, the whole procession was bellowing praises to God, in perfect discipline, a choir of hundreds conducted by the unseen Spirit.

Christmas in Salzburg

Christmas traditions here are almost identical to those back home, but we are enjoying some of the Austrian nuances of the holiday. We've traded off stockings on Christmas morning for stuffed boots on December 6th.  German Christmas hymns are more vivid and fun for kids than traditional English ones, I find. (Hark the Herald? Who's Herald?)  But if you really want a German-style Christmas, you decorate your tree with lit candles instead of electric lights! We're trying it this year, keeping that 10-litre bucket of holy water close at hand.

Salzburg does Christmas markets better than anywhere I've seen. The warm glow of the booths selling hand-crafted ornaments, the jaw-dropping, jaw-killing array of sweets, the ever-present brass quartet, the gentle snow that seems to know to begin falling as soon as you enter the market, and the smell of the chestnuts and the Glühwein (a hot spiced wine that soothes a sore throat like nothing else)—it puts us all in a warm, nostalgic haze. And so the euros slip from our pockets, booth after booth, like angels ascending to heaven.


The children are all old enough to want to gift one another for Christmas, and so everyone is hiding gifts from everyone else. Cracks are appearing in the disguise, though, like when a giver is caught reading the book he/she had meant as a present—often by the recipient. Or like poor Cornelia, who knit adorable caps and vests for Bettina's stuffed mice. Cornelia had meant them as a present and hidden them accordingly, but a nosey Bettina discovered them in the drawer—twice. After the second discovery, Cornelia gave up and just handed them to her.

There is a larger disappointment, though. In a country as Catholic as this and with a history so interwoven with that of the Church, I'd been expecting a feistier resistance to the commercial monolith. But here as in North America, the dominance of secular Christmas is thorough and unquestioned. Jesus has been relegated to Sunday mornings, when the pastor reminds us yet again that He is the reason for the season.

Church math

The family-Sunday service at St. Matthew's is a smash. Happy hymns with guitars (very non-German!), kids doing the readings, kids dancing in the aisle. The gospel and sermon are on Jesus's instruction to forgive 70 times 7. How can a pastor in a service full of elementary school children resist asking the obvious question? Three guesses who raised her hand and answered. "Vier hundert neunzig!"

Tea time with tantes

It's 3:15, we have aunts coming for tea at 4:00, and somewhere in the apartment there is a sock lying on someone's bedroom floor. That's enough to put Therese and me in drill-sergeant mode, and we scrub the entire apartment left, right and sideways. I do dishes. Therese vacuums. The three children whine about the unfairness of being made to do their 5%. Getting them to do it is more work than doing it myself (and they know that—it's part of their strategy), but at 3:58 the place is spotless, the dining room arrayed for a tea party Jane Austen could write about.

Our Austrian aunts are very aunt-like: cheerful, doting on the children, and of course bearing a two-ton chocolate cake, wrapped in a box with a ribbon. After cake and tea I politely excuse myself to go entertain the kids, whose interest in the conversation waned once their cake plate was scraped clean.

We play my patented "What Do You Want?" game, which has to be one of the dumbest games ever invented in the history of fatherhood, but the kids make me play it again and again. (It's basically an excuse to throw giggling children into a pile of pillows on the bed.) Even Cornelia, who's immersed in her paint-by-number, gets sucked in. "Hey guys, stop making me laugh, I'm trying to concentrate." To which I retort, "Stop making us concentrate, we're trying to laugh."

Home-grown Parcheesi

Remember the board game Parcheesi?  I loved it as a kid, and Bettina's just the right age for it.  I could order the game from Amazon...Nah!  We've got cardboard and markers! With some memory-jogging from Google Images, we draw up a board in an afternoon and get in two games before dinner. If we'd ordered it, we'd still be waiting.

	And when you get tired of that, there's always playdough.