Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [38]
There was a hush. Bishop Henry and three other bearded men moved to the front of the room and took their places on a short bench facing the congregation.
A lengthy silence followed. Nervously my eyes darted around the room and out the window at the trees streaming with morning sunlight. At last, someone in the congregation called out a page number and intoned a pitch. On this cue hymnals opened and the room began to rock. What was happening? Was it music? Chant? The sound was thunderous, yet at the same time high and thin. The slow rising and falling of tones, the curious tumbling ornamentation, offered little in the way of melody. Yet there was something subtle or supple about it: I thought I detected quarter-tone shifts, and they were executed in flawless unison. The effect was of a carefully choreographed whine.
Why such a mournful sound? Why weren’t the Minimites rejoicing? Wouldn’t the cumulative act in a life of harmony be harmony? One scholar, I later learned, had alleged that the type of song I was hearing had descended from sixteenth-century monastic chant; other scholars had countered that this chant had independent origins.
Either way, there was a long history behind the music, a history of precarious Anabaptist fortunes among religious enemies. Present company could not escape the memory of their predecessors’ suffering any more than they could ignore their uneasy relationship to the world around them today, a world that challenged them on almost every front. This strange and melancholy chant perfectly expressed that discomfiture. The music eerily wavered somewhere between the harmonious and the off-key, yawning over the edge of tonality one minute, circling back for a resolution the next. The Minimites were not tone-deaf. The course they charted among the hazards and temptations of modern society created dissonance.
Yet what the singers remembered was no less important than what they forgot: themselves. This music reached for something higher. And it approached that something circuitously, weaving and dipping, querying and importuning, certain nonetheless of what it sought: the Almighty, the Supreme Being to whom creation owed its existence. Despite the vagaries of human life, God existed, but his ways were not obvious. This avowal conceded neither the trepidation of a supplicant before a tyrant nor despair at a being inaccessibly remote, but rather the unflagging persistence of the searcher into mystery, consoled even in partial reconciliation or ambiguity. Something inside me softened. I knew German passably and soon found myself, without really meaning to, singing along softly, following the Gothic script in the hymnal someone passed to me.
O Gott Vater wir loben dich
Und deine Güte preisen;
Dass du uns O Herr Gnädichlich
An uns neun hast beweisen
Und hast uns Herr zusammen gführt,
Uns zu ermahnen durch dein Wort,
Gib uns Genad zu diesem.
[O Father God, we praise you
And cherish your gifts;
Give us grace
That they be revealed unto us,
And that we be led together,
Admonished by thy word.]
The one hymn lasted over ten minutes.
During the course of many verses, my voice rose and blended imperceptibly with the congregation’s until they were hardly distinguishable.
When it was over, Bishop Henry stood up and began to speak. He droned on like an auctioneer, first in Pennsylvania Dutch and later in English translation for the benefit of newer members and visitors like myself. It was not a very interesting sermon, and my mind began to wander. Dimly I caught bits of a message that was as banal as it was repetitive: “stay to the way”; “don’t deviate”; “follow Christ”; “seek a heavenly reward”; “shun the flesh.” Despite the monotony, there was something soothing in the sermon, something pleasant and narcotic in its very repetitiousness. I realized later that this may not have been