As he bounced through the valleys tightening around him, Heinrich began to wonder why these Syrians could peddle their spices and their silks unharmed, while Christian knights were dying on the bloody sands of Palestine. He stared at them as they knelt to pray and wondered if they were asking Allah to strike down the Christ. He knew Jerusalem had fallen to their kind less than twenty years before. He also knew that a remnant of Christian Palestine was hard-pressed on every side by a rising storm of infidels, perhaps kin to the ones he now served. Heinrich slowly became incensed. Look at ‘em! They strut about like clever peacocks in their foolish turbans and silk. They think our lands are theirs for the taking! The man began to bristle.
Finally, in the early twilight of that same day Heinrich reined in his horses and dismounted the wagon. He snatched a loaf of stale bread and a flagon of ale from the caravan’s provisioner and walked away. He’d not serve them another step. Midst a volley of blasphemies and curses, the man spat and marched north toward a village he had seen from higher ground. He could hear a distant bell ringing compline and he quickened his step to find shelter before nightfall.
Heinrich arrived in a small village set neatly against a starlit lake. In the silver moonlight he could see the silhouetted ring of mountains securing the modest hamlet at its center, cupping the village as if to shelter it from the evil world beyond. A stout, stone church squatted near the lake’s edge and he knocked on its heavy wooden door. A kindly priest named Father Wilfrid answered and welcomed the pilgrim inside to spend the night by a pleasant fire.
It was a good night for Heinrich. The priest was cheerful and earnest, his bread soft and sweetened, and the fire bright and warm. Heinrich slept like a happy child and awakened to a charitable first-meal of porridge and cider. Father Wilfrid blessed him with a traveler’s prayer and an embrace. Heinrich looked about the warm surroundings and smiled. This one feels true, he thought. The priest begged him to delay his leaving for a few moments so that he might show him something in his workshop by the lake.
Heinrich followed the eager man into a shed containing slabs of marble. “I collect these, my son. A man can only do so many baptisms, so many Holy Masses, so many burials before …”—he glanced about to be sure no other was listening—“before it gets a bit tiresome!”
Heinrich chuckled.
“So I carve the wisdom of others into rock for the ages to come. See, here.” Wilfrid pointed to several finished pieces. Most were inscribed in Latin but a few were in German. He translated them. “‘Open me this beautiful day and lead me into the house of God. Here at this place my soul shall be happy.’ This goes over a church door.”
Heinrich liked it. “Where is such a church?”
The priest shrugged. “I pray to find one!”
Heinrich laughed again. He liked this fellow.
“And here. ‘Starke und Hilfe in alle Not’”
“Ah.” Heinrich nodded. “‘Strength and Help in all Need.’ Would that it be so.”
The comment did not escape the priest’s notice. He paused, then showed Heinrich another. “‘Sei getran bis an den Tod,’ ‘Be true until you Die.’”
Heinrich was silent. He looked about the shop and admired the priest’s eye for wisdom and for beauty. He nodded, then ducked through the doorway and stood by the lake’s crystal waters. “This village has a name, father?”
“Ja, ‘tis called Zeil. Zell by the Lake.”
Heinrich stared at the shimmering water and the snow-laced mountains that rose around it. His glance lightly followed the shoreline and over the knotty boughs of oak and maple, the delicate bared branches of white-trunked birch, and the yellowed wands of bending willow. He turned to the father. “How does one know what is true?”
Father Wilfrid was not accustomed to such questions—his flock was more apt to ask how best to boil swan! But the young priest had a mind that was deep like the lake he loved, and clear like its waters. It was a matter he, too, had struggled with often. He answered slowly, but with conviction. “It is wise to know what it is, for it is the only thing worthy to serve.” He paused and tossed a few pebbles into his lake. “I believe, dear stranger, that truth is what remains when all else fails.”
The priest of Zell gave Heinrich good directions to the Brenner Pass, and soon the pilgrim was hurrying through tight, twisting valleys squeezed between the steep-sloped mountains. Amazed, humbled, awestruck, and overwhelmed at every turn, the simple peasant of distant Weyer pressed on. He was pleased his journey took him through some simple hamlets where he could buy bread and cheese from cheerful, pink-faced villagers.