Pilgrim’s lauds – a report
By Damiaan Messing
The lightly rained cobblestones of the Grote Markt in Nijmegen crunch under my tires when I cycle away from the Stevenskerk around half past six in the morning. After a scratchy start, I look around: my friend Manja is slowly following me, together we slowly continue our way.
“They say you’re not old until your mother dies” – the phrase cycles with me. The phrase comes from the story Road Bike that was read during the pilgrimage lauds, a new moment of reflection at sunrise around the book of hours and pilgrims Seasons of Life. I cycle on a racing bike, picked up from Amsterdam late last night, it belonged to one of my best friends. That friend is dead. You’re not old until your friends die.
Fifteen minutes earlier.
A tour through an abandoned church in fifteen minutes where I would otherwise never be there. The city lantern cuts out when we go inside, where all the lights are extinguished except for the green-rimmed glow of the emergency lamp. From the hall we step into the corridor. Shadows all around. In a long line we walk a loop around the nave.
Eight or nine of us are somewhat awkward together, but soon familiar with eight centuries of history. The morning twilight tips the shapes. Between the tall pillars, under the high roof, empty chairs await. Details of images slowly pass me by. We are the messengers of the new day.
Double tap on the marble floor. With warm solemnity, the Stevenspedel puts the book down. The reader flicks on a flashlight:
Road bike, by Steffie van den Oord
“Older men would come up to me and lisp declarations of love, addressed to my mother. On the late side.
I rushed out of the city, racing through villages without seeing any name signs, and over dikes. Sometimes I caught a smell that almost resembled it, Sunday soup, sometimes the asphalt radiated its warmth.
They say you’re not old until your mother dies. But they say so much and I felt younger than ever, my knees fell apart again. And my father, who had always been a greengrocer, became a poet. The grief, he thought, was a storm that subsided and that kept coming up.
I drew a line with my brake, stopped a passerby for a pen, and wrote it down; I carry his words on my back, in the pouch with the sweaty granola bar.
I can write whatever I want. Nothing compares to her last words to my father, who sat by her bed like a young lover: Mowing the large lawn with the machine, the small with the hand mower, and locking all the doors in the evening.
I whizz through the smell of cut grass and breathe it in with hungry lungs.
She couldn’t miss us either, but there was nothing else to do: she said it in the same breath.
It was like the Devil’s Mountain, I think on the way back, spicier than you think and grand, a warm mystery – and yet familiar to the smallest movement. The words are rising, it’s storming.
They lie down again. Just keep pedaling.”
Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims (link).
The pilgrim’s lauds is a moment of reflection at sunrise in the Stevens Church in Nijmegen, every first Saturday of the month.
