(no subject)
Today I went to church at the Paderborner Dom, like I've done every Sunday since I moved here. I love that cathedral. I love the brightness of it, the fresh colors, how well it is kept up and how full it is in the mornings. I love the pipe organ and the flickering candles and the Maria hanging in gold and white marble from the top of an arch.
Today there was a visiting men's choir singing the Mass. They were fantastic. When the service was over and the dutiful organist had blown my soul to pieces with his recessional, the men's choir filed outside to the Domplatz to give a brief public concert. I followed, because the day was beautiful and I was not done with music.
There was a beggar sitting under the roof of the vestibule, out of the sun, holding up his cup and looking through the people passing as I've seen him do in various parts of the city many times since I came here. Everyone ignored him. ("I gave to the poor today," I thought. "I give to the poor every week, in ways that will do more permanent good than putting a Euro in his cup will.")
I stayed for half the concert. In the middle of the choir's second song, the man sitting in the shade of the vestibule began to whistle. It was piercing, though I couldn't recognize the tune over the voices of the men in the courtyard. I turned to go back inside, to go through the cathedral to the street on the other side, which is my way home, and I did not look at the beggar as I passed him for the second time. I just heard him.
He was whistling the German national anthem, staring at the ground, listening to his own echoes. I hauled open the heavy cathedral door and went inside, walked around the empty, shadowy inside for a moment. Dimly, I could hear the men's voices outside still, doing nothing to conquer the quiet inside the church, seeming more to amplify it than anything. And in the spaces between the notes, and when the doors opened briefly to admit another tourist, I heard the beggar, managing to throw piercing echoes up against the gothic arches of the ceiling, and I couldn't stop my mind supplying the words for his tune - Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit...
I couldn't listen to the choir any more after that. I left, and I can't get the song out of my head, and I can't stop seeing the cathedral's shadows and hearing it over every other sound around me. It isn't guilt, not exactly. It is... the choice I gave myself, more than anything - to look at him or not to look at him, to drop the Euro into his cup or to tell myself that there were better ways I could help, less useless things I could do, that someday I was going to take the lucky circumstances of birth that gave me the power to walk by him without looking, and do something important and far-reaching for everyone like him, all the rest forced to sit outside church doors and remind those of us who are comfortable that unity and justice and freedom don't apply quite as universally as we would like to believe they do.
But it felt empty to tell myself that, because maybe someday I will do good and important things for people who have not been given the chance to do them themselves; but today, the man sitting outside the cathedral gained absolutely nothing from me. I'm frustrated by what I haven't done yet, by what I don't know how to do. I'm under no illusion that that man, or anyone in his circumstances, needs me to save them; there was just, something about his being there, in this crowd of people who'd just come from Mass, and the way they moved away from him, because the echoes of the beggar's whistling covered up the choir singing joyous praises to God not fifty feet away.
I... something about it felt wrong. So wrong that I feel the need to come and ramble about it on the Internet, because no one is home and no one is awake and I can't get his song out of my head.
Today there was a visiting men's choir singing the Mass. They were fantastic. When the service was over and the dutiful organist had blown my soul to pieces with his recessional, the men's choir filed outside to the Domplatz to give a brief public concert. I followed, because the day was beautiful and I was not done with music.
There was a beggar sitting under the roof of the vestibule, out of the sun, holding up his cup and looking through the people passing as I've seen him do in various parts of the city many times since I came here. Everyone ignored him. ("I gave to the poor today," I thought. "I give to the poor every week, in ways that will do more permanent good than putting a Euro in his cup will.")
I stayed for half the concert. In the middle of the choir's second song, the man sitting in the shade of the vestibule began to whistle. It was piercing, though I couldn't recognize the tune over the voices of the men in the courtyard. I turned to go back inside, to go through the cathedral to the street on the other side, which is my way home, and I did not look at the beggar as I passed him for the second time. I just heard him.
He was whistling the German national anthem, staring at the ground, listening to his own echoes. I hauled open the heavy cathedral door and went inside, walked around the empty, shadowy inside for a moment. Dimly, I could hear the men's voices outside still, doing nothing to conquer the quiet inside the church, seeming more to amplify it than anything. And in the spaces between the notes, and when the doors opened briefly to admit another tourist, I heard the beggar, managing to throw piercing echoes up against the gothic arches of the ceiling, and I couldn't stop my mind supplying the words for his tune - Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit...
I couldn't listen to the choir any more after that. I left, and I can't get the song out of my head, and I can't stop seeing the cathedral's shadows and hearing it over every other sound around me. It isn't guilt, not exactly. It is... the choice I gave myself, more than anything - to look at him or not to look at him, to drop the Euro into his cup or to tell myself that there were better ways I could help, less useless things I could do, that someday I was going to take the lucky circumstances of birth that gave me the power to walk by him without looking, and do something important and far-reaching for everyone like him, all the rest forced to sit outside church doors and remind those of us who are comfortable that unity and justice and freedom don't apply quite as universally as we would like to believe they do.
But it felt empty to tell myself that, because maybe someday I will do good and important things for people who have not been given the chance to do them themselves; but today, the man sitting outside the cathedral gained absolutely nothing from me. I'm frustrated by what I haven't done yet, by what I don't know how to do. I'm under no illusion that that man, or anyone in his circumstances, needs me to save them; there was just, something about his being there, in this crowd of people who'd just come from Mass, and the way they moved away from him, because the echoes of the beggar's whistling covered up the choir singing joyous praises to God not fifty feet away.
I... something about it felt wrong. So wrong that I feel the need to come and ramble about it on the Internet, because no one is home and no one is awake and I can't get his song out of my head.