Beer and Prayer Beads

Beer and prayers beads. A trip out today, train and bus to southern Bavaria’s Closter Andechs, a place of marvel for its baroque Benedictine chapel founded on the earliest church in Germany, and also for its strong and lauded beers. The place has the atmosphere of a little village, with its onion-dome towers and pretty pink-hued buildings, its guest house and little shop and beer gardens.

The church is fantastically decorated, gilded statues and surrounds amid swathes of icing-sugar pink. When I first opened the door I assumed a Mass must have been in progress as there were quite a lot of people sitting on benches in my line of sight, and someone speaking loudly in German what sounded like directly in front of them. But then when we ventured in again through the opposite door a few minutes later it turned out to be a tourist group having a general introduction to the place by their guide.

Yet there is still an atmosphere of contemplation, of devotion here, though we only saw one monk, and he briefly, exiting the church. The front of the space is cordoned off; perhaps for reverence, although perhaps for protection against theft or damage to valuables. I sat there briefly among the non-tourists; well the non-grouped tourists anyway. Upstairs there is a little chapel to Saint Hedwig, spare and modern and flooded with light. One couldn’t go in but I stuck my hand in and took a photo, like a pilgrim nicking a fragment of rubble from a holy place they shouldn’t have accessed.

A little walk around the grounds which were challenging for me because of the great dog presence. Not perhaps as bad as last night when we were shown to our seats in a nice-looking Italian restaurant only to find a great hound crouched down by the vacant table. I backed off, unable as always to tolerate a large dog in close proximity. Today dogs were mostly at a distance and on leads of some kind, though my spirit was a bit rattled by an unforeseen and off-the-leash one bounding rapidly towards me (and straight past me, but I never envisage that at the time) and I needed both beer and the calming weight of a new rosary to regain my composure. It’s those bounding hounds in particular – maybe, aside from my own childhood memories of overenthusiastic dogs, I was adversely affected by the Norfolk tales of Black Schuck, or some TV adaptation of the Hounds of the Baskervilless, the horrid fiery glow in the dog’s eyes signalling a supernatural doom in each case.

Everything’s better with a large beer in front of you. One wonders about the medieval monastics; seeing as the hops-barley-and-water combination was pretty much the only option in terms of beverage throughout much of the medieval period they must have maintained a level of beery wellbeing throughout much of the day. I think even Julian of Norwich would have drunk beer, watered down and weak though it was, from breakfast onwards. No coffee or tea in those days. This from our Eyewitness guide:

'Beer is still brewed in strict accordance to the "Reinheitsgebot", a Bavarian decree of 1516 ordering that only malted barley, hops, and water should be used. Today there are many different kinds of beer available, from dark, strong Bock beer to lighter beers such as the famous Weizen ...'. Indeed, the potent Doppelbock 'was produced by Pauline monks and was used to help them through the rigours of Lent.' I'm sure it helped a great deal!

But there were rosaries, so I’ve acquired another one of these spiritual objects from the little gift shop, the purple glass beads and shiny silver settings articulating a ritual of repetitive prayer while the fingers move from bead to bead. Your mind can transcend the words of the prayers when it’s going well, and you can experience something different in the contemplative zone altogether – like the miraculous singing of a wine glass when your fingers circle at just the right continuous momentum. Something similar to the rosary is found in Buddhist, Islamic, maybe other religions, so there is a sort of universal appeal in the objects, and they are beautiful objects too I think. On the cusp of art and contemplative craft.