Today I listened to my son perform with the university symphony orchestra. It was church, so I had a lot of downtime while I wasn’t listening to the various appeals and sermons (there’s a long story here; suffice it to say that I have decades of practice at this. In fact, the only reason I am ever to be found in range of a Divine Service is when my son is performing. I go for him, because I love hearing him play.) So there I was, lying in bed, nursing a sore neck, back, hip, and leg, eyes closed, listening to incredible music. And it was incredible. It was SO incredible that I did something I never, ever, do—I texted my son while he was onstage.
To be fair, he had texted me first, informing me he had seen my semi-illicit groceryorder, sent to Safeway during the “Welcome.” I hadn’t really planned to be a scofflaw, but I had looked into the bread cupboard and seen that we were down to a single loaf, and then looked in the refrigerator and had seen only the one gallon of milk, and told myself, I must immediately order Artisan French Bread, and potato chips, chocolate milk, and chocolate croissants, and some soda, and…but you get my drift.
What I forgot was that Safeway, who understands that I have been semi-banned from ordering groceries unsupervised (see above—I forgot to include milk and sandwich bread in my eventual order), kindly sent a note to both my son and to me, conveying the joyous news that our order had been processed and was on the way. My son alerted me to this from the stage at church, between the prelude and the offertory, where he, of course, played beautifully.
“I just can’t leave you unsupervised at all, can I?
I bristled a bit at this, but upon reflection realized there was some justice to it. Not much, though, and not enough for me to apologize for ordering four different kinds of chips (hey, three were on sale for less than half price a bag, and I don’t even care much for those weird flavors, so they were really for him). Also, I noted that he had found time (presumably during prayers, or long rests in pieces) to edit my list. The deli turkey had disappeared.
So that’s how it came about that we were doing something we never, ever do—communicating from stage to bed during performances. It turned out Special Music was an amazing song that made me think of sunlit forests, meadows, prairies, and possibly abandoned ranches and maybe covered wagons.
“What’s the name of this song?” I texted him. “This would be perfect for part of my show—maybe the part about the woods camp, and Desolation Creek.”
He texted me the name, which now escapes me, along with the name of the organist, a Man of a Certain Age who I went to college with, and whose name I can never remember. And then we fell silent, because he was, after all, onstage, and performing, even if he was hidden behind the organ, an edifice the size of a mid-size Winnebago, not including the massive wall of pipes.
I went back to doom scrolling while I waited for the sermon to be over. And then it was. The church fell into that peculiar silence unique to an orchestra lifting its instruments. And then, into the silence, mallet strokes—a metal mallet, hammering spikes into a wooden door.
I jolted nearly upright until my neck protested.
“THEY’RE PLAYING OUR FAMILY SONG!” I scream-texted to my son, who could not reply because he was, at that very moment, engaged in playing a song that has been linked to our family for more than 500 years.
The song? “A Might Fortress.” The link? This is going to take a minute.
See, I am descended from one of the ruling families in Thuringia. The family seat was the Wartburg, which my family held on behalf of Frederick the Wise. In the earliest days Thuringia was quite independent, and the Wartburg was known as a center of music and culture. One early lord of the Wartburg surrounded himself with bards, poets, and minstrels, and hosted an annual “battle of the bands” each year. An ancestress who “married in” was so socially conscious she alienated her Thuringian in-laws by caring excessively for and about the poor and sick.
Eventually she was canonized—St. Elizabeth of Thuringia. In short, the Wartburg was an important place both culturally and spiritually—it tended to give rise to people who, if they might not start major movements on their own, certainly supported people who started movements. These were people who enjoyed a good song—and a good think.
Certainly that long-ago Herrmann’s love of music, literature, and culture has carried down, as has St. Elizabeth’s commitment to a spirituality rooted in lifting up the poor, sick, and weak—in doing good not to earn heaven, but because her adopted people were poor, hungry, and sick, and needed help.
So the years passed—about 500 of them, and it was the Reformation, and Martin Luther had just nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg. Those were the mallet blows I had just listened to in my son’s performance.
The Diet of Worms followed—Martin Luther was ordered to meet with church authorities in Worms, and explain himself. Given the state of play in religious and secular matters at the time, it was important that Martin Luther went to Worms enjoying a Safe Conduct both to and from the Diet. Luther and his fellow rebel clerics marched into Worms singing a little thing that Luther had just written: “A might fortress is our God….a bulwark never failing…” The Safe Conduct had been authorized by Frederick the Wise. Old Fred was a devout Catholic—but he was also committed to the idea that everybody deserves a fair hearing, and that even more than that, a man should keep his word.
When he learned that his boss, the emperor, had no plans to honor the safe conduct when Luther left Worms, Fred swung into action. As Luther and his fellow clerics traveled back toward Wittenberg, a group of masked horsemen swept down on the travelers, seized Luther, and sped off. Together with our ancestor, who held the Wartburg, Frederick had arranged for Martin Luther to be “kidnapped” and spirited away to the Wartburg, where he hid out for nearly a year.
Think of it, Luther had written about God as his fortress—and at the time he needed it most, my family offered him refuge in a real fortress which was not just a place of safety for him, but a place full of music, culture, and critical thought. It was a place where Europe’s most skilled musicians and writers gathered. It was a place where people in power found it possible to sometimes realize that wealth and power meant responsibility. It was a place where a princess—Elizabeth of Thuringia—had believed that so deeply that she not only fed the poor thousands of loaves from the castle kitchens in time of famine, but built hospitals to care for the sick, put on her apron and cared for the sickest patients herself, and even gave away clothing and ornaments from the castle to help support the poor. It was no accident Luther found himself at the Wartburg. It was a place where thought and ideas—even non-main-stream ideas, were not just accepted but celebrated and nurtured.
While Luther was at the Wartburg he finished translating the New Testament into not just one of the many German dialects that were—and are—spoken in Germany today, but into a kind of “Hoch Deutsch,” a super-dialect—a true German Language, that could be read and understood across the German-speaking world. And he did it at the Wartburg, where poets, writers, singers, and philosophers could make full use of the new, super-German language to spread culture and ideas farther than ever before.
Luther went on to use his new universal German language to spread his philosophy, and his new, more accessible, translation of the New Testament—and he used another new invention, the printing press, to do it. And he used methods that graphic designers—us graphic designers—still use today. He considered his font choices carefully, He hired artists and illustrators to make his pieces beautiful. He designed them as not just pages of text, but as true “designs”—beautiful pieces that people would want to hang up on their walls. It was sheer genius, and my family. Martin Luther and I could sit down and have a conversation about design today, if I brushed up on my German.
My family ended up embracing Luther’s ideas, becoming some of the first Lutherans. They lost the Wartburg and ended up moving to “White Russia,” an ethnically German part of Poland that experienced constant conflict. While they were there, though, they continued bucking trends. They made strong friendships with local Polish families, one of whom traveled to America, and became my great-grandparents’ sponsors when they eventually emigrated. They opened a pub. And eventually, when my great grandmother fell in love with my great grandfather, her parents looked beyond his common birth to his big brain, and gave their blessing to the marriage not because he was well-born or rich (he wasn’t) but because he was smart.
Like St. Elizabeth, my Grandma Emma cared deeply for those in her care. My mother speaks often about how she loved children and welcomed not only her own grandchildren into her home with hugs and gingersnaps, but the children of family and friends who emigrated from the Old Country throughout the first half of the century. That tradition of love and care passed to my Grandpa, who passed it on to his grandchildren. I remember sitting with him in the garden as he tended young plants, watching his thick, trembling fingers carefully tease Morning Glory roots out of root balls, and then then carefully pour in a little fertilizer water and then knuckle dirt gently over the tender roots. He treated us grandchildren with the same care, offering us stories, refuge, caramels, and the occasional cheeseburger. He also gave us his unwavering love, faith, and acceptance.
He also gave us another family legacy—a deep love of stories, poetry, and music. Stories and poetry poured out of him. He created parodies and used them to prank classmates and delight us. And he sang, because that was his other legacy. He was very deaf and didn’t sing well, but he loved listening to music. He often told about a boy he had known, Lester who loved to play the guitar. He played all the time—even when was supposed to be sweeping out his father’s auto repair shop. Grandpa and Lester made a deal—Grandpa would clean up the shop as long as he could listen to Lester play. This man Old Man Polfus furious. “You’re spoilin’ that boy,” he snarled at Grandpa. “He’ll never amount to anything.” The boy, of course, grew up to be Les Paul.
Like his deep ancestor, Grandpa wasn’t a musician himself, but he knew enough to identify and support talent when he heard it. That’s not to say that there wasn’t talent in his family. His siblings formed a band, “Ernie’s Orchestra.” The Orchestra once performed at the Wisconsin Dairymen’s Ball. They had a hit single, which they had typeset and sold as sheet music. I once asked Uncle Fred, the band pianist, about it.
“What was the song?” I asked.
“It was called ‘The Song that I’ll Always Remember,” Uncle Fred told me, squinting at me through the brilliant winter sunshine.
“How did it go?
“Oh,” he laughed, “I’ve forgotten.”
Loving music, stories, and the young are in our DNA and have been for a thousand years. Like Grandpa, I’m no musician—when my son was three one of his first sentences was, “Please don’t sing to me, Momma—it hurts my ears.”
I was crushed, of course. I loved singing to him. But I honored his request. I stopped singing, broke out my Gilbert and Sullivan tapes, and set out to introduce him to music that did NOT “hurt his ears.” We played Gilbert and Sullivan, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven and German folksongs.
Because he loves me and is very tired of this story, my son took me to karaoke a year or so ago, and not only invited but urged me to sing—which I did, joyfully, loudly and off-key, as is my way. And my son listened, and smiled, and clapped. I love him for that.
And so today, when I heard the mallets driving the spikes into the church door, I felt a surge of recognition, and chills, and pride, and just a little irritation that I hadn’t known to look forward to this. The music surged, and the grand chords marched on just as they had when Luther sang them as he marched into Worms, as he defended the idea that we all have the right and responsibility to find God for ourselves, that salvation isn’t a commodity or a path to power, and that it is wrong for God to become a business.
I listened, and thought of St. Elizabeth, bucking her family and religion to give to the poor and sick around her. I thought of my long-ago ancestors giving up the Wartburg because they agreed with Martin Luther. I thought of my great-grandmother, choosing to “marry down” because she loved a man and saw something in him she could respect. I thought about how, in a world where it looked like the Kaiser would last forever, my great-grandfather packed up his mother, his sister-in-law, his two children, and his very pregnant wife, gathered together all the cash he could, and sailed for America, where he and my great-grandmother made a haven—a fortress, a refuge—for families fleeing a war-torn Europe. I thought of my grandfather, who became a mighty fortress for me and kept my soul safe at a time when my own world was a harsh and too-often violent place. He stocked his fortress with Zane Gray novels, risqué postcards, and caramels, but it was no less real for that.
I think of myself, striving to make my home and classrooms comforting, safe, creative places where students can first of all take a deep breath, then seek and share their true selves as they wrestle with ideas, and how we communicate them. We all need a mighty fortress from time to time—and some of us are descended from builders. I am no musician, but I have raised a musician, a kind, caring man who understands how to tend to others’ roots gently. My son played “A Mighty Fortress” today. More important, he has become a might fortress for many. Even me.
I wish I could express how happy I am to see your writing again. Thank you.