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prayed at Maria Laach, we would have heard the Dialogue Mass, the liturgical innovation for which the abbey was then famous. It involved the congregation in the Eucharistic prayer, an antiphonal recitation of the Latin verses. In the 1950s the Dialogue Mass (Missa Recitata) was sweeping the Church, marking a shift away from clerical domination toward a more democratic expression in worship. Instead of being mere spectators to the priest's act, the people participated in it. The Body of Christ was all of us. Begun at the abbey decades before and championed by Maria Laach's foundation in the United States, St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, the Dialogue Mass was resisted by the Church's old guard, but its democratic impulse would be fulfilled by Vatican II in 1964, not only by its liturgical reform but by its new definition of the Church as the People of God.
    My mother and I would have been oblivious of all this. I could handle the recitation, despite its being in Latin, because of my time as an altar boy, but my mother preferred her rosary. Neither of us could have been unmoved, however, by the mystical lilt of the monks' voices, the timeless quality of their chant, and its antiphonal rhythm with silence. Before coming to Germany, I had attended a Benedictine school in Washington, St. Anselm's, and even as a young teenager I had joined the Oblates, a lay affiliate, which entitled me to spend the night in the cloister on occasion, to eat with the monks at the narrow table of the refectory. I remember the dark bread, the porridge, and that no one sat across from you. I remember getting up before dawn to listen to the song of matins, an order of hours going back to the seventh century. I remember that I loved it.
    I felt at home in monasteries, and I still do. A favorite, forever-repeated family story tells of the time my mother brought me to a monastery when I was five or six—this would have been to pray for Joe. And I said to a bald, bearded monk, "Why do you have hair on your chin but not on your head?" His answer, if he made one, was not a feature of the story. We always laughed at my innocent impudence, and I could always picture the arches of the cloister colonnade. Years later, I saw that the peculiar revelation of the story, apart from its dead-on notation of a monastic propensity for baldness, was that a child should have been in such a place at all. Yet what the monks offered me was a quickening of that religious imagination I had from her. Now I see that my mother's offer was being responded to. I was being subtly recruited in those places. In time I was conscripted by the Benedictines of St. Anselm's, and then, because I loved it at once, commissioned somehow by Maria Laach. Not many years later, when I entered the religious life, it was to build an identity around the mystery—brothers in the choir, the balance of solitude and solidarity; a devotion to art, architecture, song; a hint of anti-Hitler heroism that defused the hint of the effete—the mystery I had glimpsed at that German cloister.
    Maria Laach was tied to the web of our Rhineland pilgrimages, too, in the chain of consequence that began with Helena, for it was founded in 1093 by monks from the Abbey of St. Maximin at Trier, 3 which had been founded, in turn—yes, the tradition insists on this—by Constantine's mother. 4 No one explained how a Benedictine monastery could have been established more than two hundred years before Benedict. The point for us was Helena—and Helena, beyond everything else, meant Trier. Because of her, we could go there, her hometown, and nearly touch what had touched the very flesh of the Lord, the son of Mary.
    In previous chapters, we followed the story as it ran from Jesus through the first generations of his followers, whose claim to the mantle of Israel was denied by the followers of the rabbis. Jews and Christians coexisted both as rivals and as overlapping communities on the margins of the Roman Empire, but