On the German Relic Trail
words + photos by Rachel Dickinson
This summer while on a pilgrimage of sorts to Germany to see several Women’s World Cup soccer matches, I stumbled across something that kept me dipping into every cathedral in every town I visited. I discovered the appeal of the relic.
St. Kilian's reliquary holding his bones in a little side chapelI am not, and have never been, a devout anything. So it’s not like I was an active or even a lapsed Catholic who knew how to behave properly in a cathedral – who knew not to ooo and ahhh over the bones and bits of cloth displayed for the world to see. Instead, I was the overweight woman on the wrong side of fifty who had experienced the hellish spring. Everything you don’t want to have happen, happened to me in the spring. My mother died. My mother-in-law died. My kid went into the psych ward for a week. And, finally, menopause struck with a vengence leaving me red-faced and sweating profusely and not sleeping at night. In other words, I was the perfect vessel for any kind of religious enthusiasm that would take me out of my own head.
I caught my first glimpse of relics in Cologne cathedral. This over-sized Gothic structure with a façade too great to capture in my camera had a gold reliquary the size of a child’s toy chest encased in a plexi-glass box that sat behind the altar so the congregation could gaze upon its wonderfulness during a service. It held the bones and some clothing of the Three Magi, which were brought to Cologne from Milan in the 12th century by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa as part of the spoils of war. I stood and stared at the gold box and kept thinking about every image I had ever seen of the Three Kings – and I realized I didn’t know anything about what happened to them after showing up in the manger with gifts in hand – and then I felt dumbstruck. And I kept tripping over details like – did they die at the same time and that’s why their bones are together or did they wait for the last Magi to die and then they sealed up the box and in essence wrote, “This is It – The Three Kings” on the cover? I mean, how did anyone know these were the right bones?
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