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Month: August 2009

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Christian Witness, Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia

The lessons of Christian history lost on Christians

From Alaska Dispatch, Johanna Eurich writes in Talk of the Tundra: No sanctuary here or How to kill Christian hospitality and charity through bureaucracy.

My husband and I, and a friend who lives with us in Spenard, just said goodbye to three unlikely guests —“ two priests and a policeman from Poland. For a few days they sang Matins and Vespers in Polish to begin and end the day in Rancho Spenardo’s garden, the site of locally legendary pagan ceremonies. Our guests arrived here when two Anchorage Catholic Churches turned them away. Sure, they weren’t on a donkey and carrying a babe… but they didn’t even get a stable.

Ks. mgr Krzysztof GrzybowskiThis is how it happened. The three had just summited Denali in a week —“ a lot faster than they expected —“ when I met them in Talkeetna and offered them a ride to Anchorage with their considerable pile of mountain gear. They had some days to spend in the state and not too much money before they flew out of Anchorage. So they planned to stay at a church —“ two of them being priests and all.

The three had been put up by tiny Saint Bernard’s Church in Talkeetna, which doesn’t even have a full time priest. There seemed no reason to doubt the generosity of the much larger and more endowed Catholic establishment in Anchorage.

As we drove, the two priests explained, with the help of the more English-proficient policeman, that visiting priests are always welcomed by churches and parishioners. Catholics are generous, they said. They take in the wayward. They have even sheltered this pagan. During my extended hike of the Appalachian Trail, monasteries, churches and Catholic retreats provided shelter and food. But apparently such hospitality has been lost track of by the Catholics of Anchorage.

First stop — Holy Family Cathedral. The staff was in a meeting and couldn’t deal with the priests. They were told to go to Our Lady of Guadaloupe —“ another well-appointed church in the Turnagain area. There a sister turned them away after consulting the —boss— by phone. I don’t think it was —The Boss— —“ you know, the Big Guy Jehovah, his son Jesus, or even the Holy Ghost. I didn’t go that high. Being good church bureaucrats, they just followed their own rules and forgot about these nice young men in a foreign land who needed a little hospitality.

The priests: Robert and Krzysztof Grzybowski (brothers) were shocked. The policeman Adrian Przylucki was worried. What were they going to do? I was embarrassed for my town and invited them home. The next thing you know their bright yellow tent was going up in my garden, and three of the nicest, handsomest guys (each could pose for a Greek statue) headed into my sauna.

Catholics and other Christians may wait for their reward in Heaven. I got my reward at Rancho Spenardo’s regular Friday sauna. The three Polish climbers were the prettiest sight. Seeing them romping in the garden, using the hose to cool down, and then steaming in the old cedar sauna was enough to make this female heart young again.

As far as Anchorage’s Catholics getting their reward in Heaven… I think they need to do a little more work here on Earth… or Saint Peter will start recruiting us tree-hugging, naked, garden-romping pagans. We at least know how to make guests welcome. And don’t be surprised if those priests start hugging trees. They learned it at my house.

The priests probably would have been better off trying with the Orthodox in Alaska. The typical response of a certain section of U.S. Catholic Bishops – get those Poles out of here before they stay and interject conservatism among the flock…

LifeStream

Daily Digest for August 23rd

googlereader (feed #5)
Shared 2 links.
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Janosik – September 10th http://bit.ly/IbiN7 [#]
lastfm (feed #3)
Listened to 2 songs.
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Waiting in Line by Mieczyslaw Jastrun http://bit.ly/pdkM5 [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 11 – Eyes by Antoni Słonimski http://bit.ly/b9Yeb [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 12 – Hamletism by Antoni Słonimski http://bit.ly/TxA0n [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 13 – Euterpe by Marian Hemar http://bit.ly/ZcFKA [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 14 – Recollection of Past Love by Franciszek Karpiński http://bit.ly/nGXuV [#]
lastfm (feed #3)
Listened to 3 songs.
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 16 – Heat by Mariusz Grzebalski http://bit.ly/kLQkJ [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: August 17 – Song of the Cancer Patient Watering Geraniums by Andrzej Bursa http://bit.ly/3sNejk [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: An interview with former Poet Laureate Robert Hart http://bit.ly/BWVR1 [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Spirits – earthly and otherwise http://bit.ly/AM7MD [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Remembering the revolution (the better one) http://bit.ly/yImBw [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: The lessons of Christian history lost on Christians http://bit.ly/4kwIiN [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: How’s it by you? http://bit.ly/zowfV [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Fraternals face varying crises http://bit.ly/17B4PD [#]
twitter (feed #4)
New blog post: Lajkoniki Polish Dancers from Holy Family at the International Village in McKeesport, PA http://bit.ly/qr5xM [#]
Poland - Polish - Polonia, ,

Remembering the revolution (the better one)

From The Observer via the Guardian: A time when hope replaced repression

By the start of 1989 communist regimes had ruled eastern Europe for 45 years. By the end of that year they had all been routed by extraordinary public uprisings. Here, Neal Ascherson, who reported on the momentous events for the Observer, recalls the idealism and anger that drove the protests…

Twenty years ago, a landscape began to tremble. At first, nobody noticed anything special. In January 1989, business was much as usual in the Soviet half of Europe. Strikes in Poland, harassment of East German dissidents, a Czech playwright called Vaclav Havel arrested yet again after a small demonstration. The west had more important stories to think about. George Bush Sr was being inaugurated as president of the United States, and Salman Rushdie was in hiding after the Iranian fatwa. In Moscow, that wonderful Mikhail Gorbachev was pushing ahead with his perestroika and glasnost. (How the Russians must love him!)

In London, a Czech exile named Karel Kyncl wrote an article about the arrests in Prague. He said that he had a funny feeling about Havel. He wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he became president of Czechoslovakia and much sooner than anyone thought. Readers smiled indulgently. Poor old Karel!

Then the trembling increased. The mountains around the cold war horizon began to wobble and fall over. Polish communism went first. Next, Hungary’s rulers published an abdication plan. In August, the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union began to demand independence. In November, Erich Honecker of East Germany was overthrown, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall was breached.

Next day, a palace coup in Bulgaria brought down Todor Zhivkov, the party leader. On 28 November, the Czechoslovak communist regime surrendered to the people. In December, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania was chased from office and shot. And just three days before the end of the year, on 29 December 1989, Vaclav Havel became president of the Czechoslovak Republic.

…

The revolutions began in Poland. In 1981, General Jaruzelski had crushed the Solidarity movement and imposed martial law. But everyone knew that the system was mortally wounded. It was just a matter of waiting for it to die. Boys and girls went round wearing tiny Canada badges. The shorthand letters CDN also stood, in Polish, for three words: “Next Instalment Shortly”. Poland’s commercial break ended in 1988, as a fresh wave of strikes broke out. The government, nerveless and divided, eventually re-legalised Solidarity and opened round-table talks with the opposition in February 1989.

The round table sanctioned independent trade unions and provided for multi-party elections in June. Reluctantly, Solidarity accepted that the elections had to be rigged. A block of seats reserved for “official” candidates would ensure a regime majority in the Sejm (the lower chamber of parliament).

But then the people stepped in. I was in the cafe of the Europejski hotel in Warsaw on that June day, as young Solidarity messengers piled our table with billows of exit poll print-outs. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Solidarity had won all but one of the openly contested seats. But in those reserved seats, only two of all the communist candidates had reached the 50 per cent of the vote needed to qualify. The voters had worked out how to destroy them.

That summer morning, the whole game suddenly changed. After 45 years, Polish communism had been annihilated. And the incredible, which was also the inevitable, now took place as negotiations opened to form the first non-communist government in Soviet Europe. On 12 September, a dignified Catholic editor named Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister. The benches of the Sejm were crowded with skinny, laughing young men and women who, only months before, had been dodging the security police.

…

Anyone who took part in the 1989 revolutions, or in the resistance movements that prepared the way for them, has to work through mixed feelings today. Disappointments live with an enduring sense that the victory was real and can’t be reversed. In Poland, I remember Marta Krzystofowicz from those times as a graceful, intrepid conspirator for freedom. Today, she is married and has a grown-up daughter. She says: “I have a glass of fresh orange juice, an uncensored newspaper to read, a passport in my desk drawer. It’s enough.”

Nobody regrets being part of a great and good revolution. That soaring feeling, physical and spiritual at once, has often been described. A girl in Leipzig told reporter Steve Crawshaw: “I felt that I could fly!” The Polish poet Galczynski once wrote: “When the wind of history blows/ The people, like lovely birds/ Grow wings …” And in 1989, for a few beautiful months, they flew.

PNCC, ,

Spirits – earthly and otherwise

Abel Pharmboy writes the Friday Fermentable on wines, beers, and spirits and other assorted interesting stuff at Terra Sigillata. In The Friday Fermentable: Wine Authorities Spread the Gospel of Roséism he gives a nod to his days as an altar boy in the PNCC.

There are too many highlights to list but as a former Polish National Catholic altar boy, I particularly appreciate the incensing technique of the Jewish co-owner, Seth Gross, using a bottle of rosé. The nod to Jimi Hendrix at the end was also a nice touch of reverence.

I appreciate the sense of humor here, great information in general. For those who like a mix of science and practicality with a nod to the higher life, his posts are worth checking out.

By-the-by, we can always use a good recommendation for those post synodal dinners. Perhaps a recommendation?

Poetry,

An interview with former Poet Laureate Robert Hart

From Examiner.com, The Berkeley Bard: Robert Hass, rock star poet

I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it–Robert Hass

Marin Catholic grad; Stanford Ph.d; MacArthur Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award; former U.S. Poet laureate–this partial list of awards and accomplishments only hint at the intellect and profound engagement with the world of San Francisco native/California poet Robert Hass.

From his Midwest Iowan perch, Michael Judge describes a recent dinner with Hass at “a fancy joint called Yoshi’s” (excertped from the Wall Street Journal Online).

“One benefit of being a poet — as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host — is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.

“The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.

“Still, for the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. So, after approaching a few slightly startled gentlemen in his age bracket, I’m relieved when a pleasant man with a warm countenance, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker, extends his hand and says simply, ‘I’m Bob.’

“After snuffing out my cigarette, I tell him my wife Masae awaits us inside and is holding what we hope will be a quiet booth where we can talk. Alas, there’s a speaker above us blaring jazz, and adjacent diners are shouting above the din. Undaunted, we peruse the wine list. ‘Buttery and oaky is the classic California chardonnay that everyone’s gotten sick of,’ says the poet, with a slight grin. ‘But I haven’t!’ And with that we order a bottle from California’s Santa Rita Hills and begin.

“He’s just flown in from Toronto, he tells us, where he attended the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony, and asks that we please forgive him if he ‘fades early. …But before I can ask him for details, he’s on to another topic: a Berkeley-based nonprofit called the International Rivers Network. ‘I’m the only poet on the board,’ he says. ‘It’s an environmental organization that thinks about the ecological consequences of big dams’ and provides ‘real life estimates of the damage done by these big boondoggle projects to the people who are trying to resist them.’ The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River.

“Suddenly, like a guest who feels he’s gone on too long, Mr. Hass apologizes and peppers us with questions. ‘How long are we here?’ ‘Where are we from?’ ‘How did we meet?’ When he discovers my wife is from Japan and we met in Tokyo the conversation turns to his love for haiku, particularly the poems of the 17th century master Matsuo Basho.

“In the early 1970s, he says, ‘I tried to teach myself something about how to make images from working on haiku . . . I had this real paradisiacal period in my life where I would teach, come home, get out the Japanese dictionary, work on haiku, then go swim laps for an hour, then have dinner and put my kids to bed. . . .’

Just then our waitress brings the ‘Fisherman Carpaccio,’ a flower-like assemblage of raw fish marinated in soy with a dash of karashi hot mustard and sesame oil. We order another bottle of chardonnay, and I attempt to ask another question. ‘That’s a really pretty presentation, don’t you think?’ says Mr. Hass, admiring the dish that’s just arrived. ‘Can we stop?’ He then turns to my wife, who’s a potter and chef, and asks, ‘What do you think about this presentation? And about saying this is carpaccio rather than sashimi?’

“Right about now I begin to feel as if we’re inside a Robert Hass poem. They are known for their playfulness with language, love of long, sprawling sentences, and, above all, a kind of unquenchable honesty, a wrestling with memory and the world as it is. Yet listening to him talk it strikes me that he isn’t self-absorbed. He is, in fact, other-absorbed. His conversation, like his poetry, is full of wonder and horror, two wholly appropriate reactions to human history — or a plate of sashimi-cum-carpaccio…

“In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz (became Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley in 1961)– who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism — Mr. Hass writes how Milosz ‘never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world’s poor salvation in the word.’

“This idea, this lament–‘the world’s poor salvation in the word,’ that language often fails us, yet it’s our only hope for redemption — permeates Mr. Hass’s latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled ‘Bush’s War,’ he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the “firebombing” of entire cities was commonplace. ‘Forty-five million, all told, in World War II,’ he writes. ‘Why do we do it?Certainly there’s a rage / To injure what’s injured us.’…

Homilies

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

First reading: Joshua 24:1-2,15-18
Psalm: Ps 34:2-3,16-21
Epistle: Ephesians 5:21-32
Gospel: John 6:60-69

—The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.——¨

The club

You might say that we belong to a club – Christians that is. We have Jesus’ words which are Spirit and life. We partake in the meals that I spoke of last week. We follow the club’s rules and its traditions. It is pretty cool to belong to the club. We even have a distinctive name: Christians. The apostles chose to belong to the club. Peter put it this way:

—Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.—

For sure, they joined the club.

As human beings we generally abhor separateness. We like to belong and Jesus wanted us to live as community. Now hold that thought about separateness versus belonging.

Is there a not club?

We could say that those who reject Christ do not belong to the club. That was pretty obvious from today’s Gospel. Those who wanted out left after Jesus crossed the line from interesting preacher and miracle doer to a challenge.

many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.—¨

In leaving they said:

—This saying is hard; who can accept it?—

As Christians we have a tendency to beat non-believers and those who have left us over the head with this saying. We want to draw a distinction between club members and non-members, outsiders. We call them weak, unable to meet the hard saying, the narrow path. If we are the club and on the path then they must be the opposite — outsiders. We are the ones who accept the challenge of the club and the path while everyone else rejects it.

Is there any hope?

Club versus non-club, the path versus the wide way of corruption. There are tons of distinctives and a lot of Christian history has been an engagement in the drawing of lines. It was thought that we could tidily box in the club and dwell securely. We, on the inside, in the club, on the path — we have our destiny wrapped up. Everyone outside the club, well we made great paintings of hell fire and preached on it extensively. Stay in the club or die. If you’re not in the club it would appear that there’s no hope.

Is there any hope?

Jesus fixes our perspective:

Jesus fixed us but good for our perspectives didn’t He?

Look at the world — amass in non-club members. I think there’s more outside than inside. Look at the churches on Sunday. Many empty, many filled with the few and the aged. Look at the denominations. They’re out there making every accommodation possible. They’ve changed core beliefs, long held doctrines — perhaps not because of belief in any of it but rather as a marketing ploy. Everyone is running about and is trying to fix the club. But, we can’t fix it, not that way. Jesus is presenting us with a big challenge and He’s fixing our bad habits. The world has changed. We expected folks to join the club just because its a club — but it doesn’t work that way — it probably never should have.

The big club

Jesus challenge is to recognize the big club, the fact that all are entitled to the club. The fix Jesus is looking for is that we knock down the self-containing walls and that we get active — invite those we consider non-members into the club. Our call is to everyone regardless of what they call themselves. Jesus’ message is for all and all are entitled to hear it.

To do that we need to get busy. We need to remove the labels and the classifications of outsider and insider. We need to take the message of the Church to all, to the unbelievers, disbelievers, and believers in whatever else may be out there. We need to say that we are here, this is what we believe, and here’s how we live.

But…

But people will be offended, they’ll resist…

Certainly and we cannot force people into the club. Our membership is free. We have a free association of those who hold the faith. If someone were forced to be here we’d have diluted the truth of the faith — God’s open invitation through grace to be regenerated.

Our message is that the unchurched and the non-believer, the person caught up in a destructive way of living, the lonely, the sad, young, old, the rich, poor, and the in-between, the smart and the ordinary – everyone, everybody, everywhere is invited, that they have a place, a role in the Church. Our job — to invite all, to give them the opportunity to choose to believe as we believe and to uphold charity toward those who choose differently.

The message:

Our saying may be perceived as hard, and we can’t change who we are as an accommodation to the world. What we represent is all Jesus said and taught, the words of everlasting life.

The hard saying is a challenge because it initially confronts selfishness, the comfortable place a person has found, the easy chair of pre-conceived notions — but in the end the challenge is found to be an easy and light burden.

Think of the person who responds to your call by saying: —How can I be a member of the club, I’m too far gone.— At first we might think that sad. Rather than sadness we need to act, to invite: —You’re already a member and you are my brother. Come with me without cost.— We can echo the words of Isaiah 55:1:

come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

Everyone, everybody, everywhere — our job, Jesus’ challenge, go out and invite them, sometimes over and over, and let them know that they are as much a part of us as we are of them in God’s kingdom. Some may not choose belief, membership, but our job, to put aside separateness and to offer belonging. Amen.

Poetry

August 22 – Madrigal XII by Michelangelo Buonarroti

Lady, as one fancies there to be
A living statue, there, deep down
In the harsh alpine stone,
Slowly found as the stone is cut away:
So our own skin conceals
Beneath its crude overlay,
Tough and yet un-worked, fit things
For the soul that trembles still,
Things you alone can bring
From out my deepest being,
For in me there’s neither strength nor will.

Translated by A. S. Kline

Si come per levar, donna, si pone
In pietra alpestra e dura
Una viva figura,
Che là più crescie u’ più la pietra scema;
Tal alcun’ opre buone,
Per l’ alma che pur trema,
Cela il superchio della propria carne
Co l’ inculta sua cruda e dura scorza.
Tu pur dalle mie streme
Parti puo’ sol levarne;
Ch’ in me non è di me voler nè forza.

Poetry

August 21 – Farewell Tatarness! by Numan Celebi Cihan

Farewell, Tatarness, I am heading towards the war,
My horse’s head already turned towards the next world.
I’ve lived for you Tatarlik, and if I die without you,
How will I enter the Paradise that is empty so.
The mountains turned over and the rivers overflew,
Not only we, but even the angels are shocked at how things go.
The young were shaken and the maidens were battered,
Abandoning their children, the mothers fled to deserts.
A clean life behind me, front of me is death.
I doubt my dark path will last any longer.
Not fearing any danger, not being frightened of shadows,
Stretches out my arm, uttering the word” Tatar” at my last breath.

Translated by Mubeyyin Batu Altan

Crimean Tatar

Savlikman Kal Tatarlik, men ketem cenkke,
Atimin basi aylandi ahret betke.
Senin icun yasadim, sensiz olsem,
Bilmem nasil kirermen bos cennetke.
Avdarilgan altavlar, tamular taskan,
Bu islerge biz tuvul, melekler saskan.
Hirpalangan menlikler,xorlangan kizlar,
Balasin taslap anaylar collerge kackan.
Artima baksam ak omur, aldimda olum,
Kop uzamaz belliymen karangi yolum.
Karsambadan havetmey, kolgeden urkmey,
Son nefeste Tatar dep uzanir kolum.

Poetry

August 20 – A Kiss of the King’s Hand by Sarah Robenson Matheson

It wasna from a golden throne,
   Or a bower with milk-white roses blown,
But mid the kelp on northern sand
   That I got a kiss of the King’s hand.

I durstna raise my een to see
   If he even cared to glance at me;
His princely brow with care was crossed
   For his true men slain and kingdom lost.

Think not his hand was soft and white,
   Or his fingers a’ with jewels dight,
Or round his wrists were ruffles grand
   When I got a kiss of the King’s hand.

But dearer far to my twa een
   Was the ragged sleeve of red and green
O’er that young weary hand that fain,
   With the guid broadsword, had found its ain.

Farewell for ever, the distance grey
   And the lapping ocean seemed to say –
For him a home in a foreign land.
   And for me one kiss of the King’s hand.

Bonnie Prince Charlie by John Pettie

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