It is a goat!

The CD from the CT scan of my thorax (yes, Kaia, it is a word!) is in this laptop. It is surely a good thing that a radiologist or two will take a look at it because this is all I can tell from my analysis. I have a heart. And lungs, two of them. The heart is on the right side, except when looked at from the back view, which worried me for a moment. There are ribs, well defined, but none of them look broken or cracked. There is a spine, always a relief. And fat. Yeah, fat. And there, tucked in behind a little pillow of fat is the goat. I knew it; it was either a broken rib or a goat. And it looks like a goat to us. It also looked like a little fetal head in the middle of a lung but we decided that is a physiological impossibility, for several reasons. So. There is not a black hole in my heart, also a relief. But not a golden glow around it either. Pretty normal looking to me. But something weird is going on in there. And tomorrow perhaps the veterinarian -- or my doctor -- will give the word. Stopping the percocet will be welcome. Feel free to keep me in your thoughts and join me in giving thanks to Dave for the amazing tender loving care he offers effortlessly and without ever any reservation.

Chopin's Heart, the Heart of Poland

Happy birthday to Fred! Bless his heart! Speaking of which, I sat next to it. Chopin died in his adopted France but his heart was lovingly returned -- and rather creepily returned -- to rest in repose in an urn in the church of the Holy Cross, built into a pillar in the nave of the sanctuary. I dashed in late for worship and looked up after a few moments and found, at my left hand, Chopin's heart. You can't see it -- thank the lord, but the urn is there with a red satin bow of honor. Now if I were to tell you that the heart was still beating, "The Telltale Heart," -- all I could think of the first time I saw it -- that would be really creepy. But it's not. Thank goodness. This is the 200th Anniversary Year of Chopin's birth. And today, this very one, 22 February, is the day. There is a lot to say about Chopin that I don't have time to tell today but, please, take some time yourself to listen to some etudes, a concerto, a polannaise. Perhaps the soundtrack of The Pianist is the most accessible popular source of Chopin's music. And you hear, you sense the romantic wistfulness of the Polish heart in every note. Poland was not a hospitable home for its 18th and 19th century geniuses. Chopin, Marie Curie are but two Poles who had to leave in order to find freedom for their creative forces to flourish. But Chopin remained a Pole through to the end. His soul is reflected in the plaintive, poignant passages and the brave chords of a concerto. Go to Poland today, find its heart, listen to Chopin! (from the Sunday, February 21, 2010 Washington Post) After 200 years, classical composer Chopin's music still holds mysteries Elliptical style: Polish-born Frédéric Chopin's music can appear simple, but his work is intricate and challenging. By Anne Midgette Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 21, 2010 Monday, Feb. 22, is Frédéric Chopin's 200th birthday. That is, it's Fryderyk Chopin's birthday; the Polish-born, Paris-dwelling composer's name is more commonly spelled these days with Ys. And that's his birth date according to a baptismal certificate; the composer said he was born on March 1. Even 200 years after his birth, things that appear simple about Chopin are actually more complicated than they seem. Including, and above all, his music. Chopin's piano pieces -- all of his pieces involve the piano: no symphonies or operas here -- are lyrical and lovely, poetic and, therefore, seen as accessible. Yet they can also be harmonically intricate, technically challenging. His 24 Op. 10 and Op. 25 Etudes, far from being simple "studies" for students, are so difficult that the great pianist and Chopin specialist Artur Rubinstein avoided playing some of them. And they can be elliptical to the point of impenetrability (take the final movement of the Second Sonata: a whirling cloud of sound less than two minutes long). Taken together, Chopin's pieces represent a towering hurdle, the benchmark against which a classical pianist is measured -- in part because of the difficulty of finding a way to plumb the music's depths while sounding simple. * * * "Proper" Chopin style is at once a seal of approval and the subject of endless debate. It involves lightness and clarity of touch, something evinced by one of the latest crop of Chopinistes, Rafal Blechacz, in his new CD of two rather conventional piano concertos. It requires a singing legato: the illusion that the pianist is creating an unbroken line of sound, like a human voice. This is particularly true in the Nocturnes, which are incessantly compared to the operas of Chopin's friend Vincenzo Bellini. But Chopin style can also evoke the kind of stormy outbursts the young Martha Argerich gives in her just-released CD, a collection of previously unreleased radio recordings from 1959 and 1967. Most important, and most elusive, Chopin style involves rubato -- changing tempo or rhythm for expressive purposes. The question of rubato dogs Chopin performance. The composer was said to be quite free as a pianist, but it's not clear what this meant: There are indications that he kept a fairly steady left-hand beat at all times. Still, generations of performers, following the misguided notion that a piece of music is a canvas upon which they are to express themselves, take Chopin's advocacy of rubato as license to slow down and speed up almost at will. Hearing a lot of Chopin -- even in some cases very good Chopin -- can leave me seasick from listening to too many phrases being stretched out as if going slowly uphill, then tumbling helter-skelter down again. Chopin's music has sometimes been branded effeminate, or "salon music": not quite serious, not quite healthy, not quite German, since it departs from the structural conventions of the great Viennese classical school. Even the two powerful sonatas are unconventional, playing fast and loose with the structural conventions upheld by Mozart and Beethoven. Indeed, some of Chopin's ardent defenders have implicitly bought into the idea that the music is weak and needs defending, trying to emphasize its seriousness (and manliness) by playing the works in sets -- all 24 preludes, or the 24 etudes of Op. 10 and 25 -- and thus casting them as long, weighty pieces rather than salon entertainments measuring three or four minutes long. * * * The view of the work as fragile and sickly is also linked to the pervasive idea of Chopin as a prototypical Romantic genius: pale and dapper, doomed to a tragically short life (he had tuberculosis), needing the care of a strong mother figure (his lover, best known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand), receiving the divine flash of inspiration at the keyboard (though a brilliant improviser, he labored over his compositions). After 200 years, classical composer Chopin's music still holds mysteries The work isn't fragile, though. Although Chopin himself was said to shrink away from too-loud playing, there's plenty in it that thunders and plenty that's assertive. It's also strikingly original. Chopin, unlike many composers of his day, wasn't under the sway of Beethoven. He abhorred, for instance, the start of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony; his primary influences were earlier, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach. Like Bach, he wrote music in sets: for instance, the 24 Preludes, a set of short pieces in every key like "The Well-Tempered Clavier." And pre-Classical keyboard music was an influence in some of the forms he particularly developed -- even the Nocturnes, that quintessentially Romantic expression. Chopin pioneered other forms, as well, like the Four Ballades: long dramatic monologues without words, at the intersection of tone poems and sonatas. Particularly his own were the polonaises and mazurkas, based on the idea of Polish folk dances, that are perennially held up as an example of the expatriate composer's patriotism. Chopin took his Polish nationalism seriously, but he was also capitalizing on a perennial interest in local folk color that turns up in Mozart's "Turkish" concerto or Brahms's Hungarian dances. There's certainly nothing sissy about the A-flat Polonaise. * * * There's a hint of the pragmatic in Chopin's 19 waltzes, as well. When Chopin went to Vienna as a young man, before settling in Paris, he disdained waltzes as the epitome of popular bad taste and complained that it was impossible for a composer to publish anything that wasn't a waltz. He may have looked down on them, but he was practical enough to start writing waltzes -- not, certainly, waltzes that one could actually dance to, but pieces that evoked the ballroom atmosphere, the whirl of gowns. The waltzes seem to be getting particular attention this anniversary year. New recordings have recently come out by Alice Sara Ott and Ingrid Fliter, two pianists worth knowing about, and Dinu Lipatti's classic set from 1950 is going to be rereleased yet again at the end of March. Listening to all the waltzes at one go is like eating a box of chocolates, leaving you feeling ever so slightly bilious; yet each of these recordings has its strengths. Fliter has a gorgeous, light, easy touch that appeals to me instinctively, but she gets a little carried away with the rubato, tugging at and prodding every phrase. Ott, too, sometimes sounds willful, but she has a wholesome directness. With a big sound that feels reined in, she embodies, in the Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat, the slightly coltish exuberance of a young girl at her first dance. In comparison, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who recorded the waltzes a few years ago, offers a drier, cooler approach: The playing is admirably clean and slightly distant, and very much a tonic after too much emoting. The waltzes epitomize one of the hardest things about playing Chopin: walking the fine line between emotion and sentiment, between feeling something and looking back, fondly, on the way it felt. Chopin presages Ravel's "La Valse" in his expression of slightly ironic nostalgia. The dance forms Chopin used had particular connotations; his works were a kind of social commentary. Today, the nostalgia threatens to trump everything. One big secret of playing Chopin may simply be to remember that it's not as pretty as it sounds.

"The Pants Heard 'Round the World"

"Look at your pants!" says the Queen to the King in Cinderella, begging him to schedule a festive ball to introduce their Prince to the eligible young women of the kingdom. Annika was rehearsing this dialogue yesterday when the Norwegian Olympic curling team appeared on the television screen. Meredith Viera called them "the pants heard 'round the world," and all we could say was, "Look at your pants!" I have the typical Swede's issues with Norwegians to begin with and this just doesn't make it easier. On the other hand, one of the issues Swedes have with Norwegians is that they are just too damn serious, and take themselves way too seriously. These pants definitely go the distance in rebutting that stereotype. So go Norwegians, wear those pants. Just don't expect us to ever take you seriously again. But this is not really about pants. That was just a teaser. This is about falling. And getting up. As much as I love Canada, I have to agree with the Salon writer yesterday who was inclined to tell Canada, "you're fired." The downhill ski course was a disaster. I keep envisioning these women whoooshing through the powder at Steamboat, snow worthy of an Olympics competition. But no, instead, they are sliding down a frozen concrete slippery slope that took six of the women out. Downhill skiing is an edgy, dangerous sport. That's a given. But taking out six of the best skiers in the world? One wonders. This is the thing, though. They got up. All but one who required an airlift off the course, the women got up, released their bindings, gathered the broken pieces of their skiis, and walked off the course. They're younger than me. Younger than most of you, too. That counts for something. But it is this getting up business that impresses the heck out of me. Getting up is good. Getting up is amazing. Getting up is normal -- much of the time. But it's not always possible. At least not right away. And it is certainly not always easy. One of my theme songs in the months after I was attacked and quit working was, "I get knocked down, and I get up again, I get knocked down, and I get up again..." Sometimes you can sing at the top of your lungs and push as hard as you can and grit your teeth and push and resolve, be determined, and still, it doesn't always happen right away. Resiliency is about bouncing back. I used to be so resilient I was a damn trampoline. Bounce, bounce, bounce. But then came a time when bouncing was no more possible than flying off into space. It's frustrating to be in a different time and space, to have to deal with an experience that is profoundly, intrinsically different from the challenges I'd faced before. But I learn new ways to be resilient, to grow those resiliency muscles. I keep saying that one of the big draws for me to Poland is the resiliency I've seen, as they bounce back, or build back, recover, return, heal after outrageous devastation: the destruction of World War II, the imposition of a communist regime for forty years post WWII, and earlier, after the Partitions of the 19th century. But it's not an even process. Some are more resilient than others. Some are more resilient in some ways, less in others. And some are more resilient now, others later. I thought I knew all about resiliency. But I was humbled. Broken beyond the point where bouncing back was easy, quick, straightforward. Sometimes it feels like I'm still just reverberating, absorbing the shock. That is the way it is. For all of us, in various ways. It varies. The least helpful thing we do when others fall is judge their response to it. We don't know what else they have endured, encountered in life. We don't get to tell others how long it will take, what exactly they must do, how much it will hurt. We see this as military veterans return home from war and respond differently to their experiences. The best thing we can do when others fall is attend to them. Listen. Honor and respect their interpretation of what happened. Then encourage and support them as they begin a healing process. I see this in Poland too. I have friends and acquaintances there who are still stuck, have not been able to move into this new era and embrace all that it offers. And others who jumped up and seized the new opportunities even as they were just beginning to emerge. Some are frozen. While others have been flying. And so it is with those of us who have faced violence and danger, hostility and harassment. We respond in various ways. I'm not a trampoline anymore but I got one. And I guess if it makes them feel better about not being Swedish, those crazy Norwegians can go ahead and wear those bizarro pants. Whatever it takes. Just so long as they don't mind hearing Annika shout, "Look at your pants!" What works for you, what have you learned about strengthening your resiliency muscles?

Lost in Bubbles

Maybe it was the narcotic haze. (Just a little bit of codeine overload as I continue to battle pneumonia.) Or perhaps it was the conversations I've had with my daughters lately. They are both up to their eyeballs in community organizing, activity, and what Macalester College refers to as Civic Engagement. Or else it was just historical amnesia. But I wrote yesterday that I don't feel apologetic about being an American. Let me clarify that. For the record, an important record. And thanks to old friend, Mike Voigt, for catching me up short. To be honest, it is such a relief to feel good about being an American again, in many ways (not all!, that I got carried away. But just a few reminders of who else we are. El Salvador. Chile. Nicaragua. Mexico. Panama. And, god bless us all, Granada! And that's before we move on to the present moment. Irag. Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia. Shall I go on? Yes. Slavery. I can apologize as long as the day lasts. Blood on our hands. Sleazy, greedy, creepy foreign policies and domestic failures. Cynical urban policies. Corruption. Petty politics. And that's before we come to the hedge funds and disastrous behaviors of the financial sector that, as it turns out, reading today's NYT's, has screwed Greece too. (With ample participation of the Greeks.) So yes, you get lots of hand-wringing, regret, embarrassment, and anger from me. Cynicism, frustration, disgust. But. As noted above, I've been paying a lot of attention to my kids. And to the communities around me. And I'm impressed. Caveat: it seems I spend a lot of my time in Poland being reminded of all that is wrong with America. We're big. We're imperious. We're cocky. We've screwed up the world's financial sector. We're racist. And that has got my back up. So I like to remember, as well, the ways our parents take an active role in their kids' education, the remarkable quality of arts and music programs, the teen-agers who spend hours sitting on town Planning and Zoning Commissions (ask Annika) representing the wisdom of a new generation. The levels of civic engagement in everything from education and health care and sports programs. Volunteer hours. I venture to assert that we probably spend more volunteer hours per capita than almost any other nation on earth. We do share our wealth, if not in the ways I'd like, in terms of economic adjustments, at least in donating and giving. So. Not to be too defensive here. But that's what I was thinking last night as I watched our delegation come in, and reflected on who we are. We are a really mixed bag. Really mixed bag. And the same ones of us who do great things also do terrible things. We are, at the same time, saints -- so to speak -- and sinners. Good and bad. I was lost in bubbles last night, grateful for all that is right. But we dare not forget the rest. And learn. And repent. And change. Yeah, change.

Here Comes Everybody!

Ghana is represented in the Winter Olympics. And Ethiopia. Cyprus. I love this! I love the world. The whole world, everybody from Andorra to Iran to Israel to Tadzikistan. Tell me it's all schmaltz. I won't believe you. On nights like this the idealist in me is alive, flaming in fact. We are everybody and yes, we are the world. All of it. Playing together on this pale blue dot. Sadly, the Jamaican Bobsled Team didn't qualify. But Moldova is represented. Here comes everybody! My daughter watched the Torun Olympics from either Italy or Estonia, I don't remember which. But I do remember her jubilation at being in the Town Square in Tallinn Estonia when their first gold medalist, a cross-country skier, returned home to an enormous crowd as the conquering Queen. I love this parade, this Opening Ceremony, the time we take to honor each participating country, the reminders of who we all are and the faces given to strangers, neighbors, ancient enemies. The ironies are striking. Turkey and Armenia. Bosnia and Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro. Macedonia and Greece. Iran and Israel. I'm sentimentally attached, of course, to Estonia and Sweden and Poland, and I will be cheering every chance I get for a Swede to beat a Norwegian. The huge Chinese delegation walked in and every single one of them held up a camera to capture their experience. The Georgians were somber and clearly affected by the tragedy form earlier today. The lone Mexican competitor looked lost. The Poles brought their best hopes, cross-country skiers, and got through without being the object of any tacky jokes. But it came close. And then the United States comes in, all boisterous and overwhelming and confident. It's a herd of Americans! This is always a striking moment for me. There is pride, of course, but also a sober sense of awareness of scale. We're big. We're really huge. And to see our relative strength in numbers out there on the field, well, what can I say? What needs to be said? Having sat in living rooms across the world and watched the United States show up in force, I always feel the embarrassment of riches. Seeing us as others see us. Dominant and dominating. Overwhelming. It's a poignant moment, always. I'm never moved to apologize for who I am, who we are. But I always do feel a sense of responsibility and humility. With great wealth comes great requirements. And I wonder, are we worthy? Are we good stewards of all we are, all we have? Sport, war, humanitarian aid, relief, music, art, literature, science, medicine, economics. Oh yeah, we compete, we share, we each bring our best, and, idealist that I am, flaming idealist that I am a night like tonight makes me wonder, even hope. Human frigging beings that we are, could we try a little harder to pull this off, more often? All the time? Okay, I'm not crazy. Not all the time. But, nevertheless, ready or not, here comes everybody!

"Over my dead body!"

Oh, this is flattering! In his column last Sunday in the New York Times, Nobel Prize winner (Economics), Paul Krugman compared the current level of functioning in the United States Congress to that of the Polish Sejm two centuries ago. It's a disturbing picture. And too true to be good. This gives me the excuse to offer a little history lesson and another insight into the Polish psyche. And perhaps, while we're at it, a glimpse into our own. It's all about the "No." As the Polish nation began to come together, as early as the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1264, a basic Jewish Charter was established to promote Jewish trade within Polish lands and by 1515, King Sigismund I extended the policy to promote Jewish settlements and a policy of tolerance toward Jews throughout the realm. This was at a time when Jews where being pushed out and persecuted throughout western Europe and squeezed into a vise that narrowed their options for freedom, promoting Jewish culture and religion, and for making their livelihood. The Jewish communities within Poland were gathered under an elected tribunal of rabbis that administered their own affairs as an almost semi-autonomous state within the state. (This is not particularly relevant to the argument at hand, I just wanted to throw it in because it is a little known part of history, which does cast a certain, different light on the history of Poland and Jewry. But anyway, I digress.) This came at a time when Poland was already on the path to a Constitutional Monarchy, one of the first in the world. Poland had a bicameral parliament, sejm, by 1497, comprised of nobility. The Catholic bishops and the Papal authorities wielded considerable power as well. Skip twenty chapters of dense Polish history, names, dates, wars, schemes, intrigues.... Oh, my goodness, this is all so complicated. There will not be a test later. Poland was one of the first nations to see the emergence of a powerful parliamentary system. The members of this parliament were the Polish nobility. A very powerful class. They pushed, they pulled, they took land back from the burghers, they cut deals with the Jewish merchant and guild classes. They adopted an attitude and a lifestyle of entitlement, and, of course, privilege. The Polish nobility was numerous by European standards. 25,000 noble families, altogether about 500,000 persons, represented as much as 6.6 per cent of Poland's total population. At the same time, for example, France's nobility comprised only one per cent of its population, and England's nobility was only two per cent. [Clearly, the Poles were more noble than anyone else!] They were a closed estate, their privileges protected by a labyrinth of detailed laws. They controlled their own destiny and that of everyone else in the Polish republic of roughly 7.5 million. They governed according to "their private inclinations." Nice gig if you can manage it. Well, these nobles felt so entitled and empowered that they were at pains to preserve the power of every single one of their caste. Which is to say, nobody wanted to allow anything to happen that they themselves would not benefit from. "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Or, at the very least, it's not going to happen. Poles may be the world's most notable idealists. By 1652, they enacted procedures that assured the Sejm would act always in unanimity. That's right. Can you imagine? They proceeded from the notion that no law could be enforced if it had not been made by unanimous consent. They wanted to avoid the chaos that comes from conflict. They strove to create harmony in their civic life. And, anyway, if a policy did not have universal consent, if it could not be convincing to everyone eligible to decide, then it must not be worthy of adoption. Yes, idealism. Indeed. My mind, which ranges toward cynicism on occasion (okay, often, when it comes to matters of the administration and distribution of power), wonders if there wasn't also an element of "over my dead body" that prompted the Sejm to give veto power to all of its members. "If I don't want it, it ain't happening." "If it's not good for me, it's not good for Poland." Kind of the reverse of the old adage, "what's good for GM is good for America." What isn't in my best interest isn't going to happen. The motivations for this policy, such as we are privvy to them, seem high-minded, if naive. But it created chaos. Eventually. Nothing got done because, surprise! the nobles did not all agree. They used the "Liberum Veto" for matters large and small. Petty and churlish. And the country stalled out. Okay, that's simplistic. But you didn't sign on for Polish History 440, the graduate seminar, after all. The point is that a lovely concept degenerated into misuse and selfish, mean-spirited, vindictive obstructionism. That pesky human nature at work once again. Now, read Paul Krugman. Sound familiar? It happens everywhere. In families, school boards, sewage oversight committees, country clubs and quilting groups. And even in churches. Striving for consensus is one thing, a noble thing. But giving veto power to the churlish, ignorant or paranoid is always a bad idea. As Krugman points out, Poland disintegrated and disappeared, degenerated into chaos, became ungovernable and vulnerable to the predatory intentions of its neighbors. Respect for bound conscience is one thing. "Liberum veto" is another. Concern for consensus is great. But the petty don't deserve to win.

I scared the dog

It is not pretty. The mucky non-productive cough of pneumonia. The Daisy dog is permanently scarred, and scared to come near me. I hope we can patch this up one day. I hope I stop coughing one day. It's been a week now. And I, for one, am not enjoying it. But at least one thing is better than the last time I had pneumonia. You. Christmas Eve 2000. I shook several hundred hands as the congregations left worship services. Somebody had Influenza B. The bad one going around that year. Christmas morning 2000. I woke up feeling like I'd been trashed by a team of roller derby queens. Which is to say, not good. But there was a worship service and it was my turn to do Christmas Day duty. The next day was a funeral and burial. The day after that was the church staff Christmas party. At my house. A kitchen full of guests, last minute preparations, gravy, mixing a salad. I could hardly stand up. So when they all went in to the dining room to sit down for the meal, I went upstairs "for a few minutes" to rest. I woke up ten hours later. I had this wicked Influenza bacteria and I got pneumonia. And, as some of you have been relating similar stories, pneumonia is nasty. And it lasts a long time. One friend wrote tonight of being sick for a month and a half. As it was, I was down, ennervated, totally wiped out for three weeks. It was six weeks before I really felt back to almost normal. I saw the doctor weekly and was on mega-doses of antibiotics. You can check my insurance records. It's true. As you have been following this blog you know that I am recovering from an attack at work. That happened in October of 2002, so about a year and a half later than this bout of illness. After I returned to work at the parish, I learned (not right away) that the "word on the street" --- which is to say gossipy emails, parking lot conversations, coffee klatches and telephone calls --- was that I didn't have the flu or pneumonia at all. In some versions, alternately, I was not sick at all and just faking it. Or, this was the most popular, I had a mental breakdown. The irony of that story was that 18 months later, in fact, their incessant and devilish harassment, sabotage, and abuse did result in my having a severe mental injury. I guess they were just planning ahead. The congregation was behaving according to a long pattern. And when I say congregation I should clarify that a core group of perhaps as many as fifty persons were gung ho on Operation Kill Jan, and others got dragged in or caught up in some of the gossip. And of those fifty, perhaps only as many as twenty or so were the most vigilant and diabolical in their behavior. The pattern that had worked for them before worked for them again. Pimp up the young assistant, undermine the senior pastor (me) and split the staff apart. It only works when the young assistants are guillible and needy. It hadn't worked with the previous team but oh, did it ever work this time. Moral of long story made short, my getting pneumonia and Influenza B became the first opening, the big opening, for mischief. (Mischief is as appropriate a descriptor here as bombing is for describing what happened at Hiroshima.) It was the opening campaign of the war they won on October 22, 2002, in the parking lot of the church. The next eighteen months were pretty much unmitigated hell. If you can imagine it, they did it. I've been reading all this week, Sophie's Choice about the holocaust, The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam war, All the King's Men about corruption in the early 20th century south, Willa Cather about the hardships of life and the moral breakdowns that were part of early life on the Nebraska prairie. The things we are capable of. Doing. To. One. Another. I realized how naive I still am. How genuinely hopeful I am about the human race. But mostly naive. Even though I know it happened, these and other terrible things, I have to confess, I have a very hard time wrapping my head around them. Really? People do these things to one another? There is still a big part of me that is in denial. Sometimes I have to watch the reality crime shows on TV just to convince myself that people, "normal" people really do terrible things. I will confess one thing more. I'm not sure if the denial isn't a perverse flip side of cynicism. Maybe I'm not so hopeful as I want to believe. Something changed inside of me as a result of that experience. Not unlike veterans who come home and talk about having become numb, even cold. I get it. Whether or not that's healthy, I'm not sure. Thanks for all your good wishes, suggestions and encouragement. I really DO have pneumonia and I'm not especially worried this time about a raging gossip campaign asserting otherwise. Thanks for being trustworthy. And kind.

Choose Life

Before I went there for the first time in 1980, this is what I knew and thought about Poland, when, rarely, I thought about Poland at all: Auschwitz. The Holocaust. And I knew it was part of the Warsaw Pact. Communist. That’s it. Period. Poland? When you live on the north side of Chicago you learn this about Poland: it is where your Jewish neighbors were sent like cordwood in box cars to death camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka and Majdanek, from which these remnant few had somehow survived, traumatized ghosts without family or home or faith. I watched Hasidic neighbors from my window go to the Yeshiva every morning. I saw the wives with their wigs play with children on the front stoops. I walked past three synagogues on the way to the grocery store. How could I go to Poland? I struggled for a time with a feeling that I would somehow betray my Jewish friends and neighbors by going to Poland. It was for them a symbol now of death, of trauma. I would be treading on their ghosts, their haunted memories of loss and torture. Having Jewish neighbors, whole communities of Holocaust survivors, the Hasidic Yeshiva across Argyle Street, an Orthodox seminary a few blocks west on Foster Avenue, thriving congregations just up Kimball and scattered all through the neighborhood, and observant religious Jews living next door, all meant learning firsthand about the Nazi horrors, the desperate struggles to live, the terror of being torn from mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and, worse, one’s children. I read their histories, their theologies, their narratives. I read Elie Wiesel, read Night, and carried, as part of me now, the haunting picture he described, of a child hanged on the gallows at Auschwitz, and the angry cry of a fellow prisoner, “Where is God? Where is He?” As Wiesel was forced to march past the boy, hanging between life and death for over half an hour, the man behind him asked again, “Where is God now?” Wiesel writes, “ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows.....’” (Night, page 62) In Poland. Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Viktor Frankl, Wiesel, Hannah Arendt, Chaim Potok — I inhaled their writings. They were foundational to the theology, still Christian, that was constantly forming and reforming within me. I would go to Poland with the witness of these Jews in my heart and mind. “Religionless Christianity,” “the cost of discipleship,” “the way of freedom,” the penetrating insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were the dominant influence on my Christian views. Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and scholar, became a leader in the resistance movement in the run-up to World War II and throughout the war, sharply critical of the German church that allowed itself to be coopted by the Nazi’s and was silent in the face of anti-Semitism and other atrocities. DB (as we groupies affectionately call him) ultimately gave up his life trying to save the world from Hitler; as part of a plot to assassinate Hitler on July 21, 1943, he was arrested, sent to Buchenwald, and was hanged in the last days of Nazi power, May 7, 1945. While his own experience was dramatic, heroic, and profoundly sacrificial, worthy of the deepest respect and a challenge to any Christian who hears the words of Jesus, “take up your cross,” and “whoever would save his life must give it up, for my sake and the Gospel,” it was his writings, especially the Letters and Papers From Prison, that gave voice to my own deepest convictions about God and the world. I would go to Poland with Bonhoeffer in hand. Poland. Poland. Poland? I would go to Poland and ask questions. I would go to Poland and wonder about evil. I would go to Poland and try to understand something more about faith. About living. I would go to Poland, defiantly, choosing life in the face of death. So I did. So I do. Humbly, gently, carefully. And I chose. Life.