Some things I have done in space and time

On Sunday I decided to pursue a pernicious rumor I had heard to the effect that Pope Benedict would be giving an address of a sort at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, which P.S. is not just the Spanish name for a certain Tolkien wizard. The journey was relatively easy and, despite getting lost in the town of Castel Gandolfo with the result that I spent half an hour walking halfway down a mountain only to return to where I started and walk five minutes to the correct location, everything was even better than I was hoping. I joined up with a group of Filipino nuns who looked like they knew what they were doing and found myself joining a huge crowd of people piling into a small courtyard in the castle at around 11:00, waiting in eager anticipation for a noontime address. I felt a bit like that guy who wears the band's T-shirt to a concert of that band, as the book I happened to bring along to entertain myself during the wait was Ratzinger's latest book on Europe (Europe: Today and Tomorrow, I believe). One of the excitable Italian young women in front of me noticed and pointed it out in a giggling stage whisper to her equally excitable confreres (consisters?), and a good time was had by all.

Then out came Pope Benedict. I am absolutely not one to be wowed by great names or personages, and I am generally unfazed by the appearance of people who are famous for whatever reason, but seeing the Pope is an experience not to be likened with seeing some pop star or even a favorite author. I confess I was pretty amazed by the whole experience - here, after all, is the man to whom I owe a very great deal of my intellectual and spiritual formation over the last two extremely influential years of my life, and who just so happens to be the Successor of Peter. The combination is, I think, a uniquely powerful one. The small talk he delivered was all in Italian, as I expected, although I believe it will be translated into English pretty soon. The text of the Italian version, for all the non-existent Italian readers of my blog, is available here. After the talk we said the Angelus, which was my first time saying or hearing it; it was a neat way to be introduced to the prayer, but seeing as we said it in Latin about all I know about it is that you say some Hail Marys interspersed with short prayers, then close with three Glory Bes. Unless I missed something. Anyway, after that he delivered a short exhortation in every language he speaks, or at least every language that had representatives there that day: Italian, German, French, Spanish, English, Polish, and I might be missing one or two others. Impressive. Turns out the Pope's French sounds basically perfect to a non-native ear, as does his Italian, but his English is rather on the heavily accented side. Still, it was great hearing him speak in my language, and there were so few other English-speakers there that it felt almost like a personal address. The whole affair lasted about twenty minutes, but I count it as one of the great high points of my trip so far.

After the talk, I decided that I would spend the afternoon on the beach of the beautiful mountain-encircled lake that Castel Gandolfo is built on. The result was a few hours of gorgeous blue-green water, forested mountains, and cavorting families, accompanied by an impressively patchy sunburn that now adorns my shoulders, the top half of my arms that had not been previously farmer-tanned to an un-burnable brown, and strange patches on my back and legs. Sweet!

And all the sweeter as I went hiking in Assisi yesterday with my full pack on my back for more or less the whole day. Nothing says awesome like a backpack full of books on sunburned shoulders! Really, though, I have no complaints. Assisi is a gorgeous mountain city built on a seemingly never-ending series of slopes that duck and weave in harmony with the narrow, stone streets flanked on either side by two-story stone buildings of 13th- or 14th-century vintage (at least in appearance). The Basilica of St. Francis is a beautiful place, made more beautiful by its effect on the town - the whole place is a haven for monastic life in various forms, and nearly every church you see is supported by some order of monks and nuns. No Dominicans, though - I wonder why. The Basilica also has the bodily remains and personal relics of St. Francis, so I got to see the patchwork habit he wore for most of his life (which is actually grey, not brown, which surprised me) and some other wonderful things, in addition to the joy of being able to pray before the bodily remains of the great saint. Even better than the Basilica itself, though, is the hermitage that the Franciscans have built on the top of a nearby mountain. The place takes about an hour or an hour-and-a-half to walk up, but once there you find a gorgeous hiding place consisting of small trails cut into the verdantly forested mountainside, punctuated every so often by extremely old wooden chapels for masses, with adjoining Eucharistic chapels. After the hubbub and tourist buzz of the Basilica and Rome in general, I can think of no greater rest than to come to such a place and be utterly alone in the presence of Christ, without even the sounds of insects to disturb your prayer. I cannot think of a time or place where I have been more at peace.

All good things must come to an end, however, and transform into new and different good things. Right now I am in Nijmegen visiting my good friend Caroline and her boyfriend, where I plan to remain for a few days. The vague plan includes running up to Amsterdam to check out museums on Thursday, which sounds quite jolly. More on that as it develops.

Well, that was a suitably rambling and stereotypical college-kid-on-European-vacation blog post. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I.

Vatican City

For an adult Catholic, the experience of seeing the Square of St. Peter's for the first time is wholly unlike any other. First you see the large pillars that seem to promise no more than any of a thousand other Roman or Grecian collonades, but the moment you pass through them you see the enormous obelisk pointing in its grasping, pagan way to the same God to which the great Dome and Spire point with unparalleled eloquence; the saints around the square welcome you with the same unflagging vigilance and joy with which they have welcomed untold hosts of pilgrims before you, who have likewise come to pay their own meager but eternal respects to the physical heart of the body of Christ. The feeling is not quite that of seeing something for the first time, for you cannot escape the impression that your are merely seeing the full face of something that has narrowly escaped your vision these many years, something that has always been present just outside your field of vision. A lifetime of near-misses, of being barely unable to turn your head fast enough to catch sight of a great and mystifying Presence is in one swift moment fulfilled; I do not think it is too much to say that the moment is a dim foreshadowing of that great eternal Moment when we shall awake and see the true face of the King of Kings, recognizing at once that we knew it all along and that we have never known it.
These notes I record now I scribbled first to the flickering light of a cigarette coal on the balcony of the conventual room where I am staying, from which the illuminated dome of St. Peter's is all that will let itself be seen. Night owls across the way fill the warm air with the sounds of a James Bond movie that spill generously into the sky from their open window. I do not begrudge the sound, nor the dim light with which I am struggling, for in them I find something beautiful about the nature of the Church herself, for now I am merely seeing a directly physical expression of what has always been true. Over how many of my cigarettes has the specter of St. Peter's loomed? Over how many action movies casting nets of simple joy into the unflinching night? Over how many quiet evenings beguiled into sleep by fleeting glimpses of beauties beyond my ken?
The bells ring in St. Peter's to usher in the eleven o'clock hour, unsettling the quiet with their undeniable thrumming. I look at St. Peter's and, hearing the bells, I realize that for all the sins of its past occupants, the Body of Christ still throbs within it. The throbbing of St. Peter's great heart awakens vibrations in my soul as well, and I feel anew the Body of Christ that some meager hours ago the priest laid on my tongue. From the depth of my sin comes the thrumming and the throbbing of Christ, creating earthy and ethereal harmonies with the bells that ring out to the night over St. Peter's. The clappers of the bells seem to have lost the power to strike, gaining instead the power to pour out rivers of pure sound unbroken by violence: the sound is that of blood streaming from a wound.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Drive for about sixty kilometers east and a little north from the center of Krakow and you'll come upon an area with some light industry and prominent railroad tracks. A little further on you'll see a 1960s-type hotel of the ultra-modern Soviet model called Hotel Globe, which acts as gatekeeper to the innocuous town of Oswiecim (German pronunciation: Auschwitz). What you see from the road looks like a quiet if drab city of relatively new construction that is notable primarily for being significantly uglier than the surrounding countryside, which is extremely beautiful. Small black signs, however, begin to catch the eye, reading nothing but "Museum - Auschwitz" with an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction. Pulling into the camp is something of a surprise, as you see none of the spare wooden barracks that one usually associates with concentration/extermination camps; rather, there is a dazzling array of simply but elegantly constructed brick buildings that look precisely like the Polish military base they once formed.
The camp is almost perfectly preserved, though most of the buildings have been reworked on the interior for the commemorative purposes of the museum. The space is surprisingly small, taking only about five minutes to walk across, but it is densely packed with rows of neatly spaced buildings that bear no exterior signs of the purposes to which they were once put; it is not the buildings, but rather the motto "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" on the wrought-iron entrance gate and the impossibly elaborate fence-and-watchtower system that prevent the distracted mind from forgetting what the name Auschwitz means.
I will not say there are no words to describe the things that the buildings contain, but I will say that I have not the words for them. In one building, you stand in a room that is perhaps fifty feet long and thirty wide that is partitioned into two glassed-off displays by a walkway of some five feet's width. For the length of the room on either side of the walkway, shoes have been piled to a height of about six feet. How is one to describe the sensation of being surrounded by the objects of the dead? And how is it possible to explain the impossible realization that the endless ranks of shoes are in fact no more than the barest fraction of the actual number of shoes discovered? The mind simply will not take it in. The gas chamber, the crematory ovens, these things you can actually touch - they are no more than cyphers, realities too brazen to divest their secrets.
The only moment in the camp when you feel at all human is the cell of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Fransiscan who volunteered to die in the place of another man who was the father of a large family, to which he was eventually able to return after the liberation of Auschwitz. Kolbe spent two weeks in the cell without food or water, but was eventually martyred when his impatient captors decided just to shoot him.
Auschwitz is a delicately constructed piece of cruelty, but for all that it has a limit and an end; the bricks themselves act as a breakwater past which the waves of inhumanity cannot pass. Birkenau knows no such limitations. A ten-minute drive from the entrance of Auschwitz puts you in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by gorgeous rolling fields of grain and verdant forests. Out of this nowhere there appears an enormous brick gate structure surmounting a double pair of railroad tracks from which the distinctive barbed-wire fencing extends to the right and the left. I know rationally that Birkenau is no more than two square kilometers in area, but nonetheless I cannot supress the certainty that it is infinitely wide and deep; the ramshackle wood-slatted buildings extend in monstrous rows until they are devoured by sheer distance and dwindle into specks toward the horizon. Birkenau has none of the ordered closeness of Auschwitz - it is an endless and open field of green verdure and wooden horror that traps the mind in an irresolvable conflict between beauty and revulsion.
Most of the Jews killed in camps were killed on these grounds; at least 1.1 million have been confirmed, and various contemporaneous reports seem to indicate that the actual number is likely somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million. Evil and the blood of innocents are the constitutive agents of the entire site. Yet somehow the simple goodness of Creation will not let evil hold sway over even this, its high altar. The place is defined by a beautiful stillness that contrasts with the ugly fullness of Auschwitz. Even as I write this the repulsiveness of the camp is almost palpable, but I cannot and will not let go of the beauty that is there; perhaps Nature is trying in her own way to tell the story of the unsung martyrs of the slaughtered masses. Driving away, you see trees and bushes whose long arms hang wearily away from Birkenau, as if they had once turned away in horror and been unable to return.
Nearby in the old town of Oswiecim there is a church built by Dominicans in the fourteenth century where St. Hyacinth used to preach. The Salesians have had it since the end of the nineteenth century and a dedicated group of priests and nuns has been praying there and educating the youth in the attached school ever since. During the long darkness of 1940-1945, they ensured that the two small red lights on either side of the tabernacle were never extinguished. The Lord hears the cry of the poor; Christ has never left Auschwitz.

I am in Krakow

That is a true statement. My first week and a half in Poland has been a grand old time; I started by taking the train from Warsaw to Torun, which is a beautiful medieval town in the northwesterly bit of Poland, where I stayed with my good friend Michal and his grandparents, who live there and are amazing. They don't speak a word of English, but his grandfather knows German quite well, so we would try to communicate on essential subjects like the greatness of the Reagan presidency and my pressing need to eat more in a heady mix of English, German, and Polish. The second morning I was there I slept in rather late having cunningly neglected to bring an alarm clock and was awoken by Michal's grandfather bursting into the room at about 10:45, puffing "Essen! Essen!" I correctly interpreted this to mean, "It is high time to be awake and eating some of God's great creation, you young lay-about!"
Also notable about my time in Torun is the fact that no fewer than all four of the Polish bands I know and love were taking part in an open-air music festival that started the day I got in. As a result I was treated to the once-in-a-lifetime experience of jamming out to Polish Catholic hard rock into the weeish hours of the evening on the grounds of a fifteenth-century Teutonic castle. Why not?
Reunions with other good friends, Paulina and Jadwiga, who are respectively Michal's wife and daughter, further proved the excellence of the decision to come to Poland. On the train from Torun to Warsaw, Jadwiga passed out with her head on my leg and proceeded to sleep with such athletic intensity that my entire right leg was left salt-stained with her sweat, as if a tidal wave of exhaustion had broken over her and spilled over into concrete reality, leaving only the high-water mark on my leg as evidence of its existence. I wish I could sleep like that.
Krakow is, as I expected, a beautiful city. The lectures and conversation at the seminar I'm on (Tertio Millennio) have proven to be surprisingly stimulating and interesting, and the people no less so. There are about forty of us in the seminar, and we seem to be getting along like a house that has very Catholicly caught on fire. This evening, after a luxurious meal at a restaurant that warmed up the stomach for the approaching tempest of deliciousness with thick slices of hearty bread on which one was to spread lard mixed with large chunks of bacon, the whole group inexplicably started singing songs in unison. I suspect that the ingestion of enormous amounts of pig fat swimming in beef fat may be the root cause of this outburst. Our musical orgy lasted about an hour and a half, with the song selection ranging from booming Polish folk songs to our respective national anthems to what I'm pretty sure may have been a 50 cent song. In short, a good time was had by all.
Other things have happened in the last week-and-a-half, as you may imagine, but time runneth short and my sleepiness groweth mightily. Tomorrow: Sunny, happy-go-lucky Auschwitz-Birkenau!

Here it is

I can't write poetry. But here's a poem anyway.


Eulogy

Abraham climbed the mountain for three days
Every fire tied to the altar's,
Every knife-stroke smelling of blood -
From the eyes just like his own, a still gaze

Job sat in the ashes for seven nights
Each sore torn away by the sherd,
Each wound where once a child was balm
Deplored by the men who pitied his blights

Martha and Mary waited for four more
All peace lost in their brother's tomb,
All joy bound close to his body,
Left behind like husks on the threshing-floor

The Son of Man hung naked for three hours
Sometimes hope appears in its loss
Sometimes darkness consumes the sun
To reveal a light lost to her powers

July 6, 2007