Praying in Polish

My Dziennik Zwiazkowy column this week is about Praying in Polish and what this meant to me.  Please consider leaving a comment at the newspaper’s website, linked below.

PRAYING IN POLISH 

I still remember my childhood Sundays at St. Fidelis Church in Chicago, the church packed with old Polish immigrants and new Polish immigrants, the ones people called Displaced Persons (DPs) – and all these Poles praying out loud. The old women and young women in their babushkas praying out loud. The working men in their dark blue suits that they would finally be buried in praying out loud. Even the kids who would rather be outside running and laughing praying out loud.

Everyone praying out loud. Everyone praying in voices that were like no other voices I heard anywhere else in America.

What I came to feel then and still feel now is that true prayer could only be prayed in Polish. There’s a human sincerity and ragged artlessness in Polish prayers that I don’t hear when prayers are spoken aloud in English.

In fact, I don’t hear much praying out loud in the English churches I’ve been in. People mumble prayers sometimes when the priest or minister asks them to pray, but it’s not the kind of full-hearted praying I remember in the Polish churches I went to when I was a kid. In some English-speaking churches, the priests and ministers are trying to convince their congregations to pray out loud because they feel that praying out loud has a spiritual and psychological value to it. However, it’s not easy to convince people to pray out loud. I’ve even heard that there are some non-Polish churches that feel people shouldn’t pray out loud. The folks in these churches will point to passages in the Old and New Testament both that question the validity and value of prayers spoken out loud. God apparently doesn’t want to hear them.

But it wasn’t like this in the Polish churches I attended as a child. When people there prayed out loud in Polish, you heard their hearts speaking plainly and directly about the things that mattered to them: their poverty, their despair, and their hope.

Prayer in English? It’s what you saw on TV–faces cleaned up and all the words stripped of their pain.

When my mother died, the funeral director found an old recording of Lil Wally, a Polka star big in Chicago in the old days, singing the prayer/song „Serdeczna Matko.”

It sounded like the prayers I remember from the old days, the prayers prayed out loud in those Polish churches I remember. 

It sounded like the first prayer prayed by the first man in a voice that didn’t know what prayer was–the primal voice pleading for just a moment of understanding and wondering if it would ever come.

/http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/modlitwa-po-polsku/

Solitude?

Someone should write a history of it.
Think about it. Probably for the first million plus years that we were here on earth, we were up to our ears in solitude. We’d watched the sky and the horizon for a bit of smoke, listen for the turning of a clumsy wheel or a whistle coming from some tall grass. Anything that might signal that our solitude was about to end.

At night, we’d sit in a tree or a cave and practice our smiles and handshakes on the off chance we’d meet somebody the next day coming toward us through that tall grass. We’d also practice our “company’s coming” talk, „Hi, I’m Abel from this tree here, glad to meet you. You just passing through? Like to stop? Care to have a banana?”

Sometimes you see a bird all alone on a tree, turning his head this way and that, pausing and listening the way birds listen to the sounds in the wind when they’re all alone. Well, you know we were probably like that bird most of the time we were on this earth–maybe up to about 15,000 years ago when we learned to hunker down together.

It was probably a good break from the solitude and what was behind it and always coming closer, the loneliness.
A person gets tired of sleeping with his back exposed to the wind and the weather. He wants to have someone behind him keeping his back warm. It was probably that way when he was a baby, his momma pressing his back into her warm belly. You miss that kind of loving and go searching for something that will break the loneliness and the fancy Sunday-dress version of loneliness, solitude.

Yeah, we want to get away from the solitude that – as the great blues and jazz singer Billie Holiday used to say – “haunts us.”

But then something happens, and we start getting a little too much of that pressing, that closeness, that togetherness we felt when we were babies and kids growing up.

Maybe it’s the growth of cities or the rise of the merchant class or the start of the industrial revolution with its ugly factories, and sometimes we feel that all we got now is people pressing into us, some pressing in a loving way but more often just pressing, just pressing a little harder and harder each day — until we start thinking down into our DNA and remembering the solitude we had so much of so long ago, and we start missing that solitude.

http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/osamotnienie-solitude/