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.
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