Witness to Hope: The Prologue
The Biography of Pope John Paul II
by George Weigel
Feast of the Holy New Martyrs Demetrius & Paul of Tripoli
Anno Domini 2020, May 22
by George Weigel
Feast of the Holy New Martyrs Demetrius & Paul of Tripoli
Anno Domini 2020, May 22
Stealing quietly through Kraków’s blacked-out streets, the audience and the actors who would perform for them arrived at an apartment in the city’s Dębniki district, across the frozen Vistula River from ancient Wawel Castle. It was the 1,181st evening in the long, dark night of the Polish soul, and they took great care to avoid the armed patrols that enforced the Nazi Occupation’s curfew. For what they were doing was an act of defiance that, detected, would have sent everyone involved to the death camps. This particular night, November 28, 1942, the Rhapsodic Theater, an avant-garde troupe committed to a “theater of the living word” without props or elaborate costumes, was performing an adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz, a classic of the Polish Romantic tradition.
The apartment blinds were drawn; the lights were lowered; a clandestine act of cultural resistance began. It did not go unchallenged. During the performance, Nazi megaphones outside began blaring the news of another victory by the invincible Wehrmacht. To some in the audience, that rasping, intrusive propaganda, interrupting a brief respite from the terrors of life in occupied Poland, seemed an apt metaphor for the hopelessness of their situation.
The twenty-two-year-old actor then speaking, an underground seminary student named Karol Wojtyla, paid no attention whatsoever to the racket outside. Unfazed, he continued his recitation as if the harsh static of the principalities and powers of the age simply did not exist…
Almost thirty-seven years later, on June 2, 1979, Karol Wojtyla addressed another audience: the largest gathering to that point in the history of Poland. The former actor no longer spoke in a darkened apartment. Rather, he said what he had to say before 1 million of his countrymen gathered in and around Warsaw’s massive Victory Square. In some respects, though, things were curiously similar. Once again, Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, was confronting a brutal attempt to crush human freedom: the communism that had replaced Nazism as usurper of Poland’s liberties. Once again, he was doing so not with what the world recognized as “power,” but with what he understood to be the truth that could set his people free in the deepest sense of freedom: the truth about the dignity, vocation, and destiny of human beings, which he believed had been revealed in Jesus Christ.
And once again, as he spoke, he was interrupted, not by the crudities of Nazi megaphones, but by the spontaneous, rhythmic chant of his people—“We want God! We want God…”
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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