April 20, 2022

I am back home.  This is where I stayed in Krakow.

On Monday, I wandered into this church.  It was the first walk from where I was staying to someplace other than where the van was parked.  Easter Sunday continues into Monday in this predominantly Catholic city.

This modest exterior opens into an almost painfully beautiful chapel, with stained glass windows.  I walked in and it seemed natural to walk then kneel in a pew.  Looking up at Christ on the cross, I immediately started to sob.  So much suffering.

Not with any disrespect, and certainly not the first person to have felt this, I wanted to admonish him to climb down from that cross and do something, do more, to help those suffering. What was the Resurrection if not hope?  Isn’t grace supposed to flow, not to those who have earned it, but those most in need of it?

I imagined Rob Sturgill’s voice.  I think Rob exists in a state of grace, optimistically and enthusiastically preaching the gospel through not words, but actions.

“What do you mean do that something? He sent you, and John, and me, , and so many others.  We can’t know the plan, trust it’s unfolding as it should, Type of Wood.  But, yes, the suffering breaks my heart, too”

Rob and I didn’t meet more than once, talked in person only once.  But I smile thinking about his energy, his optimism, his faith.

I felt a call, an urgent need, to come here, I felt that this was the case for the people from all over the world, of every faith and no faith, who were here, In Korczowa and Medyka, simply because there are so many in need here,  And they/we want to stand against this cruelty.

I don’t know how the book would stand up now, but back in the day I really enjoyed the novel, Shogun, by James Clavell.

In it, Toranaga, the Japanese shogun, asks Blackthorne, the Englishman, why the Catholics and Protestants in his country are fighting with each other. He says they’re fighting over the correct understanding of God and how he wants to be worshipped, wants people to live.

Toranaga gets impatient, saying I asked a serious question, don’t toy with me. Why are they really fighting?

Blackthorne says, no, that’s really it.  How could that possibly be, Toranaga asks.  He concludes they must all be mad.

There is none of that here.

AS I was walking back from the church, I was thinking about the rabbi who helped prepare me for my bar mitzvah and my fifth grade teacher, Pearl Henschel.

I had terrible handwriting, probably related to poor eye-hand coordination at that age.  Most teachers,thinking they were helping, harassed me endlessly about doing writing exercises, telling me to try harder, to correct something that maturation would help, to an extent.

Zmrs. Henschel told my mother she wasn’t concerned at all about any of that, I would no doubt have a secretary (!), and when she could eventually decipher it, the things I was writing about were pretty interesting.  She like the way I was thinking, and what I was thinking about.

Though from a selectively observant Jewish family, typical of my time and place, I liked the rabbi helping me prepare for my bar mitzvah a lot.  He was a real scholar and had a heart.  There was dissatisfaction in the congregation with him as a fundraiser.  No one is a more exquisite social critic nor angrier than a teenager so you can imagine how much I ran with that.  To me he was the real deal.

He also told me he wasn’t worried about me (perhaps he could tell I was getting other messages about this).  He said there were the rituals, and they had their place, and maybe I wouldn’t follow them.  The rituals weren’t the essence.  I had a good heart and he wasn’t worried about things working out between me and God.  He was sure I would get the essential things right.

I was in tears thinking about these two I hadn’t thought about in almost half a century.  I hoped I had been proving them right about me, and me about them:  that individuals showing small kindnesses make a huge difference.

You are proving them right too.  Thank you for you kindness towards me and the people of Ukraine.