The writers Joseph Pearce and K. V. Turley have observed that it is often quite ordinary, out-of-the-way places that God chooses for his purposes: Walsingham, Lourdes, even Nazareth and Bethlehem themselves. I wonder whether something similar is true of Sybiraków Park in the suburbs of the Polish city of Rzeszów. By all appearances this broad open space, with its municipal playing-fields overlooked by blocks of flats, is exemplary in its plainness, having its commonplace counterparts in every major town and city on earth. But every year, in early summer, as dusk falls on the feast of Corpus Christi, this place is so transfigured that, in truth, it comes to resemble very little else on earth. For one evening it becomes the setting of the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts of open-air hymn-singing, whose story I have tried to tell elsewhere in these pages.
This year, on the 20th June, after months of rehearsal, the big stage was set up for the seventeenth time, large enough to accommodate the choir, orchestra, soloists and other musicians. There, according to Rzeszów News, they were joined by some forty thousand people, who raised their voices in prayerful song as dusk fell. The claim to the title of ‘Europe’s largest concert of Christian music’ does not seem so unreasonable: the aerial photos speak for themselves.
This year, on the 20th June, after months of rehearsal, the big stage was set up for the seventeenth time, large enough to accommodate the choir, orchestra, soloists and other musicians. There, according to Rzeszów News, they were joined by some forty thousand people, who raised their voices in prayerful song as dusk fell. The claim to the title of ‘Europe’s largest concert of Christian music’ does not seem so unreasonable: the aerial photos speak for themselves.
These concerts have such an uplifting quality to them. Partly that is because there is no compromise on musicianship: a great deal of time and trouble is taken for the preparations, both the performance and the arrangements, which are mainly the work of the musical director, the film composer and jazz musician Marcin Pospieszalski. Maybe not all the music is to everyone’s taste, nor even to mine (I tend to prefer the orchestral arrangements, where the majesty and solemnity of the choir and orchestra are allowed to flourish): it is mainly the idea and the atmosphere that I am praising. But the musical repertoire has been really carefully chosen so that most of the music will lift the spirits of most of the people there, and some of the numbers are irresistible. The idea of giving favourite hymns uplifting and rich arrangements is, I think, thoroughly inspired — every little detail that Pospieszalski puts in adds to the overall spirit of beauty in truth, and to the dramatic, even ‘epic’, dimension of the faith. The music comes from every age and corner of the Church: medieval plainsong, traditional hymns, translated versions of more recently-written songs from America, and some new music from Poland itself, all leavened and deepened by the forces of orchestra and choir. You could take your girl friend or your grandmother to these concerts — in fact the idea is probably that you should take both.
This is because the concert’s foundation is spiritual, as well as musical. Nobody is suggesting that this is a substitute for going to church and receiving the sacraments, but it is, I think, something semi-sacramental, popular piety for the twenty-first century, drawing people into real and authentic togetherness. Something brings those forty thousand souls closer together than ordinary audiences or crowds. The originator of the idea, Jan Budziaszek — who even in Poland could not find the resources to get his idea off the ground for twenty years — has an oft-repeated refrain which runs along these lines: ‘Do you want to hear good music? Then make it yourself! Because the heart of man is never truly happy unless he is giving to someone else’. At a given point in the concert, the voice of St John Paul II is played over the speakers: this year the multitude (as JPII would have called them) heard words of encouragement to men and women to marry, to vow not to leave each other until death, and to keep that vow. And the organisers add words of their own which would be unthinkable in sullener lands further west: ‘May our entire society be freed from this illusion of freedom, free love… Too much this illusion costs. Too many children are made to lose trust in their parents, so that the indispensable ground on which they themselves have to build their future, and the future of society, gives way’. The concert’s organisers are at pains to point out that it is not a performance or a show: it is a gathering, ‘nasza Rodzina JSJD’, ‘our JSJD Family’, in which thousands of people, unified in prayer and song, are made — according to the concert’s name — ‘of one heart and of one spirit’.
A sight like this may seem unbelievable to us in Western Europe, but it is a glorious reality in Poland, which I think has a jewel in this astonishing annual tradition of musicianship with its vital air of togetherness, which has no need to rely on an enemy or a scapegoat for its unity. This is what, say, Ireland could easily have been — or even Britain, at a stretch. Has the different path that we have chosen been worth it? Well, in the choice between the dullness and ennui of self-centred secularism, and the joy of an occasion like this, the answer is clear enough to me. This is the New Evangelisation in action. Long may these concerts prosper.
‘Wykrzykujcie Bogu, wykrzykujcie Królowi’: an adaptation of the forty-seventh (forty-sixth) Psalm (‘Clap your hands, cry to God with shouts of joy’). Music originally by Marcin Gajda, arranged by Marcin Pospieszalski.
