Six years since World Youth Day in Kraków

Six years ago today I was sitting at my laptop in my student flat, watching the opening Mass of World Youth Day in Kraków, and wishing more with every minute that I were there.  I was struck particularly by the music, which was supplied by a full choir and orchestra and consisted of fine, uplifting hymns and a beautiful Mass setting — full of a kind of joyful stateliness for the occasion, and all with rich, even cinematic orchestration.  

My endeavours to try and find out more, or indeed anything, about it all — what the hymns were called and how to spell them, let alone who had composed them! — sparked an effort to learn Polish pronunciation (which turned out not to be as hard as it looks) and a tentative but continuing attempt to learn the language itself.  And it drew me into the discovery and deepening love of Polish church music and the life that surrounds it — everything from their travelling liturgical music workshops, which draw hundreds of people to make music together, to the enormous outdoor hymn-concerts held every year in the city of Rzeszów.  The discovery of the Dominican Liturgical Centre in Kraków has been a revelation, and last October it was a joy and a privilege to take part in a workshop given by the composer Paweł Bębenek at St. Dominic’s Priory in London, and then to sing music composed by him and his fellow composers in an unforgettable candle-lit vigil.

Today is also, of course, the sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of père Jacques Hamel of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen.  The mingling of the two events as they reached me from afar — of the joy of World Youth Day and the sharp sorrow of that news — is something else which has fixed that day in my memory.

The Agnus Dei of Henryk Jan Botor’s Missa Ioannis Paoli Secundi, written specially for World Youth Day and sung at its opening Mass at Błonia Park, Kraków, on the 26th July 2016.  This setting has proved popular with our parish Youth Choir in South London.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ at full strength once more

The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday in Poland (where indeed it is a national holiday), and in the south-eastern city of Rzeszów there was the welcome return in its full form of one tradition: ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’, the great annual outdoor hymn concert.  (I have written more about these concerts here, and this year’s edition, which I’ve been catching up with, can be watched in full here).  

These past two years the concert has of course been constrained by various pandemic restrictions — though the organisers heroically put together an online concert in time for Corpus Christi in 2020, and then organised two live concerts with reduced audiences in September 2020 and Corpus Christi 2021.  This is the first time that it has been possible to relax a little more about the virus, and to enter more freely into its old mood of joyful, prayerful togetherness — a mood which persisted in spite of a terrific rain-storm whose arrival coincided squarely with the beginning of the concert!  Amid the wind and the rain it was nice to see some by now familiar faces once again: Hubert Kowalski conducting the orchestra, Joachim Mencel playing the hurdy-gurdy, Jan Budziaszek the percussionist and one of the main founders, and the various Pospieszalskis and Posieszalskas: Marcin, Lidia, Barbara…

This has also, of course, been the first edition of the concert since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.  Rzeszów is only fifty or so miles from the western Ukrainian border, and it is this part of Poland which has been at the forefront of the country’s heroic response to the refugee crisis.  And of course, although Russia’s wrath is now mostly concentrated in eastern Ukraine, her forces have proved themselves capable of firing missiles well into the west, with seemingly gratuitous strikes on the city of Lviv and military positions only ten miles from Poland’s border.  So to the musicians and the concert-goers the war will be and remain an immediate and pressing concern.  And it only reinforces a paradox at which I have wondered before: that this hymn-concert, one of the most hopeful, joyful sights in Europe, has grown up in a part of our continent which has seen some of its worst and longest suffering.

It was as right and just as it was to be expected that some Ukrainian musicians were invited to contribute to the music. The band ‘Kana’ are already regulars at the concerts, but there were also some bandura players from Lviv, bringing to the stage a haunting sound that was new to me.  As well as these there were the old favourite of course: a big orchestral number at the beginning followed by Paweł Bębenek’s ‘Dzięki Ci, Panie’ (‘Thank you, Lord’); the exuberant ‘Jezus zwyciężył’, ‘Jesus has triumphed’, which is the cue for the multitude to go wild; and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The flavour of the concert seems in recent years to have been moving in more of an American-style ‘praise-and-worship’ direction, but what I have always preferred and looked forward to most are the home-grown orchestral arrangements and jazzings-up of favourite Polish hymns.  Several of these seem to appear every year — I’m never sure who is responsible for them but I think usually either Marcin Pospieszalski or Hubert Kowalski are the culprits — and at least one of them always strikes me as a real gem.  This year I was rather taken with a setting of lines from a much-loved poem by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584):

Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?
Czego za dobrodziejstwa, którym nie masz miary?
Kościół Cię nie ogarnie, wszędy pełno Ciebie:
I w otchłaniach, i w morzu, na ziemi, na niebie.

Tyś Pan wszytkiego świata.  Tyś niebo zbudował
I złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś uhaftował.
Tyś fundament założył nieobeszłej ziemi
I przykryłeś jej nagość zioły rozlicznemi.

Tobie k woli rozliczne kwiatki Wiosna rodzi,
Tobie k woli w kłosianym wieńcu Lato chodzi,
Wino Jesień i jabłka rozmaite dawa,
Potym do gotowego gnuśna Zima wstawa.

Here is a translation (from StaroPolska.pl,
http://www.staropolska.pl/renesans/jan_kochanowski/czego_chcesz_Panie.html):

What do You want from us, Lord, for Your lavish gifts?
What for the benefactions, which have no limits?
The Church will not contain You; You are everywhere:
On the earth, in the depths, the sea, the open air.

You are the Lord of the whole world, You built the sky,
And embroidered it splendidly with gold stars high.
Of the earth untraversed You lay the foundation
And covered its bareness with rich vegetation.

By Your will Spring brings flowers, in abundance born,
By Your will Summer wears wreaths made from ears of corn.
Autumn gives out wine and apples of various kinds,
Idle Winter rises, when ready meal she finds.

The melody of the song in the concert was composed by Jacek Sykulski (1969–), a beautiful setting which has become a popular hymn —

— but Mateusz Pospieszalski — brother of Marcin, the bass-guitarist and Jednego Serca stalwart — has given it a lavish arrangement, jazzing it up with a syncopated five-time rhythm, a clever lyrical part for strings, a refrain which proves delightfully contrapuntal, and some irresistible ripplings from the harp.  I don’t think they needed to change key halfway through, but otherwise I thought it a very affecting rendition, and loved especially the low, clear, pure tone of the upper voices in the second verse.  By the way, the soloist on the left, Barbara Pospieszalska, is Mateusz’s niece.

So, as I have had occasion to say before, there are plenty of good things going on in Poland.  New music with old roots, spontaneous youngsters dancing the conga, ladies with flowers in their hair, thousands of voices singing hymns in the rain…  Niech żyje Polska!  Long live Poland, and happy Corpus Christi!

‘Outrageous before Almighty God’

I have nothing original to say about what has just flared into horrible flames in the east of our continent; only that I share the general horror at the sight of the face of Europe suddenly disfigured once again by ‘conventional’ territorial warfare between nations.  Once again the world’s hard law asserts itself: that peace is fragile; that brute force is the plaything of the tyrant; that we cannot solve our problems by ourselves.

The days are turning slowly at the moment, and there is a lurid, unreal gleam to them as the nightmare unfolds.  The shock of naked evil takes time to sink in.  I understand only in outline the background to this crisis, but whatever the legitimacy of Russia’s complaints hitherto, and whatever the misbehaviour of Ukraine or the impertinence of the West, nothing justifies this campaign of outright and wholesale military aggression, let alone the very nasty weapons and tactics that are being used.  Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark puts it plainly: ‘This is outrageous.  It is outrageous before Almighty God, it is outrageous before the world.’

Yet no swift or easy end seems likely, not now that the invasion force has been committed.  This shows every sign of being a long and bitter and ruinous struggle, with impossible cost to life and limb.  Thus opens yet another chapter in the tragic histories of both Ukraine and Russia.

Somehow, although the conflict is far to our east in Britain, it reaches close to home in certain ways: for me, most obviously with respect to my Ukrainian neighbours, who still have relatives in their homeland.  I was startled, too, to read news of the Polish composer Paweł Bębenek, who on the day the invasion began was in the Ukrainian capital to conduct one of his singing workshops, just like the one I attended when he came to London last October.  Hearing news of the invasion, he knew he had to leave straightaway.  After a fortunate but desperate escape in a Polish diplomatic car, he is now safe at home, but it seems to have been a close-run thing.  (I now understand more fully why, at one moment during the London workshop, he mentioned the anxiety and suffering of Ukraine, briefly but with much feeling).  One way and another, this catastrophe does not feel as remote as it might have done.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there is a feeling of powerlessness at this remove.  Contribution to the humanitarian efforts (Caritas, Aid to the Church in Need, the Disasters Emergency Committee, of which CAFOD is a member) is one obvious and valuable way to help.  But it occurs to me that it would also be an idea, if we have the opportunity, to think imaginatively about the sort of help that could be given.  We could, for example, favour with our patronage any Russian local or family businesses that may be nearby, and thus reassure their owners, and remind ourselves, that a nation is more than any crazed madnesses of its government.  So far we have generally been good at remembering this (including my neighbours, to their great credit), but we know how human beings can be: such reassurance will do no harm.  Russia too is a noble country and its ordinary citizens deserve better than the present leadership; they should not be blamed for Russia’s disgrace.

One other thing we can do is to keep going about our lives with care and purpose.  It has occurred to me before that in my work as an archivist, one good catalogue record added is one small deed done for order against chaos, for truth against falsehood, for good against evil.  In no way is this equivalent to the valour of a soldier defending his homeland, but it is something; and the same goes for everyone.  It also aligns with the words of the poet-priest Malcolm Guite in the video below, in which he discusses C. S. Lewis’s exhortation, appropriately enough in a sermon of 1939, not to abandon poetry and beauty in times of tribulation.  We in Britain may not be directly engaged militarily in this new war, but we are engaged always in the great cosmic battle, in which every sound line of verse, every sweet bar of music, every true word, every good deed, every laugh, every tear, every prayer carries its weight.  And it is on this plane of existence that war itself ultimately begins and ends.  For, as Archbishop Wilson also points out, just as all war is fundamentally conceived in the heart, so too in the heart alone can it truly be ended.  Let it be so, let it be so.