DELIGHT

ALINA CZERNIAKOWSKA

There are feelings which brighten our everyday life. Hearts are joyful, faces are radiating, eyes are laughing – one simply wants to live! When we quote John Paul II – ‘we must only look around in the sky, look around on the earth’, find time, stop in the haste of the mediocrity, get delighted. Especially now, when the gold Polish autumn uses all colours of nature, difficult to transform by the man, paints elusive landscapes sings with voices of birds flying away, collects harvest of the whole year. The Polish Pope saw all this and wrote about delights, about God’s works so beautifully in ‘Remembrance and identity’. He found time to look at colours of a field road, colours of leaves, trees, sky although he had the whole world in his mind. We, ordinary bread-eaters, react with surprise when somebody encourages us to read poetry, reflection of autumn on ‘colours of the earth, grass, flowers, water frozen in the silence of the sun, sky painted with lines of planes and keys of birds forming groups to fly away’. We can stop for a while on beautiful autumn days and poetic verses become the reality which often goes beyond a poet’s imagination. Because which picture or which drawing or a rhyme will present the beauty of fields, forests, orchards in autumn? Who can tell a story about the skies in silence and wind, describe scents of all fruits and vegetables, giving their beauty and taste to the man in autumn? John Paul II said a significant sentence, to which literature of philosophy does not give an answer: ‘Looking at the beauty of nature, only a fool can say that God does not exist’.

Our ancestors recited long rhymes, poems by heart, found all these atmospheres, poetic beauty, music of great virtuosos in their everyday life, in the surrounding nature, in God’s and human works. I have always admired my grandparents and parents that they could cite works of Sienkiewicz, Słowacki, Mickiewicz by heart: poems, beautiful verses, depending on a season, historic events, anniversaries, feasts. About love to the man, Homeland, to God. The sang songs of many verses, full of content – unlike today, consisting of two repeated verses, without a bigger sense. If someone of young people wants to support his reflections with classical literature, quotations from literature, would seem – the compulsory one, generally invents, remembers something, but very little and not exactly.

Young generations in Western Europe, America, are returning to roots; there is fashion of returning to the past, to creating genealogical trees, reaching to information about ancestors. In our country we are not at the phase of chaste for computerization, alleged modernity, the old fashion of the West, attracting us all the time. However, we have culture of over thousand years, a great treasury of achievements of prominent Poles throughout many centuries – we can get a lot from it with joy and pride before the world. Once one of heroines of my documentary, a beautiful Polish woman – Dr. Aleksandra Wysocka said: ‘We became miserable as the society, mediocrity became the norm of life’ but maybe, not only us, Poles? Maybe the world has become miserable, chose an easier way, went away from values, beauty and does not have time for delight? It is comforting that not everyone and everywhere.

AA

„Niedziela” 43/2014

Editor: Tygodnik Katolicki "Niedziela", ul. 3 Maja 12, 42-200 Czestochowa, Polska
Editor-in-chief: Fr Jaroslaw Grabowski • E-mail: redakcja@niedziela.pl