A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

I recently visited Krakow in Poland with my daughter Hannah, as part of the celebrations of my 80th birthday. Her Polish friend Joanna had recommended Krakow, and so I asked Hannah if her friend might suggest a book or two that would give me a feel for Polish culture before we went there. She suggested ‘Map’ the collective poems of Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish Nobel Prize winner. It contains many thought provoking poems , and one in particular stirred my imagination ‘Absence’, which begins with these opening lines:

A few minor changes

and my mother might have married

Mr. Zbigniew B. from Zduńska Wola.

And if they’d had a daughter—she wouldn’t have been me.

Maybe with a better memory for names and faces,

and any melody heard once.

Adept at telling one bird from another.

With perfect grades in chemistry and physics,

and worse in Polish,

but secretly writing poems

instantly more interesting than mine.

A few minor changes

and my father might at that same time have married

Miss Jadwiga R. from Zakopane.

And if they’d had a daughter—she wouldn’t have been me.

Maybe standing her ground more stubbornly.

Plunging headfirst into deep water.

Susceptible to group emotions.

Always seen in several spots at once,

but rarely with a book, more often in the yard

playing kickball with the boys.

It could equally well have been about you or me. If my mother had married somebody other than my father and had given birth to his son ‘it wouldn’t have been me.’ If my father had married someone other than my mother and she had given birth to his son ‘it wouldn’t have been me’ either. And the same is true for you with respect to your parents

If you or I were to trace our family tree over many generations, involving hundreds of men and women, it would only take one small break in any one of its lines for us not to have been born. Somebody no doubt would have been ‘but it wouldn’t have been you and it wouldn’t have been me.’

My existence, and yours too, is a miracle. The likelihood of it ever happening is remote. Every human being is a miracle. If I gaze at the stars & the enormity of the cosmos, then the likelihood of human beings existing on planet Earth seems tiny, but the existence of any particular one of us is beyond comprehension. We are, everyone of us, a miracle, a cause for wonder and awe. There’s never been anyone else exactly like us. We are each a ‘one off.” Our vocation is similarly personal and unique. We each have a distinctive contribution to make that only we can make. Nobody else can be it and make it available to others.