From the Pastor: The Pilgrimage to Poland Bulletin article June 9 I have now returned from Poland and you are probably reading this instead of listening to my homily during the weekend Mass. Because my flight was scheduled to return several days after the bulletin had to go to the publisher, I have taken the liberty of once again using our parish time machine to let you know how everything went on our pilgrimage. The flight to Poland seemed to take approximately 28 hours. It wasn’t truly that long but I was sitting in the exact wrong place for a comfortable ride. The two people to my right were both sweet little old ladies who chain smoked the entire trip and conversed loudly in raspy Polish between drags in what seemed to be either a debate on foreign politics or a good impression of rival lovers on the Jerry Springer show. The person to my left blocking the way to the other aisle had evidently just wolfed down a 4.7 pound limburger cheese, onion and sardine sandwich in 60 minutes to win a food competition. His Gas-X and Listerine were both confiscated by Homeland Security so the copious eruptions of aromatic emanations from both sides of his body were hardly his fault. The way he clutched his air-sickness bag worried me greatly except when I distracted myself by wiping the moisture off my scalp coming from the people directly behind me who seemed to have a very bad case of either SARS or the whooping cough. Having so much to “offer up” was a great way to start a pilgrimage! When traveling in the USA if you ever need to use a restroom you can pull into rest areas on the interstate, go into fast food restaurants just about anywhere or even make a quick stop at nearly any gas station. But not so overseas. We were out one day and could not find facilities anywhere. We spotted a police officer and somebody in our group (don’t worry, I won’t tattle on you, mom!) asked where we might find a toilet but he, of course, spoke no English. So she did what every good American does. She asked very slowly and loudly, “WHERE...IS...THE...BATHROOM?” No response. Seeing the language problem somebody else immediately came to the rescue, “DONDE..ESTA...EL...BANO?” For some strange reason that doesn’t work as well in Cracow as it does in Miami. Fortunately when I was a kid my father taught me a little bit about how to translate from English into Polish and so I called on all of my mental faculties and came up with, “Areski thereski restroomskis nearbyski?” Perhaps my pronunciation was not good enough but let’s just say we had to hold it for quite some time. That wasn’t the only place where the language barrier caused problems, though. We thought we were going to see the famous Salt Mine Cathedral. This is a fabulous underground cathedral carved completely out of salt by the miners of old. They stayed underground for long periods of time and passed their free time carving beautiful white statues, altars, and everything else a cathedral would hold, all as a tribute to their Catholic faith. Unfortunately our guide mixed up the Polish word for “salt” with the word for “pepper” and we visited the not-so-famous underground pepper mines. These were occupied, not by Catholic miners but by the atheistic Communists who long controlled the country. They spent their time carving black, shadowy images reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, a fitting tribute to their “un-god.” Far from being a waste of time though, this day was nothing to sneeze at as it spiced up the rest of our trip. (OK, so that was a little peppercorn-y! You try grinding out something better.) Sorry to say I have to leave this column on a sad note. While we were in Warsaw one of the worst airline disasters ever in Poland happened the night before we were to fly home. It seems that a two seater Cessna 152 crashed in the center of the National Cemetery. Rescue crews were immediately dispatched to look for survivors. While they fortunately found both the pilot and his passenger alive and with only minor injuries, at last count they had uncovered 281 dead. With prayers for your holiness, Fr. Edwin Palka
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:17:59 +0000
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