How has the pandemic changed us? Has it made us better people? Or on the contrary? Father Maciej Zięba, one of the most extraordinary figures in the Polish Roman Catholic Church, answers difficult questions.
Kamil Bałuk: How do you cope with fear during the pandemic, Father?
Maciej Zięba: I analyse the statistics.
Statistics?
I look at the changing numbers of infections and deaths. Not only in Poland, but in all countries: from the States to Belgium and Sweden. I steer clear from Chinese and Russian data, as it is not very reliable. Such a view of things helps control anxiety levels. I have a degree in physics, we had probability theory and statistical analysis methods in the curriculum.
Wait, what about prayer?
It is very important. Which does not change my belief in hard data. My scientific background helps me verify newspaper headlines and medical prophecies. “Drastic Increase in Infections”, I read, and then I look at the curve and see that it is not quite as drastic. Apart from that, I cultivate the emotions within me.
How do you do that?
I consider whether my reaction is adequate. When a person is afraid of a gun barrel pointing at their temple, their fear is justified. But when they are afraid of a spider or a mouse, it is less so. The key is to respond appropriately to a given stimulus. And stimuli must first be understood, or best – examined. For instance, a century ago, during the Spanish flu pandemic, there were 1.5 billion people living in the world. Out of that number one third, i.e. 500 million, contracted the disease, and 60 to 90 million are estimated to have died. Leaving the house was a terrifying prospect back then. At present, going outside is not excessively risky. Of course, while analysing it all, I am filled first and foremost with compassion for those who died; thinking of Italy, Spain, the United States, where many of my friends live. But it is all about managing my fear. However, pastoral care is another matter altogether.
Are figures not helpful in this case?
The priest has to enter the world of a given person, not statistical figures. I can gently suggest to someone that their fear is inadequate. But my task is to empathize with them. When a person who is afraid of the pandemic calls me, I switch my probabilistic considerations off and I simply hear them out. I do not lecture them along the lines of: “You’re exaggerating, the probability of you getting sick is low, and of you dying – even lower.” Well, perhaps I would say something like that to IT students.
Has this rational mindset proved useful to you in the past, Father?
Faith, hope and love cannot be fully comprehended with reason alone. But while living within them, we should exercise as much reason as possible. Faith must be rational. The sphere of beauty, music or poetry is not strictly graspable by rational faculties. But it is sensible. You cannot scientifically, mathematically prove that you love this or that woman, but love must be sensible. If a person loves another blindly, it does harm to the both of them, and nothing will come out of it. In turn, irrational hope becomes foolish optimism, idealism. At times I am accused of speaking in a considered manner, appearing too intellectually methodical. But then, once you are put to the test, once the context changes, that more emotional, intuitive approach falls apart easily. We do not know our future, we keep heading into the unknown, uncertain and threatening, as Popper writes, so we must carry a compass within us and lay groundwork for ourselves. This pandemic caused many things to collapse for people, without so much as a warning.
The masks are off, many relationships have been put to the test by lockdown.
People used to rush from one place to another, lacking time for each other. Suddenly, many found themselves with time on their hands, but it turns out that it can be extremely difficult to be with our loved ones all the time. Parishioners would say: “I keep getting mad, I am a worse father/mother than I had thought.” I would reassure them that it did not necessarily have to be the case. When people are sharing a small space, they notice small things that tend to accumulate, escalate, resonate. In a situation where one cannot escape to work, cinema or a football game to discharge this energy, problems arise. And we must bear in mind that such a lockdown means a great accumulation of human energy.
Poles find it hard to sit at home like that, do you not find? Even if it has to be done for other people, so that they will not get ill. We associate sacrifice with fighting, not sitting at home.
It is a small act of heroism, but a meaningful one. Sacrifice is when we give others something we care about. When we are faced with a task that comes easily to us, it is no great sacrifice. The lockdown situation teaches patience, which is a prerequisite for love. I used to underestimate this fact.
I have this memory from when I was a cleric. I was visiting my aunt, an elderly nun, and asked her if she had any advice concerning monastic life, anything crucial that she could share with me. She looked into my eyes and said: “I don’t react right away when I feel slighted.” I was expecting mysticism, the wisdom of Zen masters, and met with something quite ordinary. But years later I understood that being able to hold back on your initial reaction is a great art that requires maturity.
What about when patience runs dry, and you can no longer stand being at home with your loved ones? Is this a bad thing? Or rather a good thing, as it connects us with reality?
I am reminded again of a certain event. As a young physicist, I worked at the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management. Once, while examining lake samples in the Greater Poland region, we stayed on a fishing farm. Admittedly it was state-owned, but as was usual in the Polish People’s Republic, fishermen were ready to give us any fish, even eels, for half a litre of vodka. Eel was certainly a delicacy. The choice du jour was pickled herring or smoked, dried cod. I was apprehensive about the eel, however, as it was covered in scales, and I had no experience in fish cleaning. So the fishermen says: “We just throw them into a plastic bag and cover them with salt. They rub against each other until their scales come off. There is nothing left to clean.” A not particularly ecologically-oriented story, but I remembered it years later, when I was a novice. We were sequestered in a small space for a year, a dozen or so guys, and that is how it went, like eels in a bag. Flats on lockdown remind me a little of that mental picture. Fractures have appeared, wounds and losses, but also a chance to see what we are really like.
Imperfect. Limited not only by our space, but also by our flaws.
These protective scales we developed have now fallen off. Now a live human being meets another such being. Such an encounter offers a chance of surviving the restrictions, of a deeper understanding, respect for our differences. Spiritual development is painful, but ultimately leads to happiness. Self-knowledge comes into play. We used to say to ourselves, for instance: “I cannot read important books, because I am constantly rushing around.” The pandemic has offered us the time, but now it seems that we simply did not feel like reading in the first place.
At what point did you understand that something serious was about to happen, Father?
To be honest, it was not until the authorities announced the restrictions. On 8th March, I had a public debate with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Crowds came, it was the last of such large meetings. By then we were already aware something dangerous was going on, but we did not think it would touch us directly. There appeared news that the virus was spreading rapidly, yet attacking only a small percentage of people aggressively, proving an extreme threat in the case of the elderly. The most important piece of information was that the number of instances of human contact increases the risk of infection, so one had to be ready for sacrifices.
What sacrifices?
Priests are made for pastoral care, for meeting people. And suddenly you had to isolate yourself radically. It was very painful. Naturally, I have tried to transfer my care into an online reality – lecturing and debating in discussion groups. But the Holy Mass in this form is something completely different. Confession, an extremely important part of pastoral care, cannot be conducted on the internet at all. In such a situation, one truly appreciates what has been lost. In our daily work, people come to the church and are simply there, present. When they suddenly disappear, it comes as a shock.
How did you cope with this shock?
Such a moment forces you to make an effort. In large parishes, Sunday mass is held every hour. Throughout the day people come, people go, in constant flux. Now the priests suddenly realize what horror it is to see an empty church. Not with 10% fewer faithful, but 100% fewer, with no faithful at all! A thought arises: we must take care that churches do not continue to empty. True Christianity is about abandoning routine, and in Poland in recent years the Church has been suffering from what I refer to as the ‘fat cat syndrome’ – it fares pretty well, all warm and cosy, it feels fed, so it does not have to move, it does not need to change anything. A mistake! One must constantly think about refreshing the language, reaching new groups, looking for novel forms of preaching the New Testament. The blessing of food products used to be a routine every year; priests had to come out every half hour and wave the aspergillum around. And suddenly there is a problem – the people have disappeared. However, there is no situation from which a way out cannot be found, you can drive around town and sprinkle holy water from the car. The faithful are happy. It is just that it requires some pastoral imagination.
What kind of a community will we be after all this? A better one? Worse? The same?
Such events trigger heroism and the most beautiful qualities in some people, while breeding opportunism and the worst in others. Statistically, it breaks down into a bell shape; the Gaussian bell-curve serves us here. During the pandemic, existential questions have reached our hearts and our homes with a vengeance. We know that we should not go outside and that this is in solidarity with others, besides, we are concerned about our health. But an elderly person might be living next door – does anyone remember about them? They are sitting alone, undergoing high stress because they are in a risk group. They are not in touch with anyone because they do not use Zoom or Skype. It is worth calling such a person, asking your neighbours to call as well. You can do shopping for such a person and add a nice note.
I have long said to my younger friends, 20-somethings, that an era was coming to an end. And that life soon would ask us questions that have not been asked for a long time. Questions about sacrifice, the meaning of life, friendship and death.
Do you remember when you first posed yourself such questions, Father?
For me it was before the Solidarity movement, in 1976, after the strikes in Ursus and Radom. I was asked to collect funds for the repressed, so I knew that the Security Service would get to me, because such collection was labelled as ‘anti-socialist activity’, which meant I would probably be removed from the University. These were not abstract questions about solidarity, concern for the weakest, risk-taking, but about a concrete thing. Are there matters over which it is worth being thrown out of university, or even going to prison, or not? Most people said no, that one had to live within their surroundings and blend in.
Among my generation, the Solidarity movement is mainly associated with a bunch of politicians who are now in conflict with one another. It is difficult to think of them in terms of one-time ideologists.
Easy now, “my son – will skirt this work, but you, grandson, will note”, as Norwid writes. Some time will pass and the next generation of teenagers will discover this treasure. It was the most beautiful social movement in the history of the world, more important than the movement of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. It is the most serious contribution on the part of Poles to the history of the world, although for now it remains forgotten, and even abused. I talk a great deal to young people, also those younger than you. It is natural that every generation that enters adult life, precisely around 20, thinks that it is living in exceptional times. We also thought so. Man landed on the moon, ‘electron brains’ (the first computers) were being constructed, we had ‘Górski’s Eagles’, the legendary football team. I have debated with 20-year-olds all my life. Those remain similar, only generations change. 20-year-olds often do not have historical awareness, they have yet to awaken it in themselves, so I help them along. They ask about history, about Solidarity, about what happened in 1989. I advise them to practice empathy and analyse history like a film, without knowing the ending.
Do you mean, for example, that had people in 1984 known that communism would collapse in five years, they would have lived differently?
Today we know that the Soviet Union collapsed bloodlessly in 1989, so we look differently at the moment the Third Republic of Poland was established. But at the time, we were surrounded by Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the Soviet Union, which threatened Poland with armed intervention. The East and the West were prickled with nuclear warhead missiles. It seemed that any violation of the status quo would cause a nuclear war. If riots broke out, they would be suppressed by Soviet tanks – like it was in the case of Hungary or Czechoslovakia. If an uprising broke out, either those tanks would drown the whole country in blood, or a world war would erupt, a nightmarish one. Once these solutions were ruled out, then it meant for people that they would have to live and die in what was around them. That meant they adapted to fit the system.
Therefore, even though in the 1980s hardly anyone believed in Marxism anymore, three million Poles belonged to the Party. Let us multiply it by four or five people per household, together a mass of people. They signed a symbolic pact, they obeyed the regime. A lot of decent and fine people asked me at that point: “Why are you resisting? It makes no sense, they will take your passport, they will take your family’s passports, they can put you in jail, they can get your father sacked.” I heard it over and over again, and it broke me down terribly. I understood their point, but I kept doing my part.
Today we plan our lives thinking that we know what is going happen. And the pandemic shows how little such plans are worth. In five years, we will have looked at the statistics, it will be known how many people died, when the vaccine was invented, how life changed. But today, wondering whether the plague will return, whether it will spread out, we are operating completely in the dark.
You need to cultivate the ability to reproduce this situation, when we do not know the ending of a film, but instead we are immersed in its plot.
So not only physics and maths, but also history?
When we cut out the past, we also cut out the future, because at that point only what is present becomes important. We dramatize, go into hysterics over our failures and go through short-lived bouts of euphoria because of our successes, after which we again return to the inattentive present. It is a shallow and superficial way to experience life. History teaches us to see things in a wider perspective, it helps you avoid mistakes and teaches you empathy – because the world has not begun and will not end with me. There will be future generations and I can teach them something.
When I think about my parents and their generation, my heart catches in my throat – what a terrible life they had. Sure, usually we bear some grudges and grievances against our parents, a number of those probably legitimate ones. But when I realize that my mum and dad grew up without fathers, because both of them had died during the Inteligenzaktion [the mass murder of around 100,000 Polish intelligentsia, perpetrated by Nazi Germany early in the occupation of Poland during World War II – ed. note] in the camp, or that my parents spent their entire childhood in the horrors of the German occupation, their youth and university years under monstrous Stalinism, and in the Polish People’s Republic they tried to fit in and toiled away trying to raise the four of us on their meagre intelligentsia salaries, it would be wrong to say that the next generations had it worse. I say that to young people when they tell me how hopeless their situation is.
Discovering that you are just a link in a chain of events helps you experience the present in a deeper and more thoughtful way.
But to make things harder, I will say that our Polish People’s Republic reality was also in some respects more genuine than the one in 2020 before the pandemic.
More genuine?
At that time, people fought for survival, instead of creating this froth of today’s world, gossip magazines and terabytes of irrelevant information. Take this, for instance. I have been a football fan since childhood. Today, the majority of sports news is about some player going to be transferred, then that transfer turns out to have been a rumour, but another transfer is being prepared. Which is also a rumour. And so on, day after day.
Kingsley Coman, a French footballer, was fined €50,000 because he turned up to training in his McLaren. His club, Bayern Munich, punished him because they had an exclusive deal with Audi. The player paid up, said he was very sorry and would visit the Audi factory to give autographs. This was news in the middle of the pandemic.
And so we are constantly bombarded with this type of information. Perhaps now there will be less of the sort? That would be a paltry profit from this pandemic, but a profit nonetheless. Ecology-oriented thinking will also get a little stronger within us. Do I really need to fly somewhere far away every weekend? Perhaps nearby there are important places too, and thanks to that I will not pollute the environment. For me, a bargain flight to Florence or Oxford is a great opportunity of which I have been dreaming. But in Lower Silesia there are beautiful places that I have not seen either. Suddenly, the pandemic begs the question as to what is real and what is merely informational froth, dispersed into the atmosphere with a fake news air-spray. Maybe it is not so great after all that you have thousands of photos on your computer that you never look at? Maybe a walk is cooler than sculpting your figure in the gym and buying more nutrients?
Maybe we needed a moment of reflection? In your online seminars you mention that sitting in the apartment can really be a moment of setting out on a journey – a spiritual one.
Because, “seeker of truth/ follow no path/ all paths lead where/ truth is here”, as Cummings writes. Stanisław Barańczak translated his poetry beautifully – and it is partly thanks to Stanisław, actually, that I am now running my online seminars. Back in 1990, he persuaded me to buy a computer and learn how to operate it. He was right. But now technology is leading us astray, drowning out the spiritual. Oh, a new text, something on Facebook, some new tweet. We are constantly producing noise, which sometimes carries some value, but in lockdown we notice that it covers barely one-tenth of what we considered important before. Once we turn this noise down, fundamental questions remain. Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I? What gives my life meaning? Such a period can be a time to embark on a spiritual journey. We only have to mute the noise, because God speaks to us clearly, but in a whisper.
How can we avoid wasting these reflections and build something new with the difficult knowledge that 2020 has brought us?
The Greek word κρίσις (krisis) denotes struggle, necessity to make a decision. The world, once seemingly tame and well known to us, has entered a period of such a crisis with the pandemic. New questions arise, and old ones demand new answers and new decisions, too. We are free to make selfish choices. Consequently, as psychologists warn us, a wave of divorces awaits us, fractured interpersonal relationships, frustration, and thus an increase in the number of patients in psychiatric clinics, an increase in addictions, and even suicides. But a pandemic can turn out to be a time of spiritual growth.
Are these really the right conditions for growth?
The most important things occur within ourselves. We have a certain database on which run our mind, volition and the emotions shaping our decisions. Lockdown expanded this base, triggered previously unnamed emotions, enforced new decisions. We can choose to ignore it and try to forget it all as soon as possible. However, consciously experiencing all this, we can – or indeed should – deepen the meaning of our lives. This way we will understand ourselves better, as well as other people and the world that surrounds us.
But are we not grasping blindly in the dark? Each new day brings in a new reality.
We probably will not always make the right choices, not always make optimal decisions, we will even not always take the side of truth and good. But one has to become reconciled with this too, in a prudent way. We are not perfect, but critical reflection on our weaknesses allows us to draw conclusions in order to face reality in a wiser and more creative manner. Thanks to our spiritual work, we can wipe our relationships clean from the dust of egoism, and deepen trust in our loved ones. Our marriage, relationships with children, parents or friends will then enter a new, more beautiful phase. New spaces for joy, good and beauty will open.
Where do you draw your hope from, Father? Are a hopeful physicist and a hopeful monk any different?
Camus aptly writes that “man is an animal in search of meaning”. We have a lot in common with our animal brothers and sisters, but what sets us apart is a deep desire to understand the world and ourselves. Physics is exactly such a great discovery of meaning in the universe. A monk is also looking for meaning, only in the spiritual sphere – the one that physics does not deal with, but which determines our humanity. That is why, as a physicist and theologian, I am occupied by the same concern: seeking the truth that gives meaning to my life. That is why in the breviary we pray: “Lord, grant unto those seeking the truth that they may find it, and having found it, that they may never stop looking for it.” Such a process is a source of hope, because you are constantly learning something new, slowly but surely you understand more and more, you discover deeper layers of significance and meaning. There is no more beautiful way of recording the sense of reality than mathematics used in physics. Music, prayer and poetry remain for us in the spiritual sphere.
And Barańczak?
He does as well. And his metaphysical translations. But just now I was thinking of Wierzyński:
Grant us sense beyond sense, emerging from death and life,
An eye invisible from anywhere, looking from out of sight.
Sight that pierces through anything, illuminates the space.
Professor of the Underworld, give us what you have proclaimed.
Stern Master and source of mystery,
Let our diligent pupil reflect eternity.
Sight in the darkness, words truthful in time,
A tune we might play you, your organists blind.
This is a kind of a prayer of mine, not only during the time of the pandemic.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Father Maciej Zięba:
A Dominican, representative of the Polish Roman Catholic Church in a modern and open edition. A Master of Physics and Doctor of Philosophy by education, a former Solidarity movement activist and adviser, journalist, publishing house CEO, provincial of the Dominican Order, member of the Synod of Bishops of Europe. The author of several books, co-creator of numerous television programmes devoted to matters of faith and religion.
Translator’s note:
Norwid quote translated from the Polish by Dorota Borchardt in collaboration with Agata Brajewska-Mazur. Poems by Cyprian Norwid, Archipelago Books, 2011.
Translated from the Polish by Karolina Sofulak
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