How long shall the land mourn?

I didn't see much point in watching the funeral. Everyone was watching it on television, or on projection screens in their local churches, but I would not have felt any more community with the people if I had been standing next to them. I let the air bring me the sounds. The combination of the church bells and the factory sirens at 10am brought forth a strange heterodyne sound, a note formed from the resonance of all the others, a mechanical song, an accidental processional hymn before the humans played their part. After that, I just waited; the occasional snatches of song from the nearby televisions, the birds, the wind. The spring morning; rain was forecast, but the sun poked through the light cloud covering, the usually obdurate Polish weather making an effort to put on a good face for this important day.

And this was an important day. No-one was going to let us forget it. The systematic, relentless TV coverage; the glutinously melancholic string quartets and slow-motion shots of the great man walking among the mountains or cheerfully leading a congregation in applause, the commentators and newsreaders, finding plenty of ground to mine in the broad territory between reverence and sentimentality, would have been considered risible in my own culture.
But there was - and is - no denying the reality of the emotion here. The day before, on Thursday, classes in my high school were interrupted by a kind of 'mini-mass', a short remembrance service partially prepared by the kids. All of them went; no-one took it as an excuse to sneak out for a cigarette or catch up on neglected homework. Down in the wooden gym, the barely-tuned piano lurking in the corner, a large portrait stood on stage with the traditional black band crossing the lower-right hand corner.

The kids sang songs, recited fragments of his works. The emotion with which they did so was palpable, and affected everyone. Normally cheeky girls and smug boys had moist eyes and snivels in the throat; the much-feared biology teacher had her face entirely buried in her handkerchief. The school's priest gave a blessing; a somewhat colourless individual most of the time, he acquired a quiet dignity which a more extrovert or pompous prelate would have turned into yet more drama and theatre, which no-one present really needed.

The proceedings were topped and tailed by a communal singing of 'Barka' (The river-boat), apparently the great man's favourite song, a usually cheerful and optimistic exploration of the Jesus-as-fisher-of-souls metaphor. This time, however, there was something almost defiant, challenging about the way it was sung; defying the black shadow of death, and perhaps another, greyer yet deeper shadow of unbelief, trying to show that we, at least, were going to keep the faith he had wanted to bring us all, in an unbelieving and very unfaithful world.

This defiance had expressed itself in other ways too, before the funeral. I, like many other people here, had received plenty of E-mails, instant-messages and text messages calling for actions of solidarity such as putting candles in our windows; marching from one place to another in white, attending the almost daily mass-masses, and so on. This was reasonable; electronics, far from isolating us in hermetic worlds of mindless entertainment, seem in fact to act as a kind of extended nervous system, putting us in near-telepathic contact with our friends and acquaintances at a speed unimaginable twenty years ago.

But what I found surprising and somewhat distasteful was the tendentious and sometimes even belligerent tone adopted by quite a few of these messages, such as 'Send this message on to as many _good_ people as possible' (Przekaz te wiadomosc dalej, do jak najwiekszej liczby dobrych osób), '_If you love him_, send this message on, add your name, and pray!' (Jesli Go kochasz przeslij dalej te wiadomosc, wpisz swoje imie i módl sie!) or even 'If you don't send it and you don't give a fuck, well, take a good hard look at yourself, guy...' (jak nie wyslesz i masz to w dupie to sie czlowieku nad soba zastanów...). Where did this aggression and insecurity come from? Why the need to manipulate people's emotions, as if they hadn't been stirred up enough?

In the way of these messages, they were spread around between many people. The media coverage, of course, was omnipresent. And at every public gathering, the emotions and the tears were there for all to see. But there are those who have been objecting to the tone of the proceedings.

I know people who dared to answer those mails with equally brusque replies; people who boycott the TV; people who stayed away from the mass-masses.

I know people who, while respecting the Pope's intellect and compassion (even though he felt unable to extend this compassion to homosexuals or believing women), felt uncomfortable with loud public declarations of undying love from people who were not regularly seen in churches.

And, quietly, individually, a few younger people have been admitting to me in privacy that they no longer believe in God, and haven't done for some while.

But all of those people have felt unable to express what they feel in public. My discussions in class on the whole 'post-Pope situation' revolved around considering his legacy (the acceptable parts of it); the idea of commentary, of analysis of the whole phenomenon, seemed out of bounds. And it strikes me that there is a quiet underground of feeling - if not of resentment then certainly of discontent - with the whole atmosphere. One wonders what will happen with this underground resistance; how it will be reconciled with the surface expressions of emotion. Those who stay underground have to learn patience; usually, their patience is rewarded in the fullness of time.

My view is this. The assertive, blackmailing sentimentality has its roots in the genuine sense of loss in the population, the loss of a man who represented this nation to the world in a way no other has done in history, who gave them a national and international identity. Now he has gone, Poland must take its place in the scramble and press of the other European nations; the Pole who led the world's and Poland's Catholics is gone; and nothing will ever be the same again. There will not be another Polish Pope; I personally doubt whether there will be many more European Popes, as the focus of Catholicism shifts from educated, sceptical, prosperous Europe to the teeming, irrational, needy Third World, be it South America, Africa or the Philippines. (Christianity is nomadic; it moved from the Middle East to Europe in the face of Islam, and now goes to the Third World in the face of materialism. Where can it go after that?)

The aggression, the obsequiousness, the negative sides of the emotion of his departure reflect a deep, almost unconscious unease in the Polish nation. They will not be so prominent in the world again; the love they bore him as a man and as a symbol was not paralleled by an adherence to his teachings (the thing he himself would have considered most important); and his teachings, and the Church founded thereon, will begin to die in the land that gave birth to him. A period of history has ended this week, and everyone knows it. Many react with sadness, love and grace; others react with defensiveness, anger and crudity. All know that something has gone which will never return. This unites them; their reactions divide them. As in all humans, they are one and many at the same time.

'How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein?' Jeremiah 12, v. 4