What you see depends on where you stand. It’s true physically and culturally, and there is even some truth in it artistically. Take a novel like William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! in which the story of Thomas Sutpen takes on mythic proportions among the various narrators, each seeing what they want to see, each perspective determined by time and place of birth as well as proximity to Sutpen. We come away from the novel wondering which of the narrators we can really trust, if any of them.
In class today, we began such an examination. Various students took various positions, each of which was determined by their birth date, and the described what they saw. What came out of it was predictable but poignant: everyone was in the same room but everyone’s notes of what they saw were different. No two people made the same notes, or even close to it.
Back at home, K was getting ready for the international festival at our former parish, which still hosts the monthly Polish Mass and so still has a certain draw for us. The Polish community was to have their own booth, selling pierogi and bigos and sausage to raise money for the church.
K and some other Polish women spent last Saturday morning making and freezing pierogi, and today there was an unbelievably long line of people interested enough in Polish food to plop down a couple of $1 tickets for a bit of the old country. The bigos was not completely consumed by the end of the evening. “You know Americans and their wariness of sauerkraut,” K justified.
Still, all the pierogi disappeared, and the Poles got to show off their polka skills, and the Polish community even managed to get the pastor to take a quick shot of vodka as the evening drew to a close.
In some ways, then, the perspective of Poland didn’t really change for the visitors. Its cuisine is heavy on the cabbage and potatoes, and there’s usually alcohol involved — that would probably be the average take on Polish culture. And it’s not entirely wrong. But it is of course only one side of the culture. It would have been hard to show that in a three-hour festival along with all the other communities. People visiting a Polish booth expect pierogi, and so that’s what the community provides. A bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, but when the food is that tasty, who really cares.
From the Boy’s perspective, it was a bit of a flop. Sure, there were hay bales to jump on and lots to see, but the music was loud, and most of the food was not to his liking.
As the sun set, a group of Latin American parishioners performed a dance that they use every year to pay homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe. One look at the costumes and it’s clear where it all came from. Indeed, G, the de facto leader of the Polish community, came running to the Polish booth urging everyone to come watch. “The Aztecs are coming!”
How strange from a modern perspective. The pre-Columbian Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on an unbelievable scale. And yet here are people dancing in Aztec garb some centuries later and imbuing it with a decidedly Catholic interpretation. Some Christians would naturally argue that it’s still pagan and quite profane: once pagan, always pagan. These are the folks likely not to have Christmas trees or hide Easter eggs.
But what you see depends on where you stand, it from where they stand, this is Christian worship. Far be it from me to say it isn’t.