During the last days of my stay in Lipnica in 1999, there was a very significant religious occurrence in the village: priests who were taking the famed Black Madonna of Częstochowa brought the painting to the village for veneration. I watched from a distance as the painting arrived and local dignitaries began parading it down the main street of the village.
As someone who'd grown up in the decidedly-Protestant South in an emphatically anti-Catholic sect, I found all such displays of devotion strange. "It's just a painting," I would have argued even knowing its cultural and historical significance to Poles. "It's not magic or anything." But Catholic veneration of relics and such does include a certain sense of what I can only call magic. Relics heal; relics protect; relics bless. Catholics would explain that they're simply physical conduits of God's mercy, healing, and love, but that's really all magical objects are: physical objects that are supposedly conduits of supernatural power.
Even during my brief foray into Catholicism left me skeptical about relics and such. Magical thinking just seems so hokey in the twenty-first century.
But there is something undeniably magical in the nostalgia that washes over me when I watched a recently-published video from that day. I've watched it a couple of times, wondering if I'd see myself in it. I never did, but I saw countless former students and colleagues, some of whom have died in the intervening 27 years.