By Rajmund Dabrowski
Now in her early nineties, my mom continues to slow down, but there are moments when she is quite alert. I call her several times a week, bridging the distance between her home in Poland and mine in Colorado. During a recent visit, she shared a memory, a story I had heard once before, but this time she offered a punchline. Such moments in our conversations make me richer in discovering yet another piece in an ever bigger puzzle of my own life.
That day, she told me how she was reminded of the exciting days when at the age of six she would sit in a projection booth at her father’s Odeon cinema, a theatre he owned for a decade or so in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a town in central Poland.
My grandfather, Jan Jedrzejak, was an actor, and traveled for seven years entertaining audiences in the region with musicals, vaudeville, and comedy acts. He later owned an Odeon cinema franchise. My mother recalls watching silent movies from a projection booth. “I was small, so my legs did not touch the floor as I sat on a table, peeking through a small projection window, watching all these film stars,” she recalled. “I was mesmerized and excited to see them, though the movies were silent. What I wished was to hear their voices,” she recalled. She also wished to meet them one day, beyond the silver screen encounters. She fell in love with the film stars, she reminisced.
Jan ultimately became a foreman and a unionist, who for me, as I connected the dots, defined what solidarity of the working class meant. Around 1927 or 1928, he was selected to represent the region in parliamentary elections as a National Democratic Party candidate. Apparently it was not yet time for an actor to succeed in politics—he was not elected.
Then, all of a sudden, my mother herself connected the dots of her early experience. “In those films, silence was silver,” she quipped. And then, speaking of her father, she said, “life could not make him silent when he saw how people lived, how they were treated. He had to speak and speak loudly.”
“And they say that silence is golden,” she added.
As for my grandparents, they continued what was deep in their humanity. When Nazis occupied Poland, they were saving the lives of those who were destined for the gallows or a concentration camp, occurrences that made them stop and do something. Silence was only needed so a Jewish family hiding in their home would not be discovered. It was golden then.
The days of my life now are days when silence screams louder than the lyrics of songs bellowing about a happy life. The lyrics speak about the golden silence, but songs are full of noise. Our own songs are all too often also full of noise.
The meaningful songs, it seems, are those challenging my patina-covered silver life calling me out of indifference. Oh, how I love silence when hearing the cries of children pulled away from the asylum-seeking mothers by the border guards. Why should I bother, I reason in my mind. And my mind is telling my heart to shut up, too. Politicians are there to say or do something, I reason in my sleepy, silent brain. And the church pulpit is screaming, “Let us pray!”
A few reflective thoughts came to me loud and clear when reading how the Christian Good News seems to ignore the least of these, leaving them in limbo. At best. And silence can be seen in our absence in standing against those who abuse power, who mistreat one another, whose anger shouts abuses, while a priest and a Levite walk in silence next to someone’s human predicament. The Apostle Luke describes silence broken by a stranger on a journey.
Walter Brueggeman in his latest book, Interrupting Silence: God’s Command to Speak Out, talks about the multiplicity of silence in our world: “Silence is a complex matter. It can refer to awe before unutterable holiness, but it can also refer to coercion where some voices are silenced in the interest of control by the dominant voices.”
There is a silver side to silence. When the golden silence is challenged, it turns into a silver hue.
–Rajmund Dabrowski is RMC communication director and editor of Mountain Views. Email him at: [email protected].