Dear Friends,
How I got to Poland is a story in itself, which. as always, fits into a larger story.
I have been practicing Zen for 40 years, and that is at the heart of this story. I sometimes refer to myself as a “recovering clergyman”, because for a short time in the late 1970’s, following my graduation from Harvard Divinity School, I served as a United Church of Christ campus minister at the University of Oregon in Eugene. But during my time in Divinity School, I had been leaning steadily away from any exclusive adherence to Christian doctrine or theology. I was powerfully drawn to contemplative monastic Christianity during that time, through numerous visits to Trappist and Benedict monasteries. It was also through my encounter with Roman Catholic monastic life that I had my first direct experience with Zen meditation practice.
Direct experience of “contemplative mind”, or what the Buddhists would call “awakened mind”, became the new center of gravity within my life of spiritual practice. Once I experienced my first intensive Zen meditation retreat, I was hooked. I have never really looked back.
My life as a Zen student ramped deeper when I met my Zen teacher Shodo Harada Roshi in 1994. By purest happenstance (or was it happenstance?), Harada chose Whidbey Island as the place he intended to build his US monastery. And that just happened to be my own back yard.
Which, indirectly, is why I now find myself in Poland, even though my primary impulse to come here was motivated by the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine.
Over the years since I met Harada in Seattle, I have made several visits to Sogenji, the Zen monastery in Okayama, Japan, where Harada is the Abbot. Sogenji is unique among Japanese Zen monasteries for having thrown its gates open, under Harada’s leadership, to the growing number of Western Zen students who want to take a deeper dive into the practice of traditional Rinzai Zen, under the tutelage of a genuine Zen Master. The “One Drop Zen” community is now world wide, including the Tahoma One Drop Zen Monastery near my home on Whidbey Island.
On my most recent visit to Sogenji, in 2014, I was surprised to find that the residential community at that time was dominated by young students from Eastern Europe and Russia. In asking these students how they had come to be there, I heard different versions of the same story. They had been born around the time that the Iron Curtain came down in the early 1990’s. Their countries were in ruins economically, and largely stripped of a coherent religious or spiritual identity following decades under Soviet domination. They no longer knew where they belonged. As they described it, that void had given rise in them to an intense need to find a new spiritual identity. A growing number of them were discovering Buddhism as an alternative path. Harada’s version of traditional, full-immersion Zen training (“Samurai Boot Camp” as they jokingly referred to it) was just the right medicine for a growing number of these religious refugees from Eastern Europe.
Szymon Olbrychowskiy, my host here in Szczecin, Poland, is part of this dedicated tribe of Harada’s Eastern European students.
So when I got the impulse to come to Poland, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, I contacted Szymon by email to see what he thought of this idea. He responded that “All disciples of Shodo Harada are my family members.”, and told me I could stay with his family as long as I wished. That pretty much settled things for me on the question of going. And for the better part of a month, he has been more than true to his word.
Not only has Syzmon welcomed me into his home with open arms, for as long as I might choose to stay, but so have his wife Paulina, his two young children, and his mother Anya, who have each received me with the same wide-open hospitality.
Szymon also set me up with individuals in his community who could - and have - included me in meaningful, front line opportunities to serve some of the currently 25,000 Ukrainian refugees in this small city alone. His example of wholehearted hospitality is one of the great gifts and lessons for me so far from my time in Poland.
But Syzmon himself would say that his embrace of Western European values (including his Buddhist practice perspective) is not typical of the “new” Poland either, which has held to the deeply Roman Catholic culture that carried it through the dark era of Soviet domination in the post-WWII era. Those Catholic roots are 1000 years old, but are characterized by a passionately independent spirit, both from Roman papal dominance in the Middle Ages, and from the more autocratic political tendencies that have characterized Russian encroachments on Poland in recent centuries.
For example, as I have gleaned from my many conversations with Szymon on this subject, and also from Adam Zamoyski’s book Poland: A History, it has been the Catholic Church more than any political dynasty or democratic institution, that has held Poland together through the continual re-drawing of national boundaries, and the dark periods of war and political despotism of the 20th Century. The Catholic Church in Poland has remained a stabilizing but conservative center pin in Polish culture, in its own way curbing Poland’s access to free thought or higher economic aspirations.
Pope John Paul II, who reigned as Pope from 1978 until his death in 2005, remains a heroic figure of mythic proportions in today’s Poland. The majority of rank and file Poles, particularly in rural and small town areas, still hold strongly to the conservative dictates of the Polish Catholic Church. This is a central dynamic and tension within Poland as it seeks to build more robust ties with the democracies of Western Europe and the US, while holding to its own independent cultural roots that lie somewhere between East and West. While it was Lech Wolesa’s Solidarity Movement of Polish workers that finally broke the Soviet stranglehold over Poland in 1990, and opened the way for a return to democratic governance, Poland has not reached anything like parity with Western Europe in terms of either economic wealth or secular democratic values.
As bridges between East and West, Poland shares with Ukraine a deep spirit of independece that distinguish both countries from the more autocratic tendencies of Russia and some of the Balkan states to the south. These distinctions have continued to express themselves in the decades since the break up of the Soviet Union, and are written in bold type with the fierce resistance of Ukraine since the Russian invasion began.
Digging down into the history of both Poland and Ukraine while actually on site here, and engaged directly in the Ukrainian refugee crisis, has been both fascinating and illuminating. It is opening worlds to me that were lost in the information blackouts of the Cold War for so much of my early life, and that have remained largely off the radar of awareness in the United States as well, until now. Of course I know I am only scratching the surface of what is to be learned here. Perhaps the biggest impact of this trip will be my new sense of heart connection with the people of both countries, a connection I trust will continue to inform my understanding of Eastern Europe’s dynamic history, long after I have returned home.
Sending lots of love,
Kurt