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Truth, Beauty & the American Way

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Ever since the World Trade Center was destroyed, the question of what to do with the site has been at the forefront of New Yorkers’ minds. The Twin Towers once stood proudly over the city; their remains—sixteen acres of ruins, a hole six stories deep looms just as large. For the past twelve months, that hole in the ground has raised again the questions to which the towers themselves, with their bold skyward thrust and their bustle of citizens and commerce, had given powerful (and, we thought, lastin)—symbolic answers. What is New York? What here do we lift up? How do we understand ourselves, and how do we communicate that understanding to the world?

In the weeks after September 11, few New Yorkers had to think twice about the answers to those questions. We are who we always were, they said: build the towers back, bigger than before. This was the city that, within minutes, chose to fly the red, white, and blue rather than the yellow ribbon, the city whose small downtown businesses, just days after the attack, put signs in their windows saying “We’re still here.” But that gritty confidence is no more.

In the Autumn 2001 issue of City Journal , Steven Malanga warned of the dangers facing New York as it planned its physical and economic comeback. He worried then that the city’s antidevelopment lobby and its traditional love affair with big-government solutions would cripple the rebuilding effort both at Ground Zero and in the city as a whole. (Ironically, such trouble was written into the World Trade Center itself: in addition to reflecting the soaring spirit of American commerce, the Twin Towers also represented what Malanga calls “the quint¨ssential New York-style centrally planned government-authority project—ill-suited for the marketplace and unsuccessful for years despite its heavy state subsidies.”)

But the problem that has emerged since last fall is a more complex one—a problem not just of government but of culture. In a scathing City Journal essay titled “Heroic Gotham Surrenders to Defeatism,” Malanga recently revisited his original concerns. Since those first weeks after the attack, he wrote, “another city has begun to emerge, displaying some of the worst tendencies of American culture, and of New York itself. This city seems uncertain about what made it great in the past, irresolute about its future, and awash in its own sense of victimization. Nowhere is that other city more evident than in the debate on how to rebuild the World Trade Center site.”

It had the makings of an old-fashioned Tocquevillean event: a town hall meeting of several thousand New Yorkers, many of whom had survived or lost loved ones in the attack, gathered to discuss what they thought should be done with the land that, in both its past and present forms, is so much at the heart of their city. The very idea was enough to make one proud. What an American thing it is, after all, to talk together about who we are, to discuss our visions of how to express our identity—how we want that day to be remembered—in what will be one of the most important public projects in the nation’s history.

Whatever expectations of civic uplift (or even of the rudiments of a plan) we might have had before the August town hall meeting, held at the Jacob Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan, they were quickly deflated as soon as the proceedings began.For one thing, the six designs the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation presented for consideration at the meeting could not have been more timid. Atop the footprints of the towers, one featured a grassy triangle, another a grassy rhombus; a modest cower poked up from one, from another a smattering of office buildings. Nobody liked any of them.

But what was proposed to take their place? Malanga describes the participants’ suggestions: “On the one hand, [they] told the planners not to build on the footprints of the old towers even though they encompass about half the site, but on the other haný, build something grand and magnificent. Participants also advised the planners to reduce the amount of commercial space on the site, but also not to destroy downtown Manhattan as a center of finance.” In other words, it should be everything to everyone, upsetting neither the economic vitality of the place nor the families of the victims. This was decision-by-interest-group at its worst, a mush of cautious thoughts shrouded in sorrowful indecision. Grief counselors were on hand to support those in attendance; “one more indication,” Malanga acidly writes, “of the event’s lachrymose and self-pitying keynote.” With vague promises to devote less space to commerce and more to a memorial, the committee threw out the plans, announced an international design competition for the memorial, hired five new firms to deal with land-use issues, and arranged six more public hearings.

Of course it is necessary that the public be consulted and that time be taken to evaluate their suggestions. And the process cannot but involve conflicting points of view. What’s strange about this story is how much New Yorkers’ views have changed. Why can’t a citizenry that was so charged with determination just after September 11 that improvised stunning rites and images to encourage the rescue workers and memorialize the missing—come up with a coherent image for that day? Why can it no longer enunciate the realities—the grief, the gratitude, the unity, the resolve—that it once knew in such an uncomplicated way?

Malanga’s theory is that the New York the world saw immediately after the attack is not the only New York there is. Another New York—the antidevelopment, antibusiness, antipatriotism, diversity-infatuated New York of community activists and cultural elites—“has never been very far from the surface.” And now that it is in the ascendancy (in other words, now that the heroes of that day are no longer at the center of our attention), it threatens to transform lower Manhattan into “a memorial landscape of death,” a government-managed “industry of bereavement tourism.” What it wants, Malanga writes, is “a rebuilding process that is in reality non-building.”

He’s right about that other New York. A year later”perhaps somewhat embarrassed about how it joined in cheering for the cops, or about what led it to hang those American flags in its windows for a month or two—it has recovered its accustomed sensibilities and attempted to quiet any outburst of the city’s original post-9/11 boldness about how to rebuild.

But at the heart of the hesitancy in these discussions lies something more than the timidity of Blue America, with its rejection of the “insensitive” response; something more even than the understandable (if, in the view of some, misguided) demand by many of the victims’ families that the ground on which their loved ones died be preserved untouched by commerce, no matter what it means for the rest of the site. We are a nation that solves problems, not a nation that lives with loss. In the moment of attack, our instincts got us through; we rallied and we triumphed; we said, “They haven’t won, and we’re still here.” In its long aftermath, we’ve grown sentimental, our boldness blunted as instinct turns to reflection.

In another context, Theodore Dalrymple has called sentimentality “an evasion of moral responsibility.” Perhaps he goes too far, but there is something to his observation. Our sentimentality, it seems, is born from uneasiness with the powerful truths that carried us through that day. We don’t know how to absorb them all; we are not accustomed to being wounded, much less to making public monuments to our pain and our survival. And in the absence of a shared vocabulary of truth and beauty—especially a vocabulary which does justice to the fact that truths both hideous and glorious exist at Ground Zero, and which helps us see that true beauty can take account of both—it is difficult to memorialize what happened on September 11 without sliding into the conventionalities of elite culture or resorting to our “personal response.” We have become, in our reflection, not eloquent but abashed.

What is the truth about the World Trade Center site? Is it Ground Zero or the Twin Towers? The dead or the living? We should avoid the temptation to dwell on what looks like the only truth remaining—the hole in the ground, the many lives lost—at the expense of the truth we understood as a city and as a nation in the days after the attack. We owe those who died not a monument to what became of them, but a testament to who we—the dead included—are. In doing so, our biggest mistake would be to forget who we were on September 12, 13, and 14.

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Standing at Attention

Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

It seems we haven’t heard the voices of soldiers for a very long time. Not these voices, anyway: matter-of-fact, a little reserved, sometimes quiet, sometimes triumphant, from a twenty-year-old private on his first combat mission, from a major who has served around the world. They’re the voices of men who have just come back from battle. This spring, they could be heard on every evening’s news, along with shots of soldiers blasting missiles at enemies in the mountains, soldiers cheering the President, soldiers walking through a drab brown world (it seems to be war’s only color) and talking about what happened in the fighting.

Some of us know these voices only from the movies—John Wayne in The Longest Day , Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan , speaking in their laconic way about taking fire, going over the ridge in the mud and the rain, remembering their wives back home. Or maybe we have heard them in the stories of relatives who served decades ago. My grandfather, who was in the Navy during World War II, used to say a few words now and then about his time on a ship in the Pacific. I have the little Bible he carried with him, with its inscription from his mother and father, its pasted—in photograph of my grandmother standing by the mailbox, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the page after the Lord’s Prayer. He never said much about those days, even when I pressed for more; what he did say had the same soft-spoken tone you can hear in the voices of the troops in Afghanistan.

Of course, the troops mostly give reporters the same line, casual and confident: “I’m just here to do my job.” That’s what they say because they have hard, dangerous things to do and don’t want to give away the game, and because they want to give the folks back home a good impression of the force that is defending them. If you’ve ever talked to soldiers, though, as I’ve lately had the privilege to, you know that the line is not only a line. They’re humble about what they do, but they’re proud of it, too. In the midst of boredom, fear, adrenaline, and exhaustion, “the job” is what holds it all together; it’s the mission, the training, the code, the men. There’s no need to talk it up.

In the 1980s and ’90s, when I grew up, actual soldiers—actual war—seemed very far away. In fact, I never thought too much about the military at all. Defense spending? Sure, that’s a good idea. Precision“guided weapons? Terrific. Respect for those who serve? Of course. But for many in my generation, that was the extent of our concern. World War II was an occasion for nostalgia. The Cold War was over. Vietnam, if not banished from memory, was conspicuously absent from public discussion. (Its veterans were all but invisible.) America was at peace. In a 2000 Gallup poll, only 4 percent of Americans mentioned international issues or foreign policy when asked what was the most important problem facing the country. With long-distance “surgical strike” capabilities, no immediate threats to our national interest, and, very importantly, no draft, we had the luxury of giving the military very little attention.

It was, in several respects, a false luxury. One reason it has been so long since we heard these voices is that it has been so long since the nation has had a clear, sustained mission overseas. To live in peacetime is a blessing, to be sure. But while we were going about our peacetime business in the Bush I and Clinton Adminis trations, American soldiers were everywhere. There were thirty-seven distinct deployments during that time”three times as many as there were from 1945 to 1989. After the quick-and-easy Gulf War, there were “interventions” in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Sudan, Kosovo, places in which it was often unclear just what our mission was. Troops were sent in, troops were pulled out, and”except when there were casualties”most Americans were hardly affected.

We didn’t pay attention because, especially in the Clinton years, the implication of those half-hearted missions was that nothing was happening that really merited our attention. In some cases, many suspected that the real purpose of the mission was not to take out dangerous entities but to distract our attention from unsavory goings—on in the Oval Office. Our indiffer ence to the military was part and parcel of a foreign policy that used the military less than wisely (and that, not incidentally, “right-sized” the armed forces down to bare—bones levels after Desert Storm). Why pay too much heed to something to which the government seemed to give so little thought?

Now these soldiers, the best trained and best equipped in the world, have been called to do their job in a grave and urgent mission, by a President who seems to have some backbone, and Americans cannot but take notice. We have seen a lot of heroes in the past eight months—rescuers, leaders, survivors—and we’ve been riding a pop culture wave of tributes to military service in movies like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers , which happened to come out just at the moment they were needed. Now, after suffering what we’ve suffered and rallying to war, we’re remembering what it is that soldiers do, who they are and what they mean.

Morale was reported to be very high in the tough battles in the Shah-i-Kot Valley back in March, even after eight U.S. soldiers were killed in action. Some of the troops, returning from Operation Ana conda, spoke to reporters in no uncertain terms about the thrill of defeating the enemy. Apparently, this made a few people uneasy. In a March 11 letter to the New York Times , a woman from Decatur, Georgia, wrote: “I am saddened to read that the troops returning from the most recent fighting in Afghanistan were ‘jubilant.’ . . . It is incendiary to gloat over our victories. Let us recognize the gravity of war with sobered reflection.”

It’s a lovely thought, but I don’t imagine too many Americans begrudged our troops their jubilation. It meant, first of all, that they were still alive (no small potatoes), and also that they knew they’d accomplished their mission—namely, to render hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters incapable of endangering Ameri cans at home or abroad ever again. To tsk-tsk them for their exhilaration and their pride in a job well done—a job, one might add, that involved putting their lives on the line in defense of ours—is the height of arrogance.

There is always the temptation to romanticize those who fight, to cover over war’s brutality (and the brutal things it can do to soldiers) with a reassuring veneer of Heroic Service. The sentiment of the woman from Decatur is another sort of flight from reality. Of course, we who do not fight need some distance from the on-the-ground facts of war; we find it difficult to face, which is why, at least for most of us, we’re not in uni form ourselves.

But it’s not a bad thing to lose one’s starry-eyed notions of what it means to be a soldier, or one’s obliviousness to what they do, or one’s presumption that they ought to behave like sensitive new-age men when they’re out on the battlefield. Watching young Americans risking their lives on the evening news reminds us that, whether we like it or not, we need these people who are trained to do battle—that the world in which we live is a stark and perilous one; that our ene mies are real and their conquest a good; and that some of our fellow citizens have volunteered to take them on. These, it seems to me, are the proper objects of our sobered reflection.

Some say that, in wartime, things become very simple: good guys and bad guys, heroes and cowards, victory and defeat. Of course, war is not simple at all: there are moral ambiguities, hairsbreadth choices, ever-changing strategies and situations, the unutterable realities of violence and death. But what’s drawing so many people to the voices of these soldiers—and to the recent films that have done such justice to military life—is, I think, a certain sort of purity they can hear there, a certain cast of mind they may not have appreciated before in those who fight, at least not by way of the evening news.

It is a paradox of military service that the training that prepares people to fight and kill is at its core a training in the virtues. The code they swear to uphold uses words like loyalty, duty, respect, service, honor, integrity, courage; one need not be a romantic to see that they know the meaning of those words. Those are the principles that can keep a man alive in the middle of enemy fire, principles in which he is trained every day. Soldiers really do know fear and shame and sacrifice; they really do learn to master their will in the face of great danger, to keep calm in the midst of uncertainty, to act in an instant, knowing that their brothers’ lives are on the line. It is a life in which not only physical and mental strength but virtue too is taken to its limits, in which you know exactly who you are.

The words of the code, said General Douglas MacArthur in a 1962 address to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, “make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.” Those who live this life don’t talk about it much. There’s nothing about it that Bobo proprieties can touch. There’s nothing sentimental, but there is something noble. We have not gained by forgetting it.

That this war must be fought is not cause for rejoicing. As MacArthur said, “a soldier above all other people prays for peace.” But Charles Kraut hammer is right to call this “a war of necessity,” in which defeat is not an option. The luxury of forgetting about the military, which we have enjoyed for twenty years, encouraged us to imagine that the world was different than it is, that courage and duty and honor didn’t have much purchase on us, that there wasn’t much left for which to risk our lives. Watching our troops in action now—hearing them jubilant when victorious and stern when in danger, seeing them go down into caves and back for their brothers—clears the mind of many fictions. Since this war began, we have had occasion to ask just what we are defending, who we are, why it is we fight. Those who do the fighting are themselves an answer to those questions.

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The Body’s Possibilities

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

One week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, I went to the ballet. I wasn’t looking forward to it. In the days since the attacks, friends and colleagues had provided critical comfort and support, but I was nowhere near ready to watch something whose only purpose was to be beautiful. In those days, it seemed as impossible as watching a sitcom or listening to Louis Armstrong. Such things seemed, in the face of Ground Zero, offensively blithe. Like someone recovering from a night of violent illness who can take just bread and water, I found myself able to stomach only the bland, sober food of network news.

But because I had been assigned weeks earlier to cover the performance for a dance magazine I write for on the side, I went to the ballet that night. It was a gala opening of the Dance Theatre of Harlem at historic City Center in midtown Manhattan. Just as before, New York’s dance royalty would be in attendance; premieres and speeches would go on as planned. But the city was still shaken. One could sense that few people were entirely comfortable in their glitzy dresses and tuxedos, and that the critics and the dance lovers were as nervous about being in a large public place as they were glad to see each other safe.

Then the curtain went up, and something strange happened. For a week, we had been so focused on the bodies at Ground Zero: dismembered ones, vaporized ones, all dead. At that point we thought there might still be survivors, though with every day the hope grew dimmer. Most of those people had just disappeared; all that was left of them were the faces on the flyers posted on lampposts and mailboxes all over the city. But here, on stage, there were moving bodies, strong and fragile and graceful bodies—bodies of live human beings. The sight was so potent that I had to look away. Tears came to my eyes when I looked back at the stage and saw the extraordinary things the dancers were doing there, in the noble patterns of the choreography, as the music sang through their steps. I regained enough composure to watch the ballets carefully and take notes for my review, but what strikes me now about that evening is not just the works themselves. It’s what the art of dancing said about the creatures that we are.

Dance is not an acquired taste. Most people either love it or they don’t, and if you’ve got the bug it can easily take over your life. Ballet lovers are perhaps the most fanatical of all, forever going on about “purity” and “the classical tradition” and “the language of gestural symbols” as their dance-immune friends politely smile and nod. In the pages of journals such as the estimable Ballet Review , critics write searching commentaries on everything from the way a young star at American Ballet Theater interprets George Balan chine’s 1929 Prodigal Son to the literary origins of the ghostly Wilis in Giselle . For most people, though, ballet is a hermetic, old-fashioned world to which the natural response is either hostility (it perpetuates nineteenth-century stereotypes about women) or indifference (what’s with all these people running around in tutus?).

The indifference is more to be taken seriously than the hostility. Those who find it revolting to watch a beautiful woman in pointe shoes—those satin instruments of torture, often referred to as “pink coffins”—dancing all night in a haunted forest to save the man who betrayed her (as happens in Giselle ) are often the same sort of people who object to Jane Austen because her women never discuss anything except their prospects for marriage. They miss the point. Those who find ballet boring, however, argue that there’s not even a point to miss. Music, painting, literature—these art forms speak to our minds and hearts in ways that both deepen and transcend what we see in the everyday world. Ballet seems to be only a notch above pantomime in what it can tell us about the human condition. It’s just people doing things with their bodies to music. What’s more, it’s ephemeral: after a dance is done, it’s gone. It does not endure like a poem or a sculpture; it stays in your mind barely half an hour after you leave the theater. The images pass, and all that remains are snippets of music and the memory of a bit of floating tulle.

But look closer. First: those bodies. What do they show? The human form has been an inspiration for artists since at least the cave drawings at Lascaux. In dance, it is not just the form one sees, but the life—the possibilities—of the body itself. Dance is the most living art form there is, taking as its instrument the muscle and bone that is our first point of encounter with the world. In ballet, that instrument is honed by years of training in a technique that goes back to the seventeenth century. The placement of the feet, the angles of the body, the curve of the arms above the head—all are as delicately calibrated and informed by tradition as the finest timepiece, demanding a constant awareness of both physics and grace. This is the body perfected.

Perfected, yet still imperfect. One of the attractions of a dance performance is the challenge it presents to the dancer. Will this individual—for each body, each personality is distinctive, even after such rigorous training—manage not only to get through all her steps but to present something of herself and even find some new insight in these movements through time and space? “Insight” in ballet is, admittedly, a mysterious quality; it has to do in part with the dancer’s response to the music, the way she picks up its nuances of mood and embodies its rhythmic dynamics. Because the vocabulary of classical ballet is so small—it is based on only five positions (even, some purists say, on the fifth alone)—it takes a sophisticated artist to say something compelling with it. Poor training or physical flaws can stop a dancer from ever reaching that level of accomplishment. Then again, an imperfect body (such as Margot Fonteyn’s) can bring forth unparalleled physical poetry.

There is also the element of risk. We are dealing, after all, with people who are subject more than almost any athlete to injury and nerves and fatigue. In a full-throttle story ballet such as Swan Lake , the ballerina is on stage for almost two full hours; her biggest challenge (the infamous thirty-two fouette turns) comes at the very end of the night. In every performance, the audience lives the role along with the dancer; we track her timing and her line as she negotiates the sometimes terrifying waters of the choreography. We wait to see if she will fail. More than that: we wait to see if she will triumph.

And every so often—maybe only a few times in a generation—we get the kind of thrilling experience that the critic Arlene Croce described watching Suzanne Farrell, at the height of her career with the New York City Ballet, in a 1978 performance of Chaconne , a work created for her by George Balanchine:

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Millennials Floating

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 -0500

This time last year, a book called Millennials Rising began to make headlines. The authors, Neil Howe and William Strauss, have of late astounded armchair sociologists with their predictions about the “turnings” of history, the approximately twenty-year cycles in which American society gets rich and complacent, comes to a crisis, unravels, and finally regains its moral bearings. In 1997’s The Fourth Turning , Howe and Strauss predicted that early in the new millennium a crisis would occur that would challenge and eventually reverse the spirit of materialism and cynicism that characterized the 1990s. What’s more, they argued, the new generation—the so-called Millennials, born in or after 1982—would be at the ready to take the reins in the new era of sober responsibility. As of September 11, the crisis has arrived; we are not likely to see its resolution for many years. What remains uncertain is whether this new generation (which in the next decade will come to make up 41 percent of the U.S. population) is really prepared to handle what comes next.

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The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century

Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 -0500

In the best that has been thought and said about the twentieth century, its Christian martyrs have hardly been mentioned. This should come as no surprise. From our vantage point at the beginning of a new millennium, it seems a little far-fetched that someone would be killed because he is Christian, at least in our society. (Since when have Christians been a serious threat to anyone?) In the usual histories about the usual suspects, the people of faith whom the twentieth-century revolutions killed are generally ignored. And in a culture that tells us religion is a private matter, the very public witness of martyrdom can be somewhat embarrassing. Add to this the often saccharine depiction of martyrs in Christian art and legend, and one has a situation in which martyrdom is seen as a pious, quaint idea from an earlier age. But today in countries all over the world Christians are still dying for their faith. At the end of the bloodiest era in human history, in which the very belief that was meant to be exterminated turned out to be far more durable than its enemies, martyrdom is more than ever a sign of contradiction.

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Letter from Poland

Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

If you looked closely during one of the full-to-bursting Sunday evening student Masses last summer at the Dominican church in Krakow, Poland, you would have seen four nicely dressed young men sitting together in one of the pews. When the Mass ended, they took out their copies of the Liturgy of the Hours and said Vespers together. They went out afterwards for their usual evening lager, cigarettes, and discussion, and, although they did not talk about God, one could be fairly certain that God was enjoying their conversation.

I met these young men first when I was in Poland for the annual American Enterprise Institute seminar on the social teachings of the Church, held at the Dominican priory in Krakow. They were always lurking around here and there, helping Father Maciej Zieba, the Provincial of the Polish Dominicans and an organizer of the seminar, with some research at the Tertio Millennio Institute across the street. They often ate in the refectory with us, and from the first it was clear that the bond between them was very strong. Soon I discovered that what united them was something much more than a research project. It was nothing less than the common pursuit of the life of faith.

For the moment, though, all I knew was that these guys seemed to be inseparable, did a lot of laughing, and had a habit of ducking into the priory’s chapter-room to pray at odd times of the day. Gradually I began to learn their whole story. (I should mention at the outset that it is somewhat unusual for a woman to have seen so much of this group, much less to be reporting on it. It is self-consciously an all-male organization, and although more women are slowly becoming involved at the fringes, most of its activities are for the guys only-a very good thing, in my opinion.)

There were about twenty of them in all; they were all from Poznan, in the west of Poland; some met in secondary school, others in their university’s law program. What brought them together in their present company, though, was that they all had Fr. Zieba as a confessor. He got to know them one-on-one in their confessions and outside discussions, and before long he realized that there were a number of very talented young men in his parish who did not know their own potential. He saw that they were more or less indifferent to the faith; they observed the rituals and received the sacraments, but had not yet found their way to a real love for the Christian life. He decided to bring them together.

There is a precedent for this sort of thing in modern Polish history. During World War II, in the parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka, a priest named Father Jan Mazarski held weekly meetings for young people on Sunday evenings. The leader of these meetings, in which theological questions were argued with the famous Polish intensity, was a tailor named Jan Tyranowski, who was the leading layman in the parish and a person of great mystical gifts. In his book Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man who Became Pope John Paul II , Rocco Buttiglione notes that Tyranowski’s religious wisdom came from the fact that he saw the doctrinal truths of the Church as “the object of normal experience.” To bring young people into this same faith, he led a “living rosary” in the parish, “groups of fifteen young men (the same number as the stations of the rosary) who committed themselves to a friendship directed toward Christian perfection.” One of the participants in this “living rosary” was the young Karol Wojtyla, much later to become Pope John Paul II. Fr. Zieba’s circle-in form and substance-is a direct descendant of this group.

The best way to describe them is the way they describe themselves: as Fr. Zieba’s “rabbinic group.” What distinguishes them from similar groups-lay institutes, third orders, and the like-is the nature of their community: it is a community of friendship, not of vows, and it is organized more organically than institutionally. Though they are not formally incorporated into it, they are closely associated with the Dominican Order and influenced by its charism. Their time together is preparing them not for the priesthood or religious life, but rather for a life of preaching the Word through their lives in the world. What will tie them together as they begin to pursue their various lay vocations, then, especially as some travel far from home to do so, is not their structural unity but their friendship. They intend to be a pattern and a rule for each other, whatever tasks they undertake.

In their effort to live the Dominican maxim, “to share with others the fruits of contemplation,” their first training is naturally in the life of the mind. They meet every week in a formal setting to discuss a common text in political theory, theology, literature, or philosophy. Usually one of them prepares a short essay on the text to be discussed and presents it to the others, who respond almost in the manner of a scholastic disputation. Recent debates have covered such diverse topics as William Kilpatrick’s work in spirituality and psychology and Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio . Not surprisingly, they have spent many hours discussing the Pope’s writings; most of them became seriously attracted to Catholicism first by learning about the social teachings of the Church. They began, as one of them has described it, “as Centesimus Annus Catholics, and it took a long time before each of us and all of us discovered and experienced that at the very bottom of this there is the humble Redemptor Hominis [“Redeemer of Man”]. Thus in a sense, the proper order, as in the proceeding of John Paul’s encyclicals, has been restored in our individual lives.”

Their involvement with each other, then, is clearly not just intellectual. As in Tyranowski’s “living rosary,” the task of this circle is spiritual growth, achieved through friendship. With great intellectual gifts sometimes comes a tendency to be indifferent to others, even a willingness to be cruel in demonstrating one’s talents. This predilection or vice almost always stems from the illusion of one’s self-sufficiency, a denial of one’s need for others; it is ultimately the Pelagian temptation as well. Convinced that this most needs to be overcome, these young men make it a point to practice what is known as fraternal correction, gently and charitably pointing out to each other (in private!) the faults each has noticed in the other. They understand in very realistic, practical ways how important it is to be honest with themselves and each other about their failures. Their ways of “confessing” to one another follow strict procedures-it’s important to them not to let emotions dominate, but to seek out the truth with a sober mind, and with perfect trust.

Fr. Zieba calls this “acrimonious love.” Love needs a special modus existendi in such a group if it is to avoid becoming just a place to hang out or, at the other extreme, a hotbed for male-male affections. A good example of the nature of their sort of love-sharp, tough, and candid as it is-is the award given each year to one young man from the rest of the group: the “Digger” award for “the most spectacular spiritual growth of the year.” The prize, a statue of a man digging in the ground and finding gold, is doubly symbolic: it represents the hard work and success of the recipient, but also the prize that awaits us all, that treasure for which, if we fully understood its value, we would give everything. Growth in holiness is always rooted in the search for the Truth; for these young men, it is friendship that makes both movements possible.

But at the very heart of the life of faith, there is humility. Seeing oneself and the world clearly, with the Father’s eyes, is the first step to unity with Christ, a step that must be taken again and again. Fr. Zieba reminds the group at every turn, with a profound and refreshing realism, of the mysterious presence of both weakness and dignity in the human person; they are learning, day by day, to see both qualities in themselves. What they seek, in the end, is an integrated life-honestly evaluated, and healed by Christ. The Eucharist, confession, and prayer are their most important guides. “It puts things in the proper order,” one of them once said to me; “for example: first the Vespers, then we can go out. We need to let God’s design arrange ours.” The fruit of their service to God, naturally, is service to one another. It is striking to see these ordinary young men helping each other in their daily tasks, taking each other to dinner, giving up their time to talk or to pick someone up on the other side of town, sweeping the floors of their meeting-place.

In addition to their intellectual and spiritual training, they are putting what they learn from one another and from the Lord into practice in evangelization. They translate and write articles for publication, interview scholars and churchmen and politicians, and help with the growth and development of the Dominicans in Poland. Several of them assist with winter and summer schools for high school students, leading discussions and serving as mentors for other young men. Now and then a new member is added to the group; it is always an occasion for celebration, and with very good reason. He will be one more young man who will learn what it means to be a Christian. No surprise, then, that on the most recent of their annual trips to Rome, in a meeting arranged by Fr. Zieba, the Holy Father himself told them to stick together.

It is a remarkable thing for an American to see a group of young people come together to discuss the Christian reality so avidly and to work so hard in common to put it into practice. For young Catholic laypersons in America, opportunities to talk seriously about the faith with their peers-and not only to talk about it, but to join with them in learning to live it-sometimes seem few and far between. Parish youth groups and Newman Centers often emphasize “social justice” (or even just “socializing”) so strongly that they spend only minimal time giving young people a chance to learn about the contemplative and sacramental riches of the Church, the interior life without which action is empty. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course; one thinks especially of all the renewal movements springing up in this country, movements whose members are extraordinary examples of enthusiasm and devotion, not to mention deep knowledge of the faith. In large part, though, youth organizations in America tend to present a vision of the Church as only a social institution, of Catholicism as more an extracurricular activity than an integrated way of life. The Church appears nonthreatening, useful, fun.

As a consequence, through no fault of their own, many young people do not understand the most fundamental truth of the Catholic life: that because of God’s presence in our midst, we are called to and enabled to achieve greater and greater holiness, and that such growth can really only take place in a community of faith, hope, and love, in which our lives are laid bare to one another and to God-a community that recognizes itself as part of the Body of Christ. More fundamentally, it seems many are afraid to acknowledge their need for God. What makes these young Poles such a good example is their growing understanding that there is no reason to be embarrassed by their neediness, their failures, their longing for fullness in God-as there is no reason to be afraid to use the gifts He has given. What they have learned, in fact, is that by sharing their very brokenness with each other, they are opening themselves to that fullness for which they long. In other words, they are becoming followers of Christ.

Another summer evening now. Fr. Zieba’s rabbinic group tumbles into a small chapel in a corner of the Dominican church in Poznan. The chapel is almost empty of decoration; there is only an altar, a crucifix, and an icon of the Virgin Mary on one white stone wall. The group knows what to do: they arrange chairs in front of the altar; one of them takes the lectionary, another the hymnbook; they sit in silence, listening for the Lord. Fr. Zieba enters, the Mass begins, and the Holy Spirit is powerfully present. At the elevation, the world inside that chapel is utterly still; at the kiss of peace, each person makes his way around the room until he has grasped the hand of everyone there. The peace of the Lord is with them.

Alicia Mosier is an Editorial Assistant at First Things .

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