The Quiet World of Peasant Truths
I have lived side by side with peasant women in the Baltic world as they go through the gestures and motions of what in my world we call personal religious rites. I call them peasant women because I am told by locals that they are farm women, women from very difficult lives, because rural life under the soviets and their programs of forcing farm people into farm collectives was very difficult. And I use all these verbal gymnastics because I have a very limited sense at best of how they see their church practices. They have come to me for blessings. Ritual actions that I understand in my California context and actions they understand in their Lithuanian context - colored of course by fifty years of horrendous, Soviet religious persecution.
So I am content to describe what I see, what they do, what I do. And perhaps most important how deeply they and their actions and responses move me. In a sense what I am proposing could be seen as subversive by the proprietors of religious worlds since having and exercising jurisdiction over religious rites is at the heart of what they do. What the pious women do is already categorized and labeled before they do it. Ask what they are doing and the proprietors can give you an institutional answer.
To explain further. Many years ago in Berkeley a cousin recently returned from Peace Corps years in Africa came over from San Francisco to borrow a big pot. Parishes have pots for big crowds and they were having a big party. When he came into the church there was a man, an African, going through a set of rituals and motions in front of the altar. I was startled. My cousin told me in a matter of fact way "Oh he's just doing his ju-ju." And then in response to my puzzled look added "That's what you do to get through the day." So I assume that in Africa ju-ju is non-proprietary. Your ju-ju is your business. But religious piety in our world is very proprietary. And our proprietors would probably be quite indignant at the thought of their piety being equated with African ju-ju - at least until someone came up with a well-researched religiously approved study on the psychic roots of African religious practices. I am sure that there is more than one course on it being taught on it right now at the GTU in Berkeley - where I used to teach. And properly explained in Dr. Johnson's 'inflated rotundity and tumified latinity of diction.'
Perhaps it's the unforgettable onset of the November cold and how it rolled in from Belarus a few dozen miles to the east and into our unheated house. Taking refuge in my previously unused, heavy, woolen habit and whatever sweaters I brought from California I found myself in the same world with the peasant women shuffling up the aisle in their heavy winter boots. The KGB files across the street where I spent most of my time was heated.
So on this page here I return to that still very present world. After the 11 AM Masses on the weekday morning during these last days of October numbers of mostly older women - and some not so old - started coming into the sacristy carrying soiled, brown, lumpy-looking bags. They are full of small candles - three or four inches high, seemingly made at home in the kitchen. People who live out of the city grow bees. And they come into Vilnius - our house is next to the bus station - because during the Soviet years no new churches were built and the village churches - out of sight of the out of the foreign press in the city - were closed and turned into party meting halls. It is a Catholic tradition in this part of Eastern Europe, I learned, for people to put candles on the graves of their dead on the close of November 1 - All Saints - and light them at dusk to burn all night long for the start of All Souls on November 2. And them again, at night fall on the 2nd, to relight them for the entire night. At least I know there is a honey-colored glow over the cemetery, at least the Bernardinu Cemetery in Uzupis, for those two nights.
I mention the graves of their dead. Except their dead have no graves - most of them. Their dead were rounded up mostly by surprise, right in the middle of their lives, and mostly at night, loaded into trucks, and driven to the railroad yards. This end of the deportation process is well described because people watched their relatives and neighbors taken away. Once at the railroad yard there were fewer witnesses. One woman we interviewed, mentioned below, who was arrested with her family when she was about 11, said that there were some frantic and distraught relatives there, searching and shouting for their loved ones. The victims of those sudden mass arrests are the perhaps the most permanent mark of Soviet rule. The most famous mass deportation was over the night of May 13, 1941. Thousands and thousands were rounded up on cue after a year's very organized planning, and taken to the railroad yard. We have this described in detail in Red Terror by the youngest member of one of the families. But from that day on they kept taking them away, even if just to the KGB prison across the street for a few months. And once arrested many were just gone. By the end every family had lost someone. And so many never came back. No details. No graves. Nothing. Just gone.
But at least those little candles - hand made, blessed at Mass, carried to the cemetery, lighted at whatever family site is there - they serve apparently as a contact with their dead. The details that involve me I know about. The rest is assumption. What I know is that I found, and even now find, my minimal role with the women and in these rites very moving. I do not know what it means to them. It seemed very moving to them, utterly silent, truly solemn. Perhaps it was something they could do for their dead. Perhaps even more important it was what they could do for themselves, placing a moment of peace and remembrance on a still present wound. In the course of fulfilling whatever it was they saw as my role in their church I moved from being an outsider to their lives to a participant., We don't know what that is like in our country because none of our dead have died in vain. Our political and religious leaders tell us that, insistently and publicly, several times a year. To question them and what they say is a form of religious treason. So we go inside to mourn deeply.
There is a silent music that runs through the Masses these days. It tells of losses. Losses whose very existence affront every sense of how things are supposed to be. That remembering comes with a silent music that may be the only gentleness I can look to for help. It is ancient music played to the slow beat of remembered sorrow. Sounds that are gentle but insistent enough to give kindness and compassion a place - a place we don't seem to need in my country.
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