And so it is done: John Paul II
Apr. 3rd, 2005 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterAn hour to midnight, and the church was more full than it is on any Sunday except Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Lots of halleluyahs and concentrating on how to follow his example, which I think is what he would have wanted.
I was six years old, and Mom took me to the flat of her friend from work. We crowded on the tiny balcony and someone held me up. I waved and cheered. Everyone did. I saw the old man in his little white car, slowly driving by just below, and he waved back and smiled at us all. It was kind of like meeting the real Santa, or a third grandfather who lives a long way away but loves you very much.
I read about his other pilgrimages in the papers and saw them on television. I remember the mass he said in his home town of Wadowice, and how he told the people about the cakes he and his friends ate after their high school graduation. I wasn't yet born when he visited Poland the first time as pope and said "May God change the face of the land - this land!", but I profited from that change of the face of the land - from our real freedom and the end of communism.
He was a good man, a kind man. He was the first Pope to enter a synagogue and a mosque. He was the first one to say "we're sorry" to the Jews, too. He proved to us that it can be done, that a human being can be this good and this real and do so much.
I've been a lapsed Catholic since a year after my First Communion, but I took part in Mass tonight, a spontaneous Mass that no-one knew about until fifteen minutes before it started. The church was full.
Goodbye, Karol Wojtyla. You will be sadly missed.
Give Christ my best.
I was six years old, and Mom took me to the flat of her friend from work. We crowded on the tiny balcony and someone held me up. I waved and cheered. Everyone did. I saw the old man in his little white car, slowly driving by just below, and he waved back and smiled at us all. It was kind of like meeting the real Santa, or a third grandfather who lives a long way away but loves you very much.
I read about his other pilgrimages in the papers and saw them on television. I remember the mass he said in his home town of Wadowice, and how he told the people about the cakes he and his friends ate after their high school graduation. I wasn't yet born when he visited Poland the first time as pope and said "May God change the face of the land - this land!", but I profited from that change of the face of the land - from our real freedom and the end of communism.
He was a good man, a kind man. He was the first Pope to enter a synagogue and a mosque. He was the first one to say "we're sorry" to the Jews, too. He proved to us that it can be done, that a human being can be this good and this real and do so much.
I've been a lapsed Catholic since a year after my First Communion, but I took part in Mass tonight, a spontaneous Mass that no-one knew about until fifteen minutes before it started. The church was full.
Goodbye, Karol Wojtyla. You will be sadly missed.
Give Christ my best.
