A Christmas 2005 Letter from Lee Hoinacki
Lee Hoinack was for several years a scholar-in-residence at St. Malachy rectory before spending his last days at his daughter Beth’s family farm in Oregon. He died in 2014. – Frank McGinty]
December 28, 2005
Dear Fran & Frank,
I have just finished reading Harold Pinter’s speech when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2005. A powerful, moving statement. He discusses truth, truth in literature and truth in the world around us. Some will disagree with his remarks in both realms. Although I’m uncertain about what he says in the former, I cannot but agree with what he says in the latter.
He cites the example of Nicaragua by recounting a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1960s to discuss funding for the Contras. A priest working in Nicaragua, Father John Metcalf, spoke of his experiences with the Contras. A Contra force attacked his parish, destroying everything, raping the nurses and teachers, slaughtering the doctors. Raymond Seitz, later the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, answered the priest: “In war, innocent people always suffer.” Pinter remarks that “There was a frozen silence.”
Pinter also says: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Toward the end of his speech, Pinter points out that: “Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force—yet.”
Recently President Bush came to Philadelphia to give a speech. I joined many others in the street outside the hotel where he spoke; I held up one pole of our banner which says “Catholic Peace Fellowship”. We were people “demonstrably sickened” by the administration’s actions.
Christmas – a time of good cheer, a belief in hope. I find myself strengthened in this belief and hope by a book I just reread, ”With God in Russia”, by Walter J, Ciszek, S.J., who spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and Siberian labor camps until he was freed through a prisoner exchange and returned to America in 1963. His book had a much more powerful effect on me than Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. Many years ago I read Ciszek’s book and this time I found I could not put it down. It was like a thrilling murder mystery.
Just before Ciszek was released, Victor Pavlovich of the KGB tried to tell Ciszek, “Now all is different, times have changed”. Ciszek speaks up: “I was in Lubyanca five years with the NKVD; they made all kinds of promises. And what did it all mean? Fifteen years in prison and the prison camps. [the Gulag]”.
After he was let out of prison but confined to a town in Siberia, Ciszek describes the celebration of Easter among Catholics in Russia. They realized something perhaps strange to us in America: Easter is a greater feast than Christmas in Christianity and their celebrations expressed this. I believe that’s true, but I don’t know how to manifest that belief in my daily living.
I’ve read and reread David Cayley’s book, “The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich”, and cannot praise it too highly.
Although I seem to be addicted to my reading, I also do other things, and feel greatly privileged to be here. I am in the final stages of preparing the manuscript of my latest book, “Dying Is Not Death”…..
Some of the above is old stuff to you – I was much impressed by the Pinter speech. And also by Ciszek’s second book, “He Leadeth Me” - not that I would pick for a title, but there’s excellent truth inside. I think I need to think about him more. He shows how to get out of an inhumane life—or, how to live what Illich talks about in the last chapter of Cayley – to accept all as gift – to live all – to do nothing for some end.
Well, as I said, I have to think about it – but both Illich and Ciszek are onto something important.
Gratuity
In “Rivers North of the Future” Illich says:
“Is there another word for the nonpurposeful action,
which is only performed because it’s beautiful, it’s good, it’s fitting,
and not because it’s meant to achieve, to construct, to change, to manage?
I do believe that Gratuity in its most beautiful flowering is praise and mutual enjoyment.”
Grace & peace,
Lee
