Poets and Poems: Andrew Calis and "Which Seeds Will Grow?"

A friend recommend I read the poetry of Andrew Calis, and I soon discovered I was gingerly wading into one of the most contentious realities imaginable – the Mideast. 

Andrew Calis is a poet whose work has been featured in Dappled Things, The Atlantic, and several other literary publications.  He’s published two poetry collections, Pilgrimages in 2020 and Which Seeds Will Grow? just last month. He has a Ph.D. degree in English Literature from the Catholic University of America. He’s a high school English teacher and lives with his family in Maryland. 

 

He’s also a member of a family that belongs to what is the most overlooked group in conflict in the Mideast – Palestinian Christians.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Some Thursday Readings

 

The artist bringing Van Gogh’s paintings to life – without the use of AI – Aimee Dawson at The Art Newspaper. 

 

Have You Lost the Ability to Think Deeply? – Lydia Kinne at The Gospel Coalition.

 

The Deep Roots of Irish Anti-Semitism – Simon Sebag Montefiore at The Free Press.

The Vicar of Baghdad

It seemed to be just another noise from the troubled Mideast, those reports of fighting in Iraq and Syria. If we were aware of them at all, they seem to be the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq and the civil war in Syria. And then an Anglican priest in Baghdad raised the alarm.

ISIS.

We started paying attention, and realized that was something far beyond the norm of what seems to pass for normal life in the Mideast. An army. Atrocities. Massacres. Every bit as bad as Boko Harum in Nigeria. And then Mosul, a city of one million people, fell to ISIS.

The Anglican priest was Andrew White. And he is a vicar – of St. George’s Church in Baghdad. But he’s also known as the Vicar of Baghdad. He’s seen his face on a wanted poster, has to travel with a bodyguard of some two dozen soldiers, has experienced explosions and bombings, and has seen friends and colleagues be kidnapped and never heard from again.

Few Christians have experienced that kind of call to service.

He’s written several books; I’ve now read two of them: The Vicar of Baghdad (2009) and Faith Under Fire (2011). I found the first in the gift shop of Southwark Cathedral in London, where White was ordained, and the second at St. Martins-in the-Fields.

He tells amazing stories. Many read like thriller suspense fiction. Except his are true.

Andrew White was just completing training as an EMT with St. Thomas Hospital (just south of the Thames across from Parliament and Big Ben) when he experienced what he could only describe as a clear call to the Anglican priesthood. He had been attending an Anglican church but had been raised Baptist. He’s become something that’s neither Baptist nor what we expect of Anglicans – a priest who’s seen miracles among the people of his church in Baghdad, experienced and seen angels of protection, and recognizes when believers speak in tongues.

In The Vicar of Baghdad, White describes how he came to be a priest, and the rather surprisingly short route he took from there to his first experience in Middle Eastern politics, working to secure agreement and cooperation among the various faiths represented in Israel and Palestine. Part of that short route including training and study in Israel, and it was there he came to understand the need to study and understand Islam. During this time he also realized that God had called him to mission in the Middle East. From the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, White moved to what was happening in Iraq. He was already involved in Iraq but was in England when 9-11 occurred. The war in Iraq followed in 2003.

White moved, and still moves, easily among household names – leaders in Israel and Hamas, Yassir Arafat (while he was still alive), politicians, church leaders and imams.

In Faith Under Fire, White repeats some of the framework information of The Vicar of Baghdad, but this is more about his faith and the faith of the people he cares for in Baghdad, as it plays out in the day-to-day reality of civil warfare and unrest. I’m glad I read the two books together, because the first is largely an account of what he does while the second is more about what he believes – and how his faith suffuses and motivates what he does.

And while he refers to it only rarely, his service comes with a cost. One is separation from his wife and two sons, who live in England. The other is that he has multiple sclerosis, diagnosed shortly before his first Mideast experience.

Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, would tell us that he’s just a man. And he is. But he’s been used by God in amazing ways.

Photograph of Andrew White courtesy of The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. 

Ingeborg Bachmann’s “War Diary”

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was an Austrian-born poet, essayist, novelist and radio dramatist. Not as well known as other members of her circle, Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, she is still considered an important member of the post-World War II literary generation that helped Europe find its way out the physical and psychological devastation of the war wrought by Nazi Germany.

Jack Hamesh (1920-1967) was a soldier in the British Army. He had been an older member of the Kindertransport – the evacuation of thousands of Jewish children to Great Britain after the Nazi violence of Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in Germany in 1938. After World War II, he settled in Palestine, eventually finding employment as a dock worker and later in harbor administration.

No one connected the two until the publication of Bachmann’s War Diary in 2010 (in German; 2011 in English). The summer of 1945 during which they met Bachmann would always refer to as “the loveliest summer of my life.”

At the end of the war, Bachmann and her family fled to a home in a rural village. Her father, a schoolmaster, was a soldier in the German army and had been captured by the Americans. Their place of refuge was occupied by the British Army. Jack Hamesh was part of the occupying forces.

They discovered love – a love of literature. Bachmann has hated the Nazis, and part of her “resistance” was to read forbidden books – Thomas Mann, Rainer Marie Rilke, Karl Marx and others.

Hamesh had lived in Vienna before he was sent to safety in Britain. His parents had died before the war; his uncle used influence to get him included in the Kindertransport. As a soldier in 1945, what had been left of his family had perished in the Holocaust. He had read many of the same books as Bachmann. And so a friendship began.

Bachmann as a teenager

War Diary, a small work (108 pages, including notes, afterword and translator’s statement) is divided into two parts. The first part in Bachmann’s of the period right after the war. The second is Hamesh’s letters, written after his unit was moved to Italy, his discharge and emigration to Palestine. (Her letters, often referred to in Hamesh’s, no longer exist). He wrote for almost two years, the last posted from Tel Aviv in July 1947, and their tone suggests he was at least a little in love with her. Bachmann was more interested in figuring out how to get into university.

And yet she kept his letters until her death, part of the record of that “loveliest summer.”

To read the diary and the letters today is to see two people sharing their love of literature and a sense of loneliness and displacement. The worlds both of them knew, on different sides of war, were destroyed. She at least had family left; Hamesh had nothing except himself. But they shared their mutual love of books and reading, even if it was only for a few short months.

War Diary also serves as a reminder that our parents and grandparents were young once, with hopes and dreams interrupted by war. It’s a small work, but a moving one.

Top photograph: Ingeborg Bachmann in the 1950s.