“We Polish people have an old saying,” she told me as she offered another slice of cheesecake: “Gość w dom, bóg w dom: visitor in the home, God in the home.”
Three different kinds of pierogies, beef, chicken, potatoes, salad, and two bottles of wine — the remnants of our dinner — still filled the table as our hostess, Marta, brought out dessert for her guests. Rose-jam-filled pączki and apple tarts followed a Polish cheesecake and a pot of coffee with frothed milk.
But even more than the food, the interest these people took in getting to know 11 strange American students struck me.
My study abroad group and I had come to Warsaw for a long weekend to visit the city, learn its history and culture, and stay with four host families.
More than 20 people packed into the back living room of Marta’s apartment for a group dinner on the last night. A few sat at the small kitchen table with the food, while others pulled in chairs from other rooms, piled onto the couch, or spilled out onto the balcony.
For the first half hour of the meal, I sat on the couch and talked to the father of one of our host families, who told me his name was Stanisław, “but you can just say Stanley.”
He may have understood only a quarter of what I said to him in English, but he smiled and asked me what I was studying, what were my favorite hobbies, and how I liked being in Poland. When he didn’t understand me, he just responded in Polish, nodded, and laughed.
He told me he liked to travel, so I asked him what his favorite country to visit was.
He paused for a moment and then leaned back.
“People are more interesting than places,” he said. “I didn’t have to go to America tonight because America came here to me.”
He gestured to our group and laughed.
We all ate together, laughed together, talked and told stories, and sang along in Polish as Stanisław played “Barka” and other traditional folk songs on the accordion.
My request for the cheesecake recipe — I scrawled it on a piece of copy paper in blue pen as Marta dictated from memory — gave way to an hour-long conversation about her experience growing up in communist Poland, raising her two children in Warsaw, and learning and teaching English as a second language. Even as she told stories about standing in line for rations as a girl, Marta kept hopping up to serve her guests more food.
It seems the great irony of Poland — a country that has been trampled and partitioned and beaten down for centuries but always lifts itself up again — is the people simply never stop giving.
At the time I was reading the philosophical and dramatic work of the slavic Pope John Paul II.
“God does indeed give people to us,” John Paul II writes in his essay “A Meditation on Givenness.” “Every such person, in some way, is a gift for us, and we can say of each: ‘God has given you to me.’ This awareness becomes a source of enrichment for each of us. We would be in grave danger were we to be unable to recognize the richness in each human person.”
This idea animates all of the philosophical writings of John Paul II that I read over the summer: Man finds his being, his identity, in his gift of self to others.
“Who is man?” John Paul II writes. “Genesis affirms at the very beginning that man is in the image and likeness of God. This means that a special fullness of being resides in man. As the Council teaches us, man is the only creature on earth whom God willed for itself (Gaudium et Spes, 24). At the same time, he is the only creature that can fully find himself only through a sincere, disinterested gift of self.”
The relationship of giving and receiving applies certainly to marriage, but it rings true in other areas of human relationship as well.
I had read these words in class, understood them, even written about them. But I felt what he meant in a concrete way only when I sat in that living room surrounded by people I had just met who welcomed me like family.
