I have been following a series of posts by John Guzlowski on language and loss. His reflections were spurred on by the untimely death of novelist David Foster Wallace.
You can read his posts: At Everything’s Jake: re: David Foster Wallace and Suicide and The Deaths of Writers and at Lighting and Ashes: Language and Loss and Language and Loss: Some More Thoughts.
While reading his posts the verse from Romans 8:26 kept jumping out at me:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.
This verse is comforting in those moments when words, poetry, art, and even tears are too little. God is connected to us in our sorrows and our joys. He understands and speaks in a language we cannot comprehend, but a language that gives peace.
From the Film Society of Lincoln Center: Truth or Dare: The Films of Andrzej Wajda October 17 —“ November 13, 2008
—The good Lord gave the director two eyes —” one to look into the camera, the other to be alert to everything that is going on around him.— —” Andrzej Wajda
We’re honored to be able to present what will be far and away the most complete retrospective of Wajda’s work ever mounted in the United States, and we hope to welcome the Academy-honored director to the Walter Reade Theater for the opening weekend of this historic overview.
Wajda was only 13 years old when World War II broke out. His father, a former officer in the Polish Army, was called up to lead a cavalry regiment. A few months later, he was rounded up along with thousands of other Polish soldiers and citizens and murdered by the Soviet Army in the Katyn forest—”an event denied by the Soviets and, even more cruelly, by the Polish Communist government for decades.
Growing up with the knowledge that his father had been murdered yet forbidden from speaking openly about the circumstances had a profound impact on Wajda, and after attending the newly-founded Lodz Film and Theater School, he developed a filmography that constitutes, quite simply, one of the great legacies of world cinema. No single visual style or strategy characterizes his films: His early work often employed intricately illuminated deep spaces, while his work in the ’70s featured a looser, more documentary feel. When Socialist Realism, the Stalinist aesthetic of exemplary working class heroes and didactic narratives, was the order of the day, Wajda’s films served as alternative or counter-histories to the officially sanctioned versions of events.
As we move away from the fog of the Cold War, his films seem less dependent on the specifics of the political or historical issues they address, becoming meditations on concepts such as the price of individualism, one’s duty towards others, and the meaning of freedom. Close artistic collaborators, especially actors Zbigniew Cybulski, Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn, Wojciech Pszoniak and Krystyna Janda, and screenwriters Jerzy Andrzejewski, Aleksander Scibor-Rylski and Agnieszka Holland often did their finest work under his direction. And several of his films, including the marvelous Ashes and Diamonds, which established him as a major international artist after only three features, are among cinema’s unquestionable masterpieces.
The Program Overview contains a listing of films in the series.
“Your kingdom come” has also reference to that whereto “Your will be done” refers —” in us, that is. For when does God not reign, in whose hand is the heart of all kings? But whatever we wish for ourselves we augur for Him, and to Him we attribute what from Him we expect. And so, if the manifestation of the Lord’s kingdom pertains unto the will of God and unto our anxious expectation, how do some pray for some protraction of the age, when the kingdom of God, which we pray may arrive, tends unto the consummation of the age? Our wish is, that our reign be hastened, not our servitude protracted. Even if it had not been prescribed in the Prayer that we should ask for the advent of the kingdom, we should, unbidden, have sent forth that cry, hastening toward the realization of our hope. The souls of the martyrs beneath the altar cry in jealousy unto the Lord, “How long, Lord, do You not avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” for, of course, their avenging is regulated by the end of the age. Nay, Lord, Your kingdom come with all speed, —” the prayer of Christians the confusion of the heathen, the exultation of angels, for the sake of which we suffer, nay, rather, for the sake of which we pray! — Chapter 5.