Art work by Marcin Dunski.
MARCIN DUŃSKI – marcin duński (dunski-art.com)
Gorzkie Żale – a Polish phenomenon on a European and global scale.
Gorzkie żale (Bitter Lamentations) – a Passion service invented in Poland in 1707 – is still a vibrant form of prayer in all the country’s churches. It is in many ways a Polish phenomenon.
Exactly on the 13th of March, it will be 317 years since the Gorzkie Żale devotion was sung for the first time in a church. It is a phenomenon on a European and world scale because, although it is a valuable cultural relic of the Baroque era, it does not function as a relic from a dusty archive but as a constantly living practice used by hundreds of thousands of people to pray. They are also a phenomenon because they are unique to Poland.
Where did Gorzkie Żale come from?
Gorzkie Żale is a Passion service – a form of communal prayer in the church, not a mass, which meditates on the Passion of Jesus Christ, based on the Gospels and the tradition of the Church. It originated in Poland, specifically in Warsaw, in the Church of the Holy Cross in Krakowskie Przedmieście – the same church where the hearts of Fryderyk Chopin and Władysław Reymont rest, and where Stanisław Moniuszko once played the organ.
The design and text of Gorzkie Żale were specially commissioned by the local parish priest, who wanted to control the rivalry between the two confraternities in the area by trying to get one of them – the confraternity of St Roch – involved in the temple for the benefit of the so-called common people. At that time, the common people were usually bored by the masses and services because they did not know Latin. The idea was, therefore, to create a service in Polish that would be understandable, easy to learn and perform, but above all, would move the heart and take it away from the worries and miseries of everyday life to meditate for a while on the divine mysteries.
The order was fulfilled by Fr Wawrzyniec Stanisław Benik, as is stated in the first printed version of the text. He wrote something that was a passionate copy of the then Breviary of Lauds, whose text really touched the hearts. He gave it a title in a truly baroque style (the full text contains up to 64 words!): ‘A Sheaf of Myrrh from the Garden of Gethsemane or the Mournful Bitter Passion of the Son of God (…) a Commemoration’, which was later shortened to the understandable ‘Bitter Lamentations’.
Pattern from the Baroque era
Gorzkie Żale, like Laud, began with a song called ‘Wake’ (today we would say: a call to prayer), always with the same content. It was the famous invocation ‘Bitter Lamentations come, penetrate our hearts…’. They had three parts, each containing three songs – the content of the reflections followed a similar pattern.
– Reading of the intention (the theme of the meditation – indicating the stage of the Passion)
– Hymn;
– Lamentation of the soul over the suffering Jesus;
– Conversation of the soul with the Mother of Sorrows;
– Invocation, ‘Who suffered wounds for us…’;
– Sermon on the Passion.
The service is scheduled to take place on each Sunday of Lent at the time of Vespers, i.e. in the afternoon or early evening.
Gorzkie Żale took hold almost immediately, not just in the local church but all over Warsaw and Poland. After all, they did not require knowledge of a foreign language; they educated the illiterate population about the Passion and, above all, they moved simple hearts with their emotional and somewhat exaggerated message. They were the free equivalent of the medieval Passion mysteries, fulfilling the same role but much less complicated to perform.
Undoubtedly, the fact that the monks in charge of the Holy Cross parish in Warsaw often went on so-called popular missions – teaching the new prayer wherever they could – also helped to spread the devotion. It also helped that the seminaries of the time were also run by monks so that successive generations of new priests entered pastoral work with a ready-made instrument of Lenten piety in their hands.
Peculiarity of the Polish soul
How is it that a baroque service written in the now highly archaic language of the time has survived as a living tradition? Polish history and the Polish soul have undoubtedly helped. Since time immemorial, Catholics in Poland have had a great weakness for meditating on the Passion of Christ, and Gorzkie Żale perfectly catalysed this weakness and responded to our spiritual needs. Plagued by wars, pestilence, poverty, a harsh climate, and partitions – in a word, all the turmoil of history – Poles found consolation and understanding for their plight in meditating on the sufferings of the Son of God. Especially women, who quickly made Gorzkie Żal their domain (and not only this service). In fact, in the structure of this prayer, the expressions of the Mother of God, contemplating the sufferings of her only Son, play an important role. Tender, attentive, serene and yet full of pain, these words have allowed many Polish mothers to identify with the divine heroine.
Attending Gorzkie Żale could never be as compulsory as Sunday Mass, but the popularity of the service made it a family tradition. It became as much a part of household rituals as celebrating Christmas Eve or blessing food at Easter. Researchers and ethnographers studying the phenomenon of Gorzkie Żale quote contemporary participants in this service: all of them say that their parents made them attend when they were children, even though they hated it (what child wants to hear about torture and suffering in archaic language?), but later, as adults, they voluntarily attend because they like the words, the melody and the words continue to move them.
Different melody everywhere
The words of Gorzkie Żale sound almost the same today as they did in 1707. Almost, because expressions from that time about ‘cruel Jews’ who tortured the Lord Jesus have been replaced by contemporary general expressions about ‘people’, ‘commoners’, ‘enemies’ or ‘soldiers’.
As for the melody – it is difficult to say for certain what the original sounded like, as no melodic notation was included in the first printings. However, researchers believe that the version closest to the original is the one recorded in the songbook published by Father Siedlecki in 1958.
The melody, or rather its richness and variety, is another phenomenon in this devotion. There are probably no two churches in Poland where it is sung identically: all parishes, especially those with a long history, have their own favourite and established melodic version, more or less deviating from the model in Father Siedlecki’s songbook. The melodies, rhythm and tempo of the singing of Gorzkie Żale vary, and in a large number of parishes, they preserve the same version that was sung in a given place even 100 or 200 years ago.
Despite attempts to translate the devotion into other languages, especially those of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Gorzkie Żale has not caught on with other nationalities. If it is sung outside Poland, it is only in Polish communities for whom singing these baroque meditations on the Passion of Christ is a childhood memory, a response to spiritual needs and a ‘little Poland’ close to them, regardless of latitude.
Author: Anna Druś
Source:dlapolonii.pl
