Once my Mother

Once my Mother is a kind of two-pronged documentary in which the Australian director, Sophia Turkiewicz, explores the horror journey that her mother, an orphan from a young age, had to endure, as well as her own journey of learning to forgive her mother after she’d ‘abandoned’ her in an orphanage in Australia. 

Helen, the mother, born in Poland in the years before the Second World War, lost both her parents early on. She went to live for a few years with an uncle in Poland, but he suddenly threw her out on the streets when she was 11 or 12. In the first of several intrepid undertakings she walked to the nearest big town, and survived on the streets for four years (!), without ever being forced into prostitution.

The Russians took over half of Poland after Hitler divided the country up between Germany and Russia - without asking the Poles. Thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia by train where they were forced to work in the freezing weather. Their general, Anders, refused to train them for the Russian army. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Anders (he must have been a brave man to stand up to Stalin): Continued friction with the Soviets over political issues as well as shortages of weapons, food and clothing, led to the eventual exodus of Anders' men – known as the Anders Army – together with a sizeable contingent of Polish civilians via the Persian Corridor into Iran, Iraq and Palestine. Here, Anders formed and led the 2nd Polish Corps, fighting alongside the Western Allies, while agitating for the release of Polish nationals still in the Soviet Union. 

In the movie Sophia makes the point that the Polish men wouldn't leave without the women and children, so they all went. 

Helen was part of this huge exodus; it required them to walk 2000 miles to the south of Russia, and later they went on another extraordinary walk 2000 miles east. Finally after these two awful treks she finished up in Africa, in a British refugee camp. She met an Italian prisoner-of-war and he fathered a child with her. However, he was sent back to Italy after the war. Being a solo mother she was castigated yet eventually, when the refugees were sent on, she got to Australia (Perth, initially) and finally to Adelaide. She was forced to leave her daughter in the orphanage for two years so she could get work; again, as a solo mother she was sidelined. 

She managed to find a Polish man amongst the circle of refugees, a man who was willing to marry her, even though he knew she didn’t particularly love him or find him attractive. Thankfully he was a good guy, and Sophia was brought home into the family. The marriage prospered and other children came along. 

It took Sophia a long time to get over her sense of abandonment, but finally in her fifties (!) she managed to see that her mother’s abandonment had been far more severe than her own. How the mother got through all she did when hundreds were dying around her is hard to grasp. 

There's a great deal of archival material, some of it seeminglessly woven in with acted shots, clips from an earlier film Sophia made about her mother, and more recent material filmed when Helen was living in an old people's home. It's an extraordinarily moving film. 

Moustache-less

As someone who's worn a full beard (inclusive, of course, of a moustache) for many years, wearing a moustache for Movember is never much of an issue for me.

However, not having one makes quite a vital difference to a number of famous faces, as the Mustaches Make a Difference campaign shows. This campaign not only promotes Movember, but also de-promotes a number of famous faces, from Gandhi and Einstein to Dali and Queen. The 'renamed' character sans moustache shows that this most remarkable facial feature makes a huge difference to the look of a man - it always intrigued me how many NZ policeman wore the 'police moustache' as I called it. It had a certain regulatory look about it, was very formal, and added an element of threat to the police face (note how ordinary Stalin looks without his moustache - it's the same process).

Here's just one example of these clever pictures:

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)