Photo Story of 2016 World Youth Day in Poland & A Short Poem for the Youth and the Pope.

 The Crowd was like a Cloud

Of river of the Youth flowing

Towards the Pope and around

Oh fruits of Earth's blessing!

- Ositadimma Amakeze



The Meaning/Commentary on the Logo of WYD

The four saints who loom over Krakow’s World Youth Day

The first two of our World Youth Day saints, St. Edith Stein and St. Pope John Paul II, were intellectuals. They were, if you like, “head saints,” The second pair, however, Sts. Maximilian Kolbe and Faustina Kowalska, are “heart saints" who burned with the love of God.

Krakow is a city of saints, and four great souls from the modern age stand tall as radiant examples of courageous faith in troubling times. All four have a special link and meaning with World Youth Day.

They are two men and two women. They are two philosophers and two simple souls. Two were killed at Auschwitz. Two lived life to its natural end. The four saints are St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) Pope St. John Paul II, St. Maximillian Kolbe and St Faustina Kowalska.

St. Teresa Benedicta and Pope St. John Paul II were both philosophers. As pope, John Paul II was the inspiration and founder of World Youth Day, and Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is one of the patrons of World Youth Day.

St Teresa Benedicta was born with the name Edith Stein. Her family was Jewish, but by her teenage years she had become an atheist. She studied philosophy at university , and after completing her doctoral thesis in 1916 she got a teaching job at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

Edith’s area of philosophy was “phenomenology.” This area of study attempts to understand the relationship of human perceptions, emotions and consciousness with reality. This interest brought Edith to a study of mysticism in religion and to the life and work of sixteenth century Carmelite St Teresa of Avila. She was drawn to the Catholic faith, baptized and eventually became a Carmelite nun in a German monastery.

By 1938 the Nazi threat to everyone of Jewish descent was growing, so Sister Teresa Benedicta and her sister Rosa, (who had also become a nun) were sent to a monastery in the Netherlands for their safety. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands and the Catholic bishops spoke out against them, they launched an attack on Jewish Catholic converts.

On August 2, 1942 Edith and Rosa were arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber about one week later.

While most people are aware of the gigantic stature of Pope St. John Paul II in the history of the twentieth century, not all are aware of his status as a philosopher. The future pope Karol Wojtyla was ordained as a priest in Krakow on November 1, 1946— four years after Sister Teresa Benedicta’s death in Auschwitz.

Two years later he was in Rome defending his doctoral thesis in the philosophy of the other famous Carmelite mystic, St. John of the Cross. On his return to Poland he taught philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

In 1957 he earned a Doctorate in Sacred Theology. Like St. Teresa Benedicta, it was in the area of phenomenology. The future Pope John Paul developed a theological approach that combined traditional Catholic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas with the ideas of personalism—a philosophical approach deriving from phenomenology.

The first two of our World Youth Day saints were intellectuals. They were, if you like, “head saints,” The second pair, however, are “heart saints.”

The hearts of St. Faustina and St. Maximillian Kolbe burn with the love of God. They connect with young people because both of them experienced the reality of God’s love and the call to serve him unconditionally when they were both very young.

Raymund Kolbe was born on 8 January 1894 in Zduńska Wola, in Poland. His life was strongly influenced in 1906 by a childhood vision of the Virgin Mary.

He said, “That night I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.”

By 1907, aged just thirteen, Raymund and his brother had left home to join the Franciscans. At sixteen he became a Franciscan novice and was a fully professed friar by the age of twenty. Full of youthful, burning zeal for Christ and a powerful love for Mary Immaculate, Fr Maximillian Kolbe became a radiant witness of Christ’s love in the world.

He started a monastery at Niepokolanow which, in his lifetime, attracted nearly 800 young men. He published magazines that reached millions, went to Japan, and then India to do missionary work and returned to Poland, only to face the horror of the Nazi occupation of Germany. He and his Franciscan friars stood up courageously and spoke out against the Nazi threat.

In February of 1941 the Gestapo closed Fr Maximillian’s monastery, arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz.  In July, the prison guards decided to punish inmates for a recent escape. When one of the randomly chosen men pleaded for his life, Fr  Maximillian offered to take his place. He was thrown into the basement starvation cell and, after two weeks with no food or water, he was given a lethal injection.

A similar “saint of the heart” is St Faustina Kowalska. Born into a poor family in the countryside of Poland, young Helena Kowalska felt a call to the religious life at the age of seven while praying before the Blessed Sacrament. At the age of nineteen she went to a dance with her sister and afterwards had a vision of Jesus instructing her to join a convent immediately.

Not knowing anyone in the city, with only four years of education and scarcely able to read and write, Helena set off for the city of Warsaw and began knocking on convent doors. Because of her ignorance and working class background she was rejected.

Eventually she was accepted by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and took the name Faustina. She served in a humble capacity as a kitchen assistant and yard worker.

During that time she also had regular visions of Jesus who imparted the message of Divine Mercy which she recorded in a diary. She died at the convent in Krakow just 33 years of age, one year before the young Karol Wojtyla arrived in the same city to begin his university studies.

As World Youth Day begins in Krakow, these four great modern saints—two of the head and two of the heart—beckon the world’s young people. They call us to move forward into the future with a solid intellectual faith combined with the burning passion for Christ and his love.

If we see and hear their witness, then like them, those with minds enlightened by learning and hearts enflamed by the Divine Mercy may transform history.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker

 

 

Youth is a thing of the mind, let the smiles keep your soul strong and simple. 

A Little Polished Artist from Poland

She's just cute with sunglasses that glitters in the sun. Her sense of colours is like the rainbows and her strokes just speechlessly perfect beyond her age. A wonder to ponder and a sight to behold. Today we are honoured to introduce Bosnia #TeenArt

Title of Work: mermaid singing for the moon
Medium: crayon on paper
Age:
Name

Time To Say Goodbye! I Couldn't Believe I Wrote This In 2009

Time to Say Goodbye!

In dedication to All I have ever loved, to all that have said goodbye and to all I did say goodbye. In my hurts and in the ways I might have hurt the order and in view of our healing and acceptance of reality, I say Goodbye.

03/19/09

There is nothing in the intellect that does not first come through the senses. I conceive and concretize my beliefs from the things around me. A couple of days ago, I wrote in my diary, “Don’t force rings in your fingers. They have the character of slipping in easily; but you might need a jack to crack them out.” Previously, I slotted the silvery ring on my fourth finger. It was stubborn to go in, but I was bent on having it on. The next hour, I needed to pull it off. I tried till the finger got swollen…. Suffice it to say I don’t put the ring on again for the simple reason of not fitting in.

Then I came to realize that with time, something might not fit in again. When I see trees sheave their leaves in the dry season, I perceive a goodbye. A sorrowful goodbye! I see the agony of the trees, meaninglessness and futility. The clinging warmth, the intimacy between the leaves and the branches, the collegial swinging in the wind, the ‘good old time’ of flourishing, all now are gone in the wind.

And I see a goodbye in the metamorphosis of a ‘thing’, when nature forces the Caterpillar out of the haven of its cocoon, to an emergence as both a prey and a pest. I see a pitiable goodbye. Then, when it adjusts to this storm of the unfamiliar and begins to savour its devastation, nature sets in again. The exuberance wanes, the effects affected and defected, till it becomes weak and begins to blister.

So sad it is to say goodbye. Often I wonder what’s good after all about the bye but bad. For come to think of the endangering departure of the chick from the sanctuary of its egg, I see little or no good about the bye. Yet little than it acclimatizes itself with the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of existence than its mother pecks with beaks so unfamiliarly painful! A heart-breaking signal that it is now, ‘A time to say goodbye.’

Nevertheless, when I see those tears in your eyes, streaking down to your cheeks, I remember mine there were. You are left alone even when you have tried to bring them back. However, if you have tried hard and it didn’t work, try trying harder and if it works not still, try not to try hardest for you may break down. Save the strength in knowing that virtue lies in the middle. Despite the fact that the seal of love is ineffaceable even beyond reciprocal affection, learn that there is time to say goodbye!

Thusly, though the trees sheaved their leaves, they did not die. They wouldn’t love to let go their ‘beauty’ but at the touch of water, all things were made new: new and succulent leaves, boughs, fruits and scintillating scents. Nor would the beastly Caterpillar have loved to lose its exploits; but at the touch of ‘beauty’ with time, it gave way to a gorgeous butterfly. Now it flies on wings, in colours and goes for pretty petals and juicy flowers. Oh, a ‘heart-breaking signal that it is now a time to say goodbye’ to the mother bird. Goodbye hurts, but would the little bird stay in the comfort of its nest, it would not learn to fly neither would it learn to be man-bird were it to stay forever in the cradle of its birth.

Therefore, learn to say goodbye to those ‘things’ you cannot have, those things you cannot help, those things that don’t want you, especially those things that have said goodbye to you. It hurts and it is hard to accept, but the truth is that if something doesn’t fit in again, it’s a moment of saying goodbye. Do not wish to die because ‘something’ has said goodbye to you. If it is someone you love so much, wish him or her good and never cease to love. It is the only consolation you have. If s(he) belongs to you, your love will win them back at last.

Nevertheless, every goodbye is a moment of reflection, and if your actions have been in the proper order of humanity, expect a positive transformation. The good thing about the goodbye is that it propels you to the secret potentials of the ‘You’ in you!

Goodbye.

ARE YOU RIDING A DEAD HORSE?

ARE YOU RIDING A DEAD HORSE?

 

Every morning a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run

Fast than the lion or it will be killed.

 

Every morning the lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun

the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

 

It does not matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up you better start running.

 

               African proverb

Creepy Things are Everywhere. They are Invisibly Visible in their Invincible Annoying Ways.

Creepy things 

Pic Courtesy of http://www.wallpapervortex.com/

Are everywhere. 

They are invisibly visible in their invincible annoying behaviours. That one, is careless or cares less of these monsters doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Look at your back now and or listen attentively you can hear their whispers; or close your eyes calmly and you can see them scamper and dawdle. At the middle of the night, when everything else slumbers but them, when one can hear the tic-tac of wrist watches banging like an old belfry in such solitude of night; then is the hour of their keeping of the jungle ruthless laws.

I see them always; they always love the company of humans as shadows derive their casts from the beings they attend to; as bulus fly and lie around cattle in the lea. I guess this ethereal companionship gives them a meaning.

I don’t mean to scare you like to be afraid to go out and pee in the middle of the night; but they are everywhere. So beware you don’t nudge or trudge on any. Sometimes, they flap your curtains like winds on the flayed pages of a huge book abandoned on a pavement. Not just there; not even in my wildest imagination could I ever say who often flips the pages of books on the desk, like ghouls scavenging for flesh in fresh graves. What are they searching for in the texts?

“Who?”

No one answers, but they are there! And often someone feels someone calls him and he says, “Yes?” in anticipation for a dialogue or a follow up, without knowing one is eerily being followed by nothingness. I had once been haunted by a headless or rather a heedless one. It lived with me and went about my rooms; a resident spirit. I guess it would hang in awkward places like on the ceiling fan or on the pane of the windows like someone catching the early morning sun in the neighbourhood. Occasionally, something is pushed down at the balcony, and I thought it was the wind again. It wasn’t always the winds. It was the creepy thing everywhere. No, they can’t just be one. I think, a band wagon of restless soaring spirits sailing the atmospheric expanse of someone’s personality.

There are often clashes or lashes behind this heedless ‘guy’ like water splashing against an old canoe at the seashore. The wadding water doesn’t know what is in the canoe nor does the canoe know what the water conceals within. Only mother earth knows. That’s how elusive these slippery heads are, that I can’t really place them; say, “this one is Tom or Mot by name.”  One is particularly prominent, but flickered like a mirror-cast of a tall beach palm in the shimmering waters. Often like a wiggling worm in warm salty water, this looming image will waggle wobblingly! In all, I was in the midpoint of everything like a fly caught in the middle of an angry-hungry spider’s web. The fatal fate of this creature is unimaginably horrific.

However, In lieu of such casualty, the snare spirals into a concatenation of imaginations from the epicenter, sending signals like the lighthouse; attracting cargoes of all sorts like a lone light in the middle of a cave. The unrestrainable flight of flies around, could explain this mysterious visitation or ghostly presence of these creepy things. Where there is light, there is flight of possibilities as where a carcass is laid, there vultures are found.

However, my worry is that these aliens are never hurtful but are a noisome bunch. It’s not that they should anyway. It’s only worrisome too, to think of the squabble among them; some are inclined to either gory or glory. No one notices that that sometimes people might look at the host as kind of weird or cryptic. Being odd is really odd especially when it is others that think one isn’t sane any longer. It is only a bat that knows what it means to be a bat! Yes, no one experiences them; but it really feels like a whole army of white ants trooping in and out, over one who was unaware that a drop of honey stuck on his hairs the previous night. It’s like mind control.

This is a disturbia!

It is most disturbing when these have to wake one from a night’s blissful rest; especially when one is dreaming dreams, ‘In the scene of a most terrific adventure, the skies were diamond-blue in a dazzlingly hue; and the champion is ushered in in fiery chariots propelled by flying lions from the cloud.

THE CORONATION: The crowd was yelling your name in fine flames of fame. Your head was about to be crowned with wreath gold…’ and something fell off from the bookshelf tinkering away on the bare floor, cutting off the dreams at such a crucial moment. It was a bottle of CalligrafInk.

What pushed it down?

Silence stared stilled on the splashes the spilled ink made on the floor. The thick dwarf bottle is broken into pieces. W-H-O made them?

“Dark blood bonfire of a slain monster prostrated from the point of crash to its squash.”

The creepiest piece is that when the lid was removed from where it had fallen apart, it gave the MONSTER a one-eyed white hollow poise of wonderment.

“It is looming gloomily!”

I tried to wave it off over my shoulder. It’s a mere optical illusion.

“You’re delusional”

I heard it echo as it distended as if writhing in pains.

I had forgotten I was sleeping. I was dreaming. It is consciousness of a fleeing feeling of fright. Through the white-eye, a miasmal beam trouped upward in an encircling gloom. Like a magical invisible whirlwind in an invisible wheat field.

*I hope to finish this Creepy Things Stuff; I am only trying to say, "My characters disturb and haunt me until I write them,"

Sunset of Hope: A mediation of Speeches Between Poetry and Photography

I was walking home one evening
Then these saw me, and I saw them
too in a one shutter-string shot!

It was a pretty landscape in a beautiful
village North of the place of my itinery. 
They knew they wouldn't resist me, for 
the feeling was mutual. 

I didn't and I couldn't
resist them either.

They spoke so loudly that I applaud and
laud the colourful black and white coloured 
canvas of the sky.

Their speeches was of hope
Hope of a blissful night's rest
Of spoils of oil of our toils
Of a new dawn and dew
The Sunset of Hope is set!

African Ceramics at the Crossroads (?): An Interdisciplinary Conference in Honour of Michael OBrien

The Ceramics Researchers Association of Nigeria (CeRAN), in collaboration with the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Energy Centre, UNN and Project Development Institute (PRODA), Enugu, Nigeria announces its 13^th annual conference and exhibition

Theme: Modernising African Ceramics Since the 1900s: Agencies, Agents and Outcomes

Venue: Energy Centre, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

Date: 25-28 October, 2016

It has been severally observed that pottery in Africa ran into a variety of difficulties following the introduction of new methods of production and other social transformations associated with the colonial encounter. The Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria appear to have captured it better in one of its maxims: Onye ite abụghị onye ahịa, literarily meaning “the potter is not in business”.

Looking back to the terrain of modern African ceramics since the 1900s, this conference examines the following key questions: What have constituted the agencies of modernisation in African ceramics over the past millennium and what have been the implications? Who have been the key agents of the modernising process? What have been the innovations and challenges associated with African ceramics modernity? Ceramics researchers, potters, curators, writers and scholars of art history, art education, economics, geology, anthropology, archaeology, engineering, and related disciplines are invited to submit paper proposals addressing these or related questions, including issues surrounding the following sub-themes:

·         Contemporary traditional potters in Africa and the challenges of modernity

·         Landmarks in modern African pottery

·         Ceramics and the decolonisation of curriculum in African educational institutions: Previous issues and current directions.

·         The making of modern potters and potteries in Africa: Histories, processes and products.

·         Pottery painting in African metropolises: Creative innovation or emblems of production problems?

·         Domestication of modern ceramics tools and production technology in Africa: Challenges and breakthroughs

·         Ceramics industries in Africa: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

·         Ceramics raw materials utilization and development

·         Geology, Archaeology, Engineering and African ceramics since the 1900s

·         Ceramics and greenhouse technology

·         Ceramics education and educators in Africa since the 1900s

·         Potters, potteries and their practices in a developing economy

·         Commercialisation of African pottery in a globalised world

  

This conference is a tribute to the many agents of the struggle for a viable ceramics production on the continent, especially Michael OBrien, the British potter and influential teacher who succeeded Michael Cardew at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in 1965 and who has relentlessly worked for the well being of many important potters and potteries in Nigeria since the 1970s. Insightful papers on the life and work of OBrien and other such pioneers are also welcome.

Due Date for paper abstracts: 31^st August 2016

Length: 200 words or less

Additional information: Institutional or other affiliations, email and phone contacts

Submissions: Send as attached email document in MS-Word to Dr. Ozioma Onuzulike (Conference Liaison) at ozioma.onuzulike@unn.edu.ng and May Ngozi Okafor (LOC Secretary) at may.okafor@unn.edu.ng.

Exhibition:

The conference will feature an exhibition of works by individuals and organizations working in the ceramics field (especially potters, potteries, ceramic artists, ceramics researchers and industries) that reflect aspects of the conference theme. Interested participants should email two or more images of proposed works in JPEG along with a list of works and brief biodata in MS Word. Due date is 31^st August 2016. Selected works should arrive latest October 24, 2016 at 12 noon.

Schedule of Events:

Arrival: October 24; Opening: October 25; Departure: October 28. (A detailed schedule of events will be emailed to participants in due course).

Please see attached document for other details.

We look forward to welcoming you at Nsukka!

Ozioma Onuzulike, MFA, Ph.D.

Conference Liaison