Shaping Post-Christendom Spiritual Practice in the United Church of Canada One Prayer Shawl at a Time

Although shawls have been fashioned in one way or another for hundreds of years, this research is focused around the special shawl-making of the relatively new Christian prayer shawl ministry that has developed in North America over the last two decades and, specifically, in the United Church of Canada. This thesis is a qualitative research study of six such prayer shawl ministries within southern Ontario. My interviews with prayer shawl groups for this research has led me to conclude that this ministry is significant in three vital ways: (1) personally, this ministry often mediates a life transition of the crafter and the recipient, (2) theologically, prayer shawls are tacitly understood to be blessing, sacramental, and a spiritual practice, and (3) culturally, this ministry provides a flexible and non-threatening form of outreach in a post-Christian setting.

Paternoster, or Invective by paradigm

The poem Apostrofa (na czas stanu wojennego) by Father Kazimierz Wójtowicz was published in the collection of poems Odpisy Nadziei in Vienna in 1982. The artist is a Catholic monk (a Resurrectionist) and a poet with considerable achievements, acknowledged in the so-called priestly poetry (Krzysztof Dybciak, Bożena Chrząstowska), but going beyond the features of its style through the connection with linguistic poetry and the New Wave poetics. The author of the article attempts to recognize the phenomenon of the text, which belongs to the realm of martial law literature and in which the poet expresses a politically and morally motivated reprimand addressed to General Jaruzelski through the pattern of Pater noster — the most important Christian prayer. The foundations of the strategy implemented in Apostrofa are: the shift of meanings (“Our Stepfather” as an invective), the reference to the language of values, the use of several rhetorical figures (including figures of thought and aversio), as well as the reference to the Lord’s Prayer in the form of reactivating a separate literary genre (pacierz — Lord’s prayer) in its serious and exhorting variant (paternoster — ‘scolding’ prayer). With such an approach, the text of Our Father cannot be perceived as the subject of occasional intertextual stylization (parody, travesty or burlesque), the matrix of a pamphlet or a pasquil, but rather as the root paradigm (“the cultural model of behavior”; Victor Turner’s concept) defining a universal ethical horizon for Wójtowicz’s poem.