‘I Have Found Him Whom My Soul Loves’

A child asks what is it that makes a man fall in love with a woman? The adult replies that the answer is in the look. Man looks at woman, they look at each other, the hearts start beating and the magic begins. Some would argue that love goes beyond that. ‘Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction,’ says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I used not to write love poems. I thought it was too soppy. Till the day I heard the French song, ‘Si tu n’existais pas’ – If you didn’t exist – and a bolt was let loose in me. I haven’t stopped being soppy since then.

February, month of love, month of lovers. It was in that month that a story broke on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). On Monday, 15 February, Ed Stourton while presenting the Panorama on BBC One, revealed ‘The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II’. The programme revealed to viewers how for 30 years, Karol Wojtyla (known to you and me as Pope John Paul II) was in an intense relationship with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (a married Polish American philosopher). The world got to know that ‘The friendship began in 1973 when Ms. Tymieniecka contacted the future Pope, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, then Archbishop of Krakow, about a book on philosophy that he had written … The pair decided to work on an expanded version of the cardinal’s book, The Acting Person. They met many times – sometimes with his secretary present, sometimes alone – and corresponded frequently.’

The Pontiff is said to have, throughout his life, enjoyed many warm friendships with a number of female friends, such as the one with Wanda Poltawska, a psychiatrist with whom he also corresponded for decades. But it is the body language in the photos he took with Ms. Tymieniecka and the words used in his letters to her which show that some friendships were much warmer than others. It is said that his letters to Ms. Tymieniecka are ‘at times more intensely emotional, sometimes wrestling with the meaning of their relationship.’

According to the BBC, ‘The photographs which have never been seen before by the public reveal Karol Wojyla at his most relaxed. He invited Ms. Tymieniecka to join him on country walks and skiing holidays … she even joined him on a group camping trip. The pictures also show her visiting him at the Vatican’. The hundreds of letters exchanged between the two over three decades and the pictures taken during their outings had been sold to the National Library of Poland by Ms. Tymieniecka. In one of the letters, world saw a different man who admitted to the woman that, ‘I accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations when she you are close and when you are far away.’ This isn’t a case of ‘kiss and tell’. Ms. Tymieniecka isn’t a spurned lover. Is she a love rat like James Hewitt? Why didn’t she burn these ‘exhibits’? Some people could even wonder why she didn’t hand them over to the Vatican. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka might not have surrendered her ‘treasure’ to the Vatican because she didn’t want them to be tucked away in the oubliette of the Church. For a change, the details revealed through The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II aren’t lewd unlike other stories that we had heard about some of the ‘bent’ clerics in the House of the Lord.

In Da Vinci Code of Dan Brown is a mention of another liaison – that of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. It was a huge scandal but it made the Da Vinci Code one of the most widely read books in the world. Dan Brown wasn’t the first to have mentioned the alleged marriage between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Barbara Thiering, an Australian theologian, historian and non-fiction writer, wrote about it in her book, ‘Jesus The Man’. Dr. Thiering studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic literature, and the apocryphal books. She spent some years in Qumran studying the life of the Essenes (the clan into which Jesus was born) for her doctoral studies. She wrote other books e.g. The Book That Jesus Wrote. These books may be a good read for anyone interested in knowing Christianity as Jesus preached it and not Christianity as Paul – a latter-day convert who hijacked Christianity from James (the brother of Jesus) and feeble Peter – preached it and imposed it on Christendom. Thanks to Paul, Christians are now interested in Jesus’ death and not in the manner he lived. Would that be why they rubbed out his alleged marriage?

Other Gospels, to which Dan Brown alluded, show a Jesus very different from what the Synoptic Gospels portray him to be. Hopefully the Church will be kinder to Anna-Teresa than it had been to Mary Magdalene. For what dirt didn’t the Church throw in the way of Mary Magdalene! She’s been portrayed in bad light in the Gospels all because, as revealed in The Gospel of Philip, ‘Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth’. Could one assume that Mary Magdalene was the 13th Disciple as Leonardo da Vinci shows in his ‘The Last Supper’? In a world full of prejudices, not only was Mary Magdalene a woman, she was also black.

Pope John Paul II, former seminarist, ex Bishop of Kracow and according to Jonathan Black in ‘The Secret History of the World’, ex pupil of Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, a modern Rosicrucian master, was no ordinary Christian. He was a man before he became a Saint. He was prepared for his mission on earth and beyond. It was to the late Pontiff that the third and last of the three girls (as they were at the time of the apparition) to whom Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima, Spain revealed the apparition’s message.

I would have loved to ask Anna-Teresa some questions but, alas, she died in 2014, a year before Pope John Paul II was made a saint.