Janos Pilinsky was a Hungarian poet. Born in Budapest in 1921, he was conscripted into the army during World War 2, and spent the last year of the war in various prison camps in Germany and Austria. This experience was definitive. A Catholic, a committed Catholic, what he experienced during the war and in these camps was something he subsequently wrestled with for the rest of his life. He could have chosen the easy route, become an atheist and walk away from his former commitments. But he didn’t, he stayed, and worked the emptiness, year after year. I’m not convinced he believed in a God, His existence, in any simple fashion, but I think he did not believe in his absence. When he confronted the emptiness, it was as a religious poet who never flinched from the biological evidence. The Incarnation and Redemptive Suffering would have been default templates to use to help make sense of the horror, yet he avoids both. How is it then that his poems can appear so luminous? Over and over again he returns to the scene of the crime, examines the evidence, and then examines it, examines it, and examines it…until it begins to shine, like a chalice, like a monstrance. But as the ‘fable’ below demonstrates, not everything that shines let’s you in.

(Fable)