7/23/2006 Domingo XVI Jer. 23,1-6 Ef. 2,13-18 Mc. 6,30-34
En búsqueda de un proyecto pedagógico.
Se puso a “enseñarles largamente”. El evangelista Marcos presenta, en este sumario, a Jesús como un educador popular.
Jesús ciertamente recorrió las rutas de la sabiduría de su comunidad. Sabia de los métodos vivenciales que la gente sencilla seguía para educar y para aprender.
Su pedagogía no depende de programas, por eso se acoge a los tiempos y a los ritmos de las personas. El tiempo oportuno no lo pone el, sino la gente que sale a su encuentro.
La vida migrante determina toda la existencia de personas concretas y comunidades. En la tarea pastoral, desde otras realidades eclesiales hay quienes dicen “lo que se necesita en el ministerio migrante, es formar lideres de la misma comunidad”. Esto no deja de ser un desafío, pero solo podrá ser resultado de un camino pedagógico inspirado en el evangelio. Los agentes no podemos disponer los tiempos, ni las condiciones.
Jesús es sumamente creativo, pero su creatividad pasa por el respeto de la dinámica de la vida de las personas.
Los padres y madres migrantes que conozco anhelan una buena educación para sus hijos. Hacen su esfuerzo, pero saben realistamente que solo cuentan con poco tiempo para “educar” a sus hijos. Los mismos adultos habrían querido tener una “mejor educación…para no trabajar tanto”.
Me parece que el evangelista Marcos, dibuja los rasgos de una comunidad educadora, cuando describe a Jesús enseñando. Es un modelo pedagógico itinerante con una mirada de largo plazo, pero que sale al encuentro de la situación concreta de las personas.
Jesús se acerca a las personas, tomándolas independientemente de cualquier estructura legal; para el la persona es mucho mas que los prejuicios socio-culturales que lleva impuestos. Esta actitud suya anima a la persona a identificar alternativas, desde si misma.
A Jon Sobrino le gusta llamar “principio misericordia” a aquella actitud constante en la vida de Jesús: Una profunda sensibilidad para “escuchar” al otro, para no suponer lo que el otro siente y piensa. Una actitud para mirar la vida desde abajo, desde la situación de quien ha sido excluido y así salir a su encuentro.
Jesús “educa” sabiendo que hay ya un dinamismo muy rico en acción en cada persona y/o comunidad. El entra en la tarea pedagógica, haciéndose cómplice de la acción creadora del Espíritu.
Tenia razón Paulo Freire, el popular educador brasileño: “Cristo será para mi un ejemplo de pedagogo. Lo que me fascina del evangelio es la indivisibilidad entre su contenido y el método con que Cristo lo comunica…”
La comunidad migrante, como muchos sectores en la iglesia, esta a la espera de una propuesta educativa que responda a sus expectativas reales y que le disponga a descubrir el camino de su propia liberación.
07/30/2006
Domingo XVII
2 Rey 4,42-44
Ef. 4,1-6
Jn. 6,1-15
La iniciativa de un
muchacho.
En el relato evangélico de la multiplicación de los panes, el acontecimiento “eucarístico” se realiza gracias al gesto solidario de un jovencito. Con sencillez presenta sus panes de cebada y sus peces y Jesús hace experimentar a aquel grupo de gente lo extraordinario de la comunión/comunidad.
El trasfondo eucarístico del relato y el análisis crítico que la comunidad que escribe hace, en un segundo momento de las interpretaciones interesadas y equivocadas que la gente hace sobre la identidad de Jesús: "Deseamos un líder que resuelva todo y que no nos implique responsabilidad personal". Ambas líneas de interpretación, la eucarística y la lectura ideológica del liderazgo de Jesús, podemos hacerlas también al ver a los hijos de la población migrante.
Por diversas razones sociológicas y culturales, los niños y niñas migrantes, tienden a conservar su idioma y su cultura de origen. Con todas las limitaciones que la palabra “conservar” pueda tener, en el paso de las generaciones. Sin embargo, un elemento que me parece significativo en el contexto de la fe católica, es que estos niños/as migrantes (nacidos ya en USA)
Logran eventualmente recibir valores de fe y una herencia de religiosidad popular que tiene sus bases más allá de la iglesia institucional, pero es “católica”.
Tal vez quien vea más pragmáticamente las cosas, pueda asegurar
“estos niños/as hablan ingles, están creciendo en la cultura de este país, si su fe es católica tendrán que asimilarse al dinamismo eclesial normal en USA”.
Me gustaría leer el evangelio de hoy, en este contexto del que hablo: Jesús Toma el pan y los peces de un muchachito para realizar el signo de la multiplicación. De hecho la iglesia tiene un desafió postergado en la atención a los niños/as y jóvenes en general; pero en concreto la población infantil y juvenil latina, hablo de lo que veo entre los niños/as y jóvenes migrantes:
Tienen en sus vidas valiosos “signos” heredados de las tradiciones de fe latinoamericanas, son sus panes de cebada y sus peces.
Esta niñez es un potencial en la formación de una iglesia multicultural. Si las iglesias locales proceden solo de acuerdo a sus programas de educación religiosa, esos niños/as van a pensar que lo que sus madres y sus familias les enseñan, en el campo de la fe, no tiene ningún valor y la iglesia, como iglesia va a perder.
Nuestro reto esta en “valorar” lo que esta juventud es. Acoger lo que ofrece: Son jóvenes viviendo en su interior dos mundos culturales. Tienen ya, a su nivel una “síntesis” multicultural. Su pan de cebada y su pescado (su experiencia “religiosa”, “bi-cultural”) si se acoge y se promueve podría aportar un impulso importante a la forma de ser iglesia en este País.
Se requiere creatividad y osadía para que el milagro multicultural acontezca entre nosotros.
A Prophet Never Has Power
Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6
July 9, 2006
In his Mexican hometown, a humble farmworker never has to present himself at the police station, much less in a courtroom. Here in the US, however, he has to stand before the immigration judge. He doesn’t speak a word of English, just his hometown Spanish. He stands all alone to hear the verdict.
Given their background, it’s understandable that the majority of such farmworkers prefer to avoid the courts altogether by moving from State to State.
But the farmworker about whom I now speak stood his ground and showed up for his hearing. He stood with dignity, and without fear, He knew he had not committed a crime. Yes, he had crossed the border, but he had done so only because he could not support his family in his own country. Without more argument than his own hopes and dreams he challenged the North American judge in silence.
Every migrant man and woman is a living expression of a prophetic cry. His or her very life is prophecy. Prophecy which goes unheard, a cry without echo.…but not without effect. And yet…where is its force?
During recent months the migrant population has been pursued and persecuted by the officials of ICE (=Immigration and Customs Enforcement). No day goes by without a group of workers calling us migrant ministers to say they have been arrested. We get on the move without delay, but the only thing we accomplish is to stand with them before the migration authorities. And every evening we take stock of our powerlessness and frustration. We could not do anything to help…
But at the same time in everyone who passes through this process (of arrest, incarceration, sentencing, and deportation) there seems to be activated that sharp emotion expressed by Ezequiel, that most authentic of prophets: “And those, whether they heed or resist…will know that a prophet has been among them.”
The lives of migrants stand scandalously as the weakest element in this technically sophisticated society, with such pretensions to an invincible democratic identity. Migrant men and women again make clear what the disciples learned: “My power is made perfect in weakness.” There is no better description of the prophetic figure than what is offered in our Biblical texts for today, for the texts speak of people who are free, without fetters. People who know that something is not working as God wants it to. People almost always called from the village and whose life is the field. They defend no power-interest, nor do they try to grab fame. They know or suspect that authority represents the interests of those who already have power and that this entire system is based on injustice.
And yet it is not the case that either the immigration judge or the ICE officials have evil intentions. Their job is to uphold the law. The problem is that they do not question the law, and they do not so because they are part of the power that created them. That is why the migrant farmworker experiences freedom, because he is not tied into migratory law as its creator or beneficiary. What moves the farmworker is the life imperative. That is why his very presence becomes a prophetic cry that challenges the law.
Those who deny Jesus’ mission in his hometown represent in various ways the interests of the domination system. “This well-known fellow can’t put in doubt the synagogue’s legality”— and therefore Jesus is not truly known at all. His prophetic effectiveness is seen more in what he cannot do than in what he can.
Nor will the prophetic presence of the migrant community among us pass away unperceived…it too will cause an impact on North American society. But how it will do so, when it will do so… take the farmworker, the prophet I spoke of above: He does not know the answer to these questions. He senses, though, that it is God who will bring about the justice he believes in, that it is God who will sustain him in the strength of his patience and waiting…
The Desert as Teacher
February 8, 2006
The survivors, after their passage through the desert, carried in their memories a new vision which they nurtured throughout their lives: Becoming free is a slow process, with no turning back, where God reveals Godself as passionate lover. When Hosea sees, many years afterwards, how the monarchy created a crisis by dividing communities and families— and how that dividedness affected even the love between spouses… then the prophet rediscovers the spirituality of the desert precisely when he lives the crisis of marriage in his own flesh, through his wife’s infidelity, within the decadent atmosphere of the monarchy which drags down the entire Jewish people.
Only the persevering love, faithful and tenacious, of Hosea can reclaim his wife’s loving heart. Such fidelity transforms love into an authentic renovating force: a love which mirrors the faithful response of God, passionately concerned for his people!
How to live the love between spouses and within families, in fidelity? How to believe in a God who passionately seeks his people? How to love one’s own identity and culture when the force of the situations to which one lives in bondage compels one to submit everything to change and loss, even those things one holds close as one’s personal “belongings,” such as one’s family, such as the person one loves, such as the faith one has received, such as one’s cultural identity— when these become things transitory, without firm basis?
The whole of migrant experience is a true desert. (I am not speaking in metaphors.) There is suffering, there is loss of faith, there are infidelities and families torn apart— the nearness of death is evident.
This experience deprives those who live it of nearly everything. They have to nurture a human and spiritual capacity for provisionality. They put their feelings to the test, they shake the very roots of their own faith. It isn’t true that those who reach their goal have more faith. Or that those who, once having swallowed a bitter draught, emerge purified. There is a shattering of the personality. You can no longer continue as you were. You have in your hands something that does not fit in the way you have experienced it up till now. That’s why you are tempted to put patches on your life or to place the new possibilities in old contexts, living them according to distorted visions and previous errors. But here also is where there is opportune territory for the experience of faith…another stage is begun, a new opportunity, something new can happen. The discovery of a faithful love (of God, of the family, of the spouse, of the community, of cultural inheritance) can provide a steady basis for the whole person… from here can arise a new man and a new woman.
“…I will bring you to the desert and I will speak to your heart…I will espouse you in justice and right, we will live in a fulfilled love.” (Hosea)
The Passion and its Following
April 9. 2006
During Holy Week and the Pascal Triduum we share many stories, many signs indicating that the Christian tradition took form by uniting itself to the history of concrete believers.
We exemplify this dynamic in our very reading of the Passion story, where we are brought to become disciples in our own right, learning, keeping silence, and being sent to comfort the broken.
All four Gospel accounts of the Passion echo and give shape to the experience of human suffering. Jesus’ disciples discovered in the Servant Songs of Second Isaiah the clues that gave meaning to the passion and death of their Lord. The lives of those first Christians, with all their contradictions, trials, and sufferings— the consequence of their chosen path— likewise found meaning in the figure of the Servant.
In each day’s unfolding, human pain is like a teacher who shows her students how to listen to and heal their own wounds.
I have a friend who has not been able to move his body for three years, nor even scarcely to speak… one day he fell from a tree while he was picking apples. Without savings, without health insurance, without his being able to work and with a small child in the house, the whole family’s life changed.
After listening to the sober account Mark gives of the Passion in this Sunday’s Gospel, we feel compelled to find sense in the suffering of the just. There is an eloquent connection between human pain, inexplicable as it may be, and the Passion of Jesus.
Suffering makes itself known in the rhythm of our lives, often surprising us… there is no preparing ourselves. Rather it seems that suffering itself prepares us for something we never suspected.
Henri Nouwen attempts to reveal the meaning of suffering in the believer’s mission. In “The Wounded Healer,” Nouwen searches for a theological-mystical clue in the fact that the pain of others has a profound impact on the believer’s own suffering. The disciple’s life is distorted if she ignores this suffering. She must pass through a struggle plagued with insecurities in order humbly to accept her own wounds. But then she becomes able to console and heal her sisters and brothers.
There is coherency in the disciple thus schooled. Normally the believer is confused by suffering, by the contradiction of the Cross, considering it totally outside God’s project. This is why Mark, in his Passion account, tells of Judas’ betrayal, of Peter’s denial, of the flight of the disciples scandalized by the failure of Jesus on the cross. Mark is treating the believer with pedagogical strictness when he warns her that by choosing to follow the Lord—once she makes up her mind to that—, she must immediately take for granted that she will have setbacks and that she will abandon the one who invites her to follow.
Those disciples are a mirror in which we see ourselves. In the passion of Jesus’ followers, what counts isn’t courage, nor clear reasons, but our recognition of ourselves as wounded… and our returning to the path.
My friend remains without movement in a nursing home, and his young wife clings to love and hope. She does not comprehend, she does not take flight, neither does she resign herself. She appears to carry the full weight of her husband’s situation. She is like a member of that faithful group who stayed close to Jesus at the foot of the cross. The women. Later these women become the first bearers of the resurrection message.
Perhaps women’s perception of suffering and of the cross is truer. They confront suffering— they do not deny it, they rely on it, and in this way they enable themselves to transform it into motivation for living.
The Migrant Spirit
April 15, 2006
Life is richer and more complex than it seems… this is also the experience of those who believe and who seek to maintain a vital unity, like a tree branch with the tree’s trunk, with the reality which gives meaning to life.
Those of us who live the Christian life don’t have a monopoly on the Spirit. Many diverse paths crossing the horizon of the religions are authentic proposals to live what we Christians call “spirituality.”
We try to express with that word those vital elements that allow a human, Christian maturity to grow and flourish in us. These elements depend greatly on ourselves, but even more on that other reality that surpasses us.
The men and women in the Gospel were certain that the energy driving them bloomed from the mission and person of Jesus. Taking Jesus’ path as one’s own is what identifies a Christian. To walk in the Spirit is an experience that unfolds itself from the person’s interior— it is not something that comes from outside. Yes, it is clear that we come to faith through witnesses close to us. We all remember friends, dads, moms, grandpas, teachers, etc. who led us through their own example to him who is the way, the truth and the life. Nevertheless, it is not until people exercise their own option for faith that they can live from the deepest part of their vital sap. From this experience and this experience alone is derived the disciple’s life adventure.
Outside influences play a role at this point. For every historical situation demands a concrete and particular expression of that inner “spirituality,” an appropriate way of connecting to Jesus’ path.
Migrant spirituality has its own special features:
a) Migrant spirituality is subterranean: Personal identity and cultural values survive in the roots. Migrants find themselves forced to learn the values and practices of the dominant culture where they are seeking to live. Their children, growing up immersed in that dominant culture, become strangers to their parents. Over the years, this tension (involved in learning the new language, in responding appropriately to the demands of work and relationships) forces migrants to displace their cultural and personal identities. Their identities aren’t lost, they go underground. It just takes a certain gesture, or encounter, or song to awaken them, bring the buried identities to the surface. They should never be given up for lost. They go under the surface for survival’s sake.
b) Migrant spirituality is provisional: Migrants cultivate an attitude of openness to whatever comes. If you’re stopped by “la migra” (=”ICE,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement) because you don’t have “papers,” you know you can be deported and so you have to leave everything behind. You have to live the present moment as profoundly as you can. If you have work, you take the fullest possible advantage of it. Everything else becomes irrelevant, because you’re not certain you’ll be working tomorrow. Your own fragility—without bank account, health insurance, credit card—makes you free.
c) Migrant spirituality is transgressive: Every formal legality that has to do with the country that receives you—and every moral normativity too—becomes relative. Life is the only value. Migrants seem, measured against all legal and cultural benchmarks, to be naïve, foolhardy, ignorant, rootless, without values…but, in the fearlessness of their lives it is possible to recognize the radical honesty of their behavior and also to surmise that there is a current that drives them. The future would not be possible for them if they did not pass beyond the narrow bounds of the “legality/illegality”mindset imposed upon them..
“If our consciences have nothing to charge us with, then, brothers, we can be sure that God is with us.” (1John 3:21)
The Good Shepherd
May 7, 2006
Corporate systems and the policies of powerful countries cast aside people and cultures that don’t fit into their projects. And yet with the turn of history those same castoffs become a fundamental factor in new social formations. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
In the mass movements of immigrants across the whole US, you saw banners bearing the legend: “We are part of the solution.” But that wasn’t the focus of North American legislators. The decisions of the majority of leaders exercising power in a country or in a community seldom respond to the reality of “minorities” (which in reality aren’t minorities at all) and of the excluded. The leaders simply don’t get to know those groups, and aren’t interested in getting to know them. For only the will to take the place of the “others” and to empathize with their reality makes such understanding possible.
But if such a will were made concrete in a leader, he or she would be esteemed by those communities suffering repression and martyrdom.
Imagine: To realize that someone has gotten to know you personally and has put his or her life at risk for you… this realization would make you feel secure, and would motivate you to act with a spirit of liberty and maturity…
Such a relation between leader and people has a much deeper meaning than what a one-dimensional scientific assessment would attribute to “knowing.” We are speaking of a relation in wholeness, not just that some things are known about the other person. The knowing we are talking about, the inter-personal relation implied by it, is sapiential. From it is born the experience of communion. Our whole life is involved in it.
Likewise to “know the other,” in the meaning given the phrase in today’s Gospel, has three phases: first, to “acknowledge complicity in the conditions that have prevented the other person from becoming what God has intended the other person to be; second, to commit oneself to widen the conditions of the other’s liberty; and third, to take active steps to realize that mission of liberation”— quoting Jesuit Father Ignacio Ellacuria, martyred in Sal Salvador in 1989. Clearly, far more is meant here than simply meeting the immediate needs of the other. Yes, meeting the other’s basic needs is important. But more important still is unconditionally recognizing the other’s humanity and acting in solidarity with the possibilities he or she possesses for becoming what he or she is and/or could be.
Every Christian community hopes to have a pastor like that!
In many Protestant and Pentecostal denominations the faithful explicitly call their leaders “pastors.” Often there’s a warm relationship between the pastor and members of the congregation. In communities of the Catholic tradition, by contrast, the title of pastor has more to do with the “spiritual” care of the community. But in practice, it turns out to be difficult to include in this “spiritual” care those dimensions that the people are most concerned about. That is because the inner being of the pastor has less to do with his or her playing a role than with his or her embodying a dynamic initiative which through various ecclesial experiences has become known as a “pastoral service of solidarity.”
The “good shepherd” in this sense refers to those men and women— and not just to exceptional individuals like the Salvadoran Bishop Romero or Mother Theresa of Calcutta—who commit the totality of their lives to defending the integral dignity of their people. Only those who are not “mercenaries” can make themselves available to the vulnerable.
Nor is the “good shepherd” a role played by only one person. Inspired by a “pastoral service of solidarity” during raids by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the members of our local migrant community have acted as “good shepherds” of each other, keeping each other informed by telephone when they saw agents of “la migra” driving around or near their dwellings. A “pastoral” network quickly developed that proved effective in helping each other avoid being arrested.
Each believer in such a network lives in trust that Jesus has taken his or her side. Even though Jesus has not yet fully manifested himself, his presence is already real and alive in each believer’s being, thanks to believers’ “pastoral service of solidarity” with and for each other.
The Boldness of Migrants
April 16, 2006
The phenomenon of undocumented people flowing across well-guarded frontiers obeys a variety of sociological laws. It also brings to light profound differences among countries and political groups. Yet despite the complexity of the matter, I have sensed the even deeper laws that govern the look and bold behavior of every migrant man and woman. These deeper laws underlie an impulse that is born, not of individual initiative, but of a current of human energy struggling to make life prevail. When such an initiative lodges in someone’s expectations, no force, no government, no person on earth can stop it.
And when the paths of concrete individuals converge with those of a whole population, you can imagine that there comes into view an additional energy that bears their lives along. Small communities are formed of those who learn to follow Jesus and in whose lives burst into bloom the passion for the Kingdom of God. Each day such people incarnate the values of brotherhood, of mercy, of the preferential option for the poor, of the vocation of service, everything they have heard or seen of Jesus, at the same time as they read scripture and seize on its freshness, in the light of the “suffering servant.”
Faith in the Resurrection must have taken time to form if we suppose that the Gospels took their final shape a hundred years after the death of Jesus. The grain of wheat passing through death to give new life is the best metaphor of when this resurrection is about to occur. Faith and the mission of Jesus give no security to his disciples, nor do they offer them the solution to the challenges posed either by their own existence or by their surroundings. Each stage of the journey brings them a series of new challenges, in every stage there is “death” (empty tombs). There is the necessity to deny and overcome obstacles that they would have considered insuperable in other moments and circumstances. But on arriving at these obstacles new possibilities open up, obstacles become thrershholds, the imagination is awakened, and the old gives way to the new. Alternative dimensions keep taking form, like all that is truly living. From the depths we discover, overtime, that what formerly made no sense now foretells transformation.
This dynamic can embrace everything. Personal conviction is no longer enough. An “impulse” is required that passes beyond what we are and can be. Jesus’ Resurrection welcomes us, according to the vision of Teihard, as a process both intimate and global. It has nothing to do with a particular moment, nor with a particular event. It is life itself in its fullness penetrating our own concrete lives. Those who are embraced by this dynamic allow themselves to be carried along by the boldness of confidence in the midst of all that is uncertain. They live with no greater strength than that given by their own weaknesses. They thrust forward in openness to communion, without losing direction in their most personal search for authenticity. This is a force that makes things grow, that weaves relationships, that crosses frontiers. It is an impulse of the future and of life that pierces the shell of staleness, rigidity, sterility.
Faith in the Resurrection of that condemned one on the cross continues to fertilize marginal communities so that they grow in self-esteem and in their capacity for solidarity and justice. In this way they are able to confront the dehumanizing forces of the dominant system.
Passing beyond
March 26, 2006
In any limit situation the final step is when you see things in a different way. You believe at such a time that the form in which you see a thing at that moment is the only valid one, the only one possible, maybe because (you say to yourself) you were educated in that manner or because all your experiences have been inducing in you a conviction that there is no other way of thinking about it— although, to be honest, you would have to admit that this new perspective represents a total break with the past.
For example…the people of the Bible tell in the Book of Chronicles how their exile in Babylon changed everything for them, even their own awareness of guilt. This Sunday’s psalm expresses the same idea in a poem full of vivid memories recast now in the light of new understanding. The exiles had to assume a different historical perspective on Yahweh’s intervention when Cyrus, a foreign military leader and their captor, made possible the return of the Hebrew exiles to their own country. The road to their liberation and rebuilding as a people lay along a route they least expected— a road smoothed by their enemy!
Christian existence develops from a similar necessity to change perspective. The synoptic gospels call it “metanoia” or conversion. Entire people have to re-root themselves in order to survive. Families have to reground their habits and presuppositions in order to grow. Each person too must break away from the perspective of his or her own personal history. There is no other way to enjoy the liberty and responsibility of an adult human being.
The communities where the Gospel of John was born deepened this understanding. When we read about the nocturnal encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus, it is of this slow, difficult process of metanoia that we are speaking, a process with profound consequences. Faith isn’t possible unless we go through this un-learning. It’s like passing from shadows into light. It’s about the event of “grace.” The mercy and love of God wrap around our lives as we open ourselves and welcome this life-giving presence in its own unexpected, unpredictable being… and we experience “the incomparable richness of his grace.” How can we know that this grace is ours every day? Will we be able to find it even where events seem to work against us? Do we believe that grace is present in us and that it is saving us?
The early Christians experienced this grace. For many of them, born in the bosom of the Jewish people, the force of their faith consisted at first in their degree of compliance with rules and laws, for this was their only path not only to God but also to their authentic identity. But then Jesus announces, then makes freely possible new relations among people and a new relation with God, relations based not on the Law but in love and liberty. Yes, he ended up condemned and nailed to a cross as a malefactor because his gospel had radical practical consequences. But then the scandal of the cross, after the experience of the resurrection, led his disciples to cast away their previous perspective. It lit in them all a new light. “Whoever believes in Jesus given to us by the Father will not perish but will have eternal life.”
The risen Christ does not bring us a message of accusation and condemnation. He is himself a free offer of life in its fullness. Accepting that offer or rejecting it is what decides everything. Nor is this a matter of our having to perform grand actions. Even a tiny light is enough to open the way in the densest shadow. Our part is to be attentive to every sign of the times and to recognize there the “free” action of the merciful God who respectfully invites us to transform our perspective and to open ourselves to new attitudes.
Knowing that We’re Loved
May 21, 2006
Knowing that we’re loved, and loved unconditionally— knowing this about ourselves is essential for affirming our own humanity.
Yet our experience shows us how broken this freely-given love becomes by the time it reaches us, this love with which and for which we came into being. So much is this the case that tenacious voices take root in our souls, in our consciences, and in our bodies, insisting that we are not worthy of being loved. Holding out against these voices is hard enough. But when we hear them amplified at higher and higher volume by societal behavior and by a communications media laden with prejudices, racism, and xenophobia, then holding out against them becomes even harder…it becomes even harder to believe that we’re loved and even more to live in this belief.
The communities centered around the disciple John saw something unique in Jesus. They saw that the man from Nazareth lived as if he truly were loved. He lived and celebrated agapé— the Greek word for self-giving fellowship— every day. He was the bearer of that love which, to the extent that it is freely affirmed in the “other,” is fulfilled in oneself at the same time. Perhaps that’s why Jesus says that this love is dynamically interpersonal. “As the Father loves me, so I love you… You must then love each other.”
But we, his disciples, discover that our being chosen and loved came before our capacity to love and enabled it … “It is not that we have loved God… it is that he has loved us first.” Paraphrasing the Taoist master: “When this love is my sole possession, I am invincible.”
The world’s movement of migrants, seen from through the eyes of the population that receives them, tends to provoke fear. Arriving migrants are seen not only as strangers but as enemies even before arriving. We can speak of an ethical predisposition against the “other.” This works against the fact that opening ourselves to otherness could create new paths that might enrich both parties in the migratory phenomenon. Only those who have experienced unconditional love can break the barriers that block that opening.
Migrant community members instantly recognize within the Anglo population those people who are open, welcoming, and unprejudiced. This is because these Anglo persons live the experience of unconditional love right in the midst of the paranoia created by the xenophobic politics of the present administration. They value their migrant neighbors and take the initiative to go to meet them, open to learning about their lives. They freely affirm those who are strangers to them, in this way starting an enriching cycle of growth in human encounter and mutual collaboration. As the fruit of a similar experience the young Christian community arrived at a beautiful realization: “God is not partial.” (Acts of the Apostles)
We have to commit to persevering in this freely-given love which constitutes and sustains us all…
But how is this done? We have to do as the migrants themselves do. We first have to feel deeply, as they do, the evil of every experience of discrimination without rejecting ourselves (without judging ourselves as the prejudiced do). By persevering in openness we see clearly how we are rejected simply because we are migrants. But at the same time we evoke through this perseverance the creative power of love that God has placed in the deepest part of ourselves and that affirms us as worthy to be loved. And we remember that God, who loved us first, was a stranger himself— a stranger who took the initiative and crossed a mighty frontier in order to share the lives of a varied humanity. Only authentic love can break down barriers as great as these.
And so we know God says to each one of us, migrant and Anglo alike: “You, my child, are a person sent by the Father to cross frontiers, carrying with you a message of transformation. And so repeat this ‘mantra’ without ceasing: ‘I am a person unconditionally loved, I have been sent on a mission….’”
Eating and Memory
April 30, 2006
Sharing meals became the signature of those disciples.
And for the people who come to the US to work in the fields, for them too sharing meals is almost a ritual. At least for the ones I know who grew up working in Mexican fields, for them meals were shared among members of their family and involved much more than taking in food.
It was Jesus who gave meaning to meals shared by a group. His dreams of the Kingdom of God were clarified in and through meals taken among brothers and equals. This is so much the case that for us also the act of sharing a little bread and wine has become the central event of the faith we celebrate every Sunday.
That’s why the selection from Luke’s Gospel today shows the risen Christ asking for something to eat. And once they sit down together with him, that handful of disciples glimpses the identity of the defeated-resurrected one and finally understands what was written about him in the Old Testament. The shared meal gives new dimension to their vocation and mission.
It’s odd, the role North American culture gives to eating. Seldom is it an end in itself. People eat together when they’re doing business together— “working lunches,” they say. Eating is a pragmatic affair. The meal itself is of little interest, “fast food,” something you gobble up on your way to something else.
In spite of that it’s still true that I have enjoyed the true conviviality of mealtime even in western New York. It happens when a family from the Caribbean invites me to dinner or when I’m in the home of a migrant family or in a migrant camp. At such times eating has no other object that to gather and to enjoy that gathering. But let it be clear that this happens not only in homes and at leisure. Particularly in the harvest season, when the rhythm of work is exhausting— it is there that I have lived most deeply the experience of “recognition,” of peace and joy, that the disciples lived when they recognized the risen one in their midst. Sitting under a tree together, sharing some tacos heated up on the spot. There are no other motives, no business to conduct, no other place to get to (as when you find yourself keeping an eye on your watch during a “lunch meeting”). Just the gathering itself.
A meal like that reconnects you to what is most human in yourself and in the others sharing the meal with you. “It is really I…not a ghost.” “You are a person…not a shadow.”
Our Eucharists, now so ritualized, aspire to connect us with that sense of conviviality which the people of our migrant communities have already tasted. Where Jesus, the rejected one, whose way of life has become a model for us— where Jesus is the fellow diner who gathers and inspires not only us but everyone else.
For me the Eucharists that come closest to this experience are those we’ve experienced in the some of the migrant camps… when the participants lay down their sacks as they return from picking apples. The Celebration unites us as we tell the stories of our comings and goings, our fallings-down and risings. We allow the Lord to speak to us as we read his word. And almost always it happens that very early, before leaving for work that day, the team has prepared something to eat for sharing after the Eucharist.
“At that moment the Spirit of the crucified and resurrected one opens our understanding so that we might comprehend the Word that has become reality in our lives, and then he sends us to be his witnesses.”
Dignity
March 12, 2006
Dyed-in-the-wool sociologists usually say that migrants “lose” the dignity given them by their places of origin. Back at home they are known as Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones… but once they enter the migrant stream, their dignity disappears. First the “coyotes” treat them with no respect, then in the eyes of contractors and farmers they are just cheap hand labor. Service agencies consider them ignorant, because they don’t speak English and because they have skin of a different color. The law itself tries to turn them into felons for the crime of being undocumented…
But what is happening here isn’t so much the loss of identity as its distortion. Certain social contexts in which people live and act cloud over their true faces. In Christian tradition we understand that Jesus lived under this bitter contradiction. The populace of his country was awaiting a politically powerful Messiah. Even Jesus’ own community of disciples saw and understood him according to that image— for it seems that only by being politically powerful could you receive your “legal documents” as a Messiah! The Gospel of Mark is very clear about this. Jesus constantly insists there that no publicity be given to himself or to his actions. He wants no part of the identity that they attribute to him.
In this context, the Transfiguration obliges us to be guided by the suspicion that the majority of us, in questions of faith, might be mistaken in the way we see these matters. And if this is so, then the community has to understand that Christ’s true face is not reflected in the Messiah of majesty and political might, but in the Messiah who confronts the cross. “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.” The brilliantly white clothing that speaks already of faith in the resurrection speaks also of how believers become so blinded by that light that they wish the path of commitment could be free of contradictions, and even that God could intervene in a more visibly effective way in our lives and societies.
As Bishop Oscar Romero liked to paraphrase it: “The glory of God is that the poor might live.” Every migrant man and woman embraces in him or herself a dignity that doesn’t shine but that is distorted constantly. Migrant believers without documents know what it means to live under suspicion…but they discover that contradiction brings you to value your own dignity more intensely and not to give it up for lost. And when there is the possibility of finding a place, a community that allows you to welcome with honesty what is happening in your person… an experience that disposes you to discover the light of the living God who battles to become embodied in you… then you regain your spirit and you live a transfiguration.
I have met wayfarers (migrant men and women) with the strength to live and transform this contradictory world and their own deficiencies, amazed by their own dignity and ready to honor their responsibilities, to support their families, and to proclaim their testimony of hope.
Camouflage?
May 5, 2006
Contrary to the way mystics lived in the past, by “fleeing the world,” this impulse of flight does not lead today’s believers to true sanctification. Nowadays it’s our insertion into all the world’s dimensions that permits us to live our Christian faith most authentically.
Yet we see a motive of insertion even within the early church itself. In its confrontation with the most systematic expressions of Greek culture, the best way the early church found to develop and live its faith was to welcome critically the thought structures and social organization which the pagan world offered it. The Fathers, as they are called— the early Greek apologists for the Christian religion— were, in their own manner of thinking, a laboratory where a faith vision was created using the philosophical materials of a culture in whose eyes this new faith was practically irrelevant.
Believers today live even more deeply within the “world” and from that greater depth of immersion must also develop their faith. The Second Vatican Council suspected that this trend was happening, but was neither able nor willing to draw the necessary conclusions. And so it is that not all church structures help or form the faithful for this labor.
Our history as a people of faith has followed a path of syncretization— not a path of ghetto-dwelling, of living in isolated bubbles of ideological purity. Today’s human cultures have been generated by surprising syncretizations. Unique, self-contained paradigms cannot be sustained in the search for truth and human fulfillment.
Jesus asks the Father that his disciples be sanctified in the truth. That word “truth,” highly valued by the community of John, seeks to connect the evangelical mission of Jesus with the practice of discipleship. That is why the word refers, not to a theoretical effort to reach the truth, but to a way of living. The best, most vital synthesis of this approach to the truth arose from syncretic experiences. The New Testament scriptures are the clearest expression of this synthesis.
The French rationalist philosopher Gaston Bachelard thought that the most expeditious way for people to open themselves to the truth was to subject themselves to the evidence of their own erroneous ideas. Not in order to cling to those false ideas, but to enable the truth to emerge in the only way it can, through dialogue and synthesis. For since the effort to construct reality epistemologically inevitably brings along with it the history of one’s own prejudices, then the truth about reality can be built up only through engaging with those prejudices and working both with and beyond them. Similarly, the believers’ approach to the truth passes through their insertion in all dimensions of the “world,” even though believers might not be in agreement with its structures. Believers have to accept those structures, while taking into account the prejudices against the world inherited from their experience of the Church.
This is why the real is called the “path to humanization”…in order to consecrate the disciple in the truth. This is not a strategy for camouflaging believers in the world’s costume. It is an unavoidable choice for opening oneself to the world with all its contradictions without becoming of the world.
In this sense those of us formed for evangelical service need to relearn the Gospel’s message by observing its practice in the lives of many simple believers. They are the ones who are living in their own flesh the mission cast only in theoretical form at Vatican II— the mission of uniting faith and life, of overcoming the divorce of a faith which distances itself from everyday reality— in order to embrace the “world” as the terrain where the Kingdom is being prepared. This mission is being carried out right now by men and women of faith who are making mature ethical decisions in disagreement with the Church’s moral teaching (we are thinking of the vitality of their matrimonial sexuality)… by men and women of faith who have aligned themselves, in their political commitments and ideological struggles, in solidarity with communities that have been impoverished and excluded.
The “world”— that anti-Kingdom force that hates the disciple— is also where Christ’s fidelity to the Father is to be proclaimed.
Bodies Handed-Over
June 18, 2006
Farm products, in the United States, are cheap because they are harvested and processed by “illegal” hands. Fruits and vegetables can’t be harvested by machinery; they need skilled human hands to gather them. The care of animals, cattle and chickens for meat, cows for milk, horses for riding— these too demand “illegal” hand labor. And one has to say, in fidelity to truth, that no North American worker is interested in laboring in these ways.
But this is why the population of North America has access to such foods at low cost. Agribusiness gets juicy federal subsidies to make up part of the difference between the profits they demand and the actual costs of the food. (Small county farms do not reap those benefits, however.) Migrants themselves make up the rest of the difference. They are a cheap labor force, without legal protection, without organizing experience, and without support structure— it is this “subsidy” which is the key to keeping product costs down.
Shoppers who go to supermarkets to buy farm products never think about the bodily energy and physical wear-and-tear on the people who harvest the goods they buy. Migrants’ stories are neither told nor heard inside the supermarkets. Yet those stories refocus for us the theological elements developed by the Feast of Corpus Christi to capture the salvific dimension of that Body handed over and of that Blood poured out….
A person laboring on farms and fields in this country has a very short work life. If we assume that the farm worker population is very young to begin with, they cannot work productively beyond ten years. You meet people with premature health problems provoked by the rhythm and type of the work they do. Those twenty-year-old workers who give themselves to agricultural work are convinced that by working hard they can save up a good sum of money. That’s why you meet young migrants working ten to fifteen hours per day, without proper time for rest and recuperation. They are forced to accept exposure to the various chemical compounds used in the fields— not to mention the stress that overwhelms them because of their legal status and because of culture shock. There isn’t time or energy for personal development in other areas. Nor for study, nor for participation in the community. Time perhaps just for distractions, often not healthy ones.
Put simply, we’re talking about hand laborers now unemployable in poor countries, we’re talking about prisoners of globalization. These men and women understand fieldwork. They have an ingrained feel for the earth and for the care of animals, and they do this labor with a will. But they haven’t the least idea of how their labor— within a cycle of injustice and exploitation— is providing life to millions of people. Their daily physical effort isn’t expended just so their own families might live and survive. Their bodies, delivered over daily to hard labor, make possible the life of a “First World” country— a country that has practically forgotten how field produce is harvested and yet could not survive without the migrants’ labor.
One migrant, Antonio, puts it this way: “We work from sun up to sun down, we do the heaviest and riskiest jobs. We have to work seven days a week…just to survive. We are the most vulnerable…living constantly with the fear of being arrested by the police or by ‘migra.’”
In a parallel situation, Jesus took a bit of bread and some wine and transformed them into a symbol of his self-giving.
When I think about the twelve million “illegal” people in the US doing such exhausting physical labor, I recall the prayer usually said in silence that Bishop Oscar Romero used to say aloud after the Eucharistic consecration of the bread and wine: “May this body handed over and this wine poured out inspire us to hand over our own lives in order that the Kingdom of brothers be realized.”
10/8/06
Un proyecto que sobrepasa la pareja.
Todo ser humano, varón y/o hembra esta llamado a intentar la comunión, sin suprimir la dualidad dinámica de su identidad y de su diferencia.
La preocupación moralizante de la tradición eclesial ha interpretado toda la riqueza del relato de los orígenes solo en el compromiso matrimonial. Sin embargo, ningún ser humano, sean cuales sean sus opciones de vida, puede evadir esta aspiración hacia la unidad de la dualidad hembra-varón.
Una lectura de esta estructura humana, es la marcada por el patriarcado: Pretender suprimir el desafío, construyendo marcos legales excluyentes, atribuidos a la divinidad o trivializar la dualidad “formalizando” una mera relación convencional y arbitraria.
Parece que lo que inspira el relato de los orígenes es la conciencia asombrada de que ni lo masculino ni lo femenino, poseen una dimensión absoluta. Se sospecha su dualidad convergente de una fuente divina común y, por eso, se cree que esa dualidad tiende a encontrar su plenitud en una comunión.
Jesús, que es un sagaz intérprete del AT, sabe que el relato de la pareja tiene mucho más que ver con esta original forma de ser del ser humano, diseñada por el creador. Por eso ante la cuestión del divorcio legal, el amplia la relación de pareja hacia el proyecto original de plenitud del ser humano. El varón se realiza en relación a la mujer y la mujer se realiza en relación al varón….esto no necesariamente implica que el matrimonio sea la única experiencia en que se vive esta plenitud. La incluye, por supuesto, como una opción concreta de un varón y de una mujer.
En nuestras historias, cada ser humano varon y/o mujer es invitado a recorrer la aventura de ir recolectando sus propias dualidades, en un proceso de asuncion, integración, superacion de multiples dualidades no asumidas y vividas frecuentemente como situaciones contradictorias. Se trata de un camino que, conforme se anda, requiere beber de los orígenes y a la vez, inspirarse en Jesús, el hombre nuevo, para ir dibujando cada persona, en su propia singularidad varón-mujer, la figura plena del ser humano. ¿Concluye algún día este proceso integrador? Es un proceso abierto…por eso la vocación de comunión solo es evocada en el compromiso sacramental de la pareja.
Los limites, así como las experiencias de plenitud, durante la jornada de la vida tendrán múltiples y diversas manifestaciones en los matrimonio, en la maternidad y paternidad sin pareja, en la opción por el celibato, en la experiencia de otras orientaciones sexuales. Pero todas son convocadas hacia la búsqueda de la comunión.
Es la relación creativa y creadora con la otra persona y en particular con aquella persona que en su identidad sexual es distinta a mí, lo que me hace crecer y desarrollarme. Es en la complejidad y la riqueza de esta relación donde las dualidades interiores se dimensionan y se expresan en forma mas humana. Sin esa relación mi propio ser no es pleno.
Lo importante es no cancelar esta relación…seria perder el origen y el rumbo: “Al principio no fue así”, dice Jesús.
