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.