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It is not enough to be good, one must be merciful

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The golden law, present in all religions and spiritual ways is: “love your neighbor as yourself”. Or to put it in other words: “don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.

Christianity incorporates this minimal ethic and thus inscribes itself within this ancestral tradition. However, it abolishes all limits to love so that it is truly universal and unconditional. It states: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father. For He makes the sun rise on the evil and the good and rains on the just and the unjust. If you love those who love you, what advantage will you have? Do not the tax collectors do it too? If you greet only your brothers, what extraordinary thing is there in that? Don’t the pagans do it too? (Mt 5:44-47).

The version that St. Luke gives in his Gospel is instructive: “Love your enemies. In this way you will be sons and daughters of the Holy Father, for he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked; be merciful as the Father is merciful” (6:35-36).

This statement is deeply consoling. Who doesn’t sometimes feel “ungrateful and wicked”? It is then that we are comforted by these encouraging words: the Father is kind, in spite of our wickedness.And so we are relieved of the burden of our conscience that haunts us wherever we go. Here resound the consoling words of St. John’s first Epistle: “If our heart accuses us, know that God is greater than our heart” (1 John 3:20). These words should be whispered in the ear of every dying person with faith.

Such divine understanding brings us back to the words of one of the most encouraging psalms in the Bible, Psalm 103: “The Lord is rich in mercy. He is not always accusing, nor does he hold a grudge forever. The higher the heavens are above the earth, the more his mercy prevails. As a father has compassion on his sons and daughters, so the Lord has compassion on those who love him, because he knows our nature and what we are dust (9-14).

One of the characteristics of the biblical God is his mercy, because he knows that we are fragile and fleeting “like the flowers of the field; the breath of the wind is enough for us to be no more” (103:15). Even so, he never ceases to love us as beloved sons and daughters, and to pity our moral weaknesses.

One of the fundamental qualities of the image of God that the Master communicated to us was precisely his unlimited mercy.  For him it is not enough to be good. He has to be merciful.

The parable of the prodigal son illustrates this with rare human tenderness. The son had left home, squandered all his inheritance in a dissolute life, and suddenly, nostalgic, decided to return home. The father stayed a long time, waiting for him, looking at the corner of the road to see if he would show up. Behold, “while he was still a long way off”, as the text says, “the father saw his son and, moved with pity, ran to him and kissed him on the neck” (15:20). It is enough to be back in the father’s house. And he prepared for him, full of joy, a great feast.

This merciful father represents the heavenly Father who loves the ungrateful and the wicked. He welcomed with infinite mercy the son who had lost his way in life. The only son who is criticized is the good son. He served his father in everything, worked, kept all the commandments. He was good, very good. But for Jesus it was not enough to be good. He had to be merciful. And he was not. That is why he is the only one to receive a rebuke for not understanding his brother who returned.

But it is important to emphasize a point that shows the uniqueness of the message of the Nazarene. He wants to go beyond simply loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Who is the neighbor for Jesus? It is not my friend, nor the one who is next to me. A neighbor for Jesus is anyone I approach, regardless of his or her origin or moral condition. It is enough to be a human being.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is emblematic (Lk 10:30-37). A nobody is lying by the roadside, “half-dead”, the victim of a robbery. A priest passes by, perhaps late in his service in the temple; a Levite also passes by, hurrying to prepare the altar. They both saw him and “passed by”. A Samaritan passes by, a heretic to the Jews; “he took care of him and showed mercy to him,” healing his wounds and taking him to an inn, and also leaving everything paid for and more that was needed. “Who of the three was next?” asks the Master. It was the heretic who approached the robbers’ victim. Love does not discriminate, every human being is worthy of love and mercy. Surely the priest and the Levite were good people, but they lacked the main thing: mercy, a heart that is moved by the pain of others.

In short, when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, he means to love those who are unknown and discriminated against; he implies loving the invisible ones, the social zeros, those who nobody looks at and pass by, to love those who, at the supreme moment of history, when everything will be wiped out, he calls them “my little brothers”. “When you loved one of these, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). Saint Francis was the one who best understood this unique “more” of Jesus’ message. That is why in his prayer he asks: “that I seek to console more than to be consoled, to understand more than to be understood, and to love more than to be loved.

Covid-19 is showing, especially in the peripheries, among the criticized members of the Landless and Homeless Movement and others, that the message of merciful love, lived by the Son of God is not extinguished and is still alive and burning.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian and wrote Jesus Christ Liberator, Orbis Books 1972, various editions.

The painful birth of Mother Earth: a biocivilization

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff

The Climate Change Summit convened by President Joe Biden, expresses a cry of alarm. If we do not stop warming to the limit of 1.5 degrees, we will experience a dangerous extermination of biodiversity and millions of climate migrants who, unable to adapt to the changes and losing their means of subsistence, feel compelled to leave their beloved homelands and break the boundaries of other countries, causing serious socio-political problems.

CO2 remains in the atmosphere for about 120 years. We awake late because of its toxicity on living systems. In recent years something frightening has occurred: the rapid thawing of the permafrost – that frozen part that runs from Canada across Russia. Add to this the rapid melting of the polar ice caps and Greenland. This phenomenon aggravates global warming because methane is 25 times more harmful than CO2. Each head of cattle, through rumination and flatulence, emits between 80-100 kg of methane released into the atmosphere every day. Imagine what such an amount means with all the cattle herds in the world. In Brazil alone the number of cattle is larger than our population.

No matter what we do, due to the excessive accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we will have no way of avoiding extreme effects. They will come: typhoons, prolonged droughts, extremely hot summers and excessive snowfall, erosion of biodiversity and loss of soil fertility, and others.  What we can and must do is to prepare for their irruption and thus mitigate the disastrous effects.

No one at the Climate Summit had the courage to point out the root causes of our global warming: our capitalist mode of production, in whose DNA is the unlimited growth that demands unlimited extraction of natural resources to the point of severely weakening the sustainability of the planet. A finite Earth cannot tolerate an infinite project. Here lies the cause, among other minor ones, of global warming. Everyone knows that here lies the original question. Why does nobody denounce it? Because it is directly anti-systemic, because it strikes at the heart of the modern techno-scientific paradigm of unlimited development/growth, to which states and corporations are committed.

They would be obliged to change what would be against their logic. But they don’t want to, because profit prevails over life. Only the Argentine president Alberto Fernández had the courage to denounce: “Pollution is the road to suicide. His statement is in line with the statement made a few years ago by the American Academy of Sciences, which issued a statement more or less along these lines: If we do not take care, warming can take ‘an abrupt leap’ (an expression used) until it reaches, in a short time, about 4 degrees Celsius; with this heat, it is said, species will hardly adapt and millions will disappear, including millions and millions of human beings.

Practically everyone regrets that the political and business “decision makers” show a serious lack of awareness of the risks that weigh upon our Common Home. It is not ruled out that something similar to what happened with Covid-19 will occur.

 Despite the warning of virus experts that we are on the verge of the intrusion of a serious virus, very few are preparing for this eventuality. This is why a leap to a new level of collective consciousness that would allow us to inaugurate a new normality different from the previous one that was perverse to humanity and nature is unforeseeable. We question: have we learned the lessons sent by Mother Earth’s counterattack on humanity through Covid-19? Considering the widespread carelessness it seems that we remain in the illusion of a return to the old, iniquitous normality.

Our President’s speech, Jair Bolsonaro, at the White House summit was one of mere convenience. He gave a clear demonstration that he is a legitimate representative of the post-truth, because he performed the ancient Chinese wisdom: “Do not look at the mouth that speaks of a politician, but at the hands that operate. The mouth totally contradicted what the hands do. The mouth uttered promises, practically unrealizable, and the hands, through their anti-environmental minister, practice systematic devastation of the forests and the dismantling of the bodies that preserve ecosystems.

Just as the “Unnamed”Bolsonaro is allied with Covid-19 so the Minister of the Environment is allied with the loggers who illegally and criminally appear as the main culprits for the 357.61 km2 of cut down forest, the worst in recent years. The hands deny what the mouth says.

Despite all the sorrows, we believe and hope that humanity will learn from suffering and hopefully from love: either we will change, or in Sigmunt Bauman’s words, spoken a week before he died, we will join the procession of those heading towards their own grave.

Human and natural history is never linear; it knows ruptures and leaps upward. It is inviting us to reinvent ourselves. Mere improvements and putting bandages over the wounds of Mother Earth’s wounded body are not enough. We are forced to a new beginning. According to the Earth Charter and Pope Francis’ encyclical “On the Care of our Common Home” (Laudato Si’ e a Fratelli tutti), “we are in the same boat: either we all save ourselves or no one is saved” (n.35; 54; 137).

The Earth has gone through 15 great decimations, but life has always survived. It will not destroy itself now. We are facing a difficult apprenticeship for the whole of humanity, because we have no other choice than this: either to live or to perish. Freud himself, although skeptical, longed for the triumph of the life drive over the death drive. Life is called to more life and even eternal life.

In this hopeful hope I have just published a book, more optimistic than pessimistic but of a feasible realism, which aims to guarantee a promising horizon: “The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and social friendship”.

It is a utopia? yes, but a necessary one, so that we can walk. It is important to remember that the utopian belongs to the real, made up not only of data that have always been made, but also of hidden potentialities that wait to be made to erupt and allow a new footprint on the ground of history. It is no good stepping on footprints made by others. We have to create our own footprints. New music, new ears. New crises, new answers. We still have a future, strengthened by the One who announced that he was “the passionate lover of life” (Wisdom 11:26). He will help us to make a painful but true and happy crossing. This is how we believe and this is how we hope.

Leonardo Boff,ecotheologist and philosopher and wrote: The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and social friendship, Vozes 2021.

Eat the world or safeguard the world?

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

“Eating the world” or “safeguarding the world” represent a metaphor, frequent in the mouths of indigenous leaders, questioning the paradigm of our civilization, whose violence has made them almost disappear. Now it has been called into question by Covid-19. The virus has struck like a bolt of lightning at the paradigm of “eating the world”, that is to say, limitlessly exploiting everything that exists in nature with the perspective of endless growth/enrichment.

The virus destroyed the mantras that sustain it: centrality of profit, achieved by the fiercest possible competition, accumulated privately, at the expense of the exploitation of natural resources. If we obeyed these mantras, we would surely be in bad shape. What is saving us is what is hidden and made invisible in the “eat the world” paradigm: life, solidarity, interdependence among all, and care for nature and for each other. It is the imperative paradigm of “safeguarding the world”.

This paradigm of “eating the world” has high ancestry. It comes from Athens in the 5th century BC when the critical spirit broke out and allowed us to perceive the intrinsic dynamics of the spirit, which is the breaking down of all limits and the search for the infinite, a purpose thought out by the great philosophers, by artists, appearing also in the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, and practiced by politicians. It is no longer the “medén ágan” of the Temple of Delphi: “nothing in excess” but now it is the unlimited spatial expansion (creation of colonies and an empire) and the temporal expansion opening up to the endless future (unlimited forward perspective).

This project of “eating the world” took shape in Greece itself through the creation of the empire of Alexander the Great (356-323), who at the age of only 23 founded an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus River in India.

The “eating the world” deepened in the vast Roman Empire, strengthened in the modern colonial and industrial age, and culminated in the contemporary world with the globalization of Western techno-science, expanded to every corner of the planet. It is the empire of the unlimited, translated into the (illusory) purpose of capitalism/neoliberalism of unlimited growth towards the future. An example of this quest for unlimited growth is the fact that more energy resources have been burned in the last generation than in all previous generations of humanity. There is no place that has not been exploited for the accumulation of goods.

But now an insurmountable limit has appeared: the Earth limited as a planet, small, overpopulated, with limited goods and services, cannot support an unlimited project. On September 22, 2020, Earth and life sciences identified The Earth Overhoot. That is, the limit of the renewable natural goods and services that are basic to sustaining life. They have been exhausted. Consumerism, by not accepting limits, leads to violence, tearing from Mother Earth what she can no longer give. We are consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths. The consequences of this extortion are shown in the reaction of an exhausted Mother Earth: the increase in global warming, the erosion of biodiversity (about one hundred thousand species eliminated per year and a million at risk), the loss of soil fertility, and increasing desertification, among other extreme events.

The crossing of some of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, and others) can cause a systemic effect, knocking down all nine and thus inducing a collapse of our civilization.

The intrusion of Covid-19 has brought all militaristic powers to their knees, rendering weapons of mass destruction useless and ridiculous. The range of viruses foretold, if we do not change our destructive relationship with nature, could sacrifice several million people and thin the biosphere, essential for all life forms.

At present humanity is being gripped by metaphysical terror in the face of insurmountable limits and the possibility of the eventual end of the species. The intended Great Reset of the capital system is illusory. The earth will make it fail.

It is in this dramatic context that the other paradigm of “safeguarding the world” emerges. It is raised in particular by indigenous leaders in Brazil like Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa Yanomani, Sônia Guajajara, Renata Mchado Tupinambá, Cristine Takuá, Raoni Metuktire among others. For all of them there is a deep communion with nature, of which they feel a part. They do not need to think of the Earth as the Great Mother, Pachamam and Tonantzin, because they feel this way.  Naturally they safeguard the world because it is an extension of their own body.

The  deep ecology  and integral as set out in the Earth Charter (2000), Pope Francis’ encyclicals Laudato SI: how to care for our common home (2015) and Fratelli tutti (2020), and the World Council of Churches’ Justice, Peace, and the Preservation of the Created program, among other groups, assmembers “safeguarding the world.” The common purpose is to ensure the physical-chemical-ecological conditions that sustain and perpetuate life in all its forms, especially human life.

We are already into our sixth mass extinction and by the Anthropocene we are deepening it.If we do not read emotionally, with our hearts, the data from science about the threats to our survival, we will hardly engage to “safeguard the world”.

Severely warned Pope Francis in Fraterlli tutti: “either we all save ourselves together or no one is saved”(n.32). It is an almost desperate warning if we do not want to “swell the ranks of those who are heading for the grave” (S. Bauman).

Let us take the leap of faith and believe what is said in the Book of Wisdom: “God is the passionate lover of life” (11:26). If this is so, He will not allow us to disappear so miserably from the face of the earth. So we believe and so we hope.

Leonardo Boff wrote: Caring for the Earth-Protecting Life: How to avoid the end of the world, Record 2010; Covid-19, Mother Earth Strikes Back: Warnings from the Pandemic, Vozes 2020.

This Holy Thursday there is a criminal lack of table fellowship among humans

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Holy Thursday, the Lord’s Supper, reminds us of table fellowship, denied to the millions starving today in Brazil and in the world, as a consequence of the Covid-19 intrusion. Unfortunately, it is evident that there is a painful absence of solidarity in the face of the hungry masses, which prevents us from eating together (commensality).

One of the merits of MST (Movement of Landless People) is that it has organized itself in all its settlements according to the ethics of solidarity among its members and even with those outside its settlements also. They are exemplary in sharing the ecologically grown food they have with many food parcels distributed to thousands of families on the peripheries of our cities. They practice one of humanity’s most ancient dreams: commensality, that is, everyone can eat sufficiently and eat together, sitting around a table and enjoying companionship and the fruits of the generous Mother Earth.

Food is more than a material object. It is a sacrament and symbol of the generosity of Mother Earth, which together with human labour, provides us with everything we need. It is not about nutrition but communion with nature and with others with whom we share bread. In the context of the common table, food is appreciated and spoken about. The greatest joy of the cooks who prepare the food is to perceive the satisfaction of those who eat and enjoy it. An important gesture at the table is to serve or pass the food on to the other. Civilized behaviour facilitates everyone helping himself or herself, ensuring that there is enough food for everyone.

Contemporary culture has so modified the logic of daily routines, turning them into functions of work and productivity that it has weakened the symbolic reference of the table. It was reserved for Sundays or for special moments of celebration or birthdays when family members met and sat down together. But, as a rule, it is no longer the point of permanent convergence of the family.

The family table has been replaced by other tables, absolutely desecrated: the negotiation table, the games table, discussion and debate tables, a currency exchange table and a table for the conciliation of interests, among others. Even though they are desecrated, these various tables have an undeniable reference: they are a meeting place for people, no matter what interests lead them to sit at that table. They sit at the table for exchange, negotiation, consultation and compose solutions that please the involved parties. But leaving the table can also mean the failure of the negotiation and the recognition of the conflict of interests.

Despite this difficult dialectic, it is important to reserve time for the table in its full sense of coexistence and the satisfaction of being able to eat together. It is one of the perennial sources of reconstructing our essence as relational beings. How this is denied today to the poor and hungry!

Let us recover a little the memory of table fellowship present in all cultures and practiced by Jesus at the Last Supper with his apostles.

Let us start with the Judeo-Christian culture because it is more familiar to us. There is a central theme – the Kingdom of God, the principle content of Jesus’ message – which is represented by a banquet to which everyone is invited.

Everyone, regardless of their moral situation, sits at the table and is welcomed. The Master says: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a king who prepared a banquet for his son’s wedding. He sent his servants to call the guests and said to them “go to the crossroads and invite everyone you meet to the party. The servants went out along the pathways and gathered all they found, bad and good, and the room was full of guests ”(Mt 22,2-3; 9-10).

Another memory comes to us from the East. In it, eating together, in solidarity with one another, represents the supreme human fulfillment, called heaven. The reverse, the desire to eat, but selfishly, each one for himself, demonstrates the supreme human frustration, called hell.

There is a legend that says “A disciple asked the Seer:

-Master, what is the difference between Heaven, with its fellowship between everyone and its opposite?

The Seer replied:

– “The difference is very small but has serious consequences.

-“I saw diners sitting at the table where there was a very large bowl of rice. Everyone was hungry, almost starving. Everyone tried, but could not get close to the rice. Attached to their hands they had long forks of more than a meter in length, they tried to bring the rice to their own mouths, individually. As much as they tried, they did not succeed because the forks were too long. And so hungry and lonely they remained malnourished because of an insatiable and endless hunger. This was hell, the denial of all table fellowship.

-“I saw another wonderful scenario,” said the Seer. People sitting at the table around a large bowl of steaming rice. Everyone was hungry. But a wonderful thing happened! Each took the rice and lifted it up to the other’s mouth. They served each other in immense cordiality. Together and in solidarity. Everyone fed each other. They felt like brothers and sisters at the big table as it says in the Tao.

And that was heaven, the full table fellowship of the sons and daughters of the Earth.

This parable needs no comment. Unfortunately today, in the time of Covid-19, a large part of humanity is hungry and desperate because there are very few people who extend their forks to satisfy each other with the abundant food on the Earth´s table. The wealthy privately own this food and eat alone without looking at who is excluded. There is a criminal lack of fellowship among humans. That is why we are so lacking in humanity. But social isolation creates the opportunity for us to review our individualistic practices and discover fraternity without borders and table fellowship: everyone can eat and eat together.

* Leonardo Boff is a theologian and philosopher. Author, among other books, of Commensality: Eating and drinking together and living in peace (Vozes).