Categoria: English

Aren’t they human beings, our brothers and sisters?

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

A society’s level of civilization and of humanitarian spirit is measured by how it welcomes and coexists with those who are different. By this measure, Europe offers a pitiful example, one that borders on barbarism. Europe reveals herself as so self-centered and self-congratulatory that it is extremely hard for her to welcome and coexist with those who are different.

The strategy generally was and continues to be this: either exclude or destroy the other. This is what happened in the process of colonial expansion in Africa, Asia and principally in Latin America. They destroyed whole nations, as in Haiti, Mexico and Peru.

The primary limit on Western European culture is her arrogance, as is seen in its presumption of being the most developed in the world, as having the best form of government (democracy), the highest awareness of rights, as the creator of philosophy and technology, and, if that was not enough, as the carrier of the one true religion: Christianity. Traces of this arrogance can still be seen in the Preamble of the Constitution of the European Union. There it is simply asserted:

«The European continent is the bearer of civilization, its people have inhabited it since the beginning of humanity in successive phases, and throughout the centuries they developed the values that are the basis of humanism: the equality of all human beings, liberty, and the value of reason…»

This vision is only partly true. It forgets the frequent violations of those rights, the catastrophes it created with totalitarian ideologies, devastating wars, pitiless colonialism and ferocious imperialism that subjugated and destroyed whole cultures in Africa and in Latin America, in direct contrast to the values they proclaim. The dramatic state of the world today and the quantities of refugees who come from the Mediterranean countries are due, in great part, to the type of globalization Europe supports, since, in concrete terms, it constitutes a sort of later day Westernization of the world, more than the development of a true global community.

This is the background that helps us understand the ambiguities and the resistance of most European countries to receiving the refugees and immigrants who come from the countries of North Africa and of the Middle East, fleeing the terror of the war, caused in great part by Western Intervention (NATO) and especially by the imperialistic policies of the United States.

According to data from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), just this year 60 million of persons have been forced to abandon their homes. The Syrian conflict alone has created 4 million displaced people. The countries that are most willing to take in these victims are Lebanon, with more than one million (1.1 million) and Turkey (1.8 million).

Now those thousands of people seek a little peace in Europe. This year alone nearly 300,000, both migrants and refugees, have crossed the Mediterranean sea. And the numbers grow daily. Their reception is charged with ill will, arousing fascist and xenophobic ideas in the population that betray great insensitivity, even a lack of humanity. Only after the tragedy of the island of Lampedusa, to the South of Italy, where 700 people drowned in April, 2014, was the operation Mare Nostrum launched, with the mission of searching for distressed ships.

Their reception is filled with incidents, especially in Spain and England. The most open and hospitable, notwithstanding the attacks on refugee camps, has been Germany. The phile-fascist government of Viktor Orban of Hungary has declared war on the refugees. It made a decision of great barbarity: ordering the construction of a razor-wire fence four meters high the whole length of the border with Serbia, to bar the arrival of those coming from the Middle East. The governments of Slovakia and Poland declared that they will only accept Christian refugees.

These are criminal measures. Aren’t all those who are suffering human beings? Are they not our brothers and sisters? Immanuel Kant was one of the first to propose a World Republic (Welterepublik) in his final book Perpetual Peace. He said that the first virtue of this republic would be hospitality, as the right of all, and it must be for all, because we all are children of the Earth.

All this is being shamefully denied by members of the European Community. The Judeo-Christian tradition always affirmed: whoever welcomes the stranger is unknowingly hosting God. The words of the quantum physicist Danah Zohar, who best wrote about spiritual intelligence, apply here: «The truth is that we and the others are a single one, that there is no separation, that we and the “stranger” are aspects of the one and only life» (QS: conciencia espiritual, Record 2002, p. 219). How different would be the tragic destiny of the refugees if these words were lived passionately and compassionately.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The crises of life and of self realization

Leonardo Boff7 Comentários

Crisis is usually spoken of in terms of the crisis of the crises; the crisis of the Earth and the crisis of life, which is threatened with disappearance, as Pope Francis pointed out in his encyclical letter about “caring for the Common Home”. But everything in life is marked by crisis: the crisis of birth, of youth, the crisis of chosing one’s life companion, of selecting a profession, the crisis of the “demon of midday”, as Freud called it, that is the midlife crisis of the forties, when we realize that we are already reaching the top of the mountain and starting the descent. And finally, the great crisis of death, when we pass from time to eternity.

The challenge before us is not how to avoid these crises. They are inherent in our human condition. The question is how to face them: what lessons do we draw from them and how can we grow from them. The path of our self realization and of our maturity as human beings passes through them.

Every situation is good, every place is excellent for measuring us against our own selves, and diving into our deep dimension and bringing out the fundamental archetype that we carry within (the basic tendency that always worries us) and that through us seeks to reveal itself and to make its history, that is also our true history. Here no one can be substituted for another. Each of us is alone. It is the fundamental task of existence. But if one is faithful in this journey, that person is no longer alone. S/he has built a personal Center from where to find all the other journeyers. Solitary then turns into solidarity.

The geography of the spiritual world is different from that of the physical world. In the geography of the physical world, countries touch each other at their borders. In the other geography, people touch each other through their personal Centers. Indifference, mediocrity, the lack of passion in the search for our profound I, is what distances us from our Center and that of others, and therefore we lose affinities, even when we are close to them, amongst them, and are trying to be at their service.

What is the best service I could offer other people? To be myself, as a being-of-relationships, and therefore always linked to the others, a being who opts for the good for himself and for others, who is guided by truth, who loves and has compassion and mercy.

Personal realization is not found in the quantity of personal abilities we can realize, but in their quality, in the way we do well that which our station of life demands of us. The quantification, the search for titles, of endless degrees, could in many personal cases mean flight from an encounter with the task of life: to measure ourselves against ourselves, with our desires, our limitations, our problems, with our positive and negative, and to creatively integrate them. Avoiding the accumulation of meaningless knowledge, that only makes us more arrogant and distant from others, is what matures us, and enables us to better understand ourselves and the world. Their own words betray the people who say: It is I who knows, I who does it, I who decides. It is always the I and never the us or the cause, agreed upon with others.

Personal realization is not so much the work of reason, that deals with all things, but of the spirit, that is, our capacity to create visions of togetherness and of putting things in their proper place and valuation. The spirit is for discovering the meaning of each situation. Therefore, the wisdom of life, the experience of the mystery of God, deciphered in each moment, belong to the spirit. It is the capacity to put one’s self completely in everything that one does. Spirituality is neither a science, nor a technique, but the mode of being complete in every situation.

The first task of personal realization is to accept our situation, with its limits and possibilities. Each situation is complete, not quantitatively scattered, but qualitatively gathered, as in a Center. To enter into that Center of ourselves is to find the others, all things, and to find God. This is why the ancient wisdom of India held that: «If someone thinks correctly, secluded in his room, that thought is heard thousands of kilometers away». If you want to change others, start by changing yourself.

Another indispensable task for personal realization is to know how to coexist with the final end, namely, death. Whoever gives meaning to death, also gives meaning to life. Whoever does not see the meaning of death also fails to discover the meaning to life. However, death is more than the last moment, or the end of life. Life itself is mortal. In other words, we slowly are dying, bit by bit, because as soon as we are born, we start to die, to wear away and to bid farewell to life. We first bid farewell to the maternal womb and emerge from it. Then we say farewell to infancy, to childhood, to youth, to grade school, the paternal home, to the adult age, to some of our tasks, to each moment that passes and finally, we bid farewell to life itself.

This farewell leaves behind not only things and situations, but always something of ourselves. We have to detach ourselves, to become impoverished and to empty ourselves. What is the meaning of all this? Pure incorrigible fatalism? Or does it not have a secret meaning? We divest ourselves of everything, even of ourselves in the last moment of life (death), because we have been made neither for this world nor for ourselves, but for the Great Other who must fill our life: God. God takes everything from us in life, in order to reserve us ever more intensely for Himself; He can even take away the certainty that it was all worth the pain. Even so, we persist, believing in the sacred words: “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart” (cf. 1 Jn 3,20). Whoever can accept the integration of the negative, including the unjust, into his own Center, would have reached the highest degree of humanization, and of inner liberty.

The negative and the crises we are going through offer us a lesson: the lesson of divesting and of preparing for the total plenitude in God. Then, we will be God, through participation, as the mystic Saint John of the Cross, says.
Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The permanent challenge: Caring for oneself

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

In considering the category of “caring” in our relationship with Mother Earth and with all beings, Pope Francis stressed not just a virtue, but a true paradigm that represents an alternative to the paradigm of modernity, namely, that of the drive for power, that has caused so much damage.

We must take care of everything, including ourselves, because we are the closest of our neighbors and, at the same time, the most complex and most undecipherable of all beings.

Do we know who we are? What do we exist for? Were are we going? Reflecting on these inescapable questions, it is worth remembering the thoughts of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), perhaps the most true:

What is the human being in nature? The human is a nothing in the face of the infinite, and a whole in the face of nothingness; a link between the nothing and the whole, but incapable of seeing the nothingness whence he comes or the infinite whither he goes. (Pensées § 72).

We truly do not know who we are. We only distrust, as Guimarães Rosa would say. To the degree that we live and suffer, we slowly go about discovering who we are. In the final analysis, we are expressions of that background (the image of God?), that sustains and directs everything.

Along with what we really are, there is also that which we potentially can be. The potential is also part of the real, perhaps it is our best part. Starting with this background, we can develop points to guide us in the search for that which we want and can be.

In this search caring for oneself performs a decisive function. First, it is not about a narcissistic view of one’s ego. That generally leads not to self knowledge but to identification with a projected image of oneself and therefore is false and alienating.

Michel Foucauld, in his thorough study, The hermeneutics of the subject (2004), tried to resurrect the Western tradition of caring for the self, especially as seen through the wise men of the Second and Third centuries, like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and others. The great motto was the famous ghôti seautón, know thyself. That knowledge is not abstract, but very concrete: recognize that which you are, try to deepen thyself to discover your potential; try to make real that which you in fact can become.

In this context the different virtues were addressed, so well discussed by Socrates. He warned about avoiding the worst of the vices, one that has become common among us: namely, hubris. Hubris is to exceed one’s limits and to strive to be special, above others. Perhaps hubris is the worst aspect of Western culture, of Christian culture, especially of the culture of the United States with its imagined Manifest Destiny (the belief in being the new chosen people of God): the feeling of superiority and of exceptionality, imposing our values on others, sanctioned by God.

The first that must be said is that the human is a being and not a thing. Humans are not a substance, constituted once and for all, but a knot of relationships always active, that through the chain of relationships are continuously constructing themselves, as the universe does. All beings of the universe, according to the new cosmology, are carriers of a certain subjectivity, because they have a history, live in an interaction and interdependency of all with all, learning through inter-exchange and accumulation of information. This is a universal cosmologic principle. But the human being has its own form of this principle, namely, the fact of being a conscious and reflecting being. The human being knows that he knows and that he does not know and, to be complete, does not know what he does not know.

This knot of relationships is built from a Center, around which relationships with others are organized. That profound I is never alone. Its solitude is for communion. It demands a you. Or, better, according to Martin Buber, it is where the you begins that the I awakens and is formed. From the I and the you is born the us.

Caring for oneself implies, in the first place, accepting oneself the way one is, with one’s talents and limitations. Not with bitterness, like those who want to change their existential situation, but with joviality. It is to accept one’s own face, hair, legs, breasts, appearance and mode of being in the world; in short, to accept our bodies (see Corbin et all, O corpo, 3 vol. 2008). When we accept ourselves more, fewer plastic surgery clinics will exist. With the physical characteristics we have, we should develop our mode of being in the world.

Nothing is more ridiculous than to artificially construct beauty, in disharmony with one’s inner beauty. It is a vain attempt to “photo shop” our own image.

Caring for oneself demands knowing how to combine our aptitudes with our motivations. It is not enough to have an aptitude for music if we are not motivated to be musicians. Likewise, the motivation to be musicians is of no use if we do not have the aptitude for that. We just waste our energies and gather frustrations. We wind up being mediocre, something that does not make us better.

Another aspect of caring for oneself is to know and to learn to coexist with the dark dimension that accompanies the light dimension. We love and we hate. We are made with those contradictions. Anthropologically, it is said that we are simultaneously sapiens and demens, people with both awareness, and rudeness. We are the intersection of those opposites.

Caring for oneself is to be able to create a synthesis, where the contradictions do not annul each other, but the luminous side predominates.

To care for ourselves is to love, to accept, to recognize our vulnerabilities, to be able to cry, to know how to forgive and to develop the resilience that is the capacity to overcome and learn from our mistakes and contradictions. Then we can write straight, even if the lines are crooked.

Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Similarities between the encyclical “Caring for the Common Home” and “the Earthcharter, on our Home”

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The encyclical, Laudato sí’, Caring for the Common Home, and The Earthcharter, are perhaps the only two documents of worldwide relevance that have so much in common. They deal with the degraded situation of the Earth and of life in its many dimensions, departing from the conventional vision that is limited to environmentalism. They subscribe to the new relational and holistic paradigm, the only one, it seems to us, that is still capable of giving us hope.

The encyclical echoes The Earthcharter, that in one of its most fundamental passages proclaims: «I dare to propose again this precious challenge: as never before in history, the common destiny calls on us to seek a new beginning» (nº 207). That new beginning is undertaken by Pope Francis.

Let us enumerate, among others, some of those similarities.

In the first place, one sees the same spirit running through the two texts: in its analytical form, gathering the best scientific data; in its critical form, denouncing the present system that puts the Earth out of balance, and in its hopeful form, offering solutions. They do not surrender to resignation. But trust in the human capacity to create a new lifestyle and in the renewing actions of the Creator, “the sovereign lover of life” (Sab 11,26).

They have the same starting point. The Earthcharter says: «The dominant masters of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, exhaustion of resources and a massive extinction of species» (Preamble, 2). The encyclical repeats: «it is enough to see reality with sincerity to see that there is a great deterioration of our Common Home… the present world system is unsustainable from many points of view» (n. 61).

They make the same proposals. The Earthcharter affirms: «Fundamental changes in our values, institutions and life styles are needed» (Preamble, 3). The encyclical emphasizes: «All pretension of caring for and improving the world presupposes profound changes in the lifestyles, means of production and consumption, and the consolidated power structures that now rule society» (n. 5).

A great novelty, central to the new cosmologic and ecological paradigm, is this affirmation of the Earthcharter: «Our environmental, economic, political, social and spiritual challenges are interrelated, and together we can forge solutions that are inclusive» (Preamble, 3). The encyclical echoes this assertion: there are some threads that run all through that document: «the intimate relationship between the poor and the frailty of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the invitation to seek other ways of understanding economics and progress, the intrinsic value of each creature, the human meaning of ecology and the suggestion of a new lifestyle» (n. 16). Here solidarity among all, shared sobriety and «moving from greed to generosity and knowing how to share» is valued, (n. 9).

The Earthcharter says that «there is a spirit of kinship with all life» (Preamble 4). Similarly, the encyclical affirms: «Everything is related, and all human beings are together as brothers and sisters… and we are united, with tenderness, to brother Sun, to sister Moon, to brother River and to Mother Earth» (n. 92). That is the universal Franciscan fraternity.

The Earthcharter emphasizes that it is our duty «to respect and care for the community of life… respect the Earth in all her diversity» (I,1). The entire encyclical, starting with its title, “Caring for the Common Home”, makes a sort of ritornello from this mandate. It proposes «to nourish a passion for caring of the world» (n. 216) and «a culture of caring that permeates all of society» (n.231). Here caring emerges not as mere perfunctual benevolence but as a new paradigm, a loving friend of life and of all that exists and lives.

Another important affinity is the value assigned to social justice. The Earthcharter maintains that there is a strong relationship between ecology and «social and economic justice» that «protects the vulnerable and serves those who suffer» (n.III,9 c). The encyclical reaches one of its highest points when it affirms that «a true ecological proposal must integrate justice, in order to hear both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor» (n.49; 53).

Both The Earthcharter and the encyclical go against current common vision in emphasizing that «each form of life has value, independent of its human use» (I, 1, a). Pope Francis reaffirms that «all creatures are connected; each one must be valued with affection and admiration, and all beings need each other» (n.42). In the name of this understanding the Pope strongly criticizes anthropocentrism (nn.115-120), because it views humanity’s relationship with nature as using and devastating her and not otherwise, forgetting that human beings are part of nature and that humanity’s mission is to be her guardian and protector.

The Earthcharter devised one of the best definitions of peace that has come from human reflection: «the plenitude that results from the correct relationships with one’s self, with other persons, other cultures, other lives, with the Earth and with the All of which we are part» (16, f). If peace, according to Pope Paul VI, is «the equilibrium of movement» then the encyclical says that the «natural ecological equilibrium has to be the one within one’s own self, the solidarian one with others, the natural one with all living beings, the spiritual one with God» (n.210). The result of that process is the perennial peace so desired by all peoples.

These two documents are beacons that guide us in these somber times, and are capable of returning to us the much needed hope that we still can save the Common Home, and ourselves.

Leonardo Boff is ecotheogian and writer,author of the book: Ecogogy:cry of Earth-cry of Poors,Orbis 2002.