Categoria: English

Can we still smile amidst the fear and consternation of our days

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

In my already long theological trajectory, from the beginning in the 1960s, there have always been two central themes that represent the singularities of Christianity: the society-like conception of God, (the Trinity) and the idea of the resurrection after death. If we omitted these two themes, almost nothing would change from traditional Christianity. It fundamentally predicates monotheism (only one God), as if we were Jews or Moslems. And instead of resurrection, it prefers the Platonic theme of the immortality of the soul. This is a sad loss, because we have stopped professing something special, I would say almost exclusive to Christianity, which is charged with joviality, hope, and an innovating sense of the future.

God is not the loneliness of the one, the terror of philosophers and theologians. God is the communion of three Uniques, that because they are unique are not just numbers, but a dynamic movement between diverse, equally eternal and infinite relationships – relationships so intimate and intertwined that they preclude the existence of three gods, but only one God-love-communion-inter-retro-communication. Ours is a Trinitarian monotheism, and not a-Trinitarian or pre-Trinitarian. This is how we differ from Jews and Muslims, and other monotheist traditions.

Saying that God is relationship and communion of infinite love, and that from God all things derive, allows us to understand what quantum physics has been saying for almost a century: everything in the universe is relationship, the intertwining of all with all, creating an intricate network of connections that form the unique and only universe. God, in effect, is the image and likeness of the Creator, the source of infinite interrelations between diverse beings, that are called Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This concept removes the foundation from any and all centralism, monarchism, authoritarianism and patriarchies, that used to find in a unique God and unique Lord their justification, as some critical theologians have already observed. The society-like God, however, offers metaphysical support for all types of sociality, participation and democracy.

But since preachers generally do not refer to the Trinity, but only to God (lonely and unique), there is lost a source of criticism, creativity and social transformation in the development of democracy, and of a participation that is open and without end.

Something similar occurs with the theme of the resurrection. The resurrection constitutes the central nucleus of Christianity, its point d’honneur. It gathered again the community of the apostles after the execution of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross (they were all returning, broken hearted, to their homes). It was the testimony of the women who said: “that Jesus who was dead and buried lives and has resurrected”. The resurrection is not a kind of reanimation of a corpse, such as Lazarus, who finally died like anyone else, but the revelation of the novissimus Adam in the joyous expression of Paul: the irruption of the definitive Adam, the new human being, as if a good ending to the entire process of anthropogenesis and cosmogenisis were being forecast. Consequently; a revolution in evolution.

The Christianity of early times lived in this faith in the resurrection, summarized by Saint Paul saying: “If Christ did not resurrect our preaching is empty and our faith vain” (1Cor 15,14). In that case, it would be better to think: “let’s eat and drink because tomorrow we will die” (15,22). But if Jesus was resurrected, everything changes. We will also be resurrected, because He is the first among many brothers and sisters, “the first of those who died” (1Cor 15,20). In other words, and this is a good response to all those who say that we are beings-for-death: we die, yes, but we die to be resurrected, to leap towards the end of evolution and to anticipate it in the here and now of our temporality.

I do not know a more hope filled message than this one. Christians should announce it and live it everywhere. But Christians put it aside and were left with the Platonic pronouncement of the immortality of the soul. Others, as, ironically, Nietzsche already observed, are sad and taciturn, as if there were neither redemption nor resurrection. Pope Francis says that “they are Christians of Lent without resurrection” with “a funeral face”, they are so sad that they look as if they were going to their own funeral.

When someone dies, the end of the world arrives for that person. In that moment, the moment of death, resurrection occurs: it inaugurates time without time, the blessed eternity.

In an epoch such as ours, one of a general disintegration of social relations and of threats of devastation of life in its different forms, and even with the danger of the disappearance of our human species, it is worth standing for these two illuminations: That God is the communion of three who are a relation of love, and that life is not destined to personal and collective death, but to still more life. Christians point to a sign of this bet: The Crucified that was Transformed. He bears the signs of his painful passing among us, the marks of the torture and crucifixion, but, now transformed, the human potentialities hidden within Him were fully realized. That is why we announce Him as the new being among us.

Easter is not for celebrating anything other than this joyous reality, that helps us smile and to look to the future without fear or pessimism.

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

Losing oneself to find oneself: the monk, the cat and the moon

Leonardo Boff1 comentário

Modern man has lost the sense of contemplation, of marveling at his reflection in the crystalline waters of a brook, of being filled with surprise at the starry sky, and being entranced by the brilliant eyes of a child who looks questioningly at him. Modern man does not know the freshness of an autumn afternoon and is incapable of being alone, without a car, the Internet, or television; without his sound equipment. He is afraid of listening to the inner voice, the voice that never lies, that gives us counsel, that applauds us, judges us and is always with us. What is profoundly true can only be well expressed, as the ancient wise men witness, through short stories and rarely through concepts. Sometimes when we imagine that we are lost, that is when we find ourselves. This story tries to communicate that to us: it is a challenge for us all.

This short story, written by my brother Waldemar Boff, who tries to live as the monks of the desert used to live, brings us back to our lost dimension. Waldemar, one of my 10 brothers, who studied in the United States, is now a peasant and an educator of the people. Waldemar writes:
«There was a hermit who lived well beyond the Iguazaim mountains, South of the Acaman desert. Some 30 fine years had passed since he had retired to that place. A few nanny goats gave him his daily milk and a plot of the fertile valley gave him bread. Near his cabin there was a grapevine. During the year, under the ceiling of palm fronds, the bees would build their hives.

“For 30 years I have lived here…”, Porfirio, the monk, sighed. “Some good 30 years…”. And, sitting on a rock, his gaze lost in the waters of the small stream that bounded among the pebbles, he stayed with this thought for long hours. “30 good years and I still have not found myself. I became lost for everything and for everyone, in the hope of finding myself. But I have lost myself irremediably!”.

The following morning, before sunrise, after the prayer of the pilgrims, with a frugal sack on his back and half torn sandals on his feet, he began walking towards the Iguazaim mountains. He always climbed the mountains when strange forces threatened to collapse his interior world. He would go to visit Abba Tebaino, the most elderly and wise hermit, father of a whole generation of men of the desert. Abba Tebaino lived under a large boulder, from which the wheat fields of the village of Icanaum could be seen far below.

“Abba, I got lost to find myself. However, I became irremediably lost. I know not who I am, nor what for or for whom I am. I have lost the best of myself, of my very own self. I have sought peace and contemplation, but I struggle with a phalange of phantoms. I have done everything to deserve peace. Look at my body, as twisted as a root, marked by so many fasts, rough shirts and vigils… And here I am, broken and weak, defeated by the weariness of the search”.

And deep into the night, under an enormous moon illuminating the profile of the mountains, Abba Tebaino, sitting at the door of the grotto, listened with infinite tenderness to the confidences of brother Porfirio.

Later, in one of those intervals where the words fall silent and only the presence remains, a tiny cat who had lived with Abba for many years, slowly came crawling up to his bare feet. The tiny cat mewed, licked the coarse ending of the sayal, made himself comfortable and began to contemplate, with his great childlike eyes, the moon that, like the soul of the just, silently climbed to heaven.

And, after a long time had passed, Abba Tebaino began to speak, with great sweetness:

“Porfirio, my dear son, you have to be like the cat; he searches for nothing for himself, but expects everything from me. Every morning he waits by my side for a crust of bread and some milk from this old wooden bowl. Later on, he comes and spends the day very close to me, licking my swollen feet. He wants nothing, searches for nothing, expects everything. He is availability. He is surrender. He lives for living, pure and simply. He lives for the other. He is gift, grace, gratitude. Here, lying close to me, innocent and ingenuous, he contemplates, as archaic as being, the miracle of the moon that climbs, enormous and blessed. The cat does not search for himself, not even for the intimate vanity of self-purification or the satisfaction of self-realization. That was irremediably lost for me and for the moon… That is the condition for being what one is, and for finding oneself”.

And a profound silence descended on the mouth of the great boulder.

The following morning, before the sun rose, the two hermits sang the matins psalms. Their praises echoed through the mountains and made the borders of the universe tremble. Then, they gave each other a farewell kiss. Brother Porfiro, with a small bag on his shoulders and half broken sandals on his feet, returned to his valley, the South of the Acaman desert. He understood that to find himself he had to lose himself in the purest and most simple gratitude.

And the people who lived in the neighboring village say that many years later, in the profound night of a full moon, they saw in the sky a great radiance. It was Porfiro the monk who was climbing, together with the moon, to the infinite immensity of the heavens, deliriously sprinkled with stars. He did not need to lose himself now, because he had definitively found himself forever».

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

Everlasting peace with nature and with Mother Earth

Leonardo Boff1 comentário

One of the more fertile legacies of Francis of Assisi, actualized by Francis of Rome, is the Prayer for Peace, which is so urgent at the present. Saint Francis initially greeted those he saw by wishing them, “Peace and Good,” which corresponds to the Biblical Shalom. The peace he longed for was not limited to interpersonal and social relations. He sought an everlasting peace with all aspects of nature, calling them by the sweet name of brothers and sisters.

Especially “sister and Mother Earth,” as he called her, was supposed to be embraced with the embrace of peace. His first biographer, Tomas de Celano, summarizes beautifully the feeling of fraternity with the world that filled him when he gave this testimony: «He was filled with ineffable delight every time he saw the sun, when he contemplated the moon, and turned his sight towards the firmament and the stars. When he encountered the flowers he preached to them as if they were endowed with intelligence, and invited them to praise God. He did that with innocence and moving tenderness: he exhorted the vineyards, the wheat fields, the stones and the jungles, the fields of the countryside and the current of the rivers, the beautiful orchards, the Earth, the fire and the wind, to be grateful».

This attitude of reverence and tenderness motivated him pick up slugs from the path, so that no one would step on them. He gave honey to the bees in winter, so that they would not die of hunger and cold. He asked the brothers not to cut the trees from the root, in the hope that they might grow again. Even the weeds had to have a place reserved in the gardens, so that they might thrive, because they also announce “the most beautiful Father of all beings.”

Only those who have listened to the symbiotic resonance within the soul, uniting the environmental ecology with the profound ecology, can experience this intimacy with all beings. Saint Francis never placed himself above things, but besides them, as one who truly coexists as brother and sister, discovering the parental links that unite all.

The Franciscan and ecological universe is never inert; things are neither placed there to be within the reach of the grasping hand of the human being, nor juxtaposed one alongside another, without coexisting with each other. Everything composes a grandiose symphony whose master is the same Creator; all things are animated and personalized. Francis discovered by intuition what we know now through scientific means (Crick and Dawson, deciphered the DNA): that all living beings are related, cousins, brothers and sisters, because we all possess the same basic genetic code. Francis experienced this blood kinship spiritually.

From this attitude was born an imperturbable peace, without fear and threats, a peace of one who always feels at home, with parents, brothers and sisters. Saint Francis totally realized the splendid definition The Earthcharter found for peace: «it is the plenitude created by correct relationships with oneself, with other persons, other cultures, other lives, with the Earth and with the main Whole of which we all are part» (n.16 f).

The supreme expression of peace, a fraternal coexistence and warm welcome to all persons and things, is symbolized in the well known story of the perfect joy. Through an artifice of imagination, Francis posits all types of injuries and violence suffered by two friars (one of them Francis himself). Rain-soaked and coated with mud, they arrive at the convent exhausted. There they are rejected with multiple blows (“beaten with a gnarled stick”), by the porter friar. Even though they had been recognized as friars, they are morally vilified and rejected as people of ill repute.

In the story of the perfect joy, that find parallels in the Buddhist tradition, Francis proceeds, step by step, to dismantle the mechanisms that generate the culture of violence. True joy lies not in self-esteem, or the need for recognition, in performing miracles, or in speaking in tongues. In its place Francis puts the fundamentals of the culture of peace: love, the capacity to endure contradictions, forgiveness and reconciliation beyond any presupposition or previous demand. When this attitude is lived, peace follows, a peace that is interior, inalterable, capable of joyfully coexisting with the harshest opposition, peace that is the fruit of a complete divestment. Are these not the first fruits of the Kingdom of justice, of the peace and love for which we so greatly long?

This vision of peace of Saint Francis represents another mode of being-in-the-world, an alternative to the mode of being of modernity and post-modernity, based on possession and disrespectful use of things for human pleasure with no other consideration.

Even though he lived more than eight hundred years ago, it is Francis of Assisi who is new, not us. We are old and are aged, because with our voracity we are destroying the bases that sustain life in our planet and endangering our future as a species. The discovery of the cosmic fraternity will help us overcome this crisis and will give back to us the lost innocence that is the childlike clarity of adulthood

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

When the Great Tribulation arrives, the Earth will at last have her well deserved rest

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

It appears to me that the reflections of Waldemar Boff*, who practices ecology with small rural producers near the Surui river, in Baixada Fluminense, Brazil, are very opportune.

This is his text:

«No one knows the day or the hour with certainty. That is because, almost without realizing it, we are already in its midst. But it is coming, with ever greater intensity and clarity. When the great catastrophe occurs, it will appear to be a surprise.

Not withstanding that well documented data point to the inevitability of global changes due to climate, with consequences that scientists are trying to fathom, and that surely will worsen, the economic interests of the great nations and their leaders’ lack of vision keep them from taking the measures necessary to mitigate its effects and adapt their way of living to the Earth’s feverish state.

We can imagine a plausible scene in which hurricanes will wipe out entire regions. Gigantic waves will overwhelm cities and civilizations, leaving them to die at the feet of the mountains. Lengthy droughts will cause all that wealth to be traded for a simple glass of dirty water. Extreme heat and cold will make us recall nostalgically our grandmothers’ tales of the afternoon breezes and the heat of the hearth fires in winter, always foreseeable, and of fruits ripened by the warmth of a beneficent summer sun. People then will eat only to survive, always small meals of questionable taste.

But that will not be the worst. The rail-thin mother will be unable to bury her daughter, and the grandson will kill his grandfather for a crumb of bread. Dogs and cats, mankind’s friends, will be sought everywhere as the last possibility to satiate hunger. The living will envy the dead and no one will mourn the deaths of the children. Hunger will reach such a point that, as in besieged Jerusalem, the starving will await death’s next victim, to eat away the flaccid flesh.

“the countryside will be devastated and the cities will be in ruins. When she is devastated, the Earth will rest for the Saturdays she did not rest when you inhabited Her” (Lev 26,33-35).

But will this be the end of the biosphere? No. For the just and sensible ones, God will make those days brief, and will not destroy all life on Earth, keeping the promise made to our father Noah. But it is necessary for humans to pass through that tribulation to awaken from their selfishness and recognize that the human being is part of the community of life, and is its main guardian.

What can we do to prepare ourselves for those times? First, we must recognize that we are already living in them. We no longer know when Spring or Fall will come. Nor can we count on the months of cold and warmth. We no longer know when there will be rain or sun. Also, it is important to remain silent, vigilant, and observant, watching for the signs that indicate the acceleration of the processes of change. And above all, it is essential to convert, to change our life habits, undergo personal change, profound and definitive. Only then will we have the moral conditions to ask others to do so. But, as in the time of the prophets, few will listen, some will ridicule and the majority will remain indifferent, allowing themselves all sorts of liberties, as in the times of Noah.

We should also return to our roots, to start over, as repentant humanity has done so many times before, recognizing that we are just creatures, and not the Creator, that we are comrades and not the lords of nature; that to be happy we must necessarily submit to the great laws of life and listen attentively to the voices of our consciences. If we obey those main laws, we will harvest the fruits of the Earth and the joy of the soul. If we disobey them, we will inherit a civilization like that in which we are living now, full of greed, war and sorrow.

For the coming times of scarcity we must retake the ancestral arts and techniques of planting, gathering, eating; of caring for the animals and using them with respect, of making utensils and tools with local crafts and technologies; of selecting and planting herbs that cure and grains that nourish; harvesting to weave; preserving the sources of water, finding the right places to dig wells and learning again to store rainwater. We must rejoin the economy of scarcity, of shared sobriety and naked beauty. From that recovered and enriched knowledge a civilization of contentment will grow, a bio-civilization, the Earth of good expectations.

After that epoch of tears and hope, we will overcome the stupid war of religions, that intolerable dispute of gods. Beyond prophets and traditions, beyond morals and liturgies, perhaps we will return to worshiping, under a multiplicity of names and forms, the only Creator of everything and Father-Mother of all life in the Great Spirit who unites and inspires all, lovingly intertwined in one unique universal fraternity. And we will at last be able to truly organize a union of all the peoples of the world and an authentic parliament of all religions».

*Waldemar Boff, a graduate in philosophy and sociology in the United States, works with the Popular Organization and Education Service, SEOP, from the Spanish, Servicio de Educación y Organización Popular, in La Baixada Fluminense, Brazil.

 
Leonardo Boff

03-30-2014
Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.