Categoria: Idiomas

Experiencing Mourning and Loss

Leonardo Boff1 comentário

Loss and mourning inexorably belong to the human condition. All of us are subjected to the unbreakable law of entropy: everything wears down slowly; the body debilitates, the years leave their mark, illnesses uncontrollably take away our vital capital. Such is the law of life, that includes death.

But there are also ruptures that break the natural flow. These are the losses produced by traumatic events such as betrayal by a friend, loss of a job, loss of a loved one due to divorce, or to sudden death. Tragedy is also part of life.

It represents a big personal challenge to face these losses and still nourish resilience, this is, to learn from the crises. Especially painful is the experience of mourning, because it reveals all the power of the Negative. Mourning possesses an intrinsic characteristic: it demands to be endured, crossed, and positively overcome.

There are many specialized studies about mourning. According to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, her experience and overcoming consisted of several steps.

The first is denial: confronting the paralyzing event, the person exclaims in a natural way: «It cannot be», «it is a lie.» Disconsolate cries erupt that no single word can express.

The second step is the rage that exclaims: «why me? It is not fair what has happened.» It is the moment when the person sees the uncontrollable limits of life and does not want to accept them. It is not uncommon to blame one’s self for the loss, for not having done something, or for having left undone what had to be done.

The third step is characterized by depression and an existential vacuum. We close ourselves into our own shells and take pity on ourselves. We resist remaking ourselves. Here all warm embrace and all words of consolation, conventional as they may sound, take an unsuspected meaning. It is the yearning of the soul for meaning, and to know that the guiding stars have only darkened, but not disappeared.

The fourth step is self strengthening, through a species of negotiations with the pain of the loss: «I cannot succumb or totally withdraw; I have to endure all this pain to take care of my family, or until I get my degree.» In the middle of the darkest night, a ray of light is seen.

The fifth appears as a resigned and serene acceptance of the unavoidable fact. We end up incorporating into our existential journey the wound that left the scar. No one exits a period of mourning as he entered it. The person is forced to mature and experience the fact that the loss is not total, but that it always brings some existential gain.

Mourning is a painful journey, and therefore, it has to be experienced. Let me offer an autobiographic example that would better clarify the need to undergo mourning. In 1981 I lost a sister with whom I had a special bond. She was the youngest of the sisters of 11 brothers. As a professor, one morning around 10 am, in front of her students, she let out an immense cry, and fell dead. Mysteriously, at 33 years of age, her aorta vein had ruptured.

The whole family, coming from different parts of the country, was disoriented by this fatal shock. We cried plentiful tears. We spent two days looking at photographs and, saddened, remembering the facts of the life of our beloved little sister. The other members of the family could go through this mourning and loss. I had to leave shortly thereafter for Chile, where I had to hold conferences for all the friars of the Southern Cone. I left with a broken heart. Every talk was an exercise in self-overcoming. From Chile, I continued to Italy where I had to deliver talks on the renovation of religious life for everyone in the congregation.

The loss of my beloved sister tormented me as an unbearable absurdity. I started to faint two or three times a day, without any physically obvious reason. I had to be taken to a physician. I told him about the drama that was going on. He understood everything and told me: «you have not buried your sister yet, nor have gone through the necessary mourning; as long as you do not undergo your period of mourning and do not bury her, you will not get better; something of yourself died with her and that needs to be resurrected.» I canceled all the other programs. In silence and in prayer I went through my mourning. When I was back home, in a restaurant, as we remembered our beloved sister, my theologian brother Clodovis and I wrote in a paper napkin something that we later put in a memorial card:

«There were thirty three years, as the years of Jesus/Years of much work and suffering/but also very fruitful/ Claudia was burdened with the suffering of others/In her own heart, as a rescue/She was as clear as the mountain fountain/Loving and tender as the flower of the field/She knitted, step by step, and in silence/ A precious brocade/She left two little ones, strong and beautiful/And a husband, proud of her/Happy you, Claudia, because the Lord, when He was back/He found you standing, working/Lamp alight/And you fell in his lap/For the infinite embrace of Peace.»

Among her papers we found this phrase: «There is always a meaning of God in all human events: it is important to discover it.» Until today we continue searching for that meaning, that only in faith can we divine.

We Need Courage

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

One of the most important Brazilian religious figures of the XX century, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns,from São Paulo, celebrated his 90th birthday this past September 14th. He was my teacher when He came back from the Sorbonne, in Agudos, Sao Paulo, when I was still wearing shorts, and after that, in Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro, when I was already a friar, professor of Liturgy and of theology of the Fathers of the Early Church. He demanded that we read them in their original languages, Greek and Latin, which instilled in me a profound love for the classics of Christian thinking. Later, he was elected auxiliary bishop of Sao Paulo. To protect him, because he defended human rights and –at the risk of his own life– denounced the torture of political prisoners in the dungeons of the organisms of repression, Pope Paul VI made him a Cardinal.

Prophetic, but as gentle as a Saint Francis, he always maintained the dimension of hope, even during the long night of the dictatorship. Everyone who saw him could hear, without fail, as I did, these firm and strong words: «courage, always forward, from hope to hope.»

Valor, or courage, it is an urgently needed virtue at present. I like to seek the deepest meaning of human values in the wisdom of the original peoples. This is why, at the Earthcharter gathering celebrated in The Hague, on June 29, 2010, where I actively participated alongside Mercedes Sosa, when she was still alive, I asked Pauline Tangiora, an old Maori woman from New Zealand, what was to her the most important virtue. To my surprise, she said: «courage». I asked her again: «why exactly courage?» She replied:

«We need courage to stand up for what is right where injustice reigns. Without courage we cannot reach the top of any mountain; without courage you can never reach the depth of your soul. To face suffering, you need courage; only with courage you can lend a hand to and lift a fallen one. We need courage to raise sons and daughters for this world. To find courage we have to unite with the Creator. It is the Creator who elicits from us the courage to struggle for justice.»

This is the courage Cardinal Arns instilled in all who strongly opposed those who stole democracy from us, and who detained, tortured and murdered, in the name of the Security of the National State (in reality, in the name of the security of capital.).

I would add: we need courage today to denounce the mirages of the neoliberal system, whose theses have been thoroughly debunked by the facts; courage to recognize that we are not headed for an encounter with global warming, but that we are already within that global warming; courage to show the causal links between the undeniable extreme events, the consequences of this global warming; courage to show that Gaia is seeking her lost equilibrium, which may result in the elimination of thousands of species and, if we are not careful, also the elimination of ours; courage to denounce the irresponsibility of those who make decisions, who still continue with the vain and dangerous objective of growth and more growth, taking from the Earth goods and services she can no longer replenish and thus weaken her, day after day; courage to recognize that the refusal to change the paradigm of the relationship between the Earth and the means of production will unfailingly lead us down a path of no return, thereby endangering our civilization; courage to undertake the option for the poor and against their poverty and in favor of life and justice, as the Church of liberation and Don Paulo Evaristo Arns do.

We need courage to say that Western Civilization is in mortal decline, unable to offer an alternative to the process of globalization; courage to recognize that the strategies of the Vatican to regain the Church’s lost visibility and credibility are illusory, and that the media-churches are reducing the message of Jesus to a cheap sedative to banish the realities of the poor from their consciences, in a shameless process of childishness of the faithful; courage to declare that a humanity that had come to see God in the universe, the carrier of conscience and responsibility, can still rescue the vitality of Mother Earth and save our essay of civilization; courage to affirm that, taking everything together, life has a greater future that death, and that a small ray of light is more potent than all the obscurity of a dark night.

To declare and to denounce all this, as Cardinal Arns and Indigenous Maori Pauline Tangiori did, we need courage… Lots of courage.

What caused the September 11th?

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We would have to be inhumane not to condemn the September 11th attacks by al-Qaeda against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and it would be cruel not to show solidarity with the more than three thousand victims of those terrorist acts.

That said, we should delve deeper into the issue, and ask ourselves: why did this meticulously premeditated attack occur? Things do not happen simply because some crazy nuts are full of hatred, and commit such crimes against their political opponents. There have to be deeper causes that, if they persist, will continue to feed terrorism.

If we look at the history of more than the past century, we see that the West, as a whole, and particularly the Unites States, has humiliated the Moslem countries of the Middle East. They controlled their governments, took their oil and built immense military bases. They left behind much bitterness and rage, the cultural breeding ground for revenge and terrorism.

What is terrible about terrorism is that it takes over minds. To effectively triumph in wars and guerrilla uprisings, it is necessary to occupy physical space. Not so with terrorism. It is enough to occupy the mind, to distort the imagination and to introduce fear. The Northamericans physically occupied the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and Iraq, but the Taliban psychologically occupied the minds of the Northamericans. Unfortunately, Bin Laden’s October 8, 2002, prophecy is being fulfilled: «The United States will never feel secure again, it will never again have peace.» The United States is now a country that is hostage to the fear that has been spread.

So as not to give the impression of being anti-Northamerican, I will transcribe here a segment of the words of the Bishop of Melbourne Beach, Florida, Robert Bowman, who, before becoming a Bishop, had been a military fighter pilot, who flew 101 combat missions in the Vietnam War. He wrote an open letter to then-President Bill Clinton, who ordered the bombings of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam, where the Northamerican embassies had been attacked by terrorists. The content of that letter also applies to Bush, who waged war against Afghanistan and Iraq, a war that Obama now continues. The letter, still timely, was published by the National Catholic Reporter on October 2, l998 under the title: Why is the US hated?, and goes like this:

«You, Mr. President, have said that we are the target of attacks because we defend democracy, liberty and human rights. That is absurd! We are the target of terrorists because, in large portions of the world, our government has defended dictatorships, slavery and human exploitation. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government does hateful things. In how many countries have agents of our government removed leaders chosen by their people, who exchanged them for military dictators – puppets who wanted to sell their countries to Northamerican multinational companies!

We have done so in Iran, in Chile and in Vietnam, in Nicaragua, and in the rest of the «banana republics» of Latin America. In country after country, our government has opposed democracy, suffocated freedom and violated human rights. This is the reason we are hated all over the world. It is for this reason that we are the target of terrorists.

Instead of sending our sons and daughters to kill Arabs throughout the world and thus to take control of the oil under their lands, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructures, to help them with drinking water, and to feed their children who are in danger of starving to death. This is the truth, Mister President. This is what the Northamerican people must understand.»

The correct answer is not to fight terror with terror, a la Bush, but with solidarity. Members of the associations of victims of the Twin Towers went to Afghanistan to found aid associations, so that the people may emerge from misery. Through such humanity, the root causes of terrorism are annulled.

The Earth Defends Herself by Slowing down Growth

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The idea of a living Earth is widely accepted, and has been incorporated into the most recent manuals of ecology (cf.R. Barbault, Ecologia Geral, Vozes, Petrópolis 2011.) It was first proposed by Russian geochemist W.Vernadsky in the 1920’s, and was retaken with great depth in the 1970s by James Lovelock, and among us, by J. Lutzenberger, where she was called Gaia. This name tries to convey the fact that the Earth is a gigantic, self regulating, super-organism, that makes all beings interconnect and cooperate with each other. Nothing is omitted, because everything is an expression of the life of Gaia, including human societies, their cultural projects, and their forms of production and consumption. But by creating the conscious and free human being, Gaia has endangered herself. Human beings are called upon to live in harmony with her, but they can also break the bonds of belonging. She is tolerant, but when the rupture damages the whole, she teaches us bitter lessons. We can already feel them now.

All the world is lamenting the slow world growth, especially in the developed countries. Many reasons are given, but from a radical ecological perspective, it is a reaction of the Earth herself to excessive exploitation by the producing and consumerist system of the industrialized countries. The aggression against Earth’s systems has been carried too far, to the point that, as some scientists note, we have inaugurated a new ecological era: the anthropocene, where the human being, as a destructive geologic force, is accelerating the sixth mass extinction, that has been underway for millennia. Gaia is defending herself, undermining the conditions of the myth of all present-day societies, including the Brazilian: that of growth, the bigger the better, with unlimited consumption.

Already in 1972, the Club of Rome took note of the limits of growth, that the Earth can no longer sustain it. It takes a year and a half to restore what we extract from her in a year. Therefore, growth is hostile to life and hurts the resilience of Mother Earth. But we do not understand, nor do we want to recognize, the signs she gives. We want more and more growth, and consequently we want to consume recklessly. The «World Economic Perspectives» report of the International Monetary Fund, foresees a 4.3% rate of worldwide growth in 2012. This is to say, we will extract more wealth from the Earth, throwing her off balance, as is shown by global warming.

The «Systemic Evaluation of the Millennium» carried out between 2001 and 2005 by the U.N. to ascertain the degradation of the principal factors that sustain life, warned: either we change our ways, or we endanger the future of our civilization.

The 2008 economic-financial crisis, that has returned now in 2011, refutes the myth of growth. There is a generalized blindness, from which not even the 17 Nobel laureates for economics escape, as was seen in their recent meeting in Lindau Lake, South Germany. Except for Joseph Stiglitz, they all agreed that the structure of the present economy bears no responsibility for the present crisis (Page 12, Buenos Aires, 8/28/2011). Therefore, they simply propose continuing down the same path of growth, with some corrections, without realizing that they have become bad advisors.

It is important to recognize the dilemma inherent in finding a solution: there are regions of the planet that need to grow to meet the demands of the poor, obviously while caring for nature and avoiding incorporation into the consumerist culture. And other highly developed regions have to be solidarian with the poor, control their own growth, take only what is natural and renewable, restore that which they have devastated and return more of what they have taken, so that future generations may also live with dignity as part of the community of life.

The reduction of growth is a wise reaction on the part of the Earth. It sends us this message: «Forget the outrageous idea of growth, for it is like a cancer that will erode all the sources of life. Seek human development of those intangible goods that can grow without limit, such as love, caring, solidarity, compassion, artistic and spiritual creation.»

I do not think I am wrong in believing that there are ears attentive to this message, and that together we will make the longed-for journey.