Categoria: Idiomas

In the midst of the pandemic: the urgency of the Spirit of Life

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

                           Leonardo Boff

In the midst of the pandemic with thousands of deaths every day, we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, of the life-giving and healing Spirit. His action with all those who are on the front lines in the fight against Covid-19 is urgent to keep them alive, protected, and with the heroic spirit to continue in their mission of saving lives, putting their own at risk.

The liturgical hymn of today’s feast speaks of him being the “great comforter and the sweet refresher”.More than ever he must show himself with these gifts to all who work in hospitals.

Let us reflect for a moment on the nature of the Holy Spirit and his relevance to life and to the present dramatic moment.

First of all it is important to say that the Spirit was the first to come into this world and is still coming. He came and pitched his tent on Mary of Nazareth. That is to say, he fixed his permanent dwelling place in her (Lk 1:35) and raised the feminine to the height of the Divine.

From this presence, the holy humanity of the Son of God originated. The Word pitched his tent (Jn 1:14) in the man Jesus, begotten by Mary. At one moment in history, she, the simple woman of Nazareth, is the temple of the living God: Two divine Persons dwell in her: the Spirit who makes her “blessed among all women” (Lk 1:42) and the Son of God, growing within her, whose mother she truly is.     

Then the Spirit descended on Jesus at the baptism by John the Baptist and inflamed him for his liberating mission. He descended on the first community gathered in Jerusalem on the feast of Pentecost that we now celebrate, giving birth to the Church. He continued to come down, regardless of whether the people were Christians and baptized or not, as happened to the Roman official Cornelius, still a pagan (Acts 11:45).

And throughout history He has always come before the missionaries, making sure that in the hearts of the people love prevailed, justice was cultivated, and compassion was lived out. Once he entered history, he never left it. He takes what belongs to Jesus, passes it on, but also “announces new things to come” (Jn 16:13).

It is by the Spirit that prophets burst forth, poets sing, artists are created, and people practice what is good, just and true. From the Spirit are shaped the saints, especially those who give their lives for the lives of others, like now those who work, almost to the point of exhaustion, in the hospitals of Brazil and the world.

It is also by the Spirit that old and crepuscular institutions suddenly renew themselves and provide needed service to communities as Pope Francis is doing and also other Christian churches.

The world is pregnant with the Spirit even as the spirit of iniquity perseveres in its work, hostile to life and all that is sacred and divine. This is happening in our country with a government that is friendlier to death than to life.

The poor feel most penalized at this moment, without an adequate house to live in, without knowing what they will eat the next day, without a job and without any security against the attacks of the lethal virus.

Today there are millions of them. The poor cry out. And God is the God of the cry, that is, the one who listens to the cry of the oppressed. He leaves his transcendence and comes down to listen to them and to free them, as in the case of the captivity in Egypt (Cf. Ex 4:3). It is the Spirit who makes us cry out Abba, dear Father (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). That is why the Spirit is the father and the godfather of the poor (pater pauperum), as the Church sings today on this feast.

He certainly does not do it miraculously, but he gives them courage and resistance, the will to fight and to conquer. He does not let his arms go down. He sent the light to the hearts of the poor to discover the right initiatives, to persist, and in fact to come alive until today; if the indigenous people could not be totally exterminated and now, because of the negligence of the oficial authorities, are at serious risk, if the Afro-descendants could not succumb to the weight of slavery, it was because inside them there was an energy of resistance and liberation, what the hymn calls the gifts and light of hearts: the Holy Spirit, no matter what name we give it.

To the desperate He shows Himself as a comforter without equal. He doesn’t assist them from outside. He has come to dwell within them as a guest to help and advise them, for this is His mission. In the great difficulties and crises, He announces Himself as a reference of peace, of calm: a refresher, for so says the Pentecost hymn that I am quoting verbatim.

He appears as the great comforter. How often, in these dark times of epidemics, the hardships of life make us fill our eyes with tears. When we lose a loved one without saying good-bye and without doing the necessary mourning, or when we experience deep frustrations, affective or professional, or when we are unemployed, we seem to fall into an abyss. It is in these moments that we must plead: “Come Spirit, be our comfort; wipe away our tears and cool our sobs.

The Holy Spirit came once and keeps coming permanently. But in dramatic moments like ours, under Covid-19 we must cry out, “Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the earth and save our country and the world.

If the Spirit doesn’t come, we will be condemned to see the landscape described by the prophet Ezekiel (c.37): the earth covered with corpses and bones everywhere. But when he comes, the corpses are clothed with life and the desert becomes a vergel. The poor will receive his justice, the sick will gain health, and the sinners, which are all of us, will receive forgiveness and grace.

This is our faith and even more, our undying hope, united with a deep solidarity with all the victims of Covid-19 around the world.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian who wrote The Holy Spirit: inner fire, giver of life, and father of the poor, Vozes 2013, Orbis Books 2014..

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

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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?

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“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.