Categoria: Idiomas

Rites and play: things very much forgotten

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

In the weeks of the Soccer World Cup we are experiencing moments full of rites, celebrations and symbols. The opening ceremony was a sequence of rites and symbols linked to soccer, principally the presentation of the teams, and the singing of the national anthem. An environment of celebration filled the cities, adorning the streets and the windows of the houses.

Here we tackle the theme of rites and celebrations, whose human and social meaning not always is thought about, and often is forgotten. First, without rite there is no celebration, because a celebration moves within the symbolic world of rites and symbols. We eat and drink in a celebration not to satisfy hunger or thirst. For that, we eat at home or in a restaurant. Rather, it symbolizes the friendship and joy of the encounter and of participating together in an event such as a soccer match. Singing in a celebration is not intended as a display of music as art, but as a ritual expression of exuberance and existential relief. And how we celebrate and drink when our favorite team wins a match or the championship!

«What is a rite?» the Little Prince asked the fox who had captured him in the famous book by Antoine de Saint Exupery of the same title. And the fox responded: «it is something very much forgotten, it is what makes some days different from the others, one hour different from the others. There is a rite among those who hunt me, they go to dance with the girls of the town on Thursdays, and therefore, Thursday is a marvelous day! I can stroll up to the vineyard. If the hunters danced on just any day, all the days would be the same and I would have no rest» (p.27).

A rite is, then, what makes a celebration different from other days. But it only gains expressive strength if there is preparation and inner anticipation, as occurs before a soccer match between two famous teams. This is why the fox advises the Little Prince: «it would be better if you always came at the same time, if you would come, say, at 4 in the afternoon; at three I would already start to be happy… but if you were to come at any old time, I would never know how to prepare my heart. The rite is necessary» (p.71).

Only with the rite will there be celebration, because then everything loses its natural consistency, taking on a profoundly human symbolic value. Things lose their actuality (are useless), in order to gain their true meaning. The sound of footsteps would never scare away the fox, they are like music that portends the proximity of the Little Prince. The wheat fields do not remind him of bread (actuality) but of the golden locks of the Little Prince (meaning).

Besides in the afore mentioned events, the presence of rite is generally strong in religious celebrations (marriage, for example, or priestly ordination). The rite expresses the meaning of things better than language, which, as the fox comments, «is full of misunderstandings». Therefore a rite is particularly expressive when it comes from the depths of our beings, from our deepest archetypes, where our personal identity is found.

Every human being, including the most secular and rational, is mythical, in the sense of ritual and symbolic expression. Humans who want to express their inner selves, their joy, their sadness, their passion, or their love, do not use cold concepts, but metaphors or life stories, that are the true myths. Through them, the mystery of the personal journey of each one emerges without violating it. Rites and celebrations always demand seriousness and concentration.

Everything we speak of about rites also has much to do with play. I am not thinking of the play that has become a profession and big international business, such as soccer and others. They are more sports than acts of play. Play, as it occurs in popular environments, on an improvised site or on the beach, has no practical utility, but it carries profound meaning as an expression of the joy of being, and of having a good time together.

There is an old tradition of the two sister Churches, the Latin and the Greek, that references Deus ludens, homo ludens and even eccclesia ludens (playful God, man and church). They saw creation as a great game of a playful Divinity: God launched from one side the stars, from the other the Sun, below, the planets and, with tenderness, the Earth, at just the right distance from the Sun, so that she may have life. Creation is a kind of all embracing happiness of God, a theatrum gloriae Dei (a theater of the glory of God).

In a beautiful poem the great theologian of the Greek Orthodox Church, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (c.330-c.390), says: «The sublime Logos plays, adorning the whole cosmos, for pure pleasure and in every way with the most varied images». In effect, play is a work of creative fantasy, as children show: it expresses a freedom without coercion, creating a world without practical end, free from profit and individual advantages. One of the finest theologians of the XX century, the brother of another eminent theologian, who was my professor in Germany, Karl Rahner, strongly recommended that «because God is vere ludens (truly playful) everyone must also be veres ludens».

These considerations show how our existence here on Earth could be serene and without anguish, especially when it is transformed by the jovial presence of God in His creation. So we do not have to be afraid. What takes away freedom is fear. The opposite of faith is not so much atheism as fear, especially fear of solitude. To have faith, more than to adhere to a series of truths, is to be happy, feeling oneself in the palm of the hand of God, and being able to live before the Divine like a child who plays with utter abandon.

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

The pact of the catacombs as lived by Pope Francis

Leonardo Boff1 comentário

On November 16, 1965, when Vatican Council II (1962-1965) was ending, some bishops, encouraged by Dom Helder Camara, celebrated a Mass in the Catacombs of Saint Domitilla and made the Pact of the Catacombs of the Church, slave and poor. They proposed for themselves ideals of poverty and simplicity, leaving their palaces and living in simple houses or apartments. Now with Pope Francis this pact is gaining real meaning. It is worth remembering the commitments undertaken by the bishops.

«We bishops, gathered in Vatican Council II, conscious of the deficiencies of our lives of poverty according to the Gospels; encouraged each by the others, in an initiative in which each of us would seek to avoid exceptionality and presumption; united with all our brothers in the episcopacy; counting above all on the grace and strength of Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the prayers of the faithful and of the priests of our respective dioceses; putting ourselves with thought and prayer before the Trinity, before the Church of Christ, and before the priests and the faithful of our dioceses, with humility and conscious of our weaknesses, but also with all the determination and strength that God wishes to give us as His grace, we commit ourselves to the following:

1) We will undertake to live according to the ordinary way our population lives, in what concerns housing, food, means of transportation and all that follows from that.

2) We renounce for ever the appearances and the reality of wealth, especially in dress (rich textiles, flashy colors, insignia of precious metals). Those symbols must certainly be evangelical: neither gold nor silver.

3) We will posses neither private property nor furniture, no bank accounts, etc., in our name; and if it would be necessary to have them, we will put everything in the name of our dioceses, or of the charitable social organs.

4) Whenever possible we will trust the financial and material issues of our dioceses to competent lay commissions who are conscious of their apostolic role, in the service of being less administrators than pastors and apostles.

5) We will refuse to be called, orally or in writing, by names and titles that imply greatness and power (Eminence, Excellence, Monsignor…). We prefer to be called by the evangelical name of Father.

6) In our behavior and in our social relations we will avoid all that could appear to be concessions to privilege, priorities or any preference for the rich and the powerful (i.e.: banquets offered or accepted, social classes in religious services).

7) Likewise, we will avoid encouraging or flattering the vanity of anyone, with an eye to recompense, or to seeking gifts, or for any other reason. We will invite our faithful to consider their gifts as a normal participation in the cult, the apostolate and social action.

8) We will give all that is necessary of our time, reflection, heart, means, etc. to the pastoral and apostolic service of individuals and labor groups, and the economically weak and underdeveloped, without harming other persons or groups of the diocese. We will support the lay, religious, deacons or priests whom the Lord calls to evangelize the poor and the workers, sharing their life and labor.

9) Conscious of the demands of justice and charity, and of their inter-relationship, we will strive to transform the works of “beneficence” into social works based on charity and justice, that take into account all men and women, as a humble service to competent public organisms.

10) We will do everything possible to see that those responsible for our government and for our public services decide and put into practice the laws, structures and social institutions necessary for justice, equality, and the harmonious and full development of the complete man in all men, and, this way, to bring about a different social order, a new one, worthy of the children of men and of the children of God.

11) Since the collegiality of the bishops finds its best evangelical realization in the service in common with the majorities in a state of physical, cultural and moral misery ―two thirds of humanity― we commit ourselves:

-to participate, according to our means, in the urgent investments of the episcopates of the poor nations;

-to seek together, at the level of the international organisms, always offering the witness of the Gospels as Pope Paul VI did in the United Nations, the adoption of economic and cultural structures that, instead of creating more poor nations in a world that is ever richer, allow the impoverished majorities to escape their misery.

12) We commit ourselves to share our lives, in pastoral charity, with our brothers in Christ, the priests, the religious, and the lay, so that our ministry constitutes a true service; thus:

-we will strive to “review our life” with them;

-we will search for collaborators who are more animators according to the Spirit than chiefs according to the world;

-we will try to make ourselves more humanly present and welcoming;

-we will be open to all, no matter what their religion may be.

13) When we return to our dioceses, we will make known to our diocesan our resolution, asking them to help us with their understanding, their collaboration and their prayers.

May God help us to be faithful».

Are not these the ideals presented by Pope Francis?Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Soccer as a universal secular religion

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The World Soccer Cup currently being held in Brazil, and other great soccer events as well, take on characteristics proper of religions. To millions of people, soccer, the sport that possibly mobilizes the most people in the world, has occupied the place religion commonly held. Some scholars of religion, like Emile Durkheim and Lucien Goldmann, to mention only two of the most important, say that religion is not a system of ideas; but above all, «a system of forces that mobilizes people to lift them up to the highest exaltation.» (Durckheim). Faith is always associated with religion. The same classical writer affirms in his famous book, The Elemental Forms of Religious Life: «faith is above all warmth, life, enthusiasm, exaltation of mental life, the transport of the individual beyond himself» (p.607). And Lucien Goldamn, sociologist of religion and a Pascalian Marxist, concludes: «to believe is to assert that life and history make sense; absurdity exists, but it does not prevail».

Thus for many people, soccer embodies religious characteristics: faith, enthusiasm, warmth, exaltation, a field of forces and an enduring trust that one’s own team will win.

The opening spectacle of the games reminds us of a large religious celebration, full of reverence, respect, silence, followed by noisy applause and enthusiastic shouts; sophisticated rituals with music and scenic displays of the different cultures present in the country; presentation of the symbols of soccer (the standards and flags), especially the cup, that functions as a true sacred chalice, a holy Grail sought by all. And there is, said with respect, the ball, that functions as a sort of host token shared by all.

In soccer as in religion, let’s take Catholicism for reference, there are eleven apostles (Judas does not count) who are the eleven players, sent to represent a country; the saints of reference such as Pele, Garrincha, Beckenbauer and others; there is also a Pope, who is the President of FIFA, endowed with almost infallible powers. He comes surrounded by cardinals that constitute the technical commission responsible for the event. There follow the archbishops and bishops who are the national coordinators of the Cup. Then there is the priestly cast, the coaches, carriers of the special sacramental power of naming, confirming and removing players. Then come the deacons who form the body of judges, master-theologians of the orthodoxy, that is, of the rules of the game, who do the concrete job of conducting the game. At the end, come the acolytes, the line judges, who help the deacons.

The conduct of a game elicits phenomena that also occur in religion: brief prayers (refrains) are shouted, people cry from emotion, pray, divine promises are made (Felipe Scolari, the Brazilian coach, fulfilled his promise of walking, some twenty kilometers, up to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Caravaggio, in Farroupilha, if Brazil won the World Cup that year, as it happened), amulets and other symbols of the diverse Brazilian religiosity are used. Powerful saints, orixas and energies of the axe are evoked and invoked.

There even exists a Holy Inquisition, the technical body, whose mission it is to guard the orthodoxy, resolve conflicts of interpretation and eventually to process and punish players and even whole teams.

As in religions and Churches there exist orders and religious congregations, there also are «organized fans». They have their rites, their canticles and their ethics.

There are whole families that go to live near the Club house of their team, that functions as a true church, where the faithful gather and share their dreams. They tattoo their bodies with the symbols of their teams, and as soon as a child is born, it is adorned with the symbols of the team, that is, the child receives there a baptism that never should be betrayed.

I consider it reasonable to understand faith as formulated by the great Christian philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, as a wager: if you say that God exists you have everything to gain; if after all God does not exist, you have lost nothing. So, it is better to bet that God exists. The fan lives on bets (whose main expression is the sports lottery or quiniela), that luck will favor his team or that something will happen in the last minute of the game, that changes everything, and that finally his team will win, no matter how strong the adversary. Just as in religion, there are persons of reference, the same happens with the star players.

There is in religion the sickness of fanaticism, of intolerance and of violence against other religious expressions; the same happens in soccer: groups of one team attack the opposing team. Buses are stoned and true crimes can occur, as everyone knows, from organized fans and from fanatics who can wound and even kill followers of the other team.

To many, soccer has become a world view, a way of understanding the world and of making sense of life. There are those who suffer when their team loses and become euphoric when it wins.

I personally appreciate soccer from the distance for a simple reason: as one with four prostheses, in the knees and the femurs, I could never ever accomplish those runs and do those jumps and stretches. The soccer players do what I could never do, without falling and breaking something. There are soccer players who are magnificent artists of creativity and ability. Not without reason, the main philosopher of the XX century, Martin Heidegger, would not miss a single important game, because he saw in soccer the concretization of his philosophy: the contest between Being and entity, confronting, denying, composing each other, and engaging in the unpredictable game of life, that we all play.

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

Rose Marie Muraro: the saga of an impossible woman

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

On June 21th, one of the most significant Brazilian women of the XX century: Rose Marie Muraro (1930-2014), ended her Earthly pilgrimage in Rio de Janeiro. She was born almost blind, but she turned this deficiency into the great challenge of her life. Soon she knew by intuition that only the impossible opens the doors to the new; only the impossible creates. That is what she says in her book, Memoirs of an Impossible Woman (Memorias de una mujer imposible, 1999, 35). With very limited vision, she studied physics and economics. But shortly thereafter she discovered her intellectual vocation as a student of the human condition, especially the female condition. In the late 1960s, she stirred up the polemical question of gender. She did not limit herself to the unequal power relationships between men and women, but also denounced the oppressive relationships in culture, the sciences, philosophical currents, institutions, the State and the economic system. Finally, she came to understand that the principal root of this system that dehumanizes both women and men resides in patriarchy.

She realized in herself an impressive process of liberation, narrated in her book, The Six Months when I was a Man, (Los seis meses en que fui hombre, 1990, 6th edition). But perhaps the most important work by Rose Marie Muraro was The Sexuality of the Brazilian Woman: body and social class in Brazil, (Sexualidad de la Mujer Brasilera: cuerpo y clase social en Brasil, 1996). It is about a field investigation in several States of the Brazilian federation, analyzing how sexuality is experienced, taking into account the class situation of women, something absent in the founding fathers of the psychoanalytic treatise. In this field, Rose innovated, creating a theoretical framework that helps us understand the experience of sexuality and the body, according to social class. What type of individuation can a starving woman realize, who in order that her little child not die, gives blood from her own body?

I worked with Rose for 17 years, as editors of Editorial Vozes: she was responsible for the scientific part and I for the religious. Even under the strict control of the military organs of repression, Rose had the courage to publish then banned authors, such as Darcy Ribeiro, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Paulo Freire, the CEBRAP Notebooks, and others. After years of long joint discussion and study, we gathered our conversations in a book that I consider seminal, Feminine and Masculine: a new consciousness for encountering the differences, (Femenino & Masculino: una nueva conciencia para el encuentro de las diferencias, 2010). I note just one her phrases: «to educate a man is to educate an individual, but to educate a woman is to educate a society».

Without ever setting aside the feminine question (in man and woman), she soon turned her attention to the challenges of science and modern technology. Already in 1969 she published Automation and the future of man, (Autonomación y el futuro del hombre), were she foretold the precariousness of the working world.

The economic-financial crisis of 2008 led her to pose the question of capital/money in the book, Reinventing capital/money, (Reinventando el capital/dinero, 2012), where she emphasizes the relevance, as opposed to the dominant capitalist economy, of the social and complementary currencies, and the solidarian networks of exchange, that enable the less fortunate to guarantee their sustenance.

Another important work, truly rich with knowledge, data, and cultural reflections, is titled Technological Advances and the future of humanity: wanting to be God?, (Los avances tecnológicos y el futuro de la humanidad: ¿queriendo ser Dios?, 2009). In this work she confronts the leading sciences; nano-technology, robotics, genetic engineering, and synthetic biology. She sees advantages on those fronts, because she is not backwards, but in the fact of living in a society that turns everything into merchandise, including life itself, she perceived a grave risk that scientists would assume divine powers and use their knowledge to redesign the human species. Hence the subtitle: wanting to be God? That is the sad illusion of the scientists. What will save us is not the new Technological Revolution, but, as Rose says, a «Revolution of Sustainability is the only one that can save the human species from destruction… for to continue as we are, we will not be in a win-lose game, but in a terrible game of lose-lose, resulting in the destruction of our species, in which we all will lose» (Reinventing capital/money, 238).

Rose possessed a very acute sense of the world: she suffered with the global dramas and celebrated the few advances. In later times she saw dark clouds over the whole planet, putting our future in danger. She died preoccupied with the search for saving alternatives. A woman of profound faith and spirituality, she would dream of the human capacity for transforming the coming tragedy into a purifying crisis that illuminates the path to reconciling society with nature and Mother Earth. She concludes her book Technological Advances with this wise phrase: «when we quit being gods we can be fully human; while we still do not know what that is, we have always intuited it» (p. 354).

Officially proclaimed Patroness of Brazilian Feminism by the President of Brazil on December 30, 2005, through the creation of the Cultural Foundation, Rose Marie Muraro, in 2009, she leaves a rich legacy of humanism for future generations. Rose Marie Muraro showed in her personal saga that the impossible is not a limitation, but a challenge. She inscribed her name in the lineage of great archetypical women who have helped humanity keep alive the small sacred lamp of caring for all that still exists and lives. In that endeavor, she became immortal.

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