Categoria: Idiomas

A challenge to Pope Francis: to embrace all of humanity

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

Commenting on the August 9, 2013, interview of me by the newspaper, La Libre Belgique, a reader, Marc Den Doncker, wrote these words, that I consider worthy of reflection.

Den Doncker says:

«Good Pope Francis frankly announces a revolution in humanity, towards one that is more plainly human. The Pope says: “if a homosexual seeks God and is of good will, who am I to judge him?”  How good it would be if, some day, the Pope expressed love for a homosexual who did not seek God, but who was still a person of good will. In that the influence of the Holy Ghost would be seen».

The commentary continues:

«How good it would be if, over time, good Pope Francis were to reflect deep in his heart about a poor woman who pierces herself with a needle to free herself from a fetus, the result of a violent rape, because she cannot take it anymore and is desperate.  And that a benevolent God, in infinity divine mercy, allows good Pope Francis to understand the desperate situation of this woman, who is filled of a profound consternation and wants to die. How fine it would be if that good God, in infinite divine goodness, understood that a couple who had decided not to have more children, simply used the pill. And how good it would be if that good God, in infinite kindness, elicited the consciousness that a woman and a man enjoy the same equality and dignity».

«I cry inside –the commentator continues– at the huge number of tragic events that life gives us day after day. Facing this reality, would the Church be willing to proceed along a slippery path, but one leading towards a humanity totally embraced, animated by the Holy Spirit, that has no relation to the principles and moral philosophies that end up killing the love for the other? It is important to wait».  Yes, filled with confidence, let us wait.

In fact, not a few ecclesiastic authorities, popes, cardinals, bishops and curates, with dignified exceptions, have lost, in great part, the good meaning of things; they forgot the image of the God of Jesus Christ, to whom He sweetly calls, Abba, my beloved Father. That God of His showed maternal dimensions when he waited for the son, led astray by vice, when he looked for the coin lost in the house, when he gathered us under his wings, as the hen gathers her chicks. His main characteristic is unconditional love and limitless mercy, because “He loves the ungrateful and the bad and lets the sun shine and the rain fall on the good and the bad”, as the Gospels tell us.

To Jesus, it is not enough to be good, as the faithful son who stayed in his father’s house and followed all his commands. We must be compassionate and merciful with those who fall, and are lost on the way. Jesus criticized only the good son, who lacked compassion, and did not know how to welcome his brother who had been lost and was now returning home.

Pope Francis, talking to the bishops in Rio de Janeiro, urged them to embrace the «revolution of tenderness» and an unlimited capacity for understanding and mercy.

Surely many bishops and curates must be in crisis, when urged to confront the challenge of the «revolution of tenderness». They must radically change the style of relating to the people: not bureaucratic and cold, but warm, simple and filled with affection.

This was the style of good Pope John XXIII. A curious occurrence reveals how he understood doctrine, and the importance of cordial encounters with people. What is more important: love or the law?  The dogmas or the cordial encounters?

Giuseppe Alberigo, a layman from Bologna, extremely erudite and committed to the renewal of the Church, was one of the primary historians of Vatican Council II (1962-1965). His great merit is having published a critical edition of all the official doctrinal texts of the popes and the councils from the beginning of Christianity: the Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta. He himself relates in Il Corriere di Bologna that, he proudly went to Rome to solemnly present to Pope John XXIII this voluminous book. John XXIII gently took it in his hands, sat in the pontifical chair, carefully placed the volume on the floor, and put both feet on top of the famous book.

It was a symbolic act. It is good that there are doctrines and dogmas, but they exist to sustain the faith. Doctrines and dogmas exist neither to inhibit faith, nor to serve as an instrument of limitation or of condemnation.

How fine it would be if good Pope Francis did something like that, especially with reference to Canon Law and other official texts of the Magisterium that are of little help to the faithful. In first place is found faith, love, spiritual encounter and the creation of hope for a humanity stunned by so many deceptions and crises. Then come doctrines. Let’s hope the good God, in infinite kindness, leads Pope Francis in this direction with courage and simplicity.

(For those who want to verify the foregoing, the reference source is: Alberto Melloni, introduction to the book, Ángelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Giovanni XXIII. Agende del Pontefice 1958-1963, Instituto per le Scienze Religiose, Bologna 1978, p. VII).

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

The need to rescue socio-ecological sensibility

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

From August 19 to 23, the XIX International Congress of C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology, in which I participated, was celebrated in Copenhagen, Denmark. There were nearly 700 Jungians, from all parts of the world, even Siberia, China and Korea. The great majority were experienced analysts, many of them authors of books relevant to this field.  The predominate tone was: the need for psychology in general, and Jungian analytical psychology in particular, to open up to social and ecological communitarianism.

This concern arises from C. G. Jung’s thinking itself.  To him, psychology did not draw boundaries between the cosmos and life, biology and spirit, body and mind, conscious and unconscious, or between the individual and the collective. Psychology dealt with life in its totality, in its rational and irrational dimensions, symbolic and virtual, individual and social, terrestrial and cosmic and in its somber and luminous aspects. That is why he was interested in everything: the esoteric phenomena, alchemy, parapsychology, spiritualism, flying saucers, philosophy, theology, Western and Oriental mysticisms, the original peoples, and the more advanced scientific theories. He knew how to incorporate all these fields of knowledge, discovering hidden connections that revealed surprising dimensions of reality. He knew how to draw lessons and hypotheses from everything, and to open possible windows on reality. Therefore, he did not fit into any discipline, which is why many ridiculed him.

We need to incorporate this holistic and systemic vision into our understanding of reality. Otherwise, we will continue to be hostage to fragmentary visions, missing the broader horizon. In this effort, Jung is a privileged interlocutor, particularly in rescuing sensible reason.

His was the merit of having valued and attempted to decipher the messages hidden in the myths. They are the language of the collective unconscious, which has relative autonomy. It possesses us more than we possess it. Each one has more thoughts than what he himself thinks. The organ that captures the meaning of myths, of symbols and of the great dreams, is the sensible or cordial reason. It is viewed with suspicion in modern times, because it could obscure the objectivity of thought. Jung was always critical of the excessive use of instrumental-analytical reason, because it closed off many windows to the soul.

The 1924-25 dialogue between Jung and an Indigenous of the New Mexico Pueblo nation is well known. This Pueblo man thought that Whites were crazy. Jung asked him why Whites were crazy. The Pueblo replied: “They say they think with the head”. “Of course they think with the head”, Jung replied, “how do you think?” Jung asked. The surprised Pueblo native answered: “We think here,”  and pointed to the heart. (Memórias, Sonhos, Reflexões, p. 233).

This dialogue transformed Jung’s thinking. He realized that Europeans had conquered the world with the head, but had lost the capacity to think and feel with the heart, and to live through the soul.

Logically, it is not about abdicating reason –which could be a loss for us all– but of rejecting its restrictive capacity for understanding. It is important to consider the sensible and the cordial as central elements of knowledge. They allow us to capture the values and meanings found in the profundity of common sense. It always incorporates the mind, and is thus impregnated with sensibility and not just intellect.

In his Memorias he says: “there are so many things that fill me: plants, animals, clouds, the day, the night, and the eternal, present in human beings. The more I feel uncertain about myself, the more the feeling of my kinship with all grows within me” ( 361).

The drama of the present day human being is of having lost the capacity to experience a feeling of belonging, something that religions have always guaranteed. The opposite of religion is not atheism or the denial of the divine.  The opposite of religion is the inability to bond and re-bond with all things. People now are uprooted, disconnected from the Earth and from the soul, which is the expression of sensibility and spirituality.

For Jung the great problem now is of a psychological nature: not of psychology understood as a discipline or only as a dimension of the psyche, but of psychology in the integrating sense, as the totality of life and the universe as perceived by and represented in the human being. In this sense, Jung writes: “It is my most profound conviction that, starting now and for  he indefinite future, the true problem will be of a psychological nature. The soul is the father and mother of all unresolved difficulties that we launch in the direction of heaven”  (Cartas III, 243).

If we now fail to rescue sensible reason, which is an essential dimension of the soul, it will be difficult to mobilize respect for the otherness of beings, the love of Mother Earth with all her ecosystems, and to experience compassion with those who suffer in nature and in humanity.

An Enduring Challenge: corporations’ socio-environmental responsibility

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are already past the economics of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who in the September 1970 issue of Time Magazine, said: «the social responsibility of corporations consists of maximizing the earnings of the stockholders». Noam Chomsky is more of a realist: «Corporations are the closest things to totalitarian institutions». They do not have to give explanations to the public, or to society. They act as predators, and their prey consists of other corporations. To defend themselves, the people can only count on one instrument: the State. There is, however, a difference that must not be overlooked: «while General Electric, for example, need not answer to anyone, the state must give regular explanations to the people» (Le Monde Diplomatique, Brazil, nº 1, August 2007, page 6).

Corporations realized decades ago that they are part of society, and have a social responsibility, in the sense that they must cooperate if everyone is to have a better society.

It could be defined this way: Social responsibility is the obligation the corporation assumes, of seeking goals that in the mid and long range, are good for business, and also good for society as a whole.

This definition must not be confused with social obligation, that is, of meeting their legal obligations: the payment of taxes and fulfillment of their duties with respect to their workers. This simply is what the law requires. Nor is it the social answer: the capacity of an enterprise to respond to the changes wrought by a globalized economy and society, such as for example, changes in governmental economic policies, new legislation, and the transformations in consumer profiles.  The social answer is that which the enterprise must do in order to adapt and to be able to reproduce.

Social responsibility goes beyond all of this: it is what the enterprise does after having fulfilled all its legal obligations, in order to improve the society of which it is a part, and to guarantee a quality of life and of the environment. It is not just what it does for the community, which would be philanthropy, but what it does with the community, with the participation of its members in projects designed and supervised in common. This is the liberator.

However, in recent years, thanks to the ecological consciousness awakened by the imbalance of the Earth-system and the life-system, the theme of socio-environmental responsibility has arisen. The key event occurred on February 2, 2007, when the UN organ that encompasses 2,500 scientists from more than 135 countries, the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change, (IPCC), after six years of investigations, released its findings to the public. We are not headed towards global warming and profound climate changes. We already are within them. The status of the Earth has changed. The weather will change greatly.  If we do nothing, the temperature could rise by up to 4-6 degrees centigrade. This change, which is 90% certain, is anthropogenic, which means that is caused by human beings, better put, by the form of production and consumption that already has been in existence for three centuries, and which now has been globalized. The greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide and methanol, are the main causes of global warming.

The following question was posed to the corporations: to what degree will they contribute to cleaning up the planet, by introducing a new paradigm of production, consumption and recycling of waste, consistent with the rhythms of nature and the network of life, and without sacrificing the natural goods and services?

This theme is being discussed in all the great global corporations, particularly after the reports by Nicholas Stern (former principal economist of the World Bank); the former vice-president of the United States, Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth, and several conventions on global warming by the UN. If henceforth we do not invest some 450 billion dollars, per year, to stabilize the climate of the planet, by 2030-2040 it will be too late, and the Earth will enter an era of great extinctions, that in great measure will affect the human species. A recent gathering of the International Agency of Energy noted that the decisions must be made now, and not in 2020. The year 2015 is our last chance. After that it will be too late, and we will go forward to an encounter with the unspeakable.

These environmental problems are so important that they must be put before the simple question of social responsibility. If we first do not assure planet Earth, with her ecosystems, there will be no way to save society and its collection of corporations. Consequently: socio-environmental responsibility!

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

The empire’s extreme arrogance: universal spying

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The kidnapping of the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, by barring his plane from entering European air space, and the revelation of universal spying by the organs of intelligence and control of the Northamerican government, (NSA), cause us to reflect on a cultural topic of grave consequences: arrogance. The above mentioned facts show the level of arrogance reached by the Europeans, under pressure from the United States. Arrogance is a central theme of Greek reflections, whence we come. In modern times it has been extensively studied by Luigi Zoja, an Italian thinker with a background in economics, sociology and analytical psychology, whose book, Historia da Arrogância, (Axis Mundi, São Paulo, 2000) was published in Brazil.

This dense book traces the history of arrogance in world cultures, especially in Western culture. The Greek thinkers, (philosophers and dramatists) noted that rationality, as liberated from mythology, was inhabited by a demon that would lead to unbounded knowledge and desire, in an endless process. That energy tends to destroy all limits and ends up as arrogance, the true sin that the gods punished harshly. The excess in any field was called hubris, and Nemesis was the divine principle that punished arrogance.

The imperative of old Greece was meden agan: «nothing to excess».  Thucydides would have Pericles, the genial politician from Athens, say: «we love beauty but with frugality, we use wealth for active projects, without useless ostentation; poverty shames no one, but it is shameful not to do everything possible to overcome it». The Greeks looked for the just measure in everything.

Oriental ethics, Buddhist and Hindu, preach the imposition of límits on desire. The Tao Te King already said: «there is no greater disgrace than not knowing how to be content»  (cap.46); and «it would have been better to stop before the glass overflowed» (cap.9).

The hubris-excess-arrogance is the major vice of power, be it personal, of a group, or of an empire. Today that arrogance is embodied in the Northamerican empire, that subjugates all, and in the ideal of unlimited growth, that underlies our culture and political economics.

Excess-arrogance has presently reached its peak in two fronts: in unlimited vigilance, that consists of the capacity of an imperial power to control everyone, by sophisticated cybernetic technology, violating the rights of sovereignty of a country and the unalienable right to personal privacy. It is a sign of weakness and fear, that an empire can no longer convince by its arguments, or attract by its ideals. So it uses direct violence, lies, disrespecting rights and statutes internationally consecrated.  According to the great cultural historians, Toynbee and Burckhard, these are the unequivocal signs of the unrestrained decadence of empires.  But they cause unimaginable destruction as they decline.

The second front of the hubris-excess resides in the dream of unlimited growth through the merciless exploitation of natural goods and services. The West created and exported to the whole world this type of growth, measured by the quantity of material goods (GNP).  It breaks with the logic of nature, that always self regulates, maintaining the interdependence of all with all. Thus a tree does not grow endlessly to the sky, and in the same way, the human being knows its physical and psychological limits. But this development causes humans to impose their arrogant process on nature: thus consuming until they sicken, while simultaneously seeking total health and biological immortality. As the limits of the Earth are being felt, because it is a small and sick planet, humans employ new technologies to force the Earth to produce even more.  She defends herself through global warming, with its extreme events.

Soja correctly says: «growth without end is nothing more than an ingenuous metaphor for immortality» (p.11). Samuel P. Huntington, in his controversial book, Clash of Civilizations, (El choque de civilizaciones, Paidos 1998) affirmed that Western arrogance constitutes «the most dangerous force for instability and possible global conflict in a world of multiple civilizations» (p.397). The surpassing of all limits is aggravated by the lack of sensible and cordial reason. Through it, we emotionally read the data, listen to the messages of nature. and perceive the humane of human history, dramatic and hope-filled.

The acceptance of limits makes us humble and connects us to all beings. The Northamerican empire, through the very logic of dominating arrogance, distances itself from everyone, creating distrust, rather than friendship and admiration.

I end with a story by Leo Tolstoi, in the style of João Cabral de Mello Neto: How much land does a man need? A man made a pact with the devil: he would receive all the land he could walk on foot. He began to walk, day and night, without stopping, from valley to valley, from mountain to mountain, until he fell dead from exhaustion. Tolstoi comments: had he known his limits, he would have known that he only needed a few meters; he would not need more than that, to be buried.

To be admired, the United States would not need more than its own territory and its own people. They would not need to distrust everyone, or always to be prying into the lives of all the world

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