Christ was available to all, and reached out to the poor, the sick
and the rejected. His mission is now ours. It is a call to be
wherever there is injustice of any kind. - Spirit and Lifestyle
Last Friday to Sunday noon, I attended a Development and Peace
retreat and AGM. These words of Spirit and Lifestyle rang true
throughout that weekend. I prepared Saturday morning's prayer and
used Carlos Mejía Godoy's as the song: Vos sos el dios de los pobres:
You are the God of the poor,
The human and simple God,
The God who sweats in the street,
The God with the leathery face.
That's why I talk to you
In the way that my people talk
Because you are the laborer God
The worker Christ.
You go hand in hand with my people
struggle in the countryside and city
get in line in the camp
so that they pay you your day's wage
... I've seen you in the general store
installed in a shack
I've seen you selling lottery tickets
without being embarrassed by that role.
I've seen you in the gas stations
checking the tires of a truck....
Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit who survived the massacre of the six Jesuits
and two women on November 16, 1989, wrote in the 2011 Latin American
Agenda that "Another church is necessary and possible." Four decades
after the Latin American bishops' meeting in Medellín, Columbia,
Sobrino call for another Medellin with another "irruption of the poor
and an irruption of God." "The poor who irrupt today do not only lack
the material, they are excluded, indigenous, and Afro-americans, and,
more and more, women and children. The God that irrupts is Jesus'
God, but with great respect to those of other religions... God is in
the poor and the crucified, together with and alongside them."
Today, I started three weeks of classes at the university. One of my
five classes is on Religion and Violence. Our instructor, Maryam
Razavy, 33, says it's critical to understand why adherents of
religions that preach peace, love and harmony will commit acts of
violence against people of other faiths, and even within a faith. She
was just thinking about Bin Laden and wondered why he had disappeared
from the news. Today, on the first day of her course, the news of his
death and public reaction bring to the fore the relevance of
"Religion and Violence." Where do we stand on the violence index?
Cecily
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