Buen Vivir

My TV watching, with the back-to-back political ads filling every commercial break, was interrupted a couple evenings ago by a program highlighting the community development efforts of several Brazilian organizations working in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. What stayed with me from the program were some of the stark visuals. A bare, wind-blown hillside covered with ragged tents stretching as far as the eye could see – still the only home for thousands, now almost three years after the quake. The mixed feelings of curiosity and distrust reflected in the eyes of a beautiful brown-faced child – maybe 7 or 8 years old – orphaned by the quake and to this day without a permanent home. The smiling faces of a group of women who have formed a crafts cooperative that provides both community and income for meeting some of their basic needs. The clear water flowing from a white pvc pipe, part of a recently dug, simple, well – and the crowd standing impatiently, each waiting their turn to collect a limited supply of the precious liquid for cooking, bathing, etc.

The other thing that caught my attention were the numbers. More than two thirds of the Haitian work force do not have formal jobs! 54% of the population (that's nearly five and a half million people) live in extreme poverty (on less than $1.00 a day). Half of the children under five years of age are malnourished. 583 out of every 100,000 women die giving birth (compared to 8 maternal deaths per 100,000 in Europe). 80 out of every 1,000 infants in Haiti do not live to their first birthday. 50% of primary age children are not enrolled in school and of those who do attend school, 60% will abandon their education before completing the sixth grade.

As the program concluded, I flipped back to another channel and was jarred back to my own reality as I was subjected once again to the almost non-stop political ads. And I couldn't help but reflect on the in-congruence. While the majority of a nation struggles to achieve even the most basic needs for housing, food, clean water, health and education, with over 50% of the population scraping by on less than a dollar a day (!!), during this election season the two major party candidates for president here in the USA have spent over one and a half Billion dollars on campaign ads alone (not including the additional millions being spent by PACs). And one of the key disagreements between the two candidates is whether millionaires and billionaires should pay more or less taxes!

What kind of world would it be, if we all agreed that each and every human being is so valuable that we would collectively ensure that every person has their basic needs met - for housing, nourishment, healthcare, education, community, and meaningful work and leisure? If that were our vision and priority, don't you think we could find a way to harness the resources of this earth to achieve that purpose? And we could rid humanity of the absurdity – no, the obscenity – of some living on as little as one dollar a day while others scramble to protect their millions and billions. A world built, not  on a vision of living with more and more, but of all living well.¹

1  The concept of buen vivir or living well draws on the wisdom of indigenous peoples and was brought into political discourse by Evo Morales, the first indigenous President of Bolivia, elected in 2005.  

Not an Escape

A chorus sung at a gathering I attended recently took me back to childhood days. Maybe you know it too. The words go like this:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in his wonderful face,

And the things on earth will grow strangely dim,

In the light of his glory and grace.

Although it had been years since I last heard them, the music and words came easily, conjuring up memories of long ago. At the same time though, as I allowed the words to sink in I was struck by a jarring dissonance.

Savior of Zvenigorod ² 

I'm a visual learner, so the invitation to imagine being face to face with Jesus carries a certain aesthetic attraction for me. I recently finished meditating through, for the third or fourth time, Henri Nouwen's Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons.¹ The book is a guided meditation on four traditional Russian icons, with fold out color plates of the images so that each can be viewed as one reads and reflects. One of the icons is the 15^th century Savior of Zvenigorod, an image of Christ that though worn and damaged over the centuries, still reveals what Nouwen describes as “a most tender human face.”

Icons are not intended to be taken literally. They are not to be viewed as factually accurate depictions. Rather they are to be approached in silence, inviting us to gaze beyond the paint and panel. And when we least expect, they may reveal themselves to us as “thin places” in the universe, as windows through which we encounter something deeper than our world of five senses, a place where we glimpse Mystery.

So, as I joined in the familiar chorus recently, I was momentarily carried along – that is, until I got to the line about earthly things growing dim. Some have come to understand faith as a kind of escape from the world. This, it seems to me though, is to misunderstand faith. The God we encounter in Jewish and Christian scriptures is a God who calls us not to escape but to be deeply engaged in our world, to challenge what is wrong and to fight for what is right especially for and with the outcasts, disenfranchised, and struggling.

At the beginning of his ministry, in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus reads from the Prophet Isaiah declaring what his own purpose and mission were and pointing to the journey outward to which he calls those who would be his followers:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4: 18 & 19, quoting from Isaiah 58 and 61).

The true journey inward is not an escape, but necessarily leads to the journey outward!

1  1987. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press.

2  http://www.iconsexplained.com/iec/00034.htm

A Reflection on the Journey Outward

The premise of this blog is that spirituality and action in the world are intimately and dynamically inter-related. And the movement between the two is dialectical, that is, it is a movement in both directions. Spiritual reflection and deepening lead to action in the world which, in turn, leads back to spiritual growth and then back to action, and on and on (thus the blog title: Journey Inward Journey Outward – Journey Outward Journey Inward.

The place from which I personally engage this process is as a Christian. I do so not as an over-against or exclusionary stance but simply as the place I have come to occupy through my personal history and choices. I am open and anxious then to journey with other Christians but also with those who journey from other spiritual places, believing that the exchange of diverse experiences and understandings will not only enrich us personally but will deepen the quality and outcomes of our shared journey.

In the first few posts I have written about some of my personal history, but from a perspective that already reflects themes and insights from my own journey inward. In the present post I want to begin looking at the question of how I view the journey outward. What kind of action in the world do I have in mind?

The criteria or quality I have come to believe needs to be upper-most in our action in the world has to do not with a what but with a who – who does the action prioritize? And the answer I find most instructive comes from Latin American liberation theology. Now it turns out that liberation theology, which developed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, re-affirmed themes from the Jewish and Christian scriptures and tradition that in some cases had been forgotten or subverted for centuries, even millennia. And so even today, these are not themes that are given equal weight among all Christians or in all Christian communities. In fact, in my experience they continue to be disregarded, even rejected, in the majority of Christian settings.

Nevertheless, I think the Latin American liberation theologians got this right. In response to what is summarized as God's “preferential option for the poor,”¹ they argue that we are called to act in ways that are informed by the poor, and that our actions are to be judged based on how they affect the poor.

1  Preference for the poor was first elaborated in a document coming out of a meeting of the Latin American Conference of Bishops, meeting in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia. For the English language text of the document, go to http://www.shc.edu/theolibrary/resources/medpov.htm

A Reflection on the Journey Inward

I was raised in a home and religious context where the Bible was understood in a literalistic sense as a direct and absolute (“inerrant” was the theological term used) Word from God, and the Christian life was lived in a strict, regimented way that emphasized our difference (as evangelical Christians) from the rest of humanity. The journey has been decades long with many conversations and events along the way, but as a result I have 

come to stand in a very different place in terms of my faith today. 

I still consider myself a Christian, but with that designation I mean

something very different from what it meant in the evangelical-fundamentalist setting I grew up in. At the core of this difference is the understanding that to be a Christian is less about belief and more about relationship. It is about relationship with God, with my human sisters and brothers, with all living beings, and with our planetary home Mother Earth. As a Christian, the Bible continues to be an important source for me but no longer as a book of absolutes and directives, but as stories and poetry and images that inspire and guide and call me to a life of deeper meaning and purpose.¹

To avail myself of opportunities to hear and respond to that call  (whether through the biblical narrative or through other narratives or in other ways) is to walk the path of the “Journey Inward.”²

1  Two books (and authors) I highly recommend that use non-technical language and do an excellent job of offering an alternative to the older more rigid way of understanding the Bible are: Marcus J. Borg. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. 2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. and John Shelby Spong. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture. 1991. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

2  For the journey images in the title of this blog, I am indebted to Elizabeth O'Connor whose book I read years ago. Journey Inward, Journey Outward. 1968. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated.  

A Fundamental Shift

The son of missionary parents, most of the first sixteen years of my life were spent in the outback of Brazil. Growing up in this way, un-self-consciously negotiating the differences and boundaries between three different cultures, my own deepest sense of self was also a rich multi-cultural mix. I was not only the white

“American” missionary kid, but embodied a very real Brazilian and Xavante sense of belonging and identity as well. And so when confronted in my teens with the realization that many of my Brazilian peers disliked the United States and Americans, this created not only an external conundrum but an internal one for me as well. (See the first two blog posts for more complete details on what is presented in summary form in this paragraph.)

Although not often at the forefront of my thinking, the question would linger, unanswered. What was it about the United States that created such animosity among my young Brazilian cohorts? It wouldn't be until almost fifteen years later that, reading a book by the Argentine Methodist pastor and theologian Jose Miguez Bonino,¹ the riddle would finally be resolved.

Although I had grown up in a multi-cultural milieu, my formal and family education was primarily “American.” Through seventh grade, with my Mom as teacher, I was home schooled using a correspondence curriculum from the U.S. Then for the eighth through tenth grades I attended an American missionary boarding school. Both these settings were informed by the perspective that, in more recent parlance, is called “American Exceptionalism.” This is the view that the United States is different from other countries. It is the idea that we are a special nation and special people with a mission of doing good in the world, that our unique destiny is to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.² This sense of the special quality and unique mission of America was amplified in the fundamentalist fervor of the evangelical mission context in which my family and other missionary families lived. And so, in that setting, there was nothing that could help me answer the puzzle.

But then during my college years I happened upon Bonino's book. In the first chapter he writes about the history of Latin America, dividing it into two movements. The first he calls “conquest and colonization” and the second “modernization and neo-colonialism.” The first was a period dominated by the colonial powers of Spain and of Portugal while the second, which began with the emancipation from the earlier powers, came to be dominated by what Bonino refers to as “Anglo-Saxon colonial and neo-colonial expansion.” “Our independence from Spain,” he writes, “made us available as suppliers of raw materials first and of cheap labor and manageable markets later on.” “Consequently, our so-called modernization was dictated by the needs and preferences of our overseas masters.”³

Initially led by the British, later this control of Latin American resources would be wielded (and managed through political, military and CIA-led interventions) by the United States. The nature of this relationship began to be understood and exposed all across Latin America during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. And with it came a growing critique of the United States and the kind of influence it represented in the region. And in learning this reality, the puzzle created by my experiences as a young adult was suddenly resolved. And with that resolution came a fundamental shift, a “conversion”⁴ if you will, in my understanding of history and of the true character of the United States.

1 Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. 1975. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

2 For more information and an extensive bibliography, see online article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

3 Bonino, p. 14.

4 See my September 29 post “Inner Shifts” at http://spiritandpraxis.blogspot.com/2012/09/inner-shifts.html