A CRY IN THE WILDERNESS?

Between the kitten and politics I’ve been the invisible woman lately. Midge is doing fine, thank you. I’d take more pictures but all you’d see right now is a blur.  That girl can really move. 

Politics? Yuck. All I can say is vote as if your right to vote depended on it, it probably does.

I’ve been continuing my reading of the Latin Americans. Powerful voices. Prophetic voices. Unheard in much of this country. Suppressed by the Vatican. Attempted to suppress anyway.  If only we had voices like this in this country. So I’m going to try something. Put excerpts in my blog.

Much of the material comes from the eighties and the nineties. Read if you wish. Copy if you like. But, think about what’s being said. What it means now. And how the silence, indifference and but we’re fighting Communism of then (and I’m guilty too) is coming back to bite us on the ass now.

Pedro Casaldaliga is the retired bishop of Sao Felix do Araguaia in Brazil. He is an unapologetic follower of liberation theology. And locked horns with his superiors and the Vatican more than once.  And if I can keep this up we’ll see why he refused to be silent.

“The fact that the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission has asked me for a statement on behalf of the rights of Salvadoran refugee children makes me deeply ashamed before God and history.

Ashamed of being a human being and ashamed of being a Christian. Impotent and frustrated despite my hope.

For Central America has been an open wound for years. And the so called Christian west and, too often the very church of Jesus, have manifested passive complicity if not open involvement while neocolonialism, the oligarchy, and military repression-which means jail, torture and death- decimates these tiny peoples at the waist of the Americas.

And the criminal nightmare has become a routine news item, or has even ceased being news, upstaged by a soccer ball…

I am not going to make a statement. Any word that is just a word seems cynical to me. May any of us who can passively witness the pain of Central America be cursed by the living God.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos…will threaten the wrath of Yahweh against our insensitive society and church.

The statement is there, inexorable. Let those who have ears to hear listen to the cry of an exiled child. Let those who have eyes to see witness the anemic faces of refugee mothers and children. “ 

Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga in  In Pursuit of the Kingdom.