Agripina, a little old lady from our parish, passed away last Monday after years of living in extreme poverty and ill health.  Her condition was so precarious that at one point her little shack literally fell to the ground.  When she fell for the last time on her way to the shared bathroom across the alleway on Monday night, the church and her neighbors immediately started making all the arrangements for her wake and funeral, because these people who had known her well for years were convinced that she had no family.  We were surprised when two complete strangers showed up and took her documents from the police doctor who had officialized her death.  They turned out to be her nephews, and they explained that they had enough money and connections to take care of the burial without our help.  As the Jesuit pastor later explained to me, this is a typical occurrence in the neighborhood:  people leave their aging family members completely abandoned, and then promptly show up after their death to claim their inheritance (in this case, the little wooden house that the parish had built Agripina after her shack had crumbled down).  Why didn’t they use some of their money and connections to help her live her last years with a little more dignity?  Why had they never even visited their aunt?

 In the middle of the week, three women approached me at work to claim that one of my co-workers had swindled them by charging them money for a free service that we provide.  Two of us interviewed them separately and it quickly became apparent that they were lying.  The three stories didn’t match up on several key details.  Had we not realized this, the slander could have cost my co-worker her job and reputation.

 Friday, I ran into a friend, and he told me how the other day he had called his uncle’s cell phone, and the stranger who picked up said “Oh, so-and-so?  We just killed him.”  His uncle had indeed been shot three times in the head.  The uncle had recently won a legal case against some powerful people who had stolen money from him, and this was revenge.  Since the people who orchestrated the murder are so powerful, everybody is scared to talk, even though everybody knows who it was. 

 The fact that we hurt each other by what we fail to do, what we say, and what we do is nothing new.  The twist for me has been the coincidence that I happen to be in the middle of a great time of consolation, and I am learning to contemplate our sinfulness lovingly.

 Facing these moments while being in such consolation, I’ve been surprised at how the sinful acts themselves don’t shock me out of it — rather, they’re put in a larger context and become relative to a greater fact of love.  At Agripina’s death, I noticed the negligent and greedy nephews, but also how the entire neighborhood snapped into action to prepare the wake:  the women dressing her body and getting the coffee going, the men moving furniture around and rigging light bulbs by the benches they had placed outside her shack.  When we confronted the slander case at work, I noticed the evil intentions of the three women, but also the respectful way one of my co-workers dealt with them while I was too angry to speak responsibly.  When my friend told me about his uncle’s death, I faced the cold reality of premeditated murder and impunity, but I also felt the power in being able to share that moment of grief with a friend.

 At an even deeper level, being able to contemplate sin with God’s love in my heart changes what I see in the hurtful acts themselves.  I see their roots and connections to a broken world:  to histories of violence and exclusion that go so far back, I am starting to understand something about original sin; to insecurities that run so deep that I can understand why we are tempted to hold on to false gods of money, self-image and power.  From this perspective, sin is still real, but rather than wanting to judge people for it, I am moved to want to liberate people from it.  And then I am consoled even more, because we have Good News.

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The Gospel message, as I see it, is that we are loved without us having to earn or deserve it, and that this makes us free to love in the same way.  And community life is, for me, a great school for learning to love this way.

For one thing, it’s easy to love my neighbor gratuitously from 9 to 5 at work, but it’s a lot harder to exercise patience and generosity with those little-things-that-drive-you-crazy before having my two cups of coffee in the morning (my cup of justice, and then my cup of mercy), or when I get home exhausted at night.  The fact of living in the same house, with shared kitchen, bathrooms, cats and guests, means that there is always an opportunity to choose between (a) getting annoyed and (b) getting annoyed and then accepting the other as-is, warts and all.

The real challenge, though, is allowing the others to accept me as I am, warts and all.  Jesuits are trained to be suspicious (in the discernment of the Second Week) and critical, even of what we like (no matter how good something is, we don’t settle for anything but the magis).  And anybody who knows Jesuits knows that we can be pretty competitive sometimes.  So sometimes we walk into breakfast a little defensive, ready to duck, dodge and counterattack with sly comments.  The safety zone is talking about other people or moving to what a friend calls “lowest common denominator” conversations, avoiding deep conversations about ourselves for fear of being caught:  “people at work might think you’re a holy superstar (a friend once referred to Jesuits as ‘Catholic ninjas’), but we know better, you are nothing but a regular human who struggles!”  We think we can love gratuitously, but that for us to be loved, we have to earn or deserve it.  It’s hard to trust the Gospel message.  The trap is that our fear of becoming vulnerable to the other leads us to become defensively aggressive or else banal and superficial, and the effect is that when we act that way, we confirm the others’ same fear that makes them act that way too, which in turn confirms our fear… it’s a vicious cycle.

How to break the cycle?  It goes back to the Gospel — what frees us to drop our guard is the message that we are loved and accepted a priori.  So, my challenge (made possible by accepting God’s a priori gratuitous love for me, i.e., grace) is to avoid adding to the fire when my community starts criticizing beyond what’s healthy, and to avoid those little verbal darts that can seem playful but that in our high-tension environment, can feel more like “friendly fire.”  Rather, I need to try more to make it a point to ask my Jesuit brothers how their day went, or how their projects are going.  At least, this way of proclaiming the Gospel message lets the other know that I can be a different sort of safety zone, and that opens the door to real one-on-one conversations (this is the point of the 22nd Annotation as “Presupposition”).  Insofar as we make an effort with these little-things-that-save-us, I can see beyond my brothers’ faults and see instead the beauty in the particular way each one is being called, and I can walk with each one in his struggle to be faithful to that call.  And I can let them do the same for me.

Community is a Gospel school, and so community is mission.  The world needs, maybe more than anything else we can offer, to know that it’s possible to live together more than superficially.  When our communities — made up of people from different backgrounds, and who didn’t necessarily choose to live together — are able to love one another, encourage one another, and see the best in one another, we become incarnate good news for the world.

Photo: “warts and all” by jenny downing from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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So it looks like the next step in my own gradual incarnation is to pick up the guitar again.  Since feeling this spiritual movement after a vow renewal retreat last week, I’ve been seeing many confirmations of it as something from the good spirit.  On a symbolic level for me, spending time playing the guitar will mean accepting that my past radical zeal, while generous and concerned with the real world, was also dangerously divorced from my own humanization.  I think it will also help that process of humanization, or incarnation, in more concrete ways:  it will be good to have a hobby to accompany my solitude on those long evenings spent in an empty Jesuit house, when I’m not in the mood to go out and visit people (this is part of an incarnate vocation too).  And for those days, the guitar offers a form of re-creation that will let me “put stuff out” emotionally, as opposed to “taking stuff in” (like when I read, watch TV or listen to recorded music), which I need because in my work I’m always taking stuff in.  Finally, many liturgical songs really move me, put me in God’s presence and help me communicate with God, so I hope that a little guitar-playing with those songs will soon start to enrich my prayer life.

In all honesty, I’m not a natural musician and I suppose I’ll never be one.  When I used to play in high school, the best I could do was to memorize solo pieces, while my friends picked up songs from the radio and could improvise at jamm sessions.  But that’s not the point.  The magis here, in my case, is not about future apostolic impact as a performing artist; it’s about regaining a gratuitous dimension of myself — I hope that playing the guitar again will make me more able to love in the rest of what I do, even if it means I work a little less overtime.

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For example, in my first blog post (”On the Contemplatio”) I wrote about a group of ice-cream vendors who were facing humiliation, exploitation and violence from their boss.  Well, months later, the boss is still at it — just this week two more of his employees came to our lawyer for help, because he arbitrarily fired them after stealing their money and identity documents.  They say that things have only gotten worse after we failed at bringing him to justice in the penal courts for his acts of violence (it’s another long story), and the labor tribunal process is still incomplete.  But there is a small sign of hope in the middle of all that — we’re very close to setting up a group of the original employees, including Axly and Guepson, with a loan so that they can start their own business and work with dignity.

In another post, I wrote about violence against Haitians in the Dominican Republic.  Recently, I visited a migrant group in a small town near Azua (in the South, not too far from Neyba), and they told me about several cases of horrific crimes that have occurred in that area recently, with no mention at all in the media.  For example, they recently recovered the remains of a man who was killed and then set on fire after demanding that his boss pay him for his work.  They live in fear and poverty.  This same group, though, has started its own school — the parish lends them a chapel for a classroom, and one of them, who is a day laborer like the rest but was a schoolteacher in Haiti, coordinates classes from literacy through the 5th grade for those who’ve never had the opportunity to study.  Besides the direct benefit to its students, the school offers the possibility of building community with Dominican neighbors from a position of strength, solidarity and respect.

On a more personal level, I’m still facing a too-heavy workload and lots of pressure (see the post, “Too Blessed to be Stressed”), but I’m slowly learning that I need to put my relationship with the divine, infinite mystery in every person (and Person) in the center of my life.  Insofar as I’m open to that, the daily work and stress become less overwhelming and very relative; the dryness of my spiritual life gets a little rain and softens, and I become more-who-I-am.

So yes, there are flowers growing out of the cracks in the asphalt.  And they are as fragile as they are beautiful and moving.  The loan for the fired ice-cream vendors is still uncertain — lots of details need to be worked out and it’s a risk all around.  The school near Azua is completely unofficial and runs precariously in terms of materials, not to mention more serious threats to its existence (what if the schoolteacher gets deported tomorrow?).  As for my personal spiritual life, I struggle with the contingency of these signs of the Kingdom — yes, it’s among us, in this “already-but-not-yet” way, but why do we only get these little tastes?  When and how does the Resurrected Lord come in a way that we can finally leave the Cross behind?

I pray that the Lord will help me during this Advent to learn to read — and to trust — those signs that, like his Incarnation, enter through the cracks of history, small and fragile but with a promise that has the power to transform all reality…

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- Spiritual Exercises, 22nd Annotation

Over the last two weeks in the Dominican Republic, we have been trying to understand and respond to what the press frames for us as simple “ethnic conflict.”  In two different parts of the country, mobs of armed Dominicans, angry over particular crimes allegedly committed by Haitian individuals (a robbery-murder in both cases), have reacted by violently persecuting all Haitian immigrants in their communities.  In the Southern town of Neyba, at least two innocent people have died and several more are critically wounded; over 500 innocent people, including Dominicans of Haitian origin, have fled to Haiti for their lives.  In the northern village of Juan Gómez, Guayubín, about 30 houses of innocent Haitian migrants have been sacked and burned to the ground.  These are the most recent in a list of violent outbursts against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin over the last few years.

The simplest way to understand this violence is in terms of an irrational but irreconcilable confrontation between Dominicans and Haitians, who simply cannot get along.  Just like the Sunnis and the Shiites, or the Hutus and the Tutsis, or the Serbs and the Croats.  Depending on your point of view in this case, either the Dominicans are the bad guys – persecuting innocent Haitians just because they’re black and poor — or the Haitians are the bad guys — illegally invading Dominican territory, taking jobs and engaging in crime until Dominicans, who are normally a welcoming people, simply get fed up.  I don’t think that either of these explanations is very helpful.

A week ago, I was part of a commission that went to talk to people in Neyba, to understand what happened and see how we might be able to help.  Not surprisingly, the story that emerged from our interviews is a lot more complex than what we were seeing in the media.  I’ll just focus on a small part of the story to make my point here.

In Neyba, the victim of the robbery-murder was a motorcycle-taxi driver, and the group that responded to his death by attacking any Haitian in sight was composed almost entirely of his workmates and family.  These motorcyclists are impoverished internal migrants themselves, who came to the town from the rural highlands looking for a better life.  They are often the victims of robbery and violence, and they feel unprotected by the police and other authorities.  In this case, they became violent after spending fruitless hours at the police station hoping for the police to help find the murderer.  It’s not at all uncommon here for crowds to in marginalized neighborhoods to lynch suspected thieves (regardless of nationality) because of the same frustration.

Of course, in this case the frustration with the lack of security and justice for the poor got combined with anti-Haitian sentiment, which responds to the agenda of a small but powerful group in this country that promotes this xenophobic discourse.  That’s how the motorcyclists and family members, hungry for a target for their anger, made the connection from the absent individual murderer (who happened to be Haitian, allegedly) to an abstract category (Haitians and their descendants in general).  It became clear in our interviews, though, that many Dominicans protected their Haitian neighbors from the violent mob, and protected their belongings from looters after the Haitians fled for their lives.  What happened was far from a “conflict between Haitians and Dominicans” in general, as the sensationalist press would have us believe.

While ethnic tension and racism are real and must be addressed, we can’t adequately respond to the violence that took place without understanding where the frustration and aggressiveness of the motorcyclists is coming from.  Easy as it may be to demonize the lynch mob, and without justifying their actions, we have to understand that they feel completely unprotected by the authorities whose job it is to provide security and justice, and address those issues too.  That’s why in our work, we are promoting intercultural dialogue and reconciliation along with programs to strengthen the institutionality and efficiency of the Dominican state, with a special focus on including the participation of marginalized groups.

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My big temptation is to start waking up well before the crack of dawn to get ahead on all the paperwork that I have backed up, and to stay late in the office, even if it means skipping Mass, to finish all the e-mails and phone calls I have to make.  Work-wise, I could certainly use the extra hours.  But by now, I know better than this.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in regency (the stage of Jesuit formation I’m in) so far, it’s that I need to rest, I need to share in gratuity with people, and I need to pray.  I also know that I’m the type of person who tends to neglect these needs when faced with other peoples’ “limit situations.”  What I’ve learned, in a sense, is that “you will always have the poor among you” — in this line of work, the “limit situation” is permanent, and if I don’t guard those things that keep me going and keep me oriented, I can easily fall into traps that poison everything I do.

But with all this work, it’s not like I can start taking more time than I already do to rest and share and pray, either.  Rather, I need to use that time better — I need to find the most re-creational ways to rest, share more meaningfully by being more present to people, and “tune-up” my prayer habits.  I may not have two extra hours to pray, but I can be more careful with those little details that Ignatius is so insistent on, like preparing my morning prayer from the night before and being attentive to my posture and the place where I pray, so that I’m more available to God during the time I do pray.  In my examens, I can’t afford to just go through the motions — in order to keep some “horizon of meaning,” I need to really listen for God’s voice as I watch refugees lose their sense of dignity after one too many years in legal and economic limbo, and also as I watch Dominicans and Haitians come together to improve literacy in their neighborhood.  When a development project, like a water well we recently built, unexpectedly unleashes all kinds of rivalries and conflicts in a community, and when it’s time to do evaluations for the staff I now supervise, I need to really ask for the grace to feel, discern and act in that situation in tune with the heart of Jesus.

That’s where my magis is right now.  I can’t physically work more than I do, and I don’t have time to pray or rest or share more than I do.  But I feel the Spirit inviting me to do all of those same things in a way that’s more centered on God, in a way that digs deeper and listens more attentively.  Precisely at the limits of my availability in terms of time and energy, I’m being stretched in my inner availability, learning to let my intentions, actions and operations be carried and guided more by the Spirit.  God’s grace is at work, bringing my work and my prayer closer together so that both become more life-giving.

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My Jesuit community is located in one of Santo Domingo’s poorest neighborhoods, because we’ve opted to live among and in close relationship to the poor, inspired by Jesus’ example.  For all our authentic solidarity, though, everybody knows that the “padres” live quite well compared to the poorest people in the neighborhood.