A spirituality for the end-time
Ranly, Ernest W.
PERU; A LANDSCAPE OUT OF JEREMIAH A spirituality for the end-time ERNEST W.RANLY In many parts of Peru, the situation is now so desperate that we who live here describe it as "total violence."...
...This is the very real eschatological joy and peace that Stanley Hauerwas describes in The Peaceable Kingdom (University of Notre Dame Press...
...To black out the capital city of Lima at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve is an effective blow against our entire sense of security and identity, and ultimately of our future...
...Oppressors cannot simply declare the end of oppression and expect that reconciliation will automatically follow...
...Schreiter concisely outlines some of the Christological, ecclesiastical, and cosmic aspects of the divine reconciliation...
...We in Peru are in the crucible of suffering, hesitation, and doubt...
...Schreiter wisely cites the case of the Chilean church under Cardinal Raul Henriquez Silva as an instance where the church itself earned the right to be a minister of reconciliation...
...The Peruvian church is unable to take a unified prophetic stance in the face of the complexity and the ambiguity of the violence...
...I have a number of questions for Schreiter of a metaphysical nature: about the ultimate reality of the human person, about death, about immortality—questions which we in Peru take very seriously, since our lives are being threatened...
...More importantly, he writes with the heart and soul of a fellow-suffering Christian...
...The major achievement of this small work is Schreiter's refusal to surrender the term "reconciliation" to those who tend to trivialize and politicize its profound Christian message...
...Entries must be original and previously unpublished...
...for Sister Augustina...
...Stories are told so that a particular type of society may survive and endure...
...In the United States, for example, children learn that even a log-splitter can become president, with the result that American children have a sense of unlimited opportunities...
...It entails the attitude of listening and waiting, of patient, silent suffering...
...The price of solidarity and victimhood—of reconciliation—is indeed very high...
...Schreiter addresses this situation and states emphatically that there is no reconciliation without liberation, for liberation is a necessary prior condition for reconciliation...
...We return to the Hebrew Scriptures with great enthusiasm...
...They illustrate the right way of suffering...
...As Schreiter writes, "violence tries to destroy the narratives that sustain people's identities and substitute narratives of its own...
...I am grateful to him (and to God) that someone so firm and confident in his academic and professional credentials has the uncanny ability to touch us all so deeply, particularly those of us in Peru...
...At some point, perhaps after the Communion of the closing liturgy, everyone is invited to bring in fresh greens and flowers, and while expressing signs of hope—"in the youth," "in the courage of the mothers," "in the smile of achild"— the cross is covered with color and life, like the jeweled crosses of antiquity...
...for the mother president of our mothers'clubs...
...Among the church's resources for reconciliation, Schreiter lists rituals, public penances, the Eucharist, and the reshaping of some of the gospel stories...
...As he did previously in his landmark work Constructing Local Theologies (Orbis), he applies linguistic semiotics as an instrument of social analysis...
...Deadline: September 15, 1992...
...not necessarily in the way they cripple the economy, but in their social/political significance...
...For only when the victims are open to the mysterious workings of God's power can genuine reconciliation occur...
...The winner receives a $1,000 prize and publication in The Critic, a journal of American Catholic culture and arts...
...They are inspired prayers...
...This is more than Marxist economic "class conflict...
...People kneel by it and weep over their memories and sorrows...
...Without undue polemics, but with magisterial authority, he restores reconciliation as a major theme of soteriol-ogy and ministry...
...racial and sexual discriminations abound...
...Job, the Prophets, the Psalms, Lamentations: they all take on new life and meaning...
...That awful cross will lie there for several days...
...ratives...
...In Peru, we agree...
...They must earn that right, by intimately sharing solidarity with the victims so that they become identified in heart, voice, and soul with the victims...
...The bottom line is always God's mercy and fidelity...
...The Christian story, as told in Romans and 2 Corinthians, is about the reconciling work of God CONTEST The Critic magazine is sponsoring a Short Story Contest...
...Schreiter seeks to understand this situation by analyzing our culture and its narERNEST W. RANLY, C.PP.S., is currently on assignment as a missionary in the mountains of Peru...
...In Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order, the Reverend Robert Schreiter, professor of historical and doctrinal studies at Chicago's Catholic Theological Union, writes with logic, economy, and the world view of an ecumenical Christian missionary...
...Likewise, reading and rereading Schreiter's book has been a real grace for me...
...Mao instructs: "Kill one, terrify thousands...
...In the first chapter, "The Context of Reconciliation," Schreiter describes the human situation as intrinsically one of conflict...
...Job never lost his humanity in confrontation with the Lord, never distorted the memory of who he was and what he had done...
...Such Sendero tactics not only bring about traumatic breakdowns for individuals, but more devastating, they undermine a society's narrative infrastructure...
...the Middle East remains in constant tension...
...Five church people have been killed deliberately...
...None of the scriptural readings ends in despair or hopelessness...
...One of our favorite readings is from Joel, begging for repentance but always assuring the people that the Lord is compassionate and merciful...
...In recent years, social action groups in the Peruvian church have avoided using the term reconciliation because conservative movements in Latin America have attempted to appropriate the word...
...But at the grassroots level, many priests, religious, and laity have made their commitment to stay with our suffering people...
...Here he comments on Peru's Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, and its "wanton executions...
...It occurs only at deeply transcendental levels, for both the human person and within human community...
...the flaw in the human situation is much deeper and endemic...
...Commonweal...
...Commonweal 17 July 1992: 21 achieved in the blood and cross of Christ...
...Lines from Jeremiah are literally true in parts of Peru: corpses in the country, dead bodies in the cities...
...Here Schreiter refers to Satan as "the one who accuses falsely" and to Diabolos as "the Confuser...
...In every case, this reconciliation is a free, unmerited gift from God...
...C, Thomas More Association, 205 W. Monroe, 6th Floor, Chicago, IL 60606...
...The participants tell their stories of suffering by forming a "dry cross" on the floor in front of the altar with thorns, brambles, and dead leaves...
...Reconciliation is a blessed, healing process, but, how slow and painful it is...
...In many retreat-workshops we have given in Peru on the spirituality of Christian nonviolence, we have used these tools and others...
...The killings and assassinations by Sendero are carefully selective: a mayor in a small town, a leader of mothers' clubs which operate neighborhood soup kitchens, several engineers working among the poor...
...The bombings and destruction of the roads, bridges, high tension lines are equally well planned...
...Their repentance and conversion are not the same thing as reconciliation...
...We need not only solidarity in prayers from family and friends but hearty theological substance for our daily spirituality...
...they will not distort or diminish the detailed, painful memories of the victims...
...Theology of reconciliation" has been proposed as a corrective and a criticism of the "theologies of liberation...
...Book discussed in this essay Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order...
...Violence between ethnic groups in what were the Soviet republics leaves us aghast at the depth and complexity of the problem of reconciliation...
...For, as he aptly notes, violence is "the narrative of the lie...
...We return to the so-called "cursing psalms" and find their cruel, harsh sayings right on target...
...According to Sendero, out of chaos and the ruins of the old society, the new social order is to arise like the phoenix from its ashes...
...Attention and compassion will not hurry the grieving process...
...Therefore, neither the church nor people who represent the church may presume to be instruments of reconciliation...
...Robert Schreiter, Orbis, $10.95, 96 pp...
...The center no longer holds...
...People come up, one by one, and add a prickly branch to the cross: "In memory of a young lad killed by the investigative police...
...But his application of linguistic semiotics to the question of violence proves illuminating...
...Its purpose is to destroy the individual's sense of self and a society's self-confidence...
...After the Mass we stand around, admiring the spontaneous beauty of the cross of flowers, embracing one another with tears of hope and renewed joy to go back to our people...
...He argues, for example, that a culture defines and defends itself by an interlocking web of stories...
...The violence here is still so active that it is premature to even talk about reconciliation...
...Only they can rightfully speak of and initiate the process that leads to reconcil22:17July 1992 iation...
...The realization grows that the present struggle here is against more than just the powers of this world...
...Learning how to wait is a key factor in what he calls or-thopathema, "the right way to suffer...
...Each member of society becomes a self as he or she develops a personal story consonant with larger social narratives...
...Thus, the Peruvian bishops recently spoke openly about the presence of the "Evil One...
...It becomes the Tree of Life, the Cross of Victory, a banner of hope...
...and so on...
...For details send SASE to: Editor, Short Story Contest, Dept...
...He gives a masterly overview of the new world order...
...While reconciliation comes about only through the free grace of God, in a human manner of speaking only the victims of violence can be instruments of reconciliation...
...Nor do we leave the cross of thorns lying there...
...Such narratives are not only "past history" but the very stuff of a living, creative society...
...This is the keystone in Schreiter's argument, or to put it more exactly, this is the divine mystery of reconciliation...
...The root of the problem is sin...
...Schreiter writes that the ministry of reconciliation is more a spirituality than a strategy or a "well-managed therapy process...
...It is precisely at this point that one must begin "the quest of a redeeming narrative" to help one recover one's own self: a new hope and confidence to rebuild family, community, and society...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
