Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries

A collaborative effort initiated by the Migrants and Refugees section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries “aims at deepening the teaching of Pope Francis and promoting a renewal of theology.” Please find the continental working group reports here and videos and guidebooks that continue to be updated here. Click here to subscribe to the Migrants and Refugees’ YouTube channel. I’ll continue to link below to resources about the project that may be helpful to theologians and colleagues in ministry.

Conferences and Panel Presentations

“Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries” Pontifical Urban University, October 12, 2022
”Doing Theology from the Peripheries: Listening in North America,” St. John’s/Catholic Relief Services, November 2, 2022
”Doing Theology from the Peripheries: Roundtable Discussion and Analysis from North American Working Group for the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development Project,” Catholic Theological Society of America, June 8, 2023

Media Coverage

“Theology Professor Works with Vatican on Global Project” by Taylor Ha, October 21, 2022
“St. John’s Professor Appointed to Vatican Theology Project on Migrant Experience,” October 31, 2022
“Questions of faith: Vatican project sends theologians to ‘the margins,’” by Cindy Wooden for Catholic News Service, November 3, 2022

For a General Audience

”Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries: Listening in North America” by Meghan Clark for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church Forum, November 1, 2022
”What if the peripheries were really the center that defines the church today?” by Stan Chu Ilo for National Catholic Reporter, November 30, 2022
“‘Gaudium et Spes’ offers wisdom for a divided church,” by Meghan J. Clark for US Catholic, January 16, 2023
”Pope Francis asks theologians to remember the marginalized. Here’s how one global project is responding,” by Meghan J. Clark for America, January 19, 2023
Response to “Pope Francis asks theologians to remember the marginalized. Here’s how one global project is responding,” by John Gonzalez for Locus Theologicus, January 23, 2023

Taking Crucified Peoples Down From the Cross Today

This post also appears today at the Sowing Holy Questions blog of the Seminary of the Southwest.

I heard this morning on the radio that almost a quarter of the population of the US has been fully vaccinated, and almost 40% of us are partially so. Thinking about how those statistics translate into everyday people’s experiences of life, I found myself hopeful about what our US American context might look like on the other side of the pandemic.  As some have noted in the New York Times and elsewhere, the pandemic has been a kind of apocalypse, an unveiling, a pulling back of the curtain that often obscured the racial, political, and economic disparities that mark our common life in the US. When I prayerfully consider what post-pandemic life might look like, the impact these disparities have on daily living for the most marginalized among us is at the forefront of my spiritual imagination. 

The late Spanish Jesuit priest and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría described those whom unjust social structures affect most acutely as el pueblo crucificado, as crucified people or a crucified community.  He argued that crucified peoples have something in common with Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered the death penalty when the religious and state authorities of his day colluded to find him guilty of blasphemy and sedition.  Ellacuría decried the impact of economic systems that allowed the vast majority of the people of El Salvador, the Central American nation where he spent most of his adult life and priestly ministry, to struggle to eke out a living, with most of its modest wealth concentrated in the hands of las Catorce Familias, the Fourteen Families.  As economic pressures on the poorest of the poor mounted, a civil war broke out, with leftist guerrillas fighting against the Salvadoran military, who protected the oligarchy and the elected officials who allowed the oligarchy’s power to go unchecked.  Through his academic work in theology at the University of Central America (UCA), Ellacuría spoke out against the violence on both sides, advocating for a third way, a way of nonviolence that called on the economically privileged to abandon the lifestyles that kept so many Salvadorans so impoverished.  He crafted a liberation theology that acknowledged the sins of colonialism and their legacy, calling on the Catholic Church of El Salvador to let go of its triumphalism and of its own wealth, encouraging its leaders to practice a different way of being church, a church that is with and for the poor.

On November 16, 1989, Ellacuría, his brother Jesuits with whom he lived in the UCA rectory, their housekeeper Elba Ramos, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Celina, who had sought refuge from the fighting in the streets the night before, were forced out of their home and onto the front lawn, where they were assassinated by members of the Salvadoran military.  These priests were put to death because their ideas were dangerous, because they had the audacity to abandon their own privileges to walk alongside Elba, Celina, and other economically poor people in the midst of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Jon Sobrino, another Spanish priest who was a member of the UCA Jesuit community, had been traveling here in the US when his brother Jesuits, Elba, and Celina, were killed.Upon his return to San Salvador, he continued to tell the story of the martyrs of the UCA, to write about the legacy of Ellacuría, and to make his own contributions to Latin American liberation theology.He is best known for Christological tomes like Jesus the Liberator and Christ the Liberator, but his text that affected my spiritual life most profoundly is a skinny blue paperback, the title of which translates to English as The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross.  In it, Sobrino offers theological reflections on mercy and solidarity, calling Christians to a witness of discipleship that takes the crucified peoples down from their crosses, that refuses to allow unjust structures like those that crucified Jesus of Nazareth to continue to put to death so many today who are considered the economic, political, religious, and ethnic “other.” He invites Christians in our own time to get in the way of the death-dealing work of these structures of sin, to practice mercy with and solidarity alongside members of crucified communities.

I’ve been sitting with the implications of Ellacuría’s and Sobrino’s words and witnesses this past Holy Week, as the trial of Derek Chauvin began in Minneapolis.  Following its coverage, I am reminded of some of George Floyd’s last words: “I can’t move.”  “Mama.”  “Some water or something.”  “Please.”  “I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd suffered the same fate of all too many others—of Brianna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Michael Ramos, que en paz descansen—a crucified community those who testify to the love of the Christ who rises are called to take down from the cross. 

Last fall, I was buoyed by many of the reflections shared here on the Sowing Holy Questions blog, posts that introduced us to spiritual practices that can root our commitments to anti-racism. In “Soul Afire,” Megan Allen wrote, “So often when we speak of reconciliation and healing, we exclude ourselves from the equation. Afraid of our own brokenness, we focus our attention outward in an attempt to save others from feeling the same pain we feel and often refuse to acknowledge to ourselves. How can we seek to bring true healing to the world if we ourselves are not willing to receive the healing power of Jesus Christ?”  Similarly, Derek Larson reminded us that “the work of racial justice…involves just as much inner work as it does outer. The work of racial healing is a contemplative practice as well as a social and active practice, which requires us to look deep within and learn how to let go of the destructive and racist influences by which our egos have been shaped.”  Many of us in the Southwest community have committed ourselves anew to spiritual practices of anti-racism over this past year, rooting ourselves in the healing and contemplative work necessary to sustain these commitments.

Today, I am curious about what it might mean for us to begin to take crucified peoples down from the cross.  What strategies, what skills might we cultivate to aid us in this work that Megan and Derek rightfully remind us calls us inward, as well as outward?  While it may not seem this way just now, on the cusp of what some are describing as the fourth wave of the pandemic, this time of death-dealing illness, this time of great unveiling will, with time and effort, I trust, come to an end.  How will these months of physical distancing, masking, and hand washing change us?  In our seminary community’s tradition of small experiments, what everyday practices might we start to develop today that can support us in guarding against the temptation to forget what has been revealed by the pandemic for all to see?  How might we work together to begin to practice mercy, to take the crucified peoples down from their cross? 

Stepping into Our Vocations: Luke 4:16-30

I gave this reflection on Luke 4:16-30 in Shelton Chapel at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary on Tuesday, October 30th, 2018. The text is below, as well.

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I come to this text as a daughter of immigrants.  My father’s family came to the United States in the 1800s, crossing the Atlantic from Germany, Ireland and Wales.  La familia de mi madre immigrated from Bolivia several generations later, their four small children in tow, seeking economic opportunity and a better life in Southern California.  As I’ve shared with my Latinx Theology students, my Mamita, as we called my maternal grandmother, loved to tell the story of coming to the United States.  Whenever anything big happened in our family—if someone graduated, began her career, was married, gave birth—she would remind us that none of it would have been possible, had she not convinced my Abuelito that they should bring their family to the US.

I situate myself in this way to demonstrate that context matters.  We don’t leave behind who we are when we interpret the Gospel, but rather, we bring these experiences with us in our encounters with the text.  Far from a blank slate, I come to the text in my particularity.  Methodist theologian and historian Justo González calls on us, in this process, to read the Bible in Spanish—to interpret biblical texts in ways that acknowledge the contexts from which we come, that are attentive to the power dynamics at work in the text, that discern what is Good News today and how we are implicated in bringing it about in the here and now.

Turning back to Luke 4, the adult Jesus we meet there is also a child of immigrants—more aptly put, he was the son of refugee parents, an asylee himself.  Raised in the shadow of the Roman Empire, Jesus was born in a place that made room where there had been none.  And soon after, his family fled the threat of state-sanctioned violence, hid in Egypt, only returning to the backwater town of Nazareth after the threat of violence against the boy children of his community had ended.  Just before we meet him in today’s Gospel, Jesus had done battle with evil in the desert, which, in turn, prepared him for preaching in Galilee.

A faithful Jewish man, he honored the custom of his faith community in attending synagogue, and he proclaimed the words of Isaiah we heard a moment ago.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring Good News to the poor.” Having returned from being tempted in the desert, where he had rejected earthly power, he begins to speak what is true, ready to face the consequences.  At first, those who had gathered at the synagogue spoke highly of him, but the conversation quickly sours.  “Isn’t this that carpenter’s son?  Who does he think he is?”  We see the consequences of telling the truth. We see how community responds to his announcement of Good News to the poor when he narrowly escapes being hurled off a cliff, a slightly tamer foreshadowing of future events in his life. 

This passage describes a key moment, I think, in Jesus fully stepping into his vocation.  It is the beginning of his public ministry.  And it makes a claim on those of us who aim to follow in his footsteps, seeking to step fully into our own vocations, preparing to begin our own public ministries.  That claim is this: Our vocations must include work for justice alongside those who are poor and oppressed.  We must speak truth in public ways, even if the consequences cause our communities to attempt to throw us off a cliff.  This is Good News, sisters, brothers, and siblings.  It is Good News for those of us gathered here.  It is Good News for the communities to which we belong.  And it is good news to those who are poor and those who are oppressed.   

Reading the Bible in Spanish, we must ask ourselves who is poor, who is oppressed. Before they were members of the caravan, the asylees of Guatemala and Honduras currently making their way through México to the United States were among the poorest of the poor, the most desperately oppressed.  And they are in urgent need of our focused attention. These are the poor to whom we are called to bring Good News, and they, in turn, speak what is true to those of us who have the privilege of papers, who enjoy the benefits of documentation, who have US American citizenship.

With the Feast of All Saints in my tradition drawing so near, I cannot help being reminded of the members of the cloud of witnesses who teach us about our vocations.  While Dom Hélder Câmara has not been canonized, I see him as a prophet of his times whose actions echo the words of our Gospel today.  He stepped fully into his vocation, speaking and acting on what is true, regardless of the consequences.  The Catholic Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, from the mid1960s to the mid1980s, Câmara accompanied the poor and the oppressed of that community in the context of violent repression from the Brazilian dictatorship that had taken over the government of his day.  He was an outspoken advocate and practitioner of liberation theology as it was articulated in Latin American contexts.  A small man in stature, Câmara had a booming and powerful voice, which he used to critique—openly and pointedly—the military dictatorship that aimed to keep the poor and oppressed of his archdiocese and their country mired in their suffering.  Derided by some as the Red Bishop, Câmara is often quoted as having said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

Following his lead, I am compelled to ask of the asylees of the caravan: Why are they poor?  What is happening in Central America that is prompting them to leave everything they know, facing violence at the hands of the Mexican police at the bridge at their southern border, waking up to clouds of pesticides the Mexican police turned on them in Chiapas?  Members of the caravan come from across Central America, but I am going to focus for a moment on Honduras, one of the most economically poor nations in the Américas.  As our government did in several Central American nations in the 1980s, the United States intervened militarily in Honduran affairs, continuing to provide military aid through the present day.  Further, our government supported the overthrow of democratically elected President Zelaya as recently as 2009.  The justification for these actions has to do with protecting US American economic and political interests, especially as those interests relate to “free trade” through policies like CAFTA and NAFTA, as well as “the drug war.”  Those whom these policies affect most directly are our Central American brothers and sisters who are already economically poor, especially Indigenous women and children.  These poor and oppressed people are fleeing their homes and facing such violence in the slim hope of a safer and more economically secure life because US foreign policy leaves them no choice.  Fully aware of the risk of their families being forcefully separated if they survive this journey to the United States, these poor and oppressed people become refugees and asylees as they join the caravan. 

Like the Jesus of Luke 4, many of us gathered in this space are preparing to step more fully into our own vocations.  Some of us already have.  To do so, we must ask ourselves, as leaders in our churches: What does living out our vocations look like, in light of our shared context, a context in which the economic privileges of our US American lifestyles are so closely related to the economic suffering of our Central American brothers, sisters, and siblings?

If we are to speak truth in our churches about these realities, we must first discern what is true.  In our current political moment, discerning what is true is no small feat.  However, we can take a cue from Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who knew of the need for the Bible and the newspaper to be read alongside one another.  If we apply González’s advice about reading the Bible to the way we read the newspaper, as well, we will ask ourselves about how news stories portray the poor and the oppressed, in what colors they paint refugees and asylees, about whose interests the perspectives presented in these news stories serve.  And we must invite the Spirit of the Lord to be upon us, too, that she might guide our discernment of what is true, that we might have the courage to speak that truth to the church communities of which we are a part.  

As this Gospel passage reminds us, we can encounter resistance from members of our communities when we speak what of what is true.  Some among us will tell us that we should leave politics outside the doors of our churches, that we must not politicize the Gospel.  However, remaining neutral in the face of the suffering of the poor and the oppressed is, in fact, a political act.  It is a political act that ignores the wise counsel of today’s Gospel.  It is a political act that prioritizes our economic comfort over the needs of others—namely, the refugees and asylees currently on the move in the caravan.  It is a political act that turns our faces not only from their suffering, but also from the truth of a Jesus who suffered similarly—as a child whose safety was threatened by the political circumstances into which he was born.  This turning away fails to recognize that the Gospels of our shared traditions are, in and of themselves, political texts.  Just three short years after we meet the Jesus of Luke 4, he was put to death, in part, for being a political dissident.  This is the Jesus of history.  This is the Christ of our faith.  His example calls on us to resist the temptation to turn away from the economic and political suffering of those who are like he was.   

As many of you certainly are aware, Pope Francis recently canonized Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was archbishop of San Salvador during the civil war that nation endured in the early 1980s.  Saint Romero was intimately familiar with what it means to step fully into his vocation, to speak truth to power, and to risk dire consequences. When Romero was early in his ministry as archbishop, members of the Salvadoran military assassinated Fr. Rutilio Grande, who had encouraged economically poor people living in rural areas to interpret the Gospels in light of their lives.  When Romero went to be among those whose lives Grande’s ministry had touched, he was moved by their suffering.  That movement of the Spirit among them led to his conversion—a turning from comfort and toward suffering, a realization of the connections between the two that would not allow him to return to his former ways of being. 

The Salvadoran Civil War largely was fought between two sides—the military who aimed to protect the economic interests of the wealthy and paramilitary groups who fought on the part of the economically poor.  During regular broadcasts of his homilies on public radio, Romero called for justice that would bring about peace, begging those who had taken up arms against their neighbors to lay them down, calling on those in power to broker a just peace that prioritized the needs of the economically poor who continue to make up the majority of the Salvadoran population.  They failed to listen, and he was gunned down while celebrating Mass with a community of vowed religious women there.  He embodied the ideas to which our Gospel points today.  And the wisdom he spoke with his life continues to ring true for we who see ourselves as church leaders today.  Romero said,

The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.”

This is Good News, sisters and brothers.  It is Good News for those of us gathered here.  It is Good News for the communities to which we belong.  And it is good news to those who are poor and those who are oppressed.  Stepping fully into our vocations, let us have confidence in who and whose we are and whom we serve.  Let us go forth to treat our sores.  Let us believe in Christ the asylee.  Let us be converted from the sins that prevent us from working on the part of justice for asylees today.  Amen.

Pushing Pause

This summer, I’m pushing pause on posting here, so I can focus my energy on honoring my commitments to other writing adventures like my forthcoming book with Convivium Press and preparing my syllabi for the new courses I’ll get to teach next academic year at Seminary of the Southwest. If you’d like to receive updates about the book as its publication date nears and other updates, click here, scroll down past my photo of the railroad tracks and the paragraphs of introductory text to the Subscribe box, and enter your contact details there. While I could never be as prolific as Sor Juana (depicted above) was, her witness is a source of inspiration. If you’re curious to learn more about her life, take a look at the TedEd video about her my ACHTUS colleague Theresa Yugar co-created. ¡Hasta pronto!

Imagining Life Together on the Other Side of the Pandemic

Time moves in a strange way right now.  Sometimes, it feels like minutes take forever to inch by, and at others, hours seem to fly past me at speeds faster than lightning.  When I left Austin in mid-March, an uncharacteristically last-minute decision to begin with, I had no idea that I would still be in Orange County six weeks later.  So much has changed during those six weeks.  I feel like my body is trying to catch up with the impact of all those changes swirling around us.  

A former coworker of mine shared with the rest of us on staff at St. Augustine at the time her sense that the rhythms of the liturgical year sometimes don’t line up with where we are in real time, but the moods that mark seasons like Advent and Lent and Ordinary Time do map on to the seasons of our lives, regardless of how long or how short they might be.  While I’m very much aware that we are in the season of Easter and that Pentecost is still a couple weeks off, parts of me have remained back in Lent. The spiritual practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving we explore during this liturgical season feel real and rooting in a different way right now.  Praying with my parents and my brother continues to be a source of consolation these days, and I’m beginning to place before God the grief I’m experiencing over how close the realities of illness and death now feel—too close, to be clear, like I can reach out and touch them, much too close for comfort.

Maybe it’s because my body is back in the suburbs where I grew up, maybe it’s something else, but unexpectedly spending quarantine in my childhood home has prompted all kinds of reflection on US American culture and the tiny little corners of it I’ve been able to occupy.  

The high school my siblings and I attended was on the other end of Bristol from South Coast Plaza, a monument to capitalism that expanded to include Crystal Court around the time I was starting first grade.  Students in their first year were called “freshmen” at our high school then. All of us were, regardless of gender.  This was a time when I only knew two options for gender had ever existed anywhere, and I had not yet heard the term “exclusive language,” even if the practice of referring to ourselves as men during Mass rankled me.  It bothered me then that the tuition was so expensive at our high school that the families of the high school-aged teenagers who lived in the neighborhood often couldn’t afford to pay it in full, available as scholarships were.  We knew who “the scholarships kids” were; they worked at the snack bar during lunch and after school, pouring their classmates’ sodas and making change at the cash register. 

By the time I had started college, I had come to understand that I had grown up in the geographic and socioeconomic midpoint between South Los Angeles and South Orange County.  My family did not struggle financially the way so many did up the freeway from us, nor was it true that we were so very wealthy that we never wanted for anything, as was the case for many of my high school classmates who lived walking distance from the water, about as many miles south.  My mom was good at reminding us by her example that we had a responsibility to those who have less, and the couple who ran the Catholic Worker where I spent a summer in college shared with me that it can be helpful to remind wealthy Catholics where they can put their extra money to use. 

As grounded as my parents kept us, I came of age in the Southern California of the 1990s, where opulent wealth coexisted alongside the kind of economic poverty that has the potential to break one’s spirit.  Whether my vantage point was the backyard of the Catholic Worker house in Santa Ana or the bluff at Loyola Marymount, it became clearer and clearer to me while I was in college that the county I called home suffered from a form of addiction we didn’t cover in my biology course on Human Drug Use sophomore year.  I grew up in an environment full of people who were constantly hungry to acquire more and more and more and more, a hunger that would not be satiated by the next purchase.  No matter how many boxes from Costco a soccer mom could stuff into her minivan, no matter the number of BMWs a family could collect in their garages, no matter how much square footage a family could afford for their McMansion overlooking the ocean, it would never actually be enough. 

To be clear, I’m not immune to this addiction.  While I’ve never been one to go on shopping sprees at South Coast, I struggle to honor the commitment to simple living with which I began to experiment during that summer I spent as a member of the Catholic Worker community in Santa Ana.  It’s nice to have nice things.  If we have enough of them, it becomes easier for us to trick ourselves into believing that those nice things can buffer us from the hard things that are unpreventable, especially for so many of our siblings in the Christ who knew suffering and who also rises.    

But the lifestyles others of us in the US enjoy are not sustainable, especially for everyone the world over.  Never has this been more the case than it was before the stock market crashed this spring.  Yes, the economic reality of the top 1% is one that only a very privileged few in the US enjoy. But even so, the choices many Americans had been privileged to make about money before the spread of the coronavirus were the stuff of dreams for the vast majority of our neighbors in the global south.  As my HTI colleague Jorge Juan Busone Rodríguez V illustrates so clearly in his recent Open Plaza piece, we are living through a time of apocalypse, a time of great unveiling.  No longer is the suffering of so many obscured from view for those who are economically comfortable.  We can’t not see it. As the numbers of those who are infected with Covid19 and those who have died from it in economically poor communities of color in the United States in cities like St. Louis continue to rise, none of us can deny the impact of the lack of consistently available and affordable public insurance on our neighbors.  As gentrification continues, poor Black and Brown folks may not be able to afford to live near those of us who experience economic and racial privilege any longer, but they have not disappeared.  In cities like Austin, ethnic enclaves that used to exist on the East Side and the South Side are, in fact, disappearing, but their former residents are being priced out of the city proper to places like Round Rock, where middle-class people of color can afford a home for their families, or Bastrop, which is becoming home to a growing number of economically poor newcomers to the United States. 

My parents and I were talking about these things as we sat in the tall chairs arranged around the island in the middle of their kitchen after breakfast last week.  My mom recounted the burning of the Amazon last fall, the political upheaval in Bolivia last winter and into the new year, and the advent of a new pandemic this spring.  I really believe God is allowing this to happen, she said, so we can remember how to take care each other.  She and Teresa of Calcutta are right. Many of us have forgotten what is true: We belong to one another.  As the news of the numbers of the dying in the US are beamed into our living rooms each night, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when this virus begins to afflict our neighbors in the global south.  That morning at the table, my mom described God as pushing pause on business as usual, sharing her hope that we will not only take better care of one another in our families on the other side of this, but that we would also remember how to care for our siblings in what my students preparing for priesthood in the Episcopal Church often call the whole human family.

Let’s use our prayer time to remember our interconnectedness and our interdependence, now.  If we don’t need to use our stimulus checks to meet our immediate needs, let’s share those alms with those who do.  And let’s develop some small experiments that help us begin to fast from our addiction to those things we might want but don’t actually need.  Let’s imagine together what our world could be like on the other side of the pandemic, even as we struggle to embrace the humility we need to practice, in order to admit that none of us really knows when that will be.  What might it be like for us simply to be in the in-between-ness of this time?  To dream about the world as it could be?  To start now with the kinds of small experiments that might bring us thismuch closer to that world becoming a part of our lived reality?       

"Teaching in Times of Crisis" Published in *Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion*

At the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting last November, the cohort of which I’m a part with the Louisville Institute presented the fruits of our dialogue about the implications of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for our times. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this seminal work’s publication, the session consisted of presentations on which my colleagues and I collaborated, as well as table conversations engaging themes relating liberative pedagogical praxis with some of the interrelated issues with which we grapple in our classrooms (e.g. climate catastrophe, immigration detention, racial justice, gender equity, among others). The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion published our short takes, which incorporate our reflections on the session since then, in its most recent issue. The issue can be accessed through an institutional or personal account; alternatively, a PDF of each piece in our roundtable is available for purchase here. Many thanks to Edwin Aponte for making our collaboration possible and to Carmen Nanko-Fernández, our facilitator, for walking with us since we began our work together in the fall of 2018.

Celebration as Resistance: Singing "Alleluia" on Easter Monday

Attempting to participate in the movements of Holy Week and Easter this year has been a challenging thing.  Our world has changed.  As a global community, we’re in the midst of what feels like the long middle of a story, and we don’t know when it will be over or how it will turn out in the end.  Being in Southern California with my family during this time, I experience a mix of gratitude and grief that—without intending to wax melodramatic, by any means—feels like nothing else I’ve encountered before. 

Regularly, we offer thanks for our blessings during these times: that most of us are healthy, that family members who have been affected by the coronavirus directly have recovered fully, that we are together during this time, that our basic needs (and then some) are met, that the sun still peeks through on the rainier days that have dotted this past week’s calendar, that functional technology keeps us connected to our loved ones elsewhere during these strange times, that we have meaningful and regular work that can be done remotely and safely.  My parents, brother, and I have been praying together more often than we ever have before, and that is a gift, in and of itself.  But we don’t hold hands during the Our Fathers that mark our at-home communion services, and we don’t hug each other to share a sign of God’s peace at the appointed time.  In order to protect those whom we love, especially those whose immunity is compromised, we keep physical distance from one another.  We do not touch as we otherwise would, especially in times of crisis.    

There have been times in recent weeks, in recent days, when I am keenly aware of the ways in which we are simultaneously grieving.  We grieve this lack of physical contact, however necessary it is.  We grieve not being able to celebrate milestones like birthdays and baby showers in the ways we had imagined even weeks ago; not hugging one another when my mom picked me up from the airport, when we receive sad news, when we are working through something hard.  I feel this grief most acutely on mornings when I wake up not feeling rested, regardless of how many hours I’ve slept the night before. 

Focus has been elusive.  While I check off items on my lists of To Do’s each day and look forward to seeing the faces of my colleagues and my students via Zoom each week, I have not been able to be as present to my academic writing as I would like.  Even as I type these words, a voice of judgment threatens to criticize me for naming this, as though naming my struggle to write somehow robs me of the ability to stand in solidarity with those who are suffering right now. One of the insights that Brené Brown shared in a recent podcast has been helpful to me when the voice of judgment tries to take over.  In it, she reminds us that having compassion for ourselves actually grows our capacity for compassion for others.  Having compassion for ourselves enables us to show up for others in ways that honor our values.  

That desire to live in a way that reflects solidarity with others, especially those who are suffering most acutely as a result of the coronavirus—the elderly, those without health insurance or a home, those in prison and in immigration detention, those whose immune systems already are compromised—is rooted in my faith, a faith that is corporate and communal.  Our salvation is wrapped up in one another.  As I watched women who have become friends give their testimonies and lead us in the recitation of the rosary during the mobile Pésame at Dolores Mission on Good Friday, I felt this interconnectedness anew.  One of the few times I’ve been able to do so since the shelter-in-place order has gone into effect, I wept bitterly at the kitchen table in my childhood home.  Standing near my parents, the three of us hovering around the iPhone that broadcast the Pésame by Facebook Live, I felt the emotional release that can come with tears.  I remembered what these women have taught me with their lives, how rooted those truths are in what my mom and my Mamita had taught me at that kitchen table, how those truths illuminate the Gospel and, in turn, salvation history. 

Ignacio Ellacuría, a Spanish Jesuit who was gunned down alongside his brother Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter on the lawn outside their residence in 1989, often spoke of el pueblo crucificado (“the crucified people”).  In the midst of the Salvadoran Civil War, he recognized the crucifixion of Jesus in the suffering of the poor.  He saw how the powers and principalities of Rome; how modern-day markets serving the gods of neoliberalism, how policies denying access to the most fundamental of human rights worked together to put Jesus of Nazareth and the vast majority of Salvadorans at risk, even to the point of death. These forces colluded to deprive them of the right to live. 

The time I spent with the women of a crucified community in East Los Angeles has acquainted me, second-hand, with the kind of trauma that can come from living in a neighborhood marked by violence.  The photo above was taken on the Feast of the Holy Family in 2015; it is of the crucifix that hangs behind the altar at Dolores Mission Parish.  I listened to the stories of women who belong to that community, women who, at times, had put the mattresses of their children on the floor before bedtime to protect them as best they could from the possibility of a stray bullet whizzing through the window; of women who had grieved alongside mothers in their communities who had lost their children to that violence; of women who witness to resurrection in their advocacy for conditions in their neighborhoods that support not just surviving, but thriving.  These women know trauma, but they also know what it is to find deep and abiding joy in lo cotidiano, in the struggles of daily living.

On this Easter Monday, I wonder what it means to sing Alleluia in these times.  How can we sing songs of praise in the midst of such suffering?  Today, I aim to take my cue from these women who celebrate life in the face of suffering as a form of resistance to forces of violence, as a witness to resurrection.  They show me that to sing a song of praise is not to deny the existence of suffering or even the persistence of death.  Rather, to utter an Alleluia in these times is to place our faith in one who saves, who breathes life into each of us.  It is an act of radical trust—not a blind faith that things will somehow magically turn out alright in the end, but rather a radical trust in one who saves.  We trust that the Spirit of God can guide us back to one another; that in finding our way back to each other, we might rebuild our relationships—individually and societally—on the other side of this pandemic in ways that witness to the upside down values of the Kin-dom of God.  Let us sing Alleluia.  Let us join these women in practicing resurrection.

Recursos para Celebrar la Semana Santa en Casa/Resources to Celebrate Holy Week at Home

Seguir a Jesus en Semana Santa: Retiro Biblico por Internet

Semana Santa en Casa

Holy Week at Home

Lectio Divina with the Words of Óscar Romero

From The Violence of Love by Óscar Romero
Compiled and translated by James Brockman, SJ
Full text at the Romero Trust

This is the Christian’s joy:
I know that I am a thought in God,
no matter how insignificant I may be –
the most abandoned of beings,
one no one thinks of.
Today, when we think of Christmas gifts,
how many outcasts no one thinks of!

Think to yourselves, you that are outcasts,
you that feel you are nothing in history:
“I know that I am a thought in God.”
Would that my voice might reach the imprisoned
like a ray of light, of Christmas hope –
might say also to you,
the sick,
the elderly in the home for the aged,
the hospital patients,
you that live in shacks and shantytowns,
you coffee harvesters trying to garner your only wage
for the whole year,
you that are tortured:
God’s eternal purpose has thought of all of you.
He loves you,
and, like Mary, he incarnates that thought in his womb.
DECEMBER 24, 1978

Lectio (read): We center ourselves. A member of the group reads the passage above, slowly, in part or in its entirety. Others in the group listen with our hearts, noting a word or phrase that might stand out to us.

Meditatio (reflect): As the reader reads the passage again, we spend time lingering over the word or phrase that stand out to us. Perhaps we name those words or phrases aloud.

Oratio (speak): The reader reads the passage once more, leaving space for the group to reflect on the words or phrases. Perhaps we share what about those words or phrases strike us, about how God might be speaking to us in those words or phrases.

Contemplatio (contemplate): The group takes time a few minutes—in silence or perhaps with instrumental music—to rest in what God is sharing with them, individually and as a community.

Servicio de Comunión en Casa/Communion Service at Home

Como muchos de nosotros buscamos maneras de poder orar en casa, sería bueno si tuviéramos acceso al texto para un Servicio de Comunión. Aun cuando no nos enfrentamos a una pandemia, un laico o diácono puede presidir un Servicio de Comunión en la ausencia de un sacerdote. Por lo general, en los Servicios de Comunión se usan hostias consagradas previamente. Puede encontrar el texto para un Servicio de Comunión en español aquí. También, podemos encontrar las lecturas del día aquí. Haga clic en la fecha escrita en español. En vez de distribuir hostias consagradas previamente, muchas personas hacen una oración de Comunión espiritual, escrita por San Alfonso María de Ligorio. Podemos entonar nuestros cantos preferidos en los lugares habituales (por ejemplo, entrada, el salmo, Comunión, salida), también. Si prefiere no dirigir el canto, tal vez le gustaría utilizar música sagrada de YouTube. Agradezco a Richard McCarron de Catholic Theological Union por compartir estos documentos conmigo, para poder tenerlos disponible aquí. Agradezco a Francisco Castillo de RCL Benziger por su apoyo, también.

With so many of us looking for ways to pray at home, it seems helpful for more of us to have access to the text for a Communion Service. Even when we’re not in the midst of a pandemic, a lay person or a deacon can preside during a Communion Service in the absence of a priest. Usually, Communion Services use previously consecrated hosts. Please find a PDF of the text for a Communion Service in English here. We can find the readings of the day here, as well. In the place of the distribution of the previously consecrated host, many communities are saying a prayer for spiritual communion, attributed to St. Alphonsus Liguori. We can sing our favorites songs in the usual places (like the gathering, the psalm, communion, sending), as well. If you would not like to lead the singing, maybe you would like to use sacred music on YouTube. Thank you to Richard McCarron of Catholic Theological Union for sharing these documents with me, that I might make them available here.

Being Christian in a Time of Crisis

This post first appeared at the blog of the Seminary of the Southwest,
“Sowing Holy Questions,” last Tuesday, February 11th.

On days like today, it’s hard to be Christian.  Following the advice often attributed to Karl Barth, I aim to be the kind of Christian who lives her faith with the newspaper in one hand and the Gospels in the other.  As the realities to which articles like this one and this one point seem to press in on us, it’s hard to know how to live into the Good News.  I’m reminded of the question one of our Encuentro students asked as we moved from our time in Laredo to our time in Austin: “How will we know what we don’t know?”  Embracing the humility in that question, I’d like to explore what it means to be a Christian in times of crisis with compassionate curiosity.    

As we learn about the gravity of climate catastrophe and the migration crisis, many of us are moved to acquire as much information as we can about the nature of the problem, in the interest of discerning the most appropriate solution.  While this can be an honorable intention, it assumes one solution, and it can provoke a kind of analysis paralysis.  In the face of this temptation, it can be helpful for us to acknowledge that we have inherited the structures of sin that birthed these crises.  By virtue of living in the United States, we benefit from these sinful structures remaining as they are, unchallenged.  However, we cannot let our understandings of the gravity of these situations lead us to believe the lie that our efforts are necessarily futile. 

Another temptation is to point to examples of Christian living that fail to witness to the reality of God’s love, throwing our arms up in despair.  While it is important to name our grief over the ways in which our faith is abused, I worry that focusing too long on these poor examples saps us of our energy, energy that could be used to dream together about what our Christian witness might look like.

In times like these, it is especially important for us to remember what is true.  Each of us in our own ways and all of us together are called to live into the truth of our Christian faith.  Fortunately for us, Christian truth lived and moved and had his being in the person of Jesus.  And the ideas we have about the shape Christian truth should take must be rooted in right relationship with him.  If our faith truly is to seek understanding, if we are to theologize, we are called to start by nurturing that relationship. 

During our Encuentro course this January, we talked about the political nature of the Bible.  The Bible is not partisan; it will not dictate to us for whom we should cast our vote in the next election.  But it is deeply political in ways that we as Christians living in the United States would do well to continue to get to know.  Our salvation history is filled with stories of oppression and domination, of marginalized peoples discerning how to survive and how to live their faith in the wake of unjust rulers.  Jesus was born in the midst of Rome’s occupation of his family’s homeland.  The Gospel of Matthew tells us that shortly after his birth, his parents sought refuge in Egypt, fearing for his safety, responding to Herod’s threat against the children of his community.  When Jesus began his public ministry, those who heard him did not acknowledge his authority, in part because he had grown up the son of a carpenter in the backwater town of Nazareth.  The truth of his witness was so piercing that those in positions of political and religious authority in Jerusalem colluded in putting him to death.  What would it look like for us to acknowledge the political nature of our most sacred texts, to allow that to guide us as we live into our own roles in the history of salvation? 

As I discern my own response to this question, I am reminded of the gift Jesus gave his mother and the Beloved Disciple as they wept at the foot of his cross.  Not until he knew that they would accompany one another on the journey ahead did he breathe his last.  What would it look like for us to live into that legacy? 

I often remind myself that the reality of suffering—of our migrant siblings; of the earth, our common home; of Black and Brown-bodied folks; of women; of our queer kin; of those who are disabled—is interconnected.  We’re not here to compete with one another in what some have called the Oppression Olympics.  If we are to live into the freedom to which the Resurrection invites us, the truth of Jesus’ witness on the cross invites us to do so together.     

For spiritual sustenance, I’m curious about what it would be like for us to return regularly to this prayer often attributed to Óscar Romero.  To my mind, it models the kind of stewardship to which we are called.  Its wisdom can help us remember that we are neither obligated to heal every social ill nor given a pass to ignore them; this prayer reminds us that we are responsible for taking the first step, to do what we can where we are, even if we’re not sure where that step will lead us.

What is one thing we can do this week that reflects our commitment to our faith during these troubled times?

Who can we invite to join us in discerning what we will do next week to honor this commitment?

Hay Poder en la Familia Unida: A Reflection on Mark 7:1-13

I shared this reflection on February 11, 2020, during the bilingual Eucharist
at Christ Chapel of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest.
The readings of the day are 1 Kings 8:22-30, Psalm 84, and Mark 7:1-13.

When I was growing up, I loved being with my Mamita, my mom’s mom.  I remember the way she looked.  She was elegant.  My Mamita’s nails were always painted her trademark shade of bright red.  Her makeup was impeccable, and her lipstick always matched her nails.  Just over five feet tall, she wore fabulous jumpsuits and high heels wherever she went.  My cousins and I would visit her in Palm Desert for weeks at a time during summer when we were growing up.  Swimming in the pool those summer evenings, we knew it was time to get out when we heard the sound of her tiny kitten heels clicking against the concrete. 

And my Mamita worked, from the time she was a young teenager in Bolivia until she retired in her 60s, here in the States.  Most of my life, she ran a chain of flower shops in Palm Desert.  During those summer visits, the temperature regularly rose above 100 degrees.  I remember my cousins and me racing from our Mamita’s air-conditioned car into the shops.  We sought refuge from those brief moments of desert heat in the refrigerated glass case, where the roses and flowers and baby’s breath were kept.  Sliding the glass door closed, we reveled in the cool, fragrant air as long as we could, pressing our noses and cheeks against the glass, giggling together, waving at our Mamita until she called us to come out. 

I loved listening to her voice.  Whether she was speaking in Spanish or in English, her voice had a lilt to it, a song-like quality I’ve come to recognize as characteristic of the women in our family.  My Mamita had her dichos, little sayings for which she was known among us.  As we climbed into her bed those summer nights, we talked through the events of the day.  We prayed together, and she asked God to bless each member of our family by name.  As she closed our prayer, she often said, “Hay poder en la familia unida.”  (There is power in the family that is united, the family that stays together.)  Especially in times of disagreement, she was quick to remind us of this.  As a teenager, I did not always welcome this reminder, to put it mildly.  At the time, I worried that focusing so quickly on unity left too little room for us to be understood or to understand fully the perspective of the person with whom we were disagreeing.

I share these memories of my Mamita because she loved spending time with the Scriptures, and I wish I could ask her now what she thinks of the Jesus we meet in Mark’s Gospel today.  Mark tells us that the news of Jesus’ works had begun to spread, and many had pressed in on him, asking for healing.  When we meet Jesus and his disciples today, they are in the midst of a disagreement with the Pharisees and scribes.  According to Mark, the Pharisees and scribes are concerned that Jesus’ disciples are eating without having washed their hands.  The Pharisees and scribes have begun to engage in practices not written in their sacred texts, but these practices have become important to their community, nonetheless.  They attempt to hold Jesus’ disciples accountable for choosing not to partake in this practice of hand washing.  In return, the Markan Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah, who warned against those who claim to honor God but cling to their human traditions.  He calls out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes for failing to heed the warning of Isaiah’s text. 

One of my favorite New Testament professors taught us that the glimpses we get of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and scribes, as we do today, should not be interpreted in black and white terms.  She sensitized us to the anti-Judaism to which some Christians can fall prey when we try to lift up Jesus as an exception to a Jewish community obsessed with fidelity to the letter of the law.  Remembering her advice prompts me to revisit the First Reading.  We meet Solomon as he celebrates what a gift it is to have a physical place where his community can come together and worship as a body.  Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes all trace their religious lineage back to Solomon.  As members of a religious minority, making their way under Roman occupation, Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes lived on the underside of history.  All of them belonged to a religious community whose sacred places were denied them, even destroyed, by those who held political power.  I wonder about the impact that living in occupied territory might have had on their psyches, on their relationships with themselves and with other members of their community, on the ways they experienced and thought about their faith.

With passages like today’s Gospel, it’s easy to malign the Pharisees and the scribes.  It’s easy to collapse into the kind of either/or thinking that enables us to side with Jesus and make enemies of all who disagreed with him.  One of the gifts of Ignatian spirituality is its invitation to imaginative prayer as we encounter Scripture.  So let’s step back a bit from the immediacy of the conflict Jesus is experiencing with his Jewish brethren.  Let’s remember what they hold in common—their deep and abiding love for their God, their commitment to live out that love in community, their passion for the perspectives they bring to the table.  Taking a cue from Ignatius of Loyola, let’s be curious together about how God might see each of them.  How might God see their love for the Divine?  How might God see their commitment to practicing their faith?  How might God see their passion for their perspectives?

None of us can know for sure how God might respond to these questions, and I don’t claim to have definitive answers. 

But I do have some hunches about our God, that self-same God over whom Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes are disagreeing about how to honor.  I have a hunch that our God is a both/and kind of deity, big enough to hold all kinds of names.  I have a hunch that our God responds to all the pronouns we now ascribe to the Divine and then some.  I have a hunch that our God weeps alongside us when disagreements like the one in today’s Gospel are cemented into the divisions that haunt the Holy Land just as deeply as they do the borderlands of Texas.  I have a hunch that our God laments the stubbornness that can prevent us from seeing the fullness of the Divine in our siblings with whom we disagree.  I have a hunch that God is calling each of us individually and all of us together to conversion—conversion from the everyday sins that allow petty disagreements to crystallize into mistrust of one another, conversion from the structures of sin that are designed to make us forget that we belong to each other, just as much as we belong to our God.  I have a hunch that our God smiles on us when we refuse to forget, when we opt instead to remember that we are all integral parts of the family of God’s creation.  I have a hunch that our God rejoices with us when we live into that remembering.  When we repent from our complicity in those sinful structures.  When we celebrate the presence of God in the family of creation.  When we take some deep breaths and begin to listen to one another.  When we’re able to see something akin to our own pain, our own fear, our own anger in the pain, the fear, and the anger boiling over in the words of those with whom we disagree.  When those who would push others to the ground begin to recognize that doing so not only breaks the backs of the oppressed, but also prevents themselves from standing upright.    Porque hay poder en la familia unida, because there is power in the family that is united, that stays together.  If we’re gonna get free of what binds us, if we’re gonna work through what divides us, we’re not gonna do it alone.  Today’s Gospel shares with us an invitation to recognize ourselves, as well as those with whom we disagree, as part of the family of God. 

The Gospel of Mark has been called a passion narrative with a long introduction.  If we sit with the long-term impact of public squabbles like these, we see how the leadership of a religious minority cooperated with those in political power to convict Jesus of crimes he didn’t commit, of blasphemy and sedition.  In the face of the overt and covert violence that fueled his trial, Jesus practices nonviolent resistance.  He refuses to cooperate with the powers and principalities that tempt us into believing the lie that we are not worthy of our rightful place in the family of God.  What would it be like for us to join Jesus in that nonviolent resistance, to call the lie what it is, to live into the truth born of relationship with God in him? Amen. 

A New Issue of the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology

A new issue of the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology went live today. All the articles on the journal’s website are available for free download.

Guiding Us into the New Year: A Franciscan Benediction

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
so that we may live deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war,
so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world,
so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.

Amen.

A Nativity Poem for the Resistance

sometimes I wonder
if Mary breastfed Jesus.
if she cried out when he bit her
or if she sobbed when he would not latch.

and sometimes I wonder
if this is all too vulgar
to ask in a church
full of men
without milk stains on their shirts
or coconut oil on their breasts
preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.

but then i think of feeding Jesus,
birthing Jesus,
the expulsion of blood
and smell of sweat,
the salt of a mother’s tears
onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth,
feeling lonely
and tired
hungry
annoyed
overwhelmed
loving

and i think,
if the vulgarity of birth is not
honestly preached
by men who carry power but not burden,
who carry privilege but not labor,
who carry authority but not submission,
then it should not be preached at all.

because the real scandal of the Birth of God
lies in the cracked nipples of a
14 year old
and not in the sermons of ministers
who say women
are too delicate
to lead.

—Kaitlin Hardy Shetler

Hope, Grief, and Action in Troubled Times

Sometimes, it’s hard to be hopeful. Especially lately, it can be really hard to be truly hopeful. During this particular Advent season of waiting and anticipation, I find myself struggling with grief. When I read news story after news story about children dying in detention, about the impact the family separation policy is having on the most vulnerable among us, I feel tempted to allow myself to fall into a pit of despair.

One of the things that I’ve learned as a Christian living through the Trump presidency is that I need to grieve. Doing so is part of how I tend my spiritual wellbeing. Whether it’s praying with the psalms of lament or simply lighting a candle to la Virgen de Guadalupe as I read the news, I need to name my grief over the way we are allowing our government to act in our names, especially toward our migrant siblings. As I sit with my candle, I pour my heart out to la Virgencita, asking for her intercession on the part of her children. The psalms of lament remind me that we are not alone, that oppressive leaders have been a part of salvation history, that we as Christians come from a long line of faithful resisters who cried out to God from the depths of their and our grief and despair, that our God hears us, that our God weeps alongside us, that our God rages at the injustices that deprive creation of the fullness of life for which we are intended.

As anyone who has lived through the loss of a loved one can attest, it is not good to grieve alone. While the temptation to isolate is strong, we need to be in community during times like these. I’m blessed and lucky to be part of a community here that shares my values and acts on those values in ways that call our elected leaders to account on issues like these.

We cannot lose touch with our call to act, especially during these times. If you live in Austin, consider joining us in support of Hilda and her son tomorrow morning. You’re also welcome to write holiday cards to folks who are suffering under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)/Remain in Mexico program in Matamoros. Send your holiday cards to First Presbyterian Church Brownsville, Attention: Project Matamoros, 435 Palm Blvd., Brownsville, TX, 78520. Please be mindful that not all who are waiting in Matamoros are Christian or speak English. Especially if you’re a Texas resident, consider writing to Ted Cruz about MPP. Address your letter to Sen. Ted Cruz, 9901 IH-10W, Suite 950, San Antonio, TX 78230. Lastly, do consider joining those who will gather in Brownsville and Matamoros this January to be present to those most intimately affected by MPP.

Finding My Parish Home

I’ve lived in Austin for a little over a year now. It is no secret that I have struggled to find a church where I feel comfortable enough to pray regularly and build community. The felt absence of a parish in my life has been a significant source of desolation since I moved to Texas. When I first arrived in Austin, less than a week after the publication of the Pennsylvania Report, I prioritized this search for a new parish. In the midst of a major life transition, I craved the sense of deep belonging that comes from participation in communal prayer born of the faith tradition members of my family have held dear for generations. In spite of a series of honest attempts, I left too many Masses feeling a kind of disappointment that was wholly unfamiliar to me. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I have been blessed and lucky to have been a part of life-giving parish communities since I was a child. This isn’t to say that they were free of the challenges that accompany real community, but each of them in their own ways was a home away from home to me, especially during divinity school and my doctoral studies. Not having that in my new surroundings, I felt unmoored.

The irony of this situation is hardly lost on me. My vocation includes teaching theology and ministry, and integral to doing so is spiritual self care. I did that as well as I could on my own, but I am a traditional enough Catholic that I feel the need to receive the sacraments in community regularly. Teaching in mainline Protestant seminaries, I was immersed in intentional community in my professional life, and that immersion did and does feed me spiritually…but it is does not satisfy the whole of my spiritual needs.

It wasn’t until this fall that I became acquainted with a Catholic parish where I feel both comfortable and challenged. Ushers and people sitting near me in the pews welcomed me. The congregation sings with the choir. The homilies break open the word in ways that speak to my life. At the start of last night’s Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the danzantes aztecas began to move in rhythm with the beat of the drums, and tears began to roll down my cheeks. Fleeting thoughts crossed my mind—about the diversity of expressions of Latinx Catholicism, how much I have come to love its tradition of flor y canto, and how curious I am about what communal worship might look like in this postcolonial moment. While I participated in the movements of the Mass, I mostly felt present to the depth of emotions that had been bubbling under the surface but I had not been able to express. I experienced a sort of freedom in those familiar movements of the Mass; it felt like home.

Breaking the Wheel

The comments below were shared at the Justice for Our Neighbors: Austin Chapter Gala this evening.

I come to this conversation as a second-generation Bolivian-American woman with light skin privilege, and I bear in mind the immigration story of my Mamita, my maternal grandmother, who traveled from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Los Angeles with four small children in tow, in search of a better life in the early 1960s.  I ask that you keep the country of Bolivia, which is going through its own political turmoil in the wake of fraudulent elections, close to your heart this night.  My latinidad and women like my Mamita, who formed me in my faith, inform my approach to my work as a Catholic theologian.

Since I moved to Austin a little over a year ago, the reality of immigration has become a more integral part of my teaching and my research.  At the end of this summer, on a delegation to the Rio Grande Valley with other theologians, ministers, and members of mainline congregations, one of us came across the image that you see here.  I don’t know who this card belongs to, and I don’t know why she carried it.  But I imagine that it was dear to her, that it might have brought her solace, that it might have brought her hope. 

I did a little digging, and I learned that there are a number of possibilities about who is represented in the image.  It is possible that she is a representation of Catherine of Alexandria, a 4th-century Catholic saint who came into conflict with the emperor, Maxentius, who was intent on extinguishing the influence of Christianity.  Likely an educated member of the nobility, Catherine came to the emperor and denounced his cruelty to Christians.  He would not relent in this persecution and even urged her to abandon her position, proposing marriage to Catherine. She, in turn, refused.  Enraged, the emperor sentenced her to death on a breaking wheel, which you see her holding in her hands in the image shown.  Death by breaking wheel was torturous, as the victim’s limbs were threaded through the spokes of the wheel, an executioner shattering the bones of each limb, one by one.  As the story goes, when Catherine came before the wheel, she simply placed her hands on it, and it shattered.

My question for us tonight is this: What does it mean for us to follow the lead of those who are being persecuted by the US American empire?  What does it look like to refuse the will of a powerful political leader?  And what does it mean to work alongside those being persecuted to break the wheels of their torture and oppression?

To my mind, this theme tonight of walking together invites those of us with the privilege of citizenship papers to walk behind those who seek this privilege.  It invites us to center their experiences and their stories in conversations about the impact of unjust immigration policy on our communities.  To some degree, it involves us getting out of the way, so we can amplify these stories in the halls of power, to do what we can to break the wheel.

The pedagogy I choose to employ in teaching about immigration involves three steps.  First, be in relationship with those who are most intimately affected by immigration policy.  Volunteer with organizations like JFON and Grassroots Leadership here in Austin.  Bring donations to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.  Make regular monetary donations to organizations like JFON and RAICES who are doing important legal work on the part of our migrant kin.  Second, discern what role, large or small, you have to play in walking together, in the work of solidarity, in the long term.  Talk with your loved ones, your neighbors, the organizations and faith communities of which you are a part, and discern next steps together.  Foremost and finally, get in the way of the wheel.  Policy change will not happen without putting these voices at the center of these conversations and amplifying them—not only in the halls of power, but also at our Thanksgiving dinner tables.  I invite each of us in this room tonight to be in right relationship with our migrant kin, to discern our next steps, and to get in the way of the wheel.  Thank you.

New Issue of Anglican Theological Review

This issue of the Anglican Theological Review has been released, and I hope you’ll take a look at it. Based primarily on the fruits of a conference that Episcopal priests Jennifer Hughes, PhD, and Altagracia Perez-Bullard, PhD, organized, this most recent issue grapples with the realities of Latinx church communities. Here’s more info about how to subscribe.

On Resilience and Faithful Resistance

This afternoon, I had a little over an hour to spend as I’d like. Of late, having a bit of free time anywhere in the middle of the week is a rarity, but that’s especially true while on the campus of a retreat center. Here at Oblate, the images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego drew me in. As I made my way up the stone steps with a senior colleague, memories of my field work at Dolores Mission Parish and the relationships with some of the women parishioners I was blessed to be a part of and to begin to sustain came back. As the women of the parish—all Latina, most of them mothers, some of them grandmothers—shared with me about their relationships with la Virgencita, I had the privilege of hearing stories about hope, resilience, and faithful resistance against forces that would deny the neighborhood and its residents the fullness of their dignity. They introduced me to a Guadalupe who loved fiercely, who saw Juan Diego—in his Brown-ness, in his economic poverty, in the fullness of his faith—who pointed to something more than the unjust circumstances that marked his day.

I am grateful to the women of Dolores Mission for sharing their faith with me, especially as they walk with Guadalupe. The conversations we shared and the witness they offer remind me over and over again that we are not alone, that God wants more for us than the world as it is has on offer. And they taught me about the role of grief in this process, about how important it is not to weep alone, especially during times of great loss.

The times we live in call for such outcries of grief. With our migrant siblings fleeing persecution, seeking asylum in this country, being separated from their families, suffering in detention, dying early and unjust deaths, I am reminded of the example of Mary of Nazareth. I imagine that she wept bitterly at the death of her son, a faithful Jewish man who preached a world to come in which justice would shine like the sun and all would have new life. His was an early and unjust death, brought about by the hands of the state and religious authorities.

The Gospels and Acts tell us little about Mary’s life after Jesus’ death and ascension. John’s Gospel introduces the image of her and the Beloved Disciple, standing at the foot of the cross as Jesus unites them in the bond of mother and son. Many artistic renditions of the Pentecost event depict her as present. Using my spiritual imagination, I’d like to believe that she was drawing near to those who loved her son, that she was grieving in community, that she was celebrating his life and carrying forward his legacy in the stories they told and in the radically egalitarian way they lived.

What might it look like for us to follow in Mary’s footsteps? This must have something to do with those who are most intimately affected by the unjust policies the current Administration has enacted against our migrant siblings. Let us listen to their stories. Let us grieve these injustices. And let us act in a way that witnesses to hope, to resilience, to faithful resistance against the forces that would deny them the fullness of their dignity.