Category: Liberating spirituality

  • Sobre la esperanza en tiempos inciertosSearching Mothers | NTR | Zacatecas, 2025

    On hope in uncertain times

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

    At dusk this Saturday, the first Advent vigil begins, when Christian communities throughout the world embark on a journey, in the midst of the darkness of time, to receive the human and divine light of dignity and hope that the Messiah brings. The ancient hymn will resonate during the nighttime celebrations, Rorate caeli , whose lyrics and melody are like a lament that rises to heaven from the desolate city, crying out that “the clouds rain down on the Righteous One,” as the prophet Isaiah (45:8) implored during the exile in Babylon.

    Each year, this four-week calendar leading up to Christmas is accompanied by symbols of light, greenery, carols, sweets, tenderness, and community. According to each culture, the waiting period for the Messiah's arrival evokes the awareness that "something is lacking" for the fulfillment of those desires for new times of justice, truth, compassion and peace, not only for a people who arrogantly claim to be the only chosen ones, but for all of humanity and even for the entire cosmos.

    Every generation has seen terrible signs that the world is ending, whether through epidemics that make us feel how vulnerable our bodies and knowledge are; whether through wars waged by empires against emerging powers that threaten their arrogance; whether through the uncertainty of life itself, diminished by age, illness, failure, loneliness, or hopelessness.

    The biblical texts that we, the believing communities, meditate on these days speak of the expectation of the messiah, first with a strong apocalyptic tone that announces the destruction of the corrupt world, reaching the entire cosmos with a catastrophe that will destroy everything because of the human pride that has taken over creation.

    Then, as the date of the celebration of the Nativity of the Messiah Child, a Nazarene, approaches, the tone of the texts becomes more hopeful with the announcement of a God who is near, humanized, small, and fragile. It is the incarnate promise of a divine and human life that begins in complete vulnerability in the story of a migrant family with a newborn baby, trying to survive on the periphery of the empire and fleeing the fury of the local ruler, eventually finding refuge in Egypt, from where a definitive chapter in the history of human redemption will begin to be written.

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    However, the collective depression we are experiencing today as humanity due to the escalation of hatred to extremes – which is spreading across the planet in an apocalyptic way “like a lie of Satan,” as René Girard said in an interview he gave me in 2007 in Paris (Hope as apocalypse)– this seems to render any narrative of hope for our uncertain times illusory. The genocide in Gaza continues as the climax of the Nakba or Catastrophe that began in 1947 with the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their lands, paving the way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, this systemic violence continues today before our digital screens, met with indifference by social media and the international community. The wars in Ukraine, Congo, and South Sudan have become so “normalized” that they no longer make the front page of newspapers, much less a trending topic in the digital world. In Mexico, public indifference to urgent issues such as the crisis facing corn, lemon, and avocado farmers—caused by the violence in Michoacán—along with the persistent femicides and forced disappearances, speaks to a growing discontent among the population, expressed through strikes, road blockades, and street protests. But the masses seem numb, retreating into bubbles of entertainment and unrestrained holiday shopping, which, among other ills, leaves household finances in ruins for months and years to come.

    Religious consumerism is also part of the overwhelming Christmas marketing, amidst kitschy decorations and echoes of folk crafts used to make piñatas featuring popular characters. It will certainly be present at Mexican posadas, Trump's piñata , which is sold in various markets in Mexico and the United States, will receive blows as a ritual of revenge amid laughter and boos until the cardboard breaks and the blond wicks of the tyrant fly out like shooting stars in some tenement courtyard in Mexico City, Chicago or Los Angeles for the delight of all.

    A few families may perhaps rediscover the “mystical” meaning of the Advent wreath, following the Avatar of Carlo Acutis explaining Advent 2025. This video, which is circulating online, aptly explains the spiritual significance of the ritual of lighting each of the four candles during this season that prepares for Christmas. The light lit each Sunday of Advent symbolizes the "people who walked in darkness and have seen a great light" (Isaiah 9:2), which the prophet foretold to the Hebrew people devastated by the division between the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with their leaders corrupted by the idolatry of power, seeking alliances with neighboring Syria to defeat the rival tribe.

    And like a non-place amidst so much noise, creating a void in the midst of the urban clamor, in Mexico the collectives of Searching Mothers (Searching mothers light Christmas tree) will set up Christmas trees covered with ornaments bearing the faces of those we have lost. They are today “the voice crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23) because they speak on behalf of the victims of the narco-state war and the idolatry of the necropower of our time.

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    Perhaps this is where the theological core of this season lies: the absence of the Messiah is something that has inspired Hebrew and Christian generations for centuries to mobilize in order to make the messianic times present through acts of remembrance, justice and an (im)possible reconciliation.

    Beyond a folkloric celebration of the coming of God-with-us, what we are about today is going to the other side of history to contemplate there, in the silence of the night, some glimmer of light that announces the arrival of the Messiah. And those who feel in every second of their lives, in every breath—like Vero and Fabiola, mothers searching for their missing children who shared their hope with us in a recent meeting in Guadalajara—the absence that hurts and motivates them to search out of love, are the ones who teach us what hope means in times of uncertainty, the heart of Advent.

    Next Monday, December 1st, the documentary Re-exists 2025 will be presented online (Presentation of the documentary Re-exists 2025), prepared by Uruguayan filmmaker Juan Meza. There, some of the stories of awakening, healing, and embodiment shared by people from seventeen countries and different religious and spiritual traditions from four continents facing diverse forms of violence where it has been possible to spell out hope.

    Advent is a time to continue weaving networks of combative hope , say the social movements on the peripheries of the empire, so that our world does not fall into the abyss. And it is possible to do so by listening to the people who for years and centuries have resisted and now accompany us in re-existing.

    Because there will always be hope as long as there are people and communities who live the end times, so insistently emphasized by Javier Sicilia and Elías González, as the opportunity to enter into another way of existing amidst violence but pregnant with the active expectation of messianic times.

    Happy Advent season!

    Mexico City, November 29, 2025

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  • Desaprendiendo la eficacia para habitar la incertidumbreDiedrick Brackens | The Cup is a Cloud | Los Angeles, 2018

    Unlearning efficiency to inhabit uncertainty

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

    It has been seven months since I left Boston, after five years of academic life in the frenetic gears of American efficiency, with a special challenge in the background that consisted of translating the master ideas of modern Latin American and European theology to multicultural groups of white students from the United States, and others who came mostly from Korea, China and Japan, plus some from Turkey, El Salvador, Colombia and Chile.

    The initial courtesy of colleagues, both students and professors, gradually gave way with a few of them to a genuine conversation, always with respect for individual work prevailing and few exchanges about the meaning of our work as an academic community.

    I cherish the best moments of those encounters, such as the colloquiums to which we gave the decolonial tone of “conversations” (Beyond Global Violence Initiative), where we were able to open windows so that colleagues from the north and south could listen to each other, with certain difficulties in moving between both worlds, not only because of the differences in language but also because of the diverse experiences that sustain the body, thought and the word.

    What we all enjoyed most were the gatherings in the warmth of Valentina and Domingo's Chilean-Bostonian home, exceptional hosts to both our hearts and our palates. There, we could share, with greater intimacy and freedom, the ideas and intuitions that had lingered in the auditoriums of the Chestnut Hill campus. Sometimes, with Francis's Italian flair, assisted by Martín, and in the warmth of Neto's affability in his home, always ready to welcome us like a true Salvadoran, each of us found our place in the ebb and flow of conversation, wine, and song. In those welcoming homes, we received friends from Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Spain, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Indiana, and California, passing through Massachusetts. And there, new projects for colloquiums, books, and trips were born, projects that continue to surprise and inspire us all to this day.

    But everything was interrupted by my sudden departure from US territory in the Trump era, leaving that seed of cordial intelligence sown in living memory.

    In the following months, back home and with interwoven journeys between South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and Chile, I faced the challenge of seeing diverse worlds with new eyes, paying special attention to "those who dwell in the shadows of the shadows of the shadows." Thus, I was led—by the pure gift of my hosts during those travels—to experience moments of devastating and beautiful simplicity, such as accompanying Lance from the University of Pretoria to the Congolese refugee farm on the outskirts of the city. There, the pain of being homeless for more than five years was evident in his eyes, but within them also shone a glimmer of dignity that I still carry in my heart and spirit as a call to closeness.

    I vividly remember the walk along the cliffs of Cape Town with Grant and his team, where on a sunny but cold South African winter morning we contemplated how the two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian, meet, sometimes with fury and other times with tenderness. A metaphor for intertwined worlds.

    I also recall with emotion the ecumenical Taizé-style prayer led by my Dominican brother Claudio, along with Eda, a resident of Istanbul, and a group of African and Ukrainian students living there. Interspersing mantras for peace in various languages, they gathered in the dim light of the Church of the Preachers, located near the Galata Tower. It was a glimpse of what Pentecost means, albeit only as a bastion of spirituality amidst a vibrant, modern Muslim culture that looks with curiosity at what happens within these Christian enclaves.

    I treasure in my memory the simple and brief Eucharist in the small wooden chapel of the Jesuits in Tirúa, on a small altar covered with a Mapuche textile and adorned with an oriental-style oil lamp that created a luminous twilight, on a spring morning in Wallmapu, in the far south of Chile. I had the grace to share with them for a few days their joyful dispossession, as travelers accompanying the Mapuche people in defense of their territory, their language, and their ancestral spirituality.

    In each of those experiences, the question of how to build bridges to share spiritual intimacy between people and communities of diverse traditions lingered for me. And I remembered the rituals we have explored at Re-existe, precisely seeking new languages to celebrate together our precarious lives, open to hope, according to diverse ancestral traditions, from indigenous peoples to Abrahamic religions and the secular inner lives of those who are individuals or groups without religion.

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    Back in the land of my ancestors, now free from the daily pressure of the classroom and the unbearable academic meetings, I'm beginning to understand what it means to unlearn efficiency. To enjoy the free time of otium, beyond the negotium, as I told you here a few weeks ago.

    But it's about more than just slowing down. Something compels me today to live in the moment. otherwise as a renewed inner life and the place as my homeland. I seek an external rhythm between morning walks, religious duties, attentive reading of books piled on my desk for years, and more creative writing, loosening my pen and exploring new literary genres. But it's not enough. There's something more I sense on the horizon, the search for a "place" to put down roots, grow slowly, and blossom, following that creative intuition of Ivan Illich and Jean Robert (The place in the space age). The place and time where inspiration flows will gradually become clearer in the coming months.

    Now that I have time to “do nothing,” I feel invited to reinvent myself every day. I am certainly working in the present on wonderful intellectual projects, such as the collaborative book on political theology—with the introduction I am writing, inviting fifteen contributors from eight different countries to the table of words to reflect on “the common good” in times of great catastrophe—whose manuscript I am revising with the support of Francis and Nathan, dear colleagues I met at Boston College, and which will be published next year by a prestigious publisher in the United States.

    I am delighted to review the scripts for the documentary and the comic book – by Juan and Katsumi respectively – which will commemorate the past meeting Re-exists 2025. The Spirit connecting the peripheries which we will soon share in the digital world to continue strengthening our resistance against the evil that surrounds us today as systemic violence. This initiative has been creating a multifaceted space-time where we learn to re-exist, reinventing ourselves alongside other survivors.

    And with excitement, I also imagine—along with some Dominicans who are seeking new expressions of the charism of preaching in our unprecedented context—what will emerge from our meeting on Nicaea last October in Istanbul. Situated in today's cities and villages, which are like laboratories, we seek how to communicate to humanity the joy of being inhabited by the divine and human Word that redeems us, whether rooted in the secularized world or amidst diverse spiritual traditions.

    Encouraged by these vivid memories and by the ongoing work that connects with my deepest desire, I now face the challenge of "stopping" the whirlwind of efficiency, unlearning to live and think only in terms of production. It is a journey in reverse, but above all, an implosion of a dizzying desire, to return to the still center of body, desire, thought, and spirit from which it flows another mode of existence.

    And then I will learn to let myself be inhabited and moved – as I discussed with my friend Juan Carlos La Puente in the heart of the pandemic (Mutual accompaniment in the divine Ruah)– because of the uncertainty as a gift and surprise of the fluttering of Life that encourages us all.

    Mexico City, November 15, 2025

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  • Noticias de WallmapuGabriel Pozo Menares | Mapuche Calendar | Wallmapu, 2011

    Wallmapu News

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

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    The light of dusk reaches Tirúa, in Mapuche lands, while Carlos, my Jesuit host who has been here for more than fifteen years (HistoriActiva Jesuit community of Tirúa), drives along the dirt road to visit friends who have opened their homes to share life in the area for years. We arrive and are greeted by the oldest daughter, along with her cats and dogs. She briefly interrupts the work she's preparing for her last semester of high school, as after graduation she plans to enroll in university to study teaching. Life goes on simply among the families who live here. Her father spent the day growing potatoes and then dedicated the afternoon to laying the floor of a new room in the house. They offer us mate as a ritual to accompany their conversation. Before leaving, the friends exchange bird food and make plans to recycle an old wooden door that will be installed in a budding eco-spirituality center.

    Wallmapu (Declaration of the Department of History on the term Wallmapu) is the term that refers to the ancestral lands of the Mapuche people (The Indigenous World 2025: Chile). Today, they are dominated by the forestry industry, which has contaminated the territory with invasive species such as eucalyptus and pine to mass-produce cellulose for export to the global packaging market.

    The Mapuche people today are divided between the frantic integration into the modern world of consumption on the one hand and, on the other, the defense of their territory, language, and traditional medicine under the leadership of Machi women, healers and spiritual ancestors.

    On both sides of the mountain range, divided between Chile and Argentina, the Mapuche people fight for their territorial and cultural survival, in the face of the overwhelming inertia of the modern world (Chile: Resistance to the forestry model in Wallmapu, Mapuche territory). For communities assimilated into today's modern model, it seems better to eat processed foods than seaweed and shellfish as the ancients did; or to drink Coca-Cola instead of herbal teas because it gives them greater status; they prefer to be evangelical Christians or Roman Catholics rather than follow the spirituality and language of their ancestors. Ultimately, it is a matter of "integration" into the modern world, even at the price of cultural assimilation and environmental depredation, which, in its symbolic undertone, is violence against the ancestors and against Mother Earth.

    Civil society networks such as “Churches and Mining”, or the initiatives for intercultural dialogue on ancient and modern astronomy promoted by some universities in the region, are modest attempts to accompany a people torn apart by internal contradictions between modernity and tradition.

    Perhaps eco-spirituality is being an "articulation," among others of a more social and political nature, that allows for these intersections. Carlos told me the anecdote of a grandmother who, attending a workshop on traditional medicine and eco-spirituality, said she didn't understand anything about the intersections of the three bodies (personal, communal, and territorial) that the workshop presented, because she had been thinking throughout the entire meeting about the meaning of that strange word written on the invitation: "articulation." A term that the grandmother kept thinking about until she finally realized that it surely referred to the articulations of bones, when she felt something in her body was out of alignment, impeding her mobility and causing pain. So she concluded that the workshop was a path to healing her joints. And ultimately, that was the objective of the workshop! That grandmother had followed it in her own way, even though she was absent from the rest of the talks.

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    Before arriving in Mapuche lands, I was able to speak with university students at two forums in Santiago, Chile. The first was about the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology, on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death (Gustavo Gutiérrez International Congress). In a traditional academic format with keynote lectures and presentations, over the course of a couple of days a clearer awareness emerged among attendees about the importance of style Latin American to speak of God, intimately connected to the experience of the poor and oppressed. A wisdom that is already part of the way some Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian communities understand their faith in a liberating God and promote the transformative role of victims in their own liberation processes, leaving behind lands of slavery and embarking on paths of new life.

    But we also began to see, not without some attendees' surprise, that it is necessary to open our hearts and our eyes to other exclusions, such as those experienced by women, queer/cuir people, undocumented migrants, relatives of missing persons, Afro-diasporic peoples, and indigenous peoples, to mention those who represent today's resistance to the violence that afflicts us in so many ways, with the Palestinian people today facing the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government and its accomplices at heart.

    During the colloquium, several initiatives emerged to keep the memory of the great Peruvian theologian's work alive, through the work of the archives that house the recordings of the summer courses Gutiérrez offered in Lima for several years, a valuable resource that will reveal another angle of the author's thinking. Likewise, some of us proposed to investigate the relationship between Gustavo's thought and the work of Aníbal Quijano, his compatriot, who represents one of the most important sources of decolonial thought today, along with Frantz Fanon. The confluence of both thought styles, along with Black, feminist, queer/cuir and Palestinian liberation theology, will provide us with a more pertinent theoretical framework for understanding the intersectionality of violence and ongoing resistance in order to create alternative ways of life, governance, and spirituality that inspire communities located at the fractures of humanity.

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    The other meeting, held with colleagues from the Chilean Society of Theology (UCSC hosted the Annual Conference of the Chilean Theological Society), was an opportunity to think together about possible paths to hope for communities facing systemic violence.

    My contribution to that annual event brought to the table the question of thinking about hope from a perspective of "combative decoloniality," like the dignified rage practiced by the Zapatista communities, or the indignation of women who face sexual or spiritual abuse in their respective religions. Because, from my perspective, it's about dismantling a vision of hope as a flight from the world in anticipation of consolation in the afterlife of eternal life.

    Rather, it's about discovering and strengthening the hope that "emerges" from the fractures of humanity. It's where survivors paddle against the current of the history of oppression and privilege, inhabiting the world with practices of mutual care, in the pedagogy of embodiment, and collective healing with memory, truth, and justice, as we explored at the recent Re-existe 2025 gathering.

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    The sky of Wallmapu, with the crescent moon shining brightly, is today a living metaphor for the hope that surrounds us when we hear the heartbeat of the lands and stars of the South.

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    Tirúa, October 25, 2025

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