Category: Liberating spirituality

  • 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.

    ∂

    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

    Note: I would appreciate your feedback at the end of this page.

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

    Wallmapu News

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

    p

    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.

    p

    ∂

    p

    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.

    p

    ∂

    p

    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.

    p

    ∂

    p

    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.

    p

    Tirúa, October 25, 2025

  • Una flor de composta O sobre las re-existencias en medio de la catástrofeCarlos Mendoza | Re-exists 2025 | Opening Ritual 23 IX 25

    A compost flower Or about re-existences in the midst of catastrophe

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

     

    At the end of September, more than eighty people from survivor groups around the world gathered for a meeting of mutual listening, deepened by attentive dialogues with university students and nourished by provocations from artist groups. We were received with the magnificent hospitality of the Jorge Manzano Chair from ITESO that became home for a few days.

    We began by celebrating the resistances that transform what seems like waste through love, inspired during the opening ceremony by the renowned Catalan singer Lídia Pujol who whispered that “from the compost that is rottenness, the flower can emerge” (Babel). She had discovered this wisdom in the poetry of her 12th-century countryman Ramon Llull, who recounted that “having found a friend who was dying without love, when he asked him why he was dying without love, he replied that no one had made him know about love or had taught him to be a lover.”

    Angelica, from the lands of Malaysia, scattered grains of rice and Himalayan salt as an offering during the inaugural ritual, during which we prepared to listen attentively to the otherness that welcomes us as Mother Earth and inhabits us as Divinity that animates us with its ineffable breath of life.

    Five tables, each with representatives from six collectives, divided into Spanish and English language groups, were the place where we listened to each other each morning, exchanging experiences to awaken, heal, and embrace each other, drawing on the inner vulnerability of each person and collective. Each table had two listeners, who identified the similarities and differences between the experiences described, thus weaving together a mutual accompaniment of solidarity and hope to confront the local and global horror we were describing. Raúl, a young Mayan popular educator through hip hop in Chiapas, commented that "no one had ever sat at a table to listen to my knowledge." Nancy, a Latina feminist theologian from the United States, along with Bosque, a biologist and environmental-spiritual activist from Cuernavaca, were tasked, like other members of academia and organized civil society present at the meeting, with cultivating this attentive listening to weave a common narrative amidst the differences of each experience and context.

    Thus, we respectfully explored the sacred ground of resistance and re-existence. First, by approaching the horror, which we named according to the stories each person told. Sofía, for example, shared her experience as a young Ecuadorian migrant lawyer in Barcelona, where for several years she has worked with undocumented domestic workers in a feminist "coalition" that led them to form a union to strengthen them in the fight for their rights as migrant women while allowing them to develop artisanal skills to support their cause. Sofía's reflection echoed that of Alex, a graphic designer and popular artist who accompanies the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador in the face of President Bukele's state of emergency. Now in its fourth year under an authoritarian leader, this regime of exception produces a filthy life for poor youth in the Salvadoran peripheries accused of criminality to whitewash a regime that has been colluding with criminal mafias for years. The resistance of both groups, in Catalonia and El Salvador, exuded an "interiority" that inspires them in their daily struggles. Christian spirituality in the Salvadoran case and feminist sorority in the Catalan case.

    But it wasn't just about sharing the spoken word; it was about exploring other languages through workshops on body language and sound expression, or through the Jauja dance in the Peruvian Andean highlands as a path of resistance for a people, thus discovering other modes of communication between the seeking mothers and the healing companions who came from South Dakota or Malaysia. These other languages allowed us to overcome language barriers and helped us create powerful nonverbal communication bonds.

    And to tie knots in the fabric of the threads intertwined in each day, the performances, like the one prepared with much love and talent by a Portland collective to celebrate the water that makes us up, thus helping us feel that we are water. To the rhythm of hip hop and rap as an alternative urban art proposal, the Mayan collectives of Chiapas that educate children threatened by drug cartels in the outskirts of cities in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, turned out to be a balm to heal wounds still open from other violence. Like that narrated by Vero looking for her son Diego, missing for ten years, or the violence against girls in Pakistan that Sabine recounted in her Support work in working-class neighborhoods of Faisalabad, in the Punjab region of PakistanThanks to this rapper performance, we all joined in the dance, while drawing symbols on the mural painted by Yara as part of a performance also dedicated to the water being killed in the planet's rivers, lakes, and seas.

    We concluded each day with a harvest moment, where the popular narrative of Blessed Mixture, formed by young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Our America, helped us celebrate what we heard and shared through symbols, songs, and rituals. The guiding figures were the bees, a symbol of Mother Earth's resilience, which we welcomed with a wax candle produced by them, burning their flame in the palm of our hand to feel the pain of endangered species. This gesture was accompanied by a drop of honey poured into the other hand to give us a taste of their sweetness as survivors.

    Then came the little house of Acteal, which was placed in the center of the circle of participants to remind us of the martyrdom of some human bees. pacifist collective of Las Abejas linked to the Zapatista bases, opting for the path of active non-violence in their shared struggle with justice and dignity for the indigenous peoples, suffered the murder of 45 of its members, among them four pregnant women, who were massacred on December 22, 1997 in Chiapas in the community hermitage while they were praying for peace, a crime perpetrated by paramilitaries with the complicity of the federal army (Acteal Massacre, Chiapas. Serious human rights violations by the Mexican State in 1997). His memory continues to sting like a splinter that hurts the lives of the indigenous peoples who seek other possible worlds.

    We closed those moments of harvest by making kites with messages of peace for women violated by patriarchy and for the Palestinian people resisting the ongoing genocide by the Israeli state. These artifacts helped us direct our hearts and gaze toward a future with dignity and hope for the people in resistance.

     

    ∂

     

    The visit to the community of El Salto, in the suburbs of Guadalajara, led us to cross the abysmal line of the ongoing ecocide that the environmental collective that received us on the “Tour of Horror” (A Leap of Life) describes itself as “an industrial paradise with an environmental hell.” The Lerma-Santiago River basin, which runs 708 kilometers across western Mexico, is an open wound for Mexican territory and for the animal and plant species and people who inhabit it. Since the post-war industrial boom of the last century, polluting industry has spread across this vast region like a social and environmental virus. To date, more than 90 highly toxic pollutants have been identified, many of them carcinogenic, of which only a few, more visible, are treated with a couple of treatment plants. Sofía and Pedro, young environmentalists from the area, tell us that the transnational corporations established in this basin, such as Nestlé, Toyota, IBM, and many others, claim to be green companies today, when in reality, their local parts suppliers are the ones producing the most pollution because they do not comply with current national and international regulations.15 transnational corporations pollute the Santiago River, according to an international report.). ITESO is part of a network of universities in the region that study the water problem (Industry and nature in conflict: will there be a
    future for water in Lerma-Chapala?) in constant collaboration with the collectives of residents and environmentalists who seek to save the watershed with its inhabitants of diverse species.

    Among the members of the group welcoming us is Emmanuel, a little boy of barely ten years old. Wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, he leads his mother's hand as they show us the polluted wetlands, filled with the fetid odor of the city's sewage and the invasive species that inhabit them, such as tilapia, a contaminated fish sold in many markets across the country. The ecological present for this little boy from Guadalajara is catastrophic, but a possible future is beginning to emerge with community organizing.

     

    ∂

     

    One of the morning rituals was presided over by Cecelia Firethunder, a Lakota grandmother who told us about her people's long journey of healing their wounds in resistance in the United States. Her experience as a child in a sunflower field that welcomed her in a dance of dignity and strength when she faced discrimination at school has continued to inspire her ever since, as she accompanies her people in awakening from centuries-old segregation, to heal their wounded memories by recovering their language, their knowledge, and their ancestral rituals. It is then possible to walk forward creating new ways of eating, like the initiative shared by her compatriot Nick Hernández to recover lands and methods of communal organization and indigenous Lakota agriculture (Makoce. Agricultural Development) in the heart of the Indian reservations, which have been territories controlled by the US government for two hundred and fifty years.

     

    ∂

     

    From the compost that is rotten, the flower can emerge, as Lídia Pujol said.

    But for that moment to arrive in our time of environmental collapse, it is necessary to first recycle the waste produced by extractive, racist, and patriarchal capitalism to recover the organic essence of the resistance of communities of survivors, including Mother Earth.

    At the end of the meeting, we each returned to our places of origin and life choices, certain that as long as there is resistance, there will be hope, because there, in the midst of catastrophe, the lilies of re-existence sprout.

     

     

    Guadalajara, September 28, 2025

English
Spanish English