Tag: Divine Ruah

Roberto Mamani | Ari Kepay | Tarija, Bolivia, 2020

Where the Pacific Desert begins On the intersections of Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The “Huaca Mach'ay” is the ancestral sacred cave carved from sillar, the name given to ignimbrite, a volcanic rock found in the highlands of Arequipa, Peru. For thousands of years, pilgrims have venerated these places as the womb of Mother Earth, coming here to experience the birth of new life. As a community of friends, we have traveled from the north and south to Arequipa, the Castilian name for Ari Kepay, which in Quechua means “here we stay.”.

That cosmic womb welcomes us one sunny morning in the Andean highlands, accompanied by Fiorella as our guide. With her activism in defense of the Chili River and its valley, threatened by the hydroelectric and real estate industries, she listens to our questions and other ways of being visitors in her territory. We are a group of companions from the Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment who, over the course of eleven years, have shared the emotion of telling our stories of vulnerability, righteous anger, and hope, learning from individuals and collectives resisting diverse forms of violence in Oregon and Chiapas, Arequipa and Barcelona, Monterrey and Lima.

As the start of our annual in-person gathering, Belissa welcomes us to her hometown, “the white city,” so named for the volcanic stone that adorns its houses with facades sculpted with baroque flourishes, a reminder of its colonial and racist past, as it was a city built for Spanish colonizers. We didn't come for cultural tourism or to kayak the rapids of the Chili River. We arrived here after monthly meetings in “virtual homes” over a four-month cycle, where we shared our stories of vulnerability and resilience, of awakening with diverse commitments to life. Each of us was invited by a loved one who had already experienced the power of a spirituality rooted in our own wounds, open to those of other individuals and groups, with whom it is possible to weave threads of hope. Adrián, as a companion to young day laborers and queer people on the West Coast of the United States; Bosque, as an activist for deliberative democracy on environmental justice issues in Monterrey; Belissa as a doctor walking with health collectives for the care of neurodivergent children in vulnerable situations in Arequipa; Rachel as a pastor exploring new pastoral ministries for queer communities in Oregon.

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The Apus are the guardian mountains of the memory of this place where the Pacific Desert begins, stretching from Arequipa in Peru to Atacama in Chile. Misti, Chachani, and Pichu Pichu are the three silent witnesses to the stories of the Inca and mestizo peoples who coexist with the creatures of the ravines: birds, reptiles, and endemic cacti of this remarkable ecological niche. Modern exploitation is causing the glaciers to melt, and the rivers are being turned into irrigation ditches. We witness the socio-environmental devastation accelerated by the impoverishment of the lives of internally migrating peasant communities from remote provinces in the Andes Mountains, drawn by the mirage of the modern city that expels them from the highlands to the outskirts of beautiful Arequipa.

The river is the lifeblood of the Andean spine, formed by rocks that descend from the volcano, explains Jorge, an anthropologist from Arequipa who calls himself a “Renaissance man” as he recounts his struggle to defend the territory as a member, along with Fiorella, of the citizen initiative “Save the Chilina Valley.” His aspiration as a young ecotourism entrepreneur is centered on protecting the legacy of his ancestors, confronting the mafias that seek to control the territory with their tentacles extended into the real estate industry, local and regional governments, and the indifference of the local population. A coalition of several civil society organizations has so far managed to halt the construction of a sixth hydroelectric plant in the river canyon, a project that lacks environmental planning and is the spearhead of a land-use change across the entire valley to build resorts for extreme sports tourism. The value of this civil society initiative lies in the recovery of the social fabric of the Arequipa community to mobilize it to take charge of the care of its territory, with the tremendous challenge of weaving a common cause amidst perverse private interests.

At the end of the visit, we perform our traditional ritual of gratitude for what we have learned from our hosts. The veneration of the sacred place and its ancestors is followed by a blessing from everyone gathered in a circle around those who opened their hearts and shared their struggles with us, thus connecting who we are with our hosts and supporting each other in our resistance and new ways of re-existing.

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“Mothering” is an intimate act, but also a collective one. It represents a new dimension for me, ever since Kochurani helped me perceive in my own life the reality of giving birth to life. It's a capacity we rarely acknowledge, yet it's a source of life and dignity. It's not an experience exclusive to women when they conceive the offspring of the human species. It's an act of conceiving and giving birth that celibate women also experience through processes and acts of bringing life into the world in any of its forms: caring for our grandparents, for example; or protecting a territory from extractive mining companies; and even giving birth to new forms of communal governance in small pockets of resistance. That's why men are also called to “mother,” thus empowering the feminine dimension of our deepest being.

Fiorella shuddered when, in the ritual of gratitude, I thanked her for her diverse motherhood, which ranges from caring for her young son to the community care of the threatened river.

May these encounters where the Pacific desert begins, with the Apus as guardians of our intersecting paths, be a propitious occasion to be reborn wherever we find ourselves, putting down roots to stay wherever we arrive.

Ari Kepay, October 3, 2026

October 3, 2026
Alex Serpas | Re-exists: A Leap of Life | Acrylic paint on paper | El Salvador, 2025

From resistance to re-existence On the decolonial learnings of the last decade

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

I return to the story of the river of waters of life and thought that has been formed thanks to shared learning experiences with friends with whom I discover an inspiring way to live spirituality and to weave a theological and philosophical thought that is meaningful and mobilizing for the times we live in our era of global uncertainty.

Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment was the first stream that began to flow, irrigating the lands of my theological work, which I cultivated with people on the margins of society. I sought a spirituality of life that flourishes amidst the cracks of power, first in Mexico and the United States, then throughout the continent, and now reaching Europe and Africa. Thus, little by little, I explored spaces of great vitality, diverse spiritualities with their own theological knowledge outside the university, such as the public square, pastoral service, and social activism. These were spiritualities I had sensed since my youth, but which I now listened to with greater attention, both heart and mind.

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The other tributary of the valley of decolonial practices and knowledge was one I began to navigate with Pablo Reyna, Araceli Téllez, Eduardo Velasco, and several colleagues from the Ibero-American University of Mexico City more than a decade ago. It was during the time of the #YoSoy132 student movement, which rose up against the corruption of the Mexican political system; also during the protests over the forced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students; and, later, during the #MeToo movement, ignited by feminist comrades in public squares around the world to dismantle the age-old patriarchy.

I joined the learning process to “decolonize the university,” to which David Fernández—who began his rectorship at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City inspired by the thought and martyrdom of his Jesuit colleague Ignacio Ellacuría of the Central American University of El Salvador, and advised by the sharp intellect of the great Mexican thinker Gustavo Esteva—had called us, from my position as an academic and administrator. In my capacity as Divisional Director of Humanities and Communication at Ibero Mexico City, I proposed holding a colloquium in 2016 called “For a Change of World,” where we invited students, faculty, researchers, administrative staff, and university service personnel to raise the most urgent social problems of our time and discuss ways to address them, considering their root causes as part of our university vocation, and making the crucial “epistemological” shift to learn from the knowledge of the peoples and social movements that creatively and hopefully confronted these forms of violence. The keynote address given by Leonardo Boff on the challenges of our time was memorable at that colloquium.

From that auspicious moment, a series of talks, workshops, and academic colloquia followed, each bringing together three diverse and complementary perspectives and analyses: social movements resisting various forms of violence; academics learning and researching alongside these movements; and artists' collectives creating performances, choreographies, music, paintings, sculptures, plays, and literature to tell and recreate the life stories emerging from the cracks of a violent world. Over time, it proved to be a fascinating formula, full of cognitive, social, cultural, and spiritual challenges, revealing itself as a specific path to "decolonizing" the university, thus opening it to other processes of knowledge and transformation of reality arising from the peripheries of the hegemonic world.

The 2017 colloquium “At the Crossroads of North and South” on the poetic and academic work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos was another memorable moment. Rappers, singing and dancing to the poetry of the Portuguese author's INKZ (Incapable) writing, interacted with Searching Mothers from Mexico and Argentina, with young women from the Community Guards of Cherán in Michoacán, and with healers from Bojayá in Colombia, healing the trauma of the massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries and the army, among many other experiences of victims turned survivors. In this way, we explored new paths of the “ecology of knowledges”—a barely explored territory that we will have to traverse in the years to come.

Later, the conference on decolonial theologies organized in 2019 by the international theology journal Concilium in Mexico City—a publishing initiative I was part of as an editorial advisor and later as a director, which kept the flame of the Second Vatican Council alive—in collaboration with the Ibero-American University and the Dominican Catholic University Center (CUC) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together several of these threads into a master knot. An ecumenical prayer service in the Santo Domingo Church in Mexico City, co-led by a Dominican Catholic bishop and an Afro-Puerto Rican queer bishop, opened the event, which then brought together social movements from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina on the Santa Fe campus of the university. There, they engaged in inspiring conversations with investigative journalists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians in roundtables of mutual listening. Each day was accompanied by three-way discussions, following the format that had revealed to us a new model of university in its infancy. Other times we organize round tables with renowned figures, such as that extraordinary conversation between Rita Segato, Raúl Zibechi and Amador Fernández Savater about the spiritualities that animate resistances, a topic for the three figures outside of their usual reflections on critical theory that they agreed to explore, carried out at the CUC of the University Parish of the Dominicans, to close the event with provocative intuitions about “political hope”.

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Up until then, we called these conversations “Resist” until, in dialogue with Nelson Maldonado-Torres during a colloquium in Boston in the spring of 2022, I realized the need to name this deeper phase of the decolonization of life and thought with a new expression. It was crucial to focus on the “re-existences” created by Afro-diasporic peoples, women in their struggle against patriarchy, queer collectives, mothers searching for their missing children in Argentina and Mexico, collectives of people in forced migration, people with disabilities (or different abilities, depending on the desired emphasis) creating living spaces, and so many other communities in resistance that invent, day after day, new ways of life, communal organization, and spiritualities of Buen Vivir (Good Living).

Inspired by this intuition, together with Elías González and Juan Carlos La Puente, we organized two festival-meetings at ITESO in Guadalajara, both titled “Re-existe” (Re-exists), the first in 2023 and the second in 2025. Thanks to the vision of its rector, Alexander Zatyrka, and the creative imagination of a handful of theologians from Peru, Kenya, Nigeria, Catalonia, India, and Mexico, we were able to bring together eighty invited guests and hundreds of students and faculty at both events. The heart of both discussions and festivals beat with a focus on the spiritualities that sustain, with “combative hope,” the people and communities located on the fringes of the hegemonic world. Mining extractivism was analyzed in its connections to white supremacist racism and xenophobic immigration policies, with their strategies of ethnic cleansing and extermination focused on controlling territories and subjectivities through new settler colonialisms, such as those that gave rise to countries like the United States, South Africa, and Israel. There, we sought to unravel the processes of awakening, healing, and self-empowerment deployed by communities in resistance. Histories that, little by little, transform into re-existences.

The harvest of these wonderful encounters was also expressed as a celebratory ritual thanks to the support of Fran, Diego, Glenda, and Lau, popular educators from the Bendita Mezcla collective, formed by the younger generations of the Base Ecclesial Communities of Our America. And so, these conversations reached their aesthetic climax with the comic book talent of Katsumi Lemus, the rap and hip hop of the comrades from Psicolexia and Semillero 259 from Chiapas, the performances of the Portland, Oregon, artists' collective, the dancers of Jauja in the Andean highlands, and so many other people who create glimmers of beauty in the cracks of necropower.

We now dream of reuniting in Mother Africa in 2028, where we can honor the living memory of those peoples who teach us so much today about the power of their recovered ancestral heritage. Peoples who are living testaments to the creativity of the diaspora and the profound thought that arises from centuries-old wounds transformed into bodies and territories of dignity and hope, as in South Africa and Kenya, South Sudan and the Congo.

In the context of the great catastrophe (Nakba) that we face today—whether as “war against humanity” according to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, as genocide in Palestine denounced in its ideological apparatuses of Jewish and evangelical Zionism by Silvana Rabinovich and Mitri Raheb, or as technofascism throughout the world according to decolonial thought—these encounters are more urgent than ever to weave networks of mutual recognition and political hope, promoting a sharp analysis of the complexity of the catastrophe.

But perhaps the greatest challenge lies in sharing the initiatives for caring for territories and the processes of autonomy cultivated by many groups located in the cracks of the hegemonic world, where the life of the peoples is preserved and enhanced as a seed of hope for humanity and for the Common Home that welcomes us into its bosom.

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On this urgent topic, a book on decolonial political theology has been in the works for a year. It is a decolonial analysis because it arises from the cracks in necropower during the great catastrophe. But such an approach is insufficient if it is not enriched by the anthropological analysis of mimetic desire, which explains the violence within subjectivity in relation to the otherness of one's neighbor and the other God. This decolonial political theology remains open to ongoing critique thanks to the horizon of apophatic thought, which warns us against any usurpation of the divine. It is a collective work that I gradually developed, together with colleagues who participated in the colloquia I organized with the support of Martin, Matthew, and Francis, enthusiastic doctoral students at Boston College, during the five years I lived in Massachusetts. The New York-based publisher Orbis Books is the home that welcomes us for the publication of this work, where we will give an account of our feelings and thoughts of re-existence in times of necropower.

I will share more details about this book, which is in the final stage of the publishing process, in future posts.

Jobel, September 12, 2026

September 12, 2026
Paulo Medina | Cosmos | Chihuahua, 2020

Mutual accompaniment as a path of decolonial spirituality Explorations from the "here and now" of religion

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The spring that nourishes the valley of re-existences is, without a doubt, spirituality or that inner strength that arises from shared vulnerability to resist and re-exist.

When a victim of any kind of violence simply freezes, licking their wounds, they risk becoming trapped in their pain, with little chance of healing the trauma and loss, and without the possibility of grieving. But when they allow themselves to be touched by the wounds of another person or group, they begin to realize that their pain and anger connect them to others. And from there, paradoxically, emerges a power to discover themselves, alongside others, no longer isolated, but capable of confronting the trauma and creating new ways of life that will allow them to exist again.

That is why the Searching Mothers in Mexico represent an ethical, political, and spiritual compass in this uncertain time for the world, helping us keep hope alive. Mutual care emerges here as a way of inhabiting, with others, the cracks in the narratives imposed by the oppressors, whether they be mafiosos or well-meaning people who wield toxic power that stifles life. It is about, day by day, experiencing in solitude the pain that no one can truly feel except in their own flesh, but with hope when one opens oneself to the pain of other people and families, while simultaneously exploring new territories to inhabit with "others," against the grain of the hegemonic narrative, wherever we may find ourselves.

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I discovered this wellspring of spirituality through mutual accompaniment with my Peruvian friend Juan Carlos La Puente more than twenty years ago in Santiago, Chile, during a period of community study with lay people, friars and sisters of the Dominican family, students, and advisors, sharing a roof, food, prayer, and leisure time together. We sought to go beyond the traditional frameworks of spirituality, especially in the case of Christianity and the centuries-old religious orders that had given way to a vertical style of “spiritual authority,” with a certain modern Jesuit influence, leading to the exercise of control over people's lives and consciences. Due to family tradition and as a young friar, I never had that experience, but my friend did, which allowed him to realize that this path was not the one that helped him flow in the life of the Divine Spirit. Juan Carlos longed to explore, like a condor of his land, that flapping that teaches us to "be moved and let ourselves be moved," as he recounts in the book "Mutual accompaniment in the divine Ruah" that we published together, during the Covid19 pandemic, in 2022.

A few years earlier, in 2016, we had the opportunity to drink from the same well in San Juan, Puerto Rico, along with two young Lutheran pastors, Melisa and Ron, who, with the support of David, their bishop in Portland, Oregon, were seeking to connect their Protestant spirituality of "sola fides" or "faith alone saves"—which had borne so much fruit over recent centuries—with the liberation and decolonial theologies emerging in the Global South. Months after that encounter, we met in a cabin in Oregon, the Green State of the United States, a group of about fifteen people, mostly young Lutheran pastors like Tayler, Lauren (now a bishop), Erika, and others, along with Saúl, Héctor, and me—three Mexicans who were then, though unknowingly, walking from our own vulnerability—David, a Lutheran bishop, and a "wounded Catholic," as Juan Carlos already described himself at that time. In Portland, he collaborated with migrant collectives, homeless people, and Latinx artists who, through their aesthetic work, accompanied the paths of dignity for these people and communities in resistance.

Thus, we began exploring a path of “mutual spiritual and theological accompaniment” that, since then, has brought together sixty or more people each year, eager to explore this “alternative” path of embodied and diverse spirituality, often outside the religious institutions that arose from this search but which, over time, became lost in the minutiae of controlling bodies and minds, and “hijacked spirituality,” as Carmenmargarita Sánchez de León likes to say, in the straitjacket of a belief system. We thus discovered the power of decolonial spirituality that emerges on the margins of the hegemonic system. This mutual accompaniment takes place through virtual and in-person meetings: five monthly online sessions, where we begin with personal accounts of our own vulnerability, precisely where we learn to “awaken,” with intuitions of life, dignity, rebellion, and resistance. We read each other's stories to find common threads and differences, which intertwine into a multicolored tapestry that adorns the table in our little house. There, a chef helps us cook together these shared narratives, built with words, symbols, and rituals that each of us creates, sometimes in the intimacy of our own homes, and sometimes together. At the end of each year, we gather for a virtual retreat "in the cloud," where we share with friends from other little houses the beautiful plants and delicious fruits we have sown and harvested "together." To conclude the year, those who are able to meet in person travel to a territory where a fellow member lives with their community of belonging and resistance. There, we celebrate our liberating intuitions, sharing the paths that have led us there, and celebrating in community with symbols and rituals what we see the Ruah (Spirit) moving us to experience.

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This experience of more than a decade of exploration gives us clues in diverse contexts - from the working-class neighborhoods of Arequipa and Nairobi, between lands of resistance in Catalonia and Chiapas, through homes of re-existence in Kerala and Portland, connecting artists with social activists, Lutheran pastors and Roman Catholic laypeople or freethinkers, all seeking inner life beyond religions - where we cultivate mutual support to give each other strength on the exciting path of re-existing amidst the growing violence of this world.

There, the other stream that feeds the valley of resistance and re-existence is born. The Resiste and Re-existe gatherings, which also emerged more than a decade ago at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where I spent twenty years, were inspired by the vision of figures like Gustavo Esteva, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, David Fernández, and Pablo Reyna. This path was illuminated by the proven wisdom of Raúl Zibechi, Rita Segato, Aída Hernández, Lorena Cabnal, Daniela Rea, and so many other "wise" individuals, situated in the cracks of global and local necropower, to tell and think about "other possible worlds | where many worlds fit," as we connect the dreams of the World Social Forum and the Zapatista movement in the mountains and jungles of southeastern Mexico.

But it must be said that the “collective awakening” came, with the force of a tide of life, from the social movements that envision and work, day after day, on the “change of world” that we all long for.

But that's another story that awaits us next week.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, September 6, 2026

September 6, 2026

English