A new stage of my mission

God willing, next year I will be living in a rural village in the parish of Dulce Nombre.

For about a year I’ve been thinking about moving to a village. I even sent out a few feelers when I visited to see what the people might say.

A few weeks after I came to Honduras on June 2007, I have lived on a street in Santa Rosa de Copán. It is a friendly street which has been paved for a few years. (The first few years it was all mud or dust.)

I know many of the people on the street and feel very much at home here. Spanish Franciscan sisters live on the street and I’ve sort of been adopted by them.

Up the top of the hill is the church of San Martín de Porres, where Padre Fausto often presides at the Sunday Masses and often gives very challenging homilies.

It is a good place to live.

But I’ve been feeling a call to move to the countryside. It’s where I love to work and where I think there is a greater opportunity for me to serve the poor.

I’ve been helping out in the Dulce Nombre de María parish since September 2007, but it’s been from a distance. I feel that it is probably time to live among them.

This call has been reinforced by the new priest in the parish, Padre German Navarro. He is very open and collaborative and is a  hard worker, visiting all the parish’s 47 villages and towns every two months.

I have talked this over with him and he is very supportive. After all, it does mean I’ll be more available to help.

When I went to Ames at the beginning of this month, I shared my idea with friends, as well as with members of the St. Thomas Aquinas Honduras Ministry committee.

Talking over with Jan and Cornelia, retired sociologists at Iowa State, who have Latin American experience, helped me clarify my reasons for moving and some ideas of what I’d be able to do.

A dinner visit with my good friends, Gary and Nancy, both former international volunteers with the Mennonite Central Committee in Bolivia and El Salvador, helped me to see it better in terms of our shared faith and our shared Franciscan charism.

This week I got a chance to speak with our bishop, Monseñor Darwin Andino, to make sure that this would be acceptable. He just asked me if Padre German was okay with this – as he is.

At Friday’s parish council meeting I shared with them that I would have more presence in the parish and would be moving to a village. Someone asked me if I had chosen a village or if I would pull the name out of a hat. I explained that I had an idea of a place that would allow me good access to some of the more distant parts of the parish and that would have an environment that would be good for me – water an electricity being important.

On Saturday, I went out to the village to meet with the village church council to ask what they thought of this.

A view from the village.

They were very accepting – especially since two had some idea that I was thinking of doing something like this. We talked about several details. I assured them that I would prepare my own meals and that they needn’t worry about finding ways to feed me, though my guess is that I’ll get lots of invitations. I explained that this is something that will not happen until sometime next year. I either have to find a place in the village or build a small house.

I left feeling blessed.

The road out of town, with the school and church on the left.

As I drove back to Santa Rosa I remembered my experience at Mass in St. Thomas Aquinas in Ames the previous Saturday. The Communion hymn we sang was a favorite: “Taste and See,” based on Psalm 34. After receiving the Body of Christ, as I approached the cup of the Blood of Christ, being offered by my friend Gary, we sang the last line of the first verse, “The Lord has been so good to me.”

I nearly burst into tears, remembering the goodness of the Lord – a goodness I have experienced again and again, especially here in Honduras.

The Church in Plan Grande

And so, next year, God willing, I will be living in the village of Plan Grande.

The Lord has truly been so good to me.

Shame and Indignity in Honduras

One thing I noticed early in my time here in Honduras is the prevalence of what some would call “low self-esteem.” 

Many rural people, especially the young, are very timid. They are “penoso,” as we say here. They defer to others, especially those who are in leadership positions, be they teachers, politicians, or priests. They do not speak up and some, when questioned, answer looking at the ground, not daring to look someone in the face. 

A US evangelical missionary here who had been in Mexico noted that he found the Hondurans more timid than the Mexicans he had worked with.

A few months ago, I read Brenneman’s Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America, an analysis of gang members in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, taking as his focus the lives of thirty some former gang members, some of whom were able to exit the gangs through the “evangelical option.” The gangs permitted the exit of those who had a conversion experience and joined an evangelical church.

What really fascinated me was his discussion on “pre-disposing factors” that lead to joining a gang or were indicators of potential for joining. There were the three obvious ones: poverty, problems in the family, and difficulty in school. But Brenneman added another factor: shame.

Many had entered gangs with a deep sense of shame. They were poor; their family was poor; their family had problems, and in some cases rejected them. They experienced the powerlessness and the marginalization of being poor.

But this is not a mere personal feeling. It is, as Brenneman notes, socially induced.  They may have low self-esteem, but shame has social sources.

In my first years in Santa Rosa de Copán I met a young woman university professor who noted the class nature of society. Thus, many of the students in some universities are really on an upward-mobility track, not only to get a job but to escape the fate of the poor.

This is built into the Honduran society. People are addressed by their titles: doctor, engineer, lawyer, professor, and more. There is enormous prestige attached to a title before your name.

But it’s more than that.

Some people look down on the poor, especially the rural poor.

I remember a college professor I met in 2007 who lamented to me that most of the priests of the diocese were from the countryside and don’t understand city people (and, I intimated, professionals like him.)

But the most blatant example was when the president of the National Congress, upset about the support of rural people in our area of Bishop Santos’ campaign against open-pit mining.

He called them “gente del monte” – which literally means “people of the weeds.” For him, they are hay-seeds, hick, hillbillies.

And so it is no wonder that the poor feel shamed and isolated and looked down upon.

Brenneman refers several times to the work of James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who has worked for more than 25 years in US prisons.

I found his short book Preventing Violence a lucid discussion of the role of shame in society.

He very clearly lays out the social sources of shame, something that is even built into our languages. As he wrote in Preventing Violence:

Why do economic inequality and unemployment both stimulate violence? Ultimately, because both increase feelings of shame (Gilligan, Violence). For example, we speak of the poor as the lower classes, who have lower social and economic status, and the rich as the upper classes who have higher status. But the Latin for lower is inferior, and the word for the lower classes in Roman law was the humiliores. Even in English, the poor are sometimes referred to as the humbler classes. Our language itself tells us that to be poor is to be humiliated and inferior, which makes it more difficult not to feel inferior. The word for upper or higher was superior, which is related to the word for pride, superbia (the opposite of shame), also the root of our word superb (another antonym of inferior).

 And thus we must look carefully about how to respond to violence, as Brenneman notes:

For as long as chronic shame is abundant in the barrios of northern Central America, the symbols, drugs, sex, and weapons of the gang will continue to hold irresistible allure for thousands of youth. Additionally, chronic shame will continue to persist and even increase as long as its sources go unchallenged. The steep pyramids that separate and stratify Central Americans on the basis of class and race remain intact, held together by tacit agreements between a handful of elites and a military with little claim to legitimacy.… Providing more sophisticated weapons and helicopters to national governments will do little to stem the tide of violence.

Looking for more insight into the dynamic of shame, I read Donna Hicks’ Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict.  I had hoped this would help me deepen the insights I had culled from Brenneman and Gilligan. 

Hicks does have some helpful suggestions about the elements of dignity and what violates dignity. But she does not treat the social sources of indignity. Perhaps this is due to her paradigm of conflict resolution which has more to do with individuals and their emotions and actions than with the underlying injustice that often results in violence. John Paul Lederach’s work on Conflict Transformation is, I believe, a more comprehensive approach.

Reading Brenneman and Gilligan have helped me to think a little more clearly about violence here – but even more about how I serve.

• What can I do to help break down the classism here? 
• What can we do to help the poor work together for a decent and fulfilling life – in their villages?
• How can I facilitate training of catechists and church leaders in such a way that the participants recognize their dignity and their capacities?
• How can we work with young people, helping them recognize their worth?
• How can we – I mean the people I work with, not me – create real communities where people try to live as sisters and brothers, caring for each other, especially the least among is?

All this, I think, will be much more helpful for the future of Honduras and to the diminution of violence than the military police that have been formed to “combat crime.”

And so I turn to what Gilligan writes:

Our first task, then, before we can even begin to think about preventing violence, is to learn how to create something that would actually be a community.

We need, I believe, to look to the ideal of Christian community presented in the Acts of the Apostles, as a paradigm for our work together:

They all gave full attention to the teaching of the apostles and to the common life, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Great awe fell on everyone, and many remarkable deeds and signs were performed by the apostles. All of those who believed came together, and held everything in common. They sold their possessions and belongings and divided them up to everyone in proportion to their various needs. Day by day they were all together attending the Temple. They broke bread in their various houses, and ate their food with glad and sincere hearts… (Acts 2: 42-46)

And so:

The company of those who believed had one heart and soul…. there was no needy person among them… (Acts 4: 32,34)

And so might shame and violence decrease.

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The quotations from the Acts of the Apostles are taken from N. T. Wright’s The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation.

Back home to Honduras

I am returning to Honduras today, invigorated after a short stay in Ames, Iowa, reconnecting with friends and with St. Thomas Aquinas Church where I worked for 24 years before going to Honduras.

St. Thomas supported me for the first five years and has established a sister-parish relationship with the parish of Dulce Nombre de Maria in Dulce Nombre de Copán, Honduras, where I am helping.

One project they recently did was prepare quilted banners for all the 47 churches in the parish, expressing the solidarity in Christ between the two parishes.

Over ninety St. Thomas parishioners were involved in the project. Some of them were hung in the St. Thomas church gathering space before sending them with me.

Here are a few photos:

Back at St. Thomas Aquinas

Since the evening of October 2, I have been back in Ames, Iowa, where I served for twenty-four years at St. Thomas Aquinas church and Catholic Student Center.

Last year when I visited the church was closed due to an arson incident that left the building largely intact but uninhabitable because of the smoke and soot damage. 

It is now open, cleaned throughout, and with new lighting and a new sound system in the church.

Here are a few photos to share the beauty of the church.

Tabernacle

Baptismal pool looking toward the altar

Baptismal pool looking toward the east entrance

the church  looking to the south

Fr. Jon celebrating the Thursday Night Liturgy

Fr. Richmond celebrating in the daily Mass chapel

Baptismal pool and altar from walkway

Statue of St. Thomas Aquinas

Prayer garden to the south of the church

Even more photos at my Flickr Set STA October 2013.

Accompanying the poor with St. Francis

Today is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

In the last year or so, the place of Francis in my life has become much more central.

There is much to learn from the Little Poor Man from Assisi, especially for one who works among the poor in Honduras. Francis is central to my understanding of my mission.

This year, though, I will not celebrate the feast there but in the Us, visiting St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, the church where I served in campus ministry for 23 years and which supported me in my mission. 

On the plane yesterday, I began to read Jon Sweeney’s collection: Francis of Assisi – In His Own Words.

Image of a poor man, outside San Damiano, Assisi

This quotation from the Earlier Rule for the Lesser Brothers struck me:

they should rejoice when they have an opportunity to talk with people who are easily despised, with the poor and the weak, with the sick and lepers, and with anyone who begs in the streets.

That is what I most love in my ministry in Honduras – the chance to stop and speak with those at the margins.

I do have to admit, though that there are some people I try to avoid – the drunk who is always asking for money, the pastoral worker who always seem to be complaining (and who speaks so fast I cannot always understand him).

But just standing around and listening to people sustain me. It is also important for them, for so many people ignore and do not even listen to the poor.

But listening is the first step in recognizing the dignity and the worth of each person. It is the first step in seeing Christ present in the poor.

I need to do it even more.