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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Teresa Forcades, Spanish Benedictine nun, theologian, physician and political activist, is one of Europe's leading radical thinkers. Marrying her Catholic faith with a passion for social justice, she came to prominence for her eloquent condemnation of the abuses of some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies. She has gone on to found a leading Catalonian anti-capitalist independence movement and is one of the leading voices in the world today against the injustices of capitalism and the patriarchy of modern society and of her own church. In Faith and Freedom, her first book written in English, she skilfully weaves together her personal experiences with a reflection on morality, religion and politics to give a trenchant account of how the Christian faith can be a dynamic force for radical change. Placing herself in a powerful tradition of Catholic social doctrine and Liberation Theology, she applies her perspective to the issues most precious to her: freedom and love, social justice and political engagement, public health, feminism, faith and forgiveness. Structured around the five canonical hours that give its peculiar rhythm to the monastic day, this book is a thoughtful and bold polemic against the exploitation and injustice of the status quo. Its call for liberty, love and justice will resonate with anyone disaffected with a savage and destructive political and economic system that marginalises and murders the poor and undermines the very fabric of social life.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction
1: Matins: love and freedom
2: Lauds: social justice
3: Sext: public health
4: Recreation: feminism
5: Vespers: faith
6: Compline: forgiveness
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
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Copyright page
Copyright © Teresa Forcades i Vila 2017
The right of Teresa Forcades i Vila to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0975-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0976-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Forcades i Vila, Teresa, author. Title: Faith and freedom / Teresa Forcades.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016016612 (print) | LCCN 2016031510 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509509751 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509509768 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509509782 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509509799 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church–Doctrines–Meditations.
Classification: LCC BX2182.3 .F67 2016 (print) | LCC BX2182.3 (ebook) | DDC 230/.2–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016612
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Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Introduction
Life as a Benedictine nun has been both a gift and a challenge ever since I entered the monastery eighteen years ago. I have enjoyed the beauty and the freedom of prayer, and have also encountered personal hardships in our earnest community life. I have known periods of dry or even anguished prayer, and have experienced the joy of being lifted up by my sisters' wit.
After studying science, and becoming a medical doctor, I went on to study feminist theology in the United States before entering the monastery at the age of thirty-one. Nine years later, in 2006, having completed a doctorate in Public Health and being close to finishing a doctorate in Fundamental Theology, I wrote a report on the crimes of big pharmaceutical companies. I soon became well-known in my own country as a denouncer of medical abuses and an advocate for women's and LGBT rights in the Roman Catholic Church. Wider popularity came in 2009 with an hour-long internet video that exposed the gap between public policy and scientific evidence with regard to the swine-flu vaccine. The video had more than one million hits and I was flooded with encouraging emails. Soon afterwards, in the context of the growing economic crisis, I began to come under pressure to engage politically. In April 2013, together with the Catalan economist Arcadi Oliveres and about forty other social and political activists, I was involved in setting up a political movement, called Procés Constituent, which stands for an independent and anti-capitalist Catalonia. In June 2015, with monastic permission, I took leave of my community temporarily in order to engage in active politics for a maximum of three years.
The book you are about to read is the first I have written directly in English. It brings together my thoughts on the issues most fundamental to me: freedom and love, social justice and political engagement, public health, feminism, faith and forgiveness. It is divided into six chapters named after the five canonical hours that give the monastic day its peculiar rhythm (matins, lauds, sext, vespers, and compline), plus the hour of recreation, the daily gathering of the community.
1Matins: love and freedom
It's pitch black in Montserrat. Quiet. Down below the mountain, the serpentine yellow lights of the village of Monistrol. Above, bright stars. The bell rings at 6 a.m. and at 6:30 the first prayer of the day starts: matins. Half asleep, braced against the winter cold, we gather in the monastery church and face the large window above the altar with its serene Christ on the Cross. It is a simple piece of unpainted clay in the style of the old Romanesque Maiestas. Jesus reflects no pain and hangs effortlessly, as if ready to fly from the cross, as if he had nothing to do with such gruesome torture. His arms are not aligned but stretch forward in an open embrace: the cross hangs in the middle of a large corner window with a panoramic view of the mountains, and the arms have to accommodate themselves to the square angle left by the tall brick walls. At this dark hour, the window glass reflects the hanging Christ and duplicates his embrace, redirecting it towards the wider world outside the church walls.
“And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” This is how the Gospel of Mark explains the consequences of Jesus' death (Mark 15:38). The reference is to the temple that stood in Jerusalem in the first century CE: its curtain isolated the space where God dwelt, which could only be entered by the high priest at strictly prescribed times. Mark wants to make clear that Jesus had nothing to do with such separation and regulation. Jesus came precisely to free God from such ungodly constraints. Jesus' name Emmanuel means “God with us.” God with us, God among us. The Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila put it even more plainly: Entre pucheros anda el Señor (God walks amidst the kitchen pots).
No organ is played during the matins prayer, and there is almost no singing except on Sundays or major festivities. Voices are still hoarse from sleep, so reciting rather than singing the psalms helps warm them up for the next prayer, the joyful lauds. Matins is sober. It is also called the “office of readings”: its distinctive feature consists of two relatively long readings (around two pages each) proclaimed from the lectern. The first is from the Bible, the second from classical theological treatises, most of them belonging to the first centuries of Christianity, the so-called “patristic era.” Patristic theology, despite being more than 1,500 years old, has not lost its power to speak to the heart; this is because it was written at a time when Christian believers had no social standing at all and were considered a bunch of ignorant peasants or in some cases a dangerous fanatical sect. Some of those early Christians refused to acknowledge the divine status of the Roman Emperor and were sentenced to death for doing so. Not all were heroes, though. Quite a few, probably the majority, gave up in the face of persecution and tried to dilute the message handed down by Jesus, to make it less sharp and uncomfortable. Clear injunctions to social upheaval such as: “You know that among the nations those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them; but it should not be so among you” (Mark 10:42) coexisted at that time with open endorsements of the status quo: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2:12). These contradictions coexisted then and continue to coexist today, for both these sentences can be found in the New Testament.
Often, while listening to a biblical or patristic text during matins, I am elated or deeply moved. At other times, I am frustrated or even angered. On a couple of occasions when I have been the reader I have omitted a sentence of the text because I found it too offensive; for example: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Timothy 2:12). On these occasions, I think of Howard Thurman's grandmother. Thurman was one of the greatest African-American philosophers and theologians of the twentieth century, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. Thurman's grandmother had been a slave most of her life. She was an illiterate deeply devout Christian who forbade her grandson to ever read to her from the letters of Paul because she knew that they contained the statement: “Slaves, be obedient to your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). She refused to acknowledge this as the word of God.
This is what the matins prayer with its long biblical readings invites me to do: to take personal responsibility for my own faith. I do not have faith in a book. I honor the Bible and cannot imagine my life without it. I read from it every day (or almost every day), but I do not expect the text of the Bible to hinder my thinking, or be a substitute for it. I do believe that the text – the different texts – of the Bible are inspired by God and, precisely because of that, they do not collide with my freedom but count on it. God – such has been my experience – has never collided with my freedom; She has created the space where my freedom can exist and invites me to own it. God has never invited me to give up my freedom in order to obey or to please Her. God takes no pleasure in slaves: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:15).
God takes no pleasure in slaves but enjoys friendship and freedom. The first book of theology I ever read was Leonardo Boff's Jesus the Liberator. I was fifteen years old at the time, and part of a family that mistrusted the Roman Catholic Church despite having had me and my two sisters baptized into it. The three of us were born during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who imposed a fascist regime known as “National Catholicism,” religiously sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Spanish Catholic Church. My parents opposed Franco and resented the support that the Church gave to his regime. I read Jesus the Liberator because I was eager to learn more about Jesus after being shaken to the core by reading the gospels for the first time. I remember being deeply affected, but I don't remember having felt “personally liberated” by God: this first religious experience of mine had more to do with making sense of life than with liberation. As a teenager, I didn't feel oppressed; I was rather content and full of plans. It was only much later, while studying theology in the Unites States in the 1990s, that I came across the text of the Enuma Elish and realized, at least at a theoretical level, how seriously the biblical God takes human freedom and how deeply involved She is in supporting it.
The Enuma Elish is the ancient Babylonian Creation narrative that directly inspired the biblical book of Genesis. Its name means “when above” and reflects the opening words of the text: “when the sky above was not named and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name…” This epic poem of about 1,000 lines was first discovered in 1848 among the archeological remains of Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh (present-day Mosul, in Iraq). The clay tablets of Nineveh are fragmentary and were written in Akkadian cuneiform script in the seventh century BCE. New tablets of the same text were discovered in Assur (Iraq) in the twentieth century; these had been written in Assyrian in the tenth century BCE. The original Enuma Elish is presumed to have been written in the eighteenth century BCE in Babylon during the Hammurabi dynasty. Its narrative dominated Mesopotamian cosmogonies for more than 1,000 years and greatly influenced those of its Near Eastern neighbors. The Enuma Elish includes what seems to be the most ancient notion of a creator God (Marduk), who shapes the world in seven days with a distinct order that resembles evolution: it starts with the planet (the separation of heaven and earth) and ends with human life.
