{"id":264437,"date":"2023-02-02T12:16:53","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T17:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=264437"},"modified":"2023-02-02T12:16:53","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T17:16:53","slug":"freedom-to-believe-four-notes-on-faith-politics-and-people-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/in-plain-words\/freedom-to-believe-four-notes-on-faith-politics-and-people-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom to believe? Four notes on faith, politics and people (I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a treatise of his with the disturbing title of <\/span>Pol\u00edtica de Dios<\/span><\/i>, Francisco de Quevedo affirms: \u201cAll the princes, kings and monarchs of the world have suffered servitude and slavery: only Jesus Christ was king in all freedom.\u201d Did he know what the great writer, and man of his time, was talking about? Is it that the freedom of the spirit, that of the people, politics, can be touched with the hands? And what does faith have to do with all that? These notes try to land these questions and others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note 1<\/b><\/p>\n

Almost a decade ago, Father Espeja invited me to speak in the Aula Fray Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas, in the San Juan de Letr\u00e1n Church of the Dominican friars, located in the heart of El Vedado. His invitation contained a bait question: What do you believe?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI believe,\u201d I told him, \u201cin the power of creative thought.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Of all my talking that night, which I cautiously spared the reader, I remember having invoked the Dominican motto, \u201cveritas, amor veritatis<\/em>\u201d, which amounts to something like \u201ctruth conceived from the love of truth.\u201d My argument was that the truth is not just about contemplating it, but about exercising and communicating it; that is, of interacting with others. \u201cIt also has to be defended from its enemies”, I finally added, \u201cbecause it has enemies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My friend Jes\u00fas Espeja, then parish priest of the El Fanguito neighborhood, on the banks of the Almendares River, never asked for the sake of asking. So he asked me the second: And what does that have to do with your life?<\/span><\/p>\n

I will remember a couple of tenuous ideas, rather brushstrokes, with which I defended myself from that soft thrust of his.<\/span><\/p>\n

We tend to think of the Revolution as a radical break in the life of the nation, in the existence and experience of all of us, in the flow of events \u2014 and there is no doubt that it meant all of that. However, it also resulted in a process that is inseparably linked to our previous life, and that becomes inextricable from that past that we carried \u2014 and continue to carry \u2014 inside. In my case, that life had to do with the different faiths (like that, in the plural) acquired until then.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Revolution renewed among Cubans \u2014 not only religious believers \u2014 the idea of a kind of promised land contained in the postponed patriotic utopia. Boys and young people like me tended to live it not as a doctrine, a philosophy, an ideology, but as a vital vibration, a belief.<\/span><\/p>\n

The revolutionary ideology as a link with a previous faith was in my eyes very compatible with everything I had read and learned in the sayings of the Gospel. \u201cBlessed are the poor, for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven\u201d; \u201cIt is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,\u201d \u201cLeave everything you have and follow me,\u201d were consistent with \u201cThe homeland is an altar, not a pedestal,\u201d \u201cI wish to cast my luck with the poor of the earth,\u201d and with the calls to make homeland and defend it. Because it was clear that the Homeland was not \u201ca piece of cloth,\u201d as Emiliano Zapata is said to have said; that is to say, it was not an invocation, a symbol, a constitutional concept, a great tree that shelters us all like birds in the rain, etc.; but something very visible and touchable, especially when it has to be defended with actions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Faith in the Revolution also brought with it adventure and freedom. Leaving the games behind and going to teach people how to read and write was not only fulfilling an idea of social justice, but rather running away from home \u201cwith permission.\u201d It was a very palpable adventure to go away to teach reading and writing for more than half a year at the top of a hill, far from the family\u2019s control, and also an infallible temptation. Of course, for those of us who got hooked on the Revolution with the literacy campaign<\/a><\/strong>, it was an ethical demand: a man had to do something like teach those who don\u2019t know and the poor.<\/span><\/p>\n

To a large extent, the Revolution was that, an intoxicating sensation of freedom. Naturally, we learned much more from the farmers in the countryside than we taught them. As Saint Paul said to the Romans: \u201cYou then, who teaches another, don\u2019t you teach yourself?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To a large extent, the ideology of the Revolution came to be a new secular faith, which worked on values acquired in previous religious education. Going to teach with a rosary around the neck and a Marxist pamphlet in hand was as coherent as dozens of friends were doing it. Perched on those hills we were happy, we participated at the same time in an adventure and in the transmutation of our faith. When we came down, we were others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then something unforeseen happened: the forced choice between religious faith and that of the Revolution. The obligation to choose between one or the other posed a dilemma for religious believers in Cuba. Although, if you think of adolescents or young people like those, choosing between life in the Church and the revolutionary adventure was a decision that didn\u2019t take long to make. Especially since the acquisition of the new faith incorporated and subsumed values acquired in civic education and in the commitment professed in the basic faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last point of my confession to Father Espeja was that of heterodoxy. In the history of the Church, heterodoxy almost always leads to heresy, assumed as a breach or refutation, in a negative sense. My position was to emphasize the positive side of heterodoxy and heresy, as they are sources of renewal of the doctrine and its advance.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we look back at any religious current, we appreciate that, after the heretics and the heterodox, comes a renewal that enriched the doctrine and made it advance. Then, even though they have been burned at the stake, those heretics made crucial contributions. Without heretics we would not have updated the tradition, nor would we be able to use it in a creative way. So it is that heterodoxy, both in religion and in any other manifestation of culture and thought, is decisive for creative thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

When heresy raises the criticism of dogma, the thing is not reduced to someone else\u2019s dogma, but ours, to the one in which we grew up and of which we are unaware, unless we put our creative eye on ourselves. \u201cWhy do you look at the speck that is in your brother\u2019s eye and do not see the beam that is in your eye?\u201d says the evangelist Matthew. We have to look at the dogmas that survive in us, and that do not constitute transcendental ideas or values, but only dogmas, sterile by definition.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the end, if some truths became dogmas, it is not for that reason that they must be repudiated; but rather, let\u2019s say, recreate them. Jesus says: \u201cYou will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.\u201d The same as Gramsci: \u201cThe truth is always revolutionary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A faith or a church without heretics is like a system without antibodies. I don\u2019t know if Cuban religious people can agree, or perhaps it seems to them that spiritual health lies in thinking alike, and celebrating it. In any case, if heresy is not simple antagonism with what others believe, but something deeper and more transformative about one\u2019s own faith, today it seems conspicuous by its absence in the Cuban landscape. At least among believers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The family: original design or cultural design?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n