Resurrection is real in Latin America, draped, perhaps, in the purple

cloak of the bloodied Christ that stands in the dusty comer of the
village church, illuminated hy countless candles.

The Cross and the Crib:

Hope From the Underside
By BRIAN J. PIERCE

KNEW THAT A SHIFT in my spirituality and my

understanding of the paschal event had taken place
when I caught myself saying not long ago: "It is a
source of great hope for me that Jesus' life and mission
were largely a failure." A shocking statement for a North
American who teethed on the first-world ideology of
success and victory, and on resurrection images of
"General Jesus" riding by in the victory parade to shouts
of "Alleluia! He is risen!"
I credit this fundamental shift to the deep faithfulness
of the poor of Latin America with whom I have been a
co-pilgrim for the past 12 years. The joumey has been
diverse: working with Latino immigrants and Central
American refugees in the United States, among squatters
in Lima, Peru, and presently with campesinos, university
students and persons with AIDS in San Pedro Sula,
Honduras. The stories are similar. The shared pain and
life in the shadow of death are what weave the continent
into one vast tapestry of the crucified Christ. It is the
same "beaten, tortured and crucified Christ" that
Bartolom de las Casas, O.P., saw in thousaiids of
Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America in
the 16th century. Not much has changed. This centuriesold Good Friday procession of Latin America's battered
poor continues through slums and over borders even to
this day.
This is the miracle of hope that defles the tidy, neatly
kept categories of first-world theologies and ideologies.
There are no ticker tape parades for the oppressed poor
of the third world. There are occasional moments of
exhilaration, like the people's nonviolent revolution in
the Philippines, the Sandinista project in its early years in
Nicaragua or the election of Jean Bertrand Aristide as
BRIAN J. PIERCE, O.P., is presently ministering as part of
a preaching team in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and
writes from there.

AMERICA APRIL 2,1994

president of Haiti. But these moments are bashed quickly

by the sentinels of militarism and the economic status
quo. The momentary high fades into a Lenten melody
sung as the pilgrim poor move to the next station on their
way of the cross.
Hope does not fade away in the barrios and squatter
villages to the south. Oh yes, not to fall into romantic
idealization, among the poor hope does waver and droop
and become at times like a "dry, weary land without
water." But hope does not die. Its roots reach deep into
underground wellsprings. Resurrection is real in Latin
America, draped, perhaps, in the purple cloak of the
bloodied Christ that stands in the dusty comer of the village church,' illuminated by countless candles, but it is
real. Hope is the daily bread of Latin America's poor
yes, even in a land devoid of victory parades.

O E V E R A L EXPRESSIONS of popular piety in

Latin America hit most of us North Americans square in
the face the first few times we encounter them. The most
obvious is what seems to be an obsession with the
Crucifixion. I remember standing for hours as a young
Dominican theology student in Lima, Peru, on Good
Friday, holding the large crucifix, along with another
brother, as hundreds and hundreds of mourners
approached to adore and kiss the feet of the crucified
Christ. The women wept as if their only son had just
been gunned down by a death squad. It overwhelmed
me. Three days later, on Easter Sunday, there was just a
scattering of folks to celebrate the Resurrection.
"They are obsessed with suffering," I screamed in my
heart, trying to understand it all. "Where is the hope?
Where is the promise of new life?" I knew that I had
seen and experienced every day a deep hopefulness in
the people, but I could not make a theological connection
between that lived hopefulness and what I perceived as
an overemphasis on the crucifixion of Jesus.
Little by little the scales have fallen from my eyes,
thanks to the patient accompaniment of the people. It is

13

The two most popular religious feasts in all of Latin America are
Christmas and Good Friday, feasts of God's nearness to the poor.

only now that I can see the failure of Jesus as a source of

hope. There is no contradiction between the bloodied
statue of Jesus in the church and faith in the
Resurrection.
L H U M A N BEINGS

suffer. The Buddhists hold

this as a sacred truth. We all know it to be true in the

depths of our heart. We who live in the first world, though,
are taught to deny it. We come to believe that all pain can
be overcome with some miracle drug or miracle therapy or
miracle religious experience. Religiously, we legitimize
our belief by an appeal to the victorious resurrection of
Christ. We live in the world of victory parades, over the
Iraqis or whomever. What we call hope is more often a
numbing denial of our brokenness and pain. We live in the
illusion that Easter is possible without Good Friday.
For the poor of Latin America the cross is a part of
life. A bigger-than-life resurrected Christ actually works
against hope for them, because it places God far away,
up there, in a future that does not and never will exist.
The profound hopefulness of the poor in Latin
America comes from the cross and the crib. As I have
come to understand it, the inherent spirituality of the
people may be described in this sequence: We suffer; we
live in poverty and die before our time; God, in Jesus,
was bom in a poor stable, because many people closed
their doors to God; God suffers too; God was killed and
also died an early death; if all of this happened to God,
we are not alone; God is with us.
It is a deeply incamational spirituality. "Emmanuel" is
the starting point of the popular religious faith of Latin
America's poor. The bloodied crucifix is not obsession
with death; it is the proclamation of God's nearness to all
those who suffer (all human beings). A cheap resurrection ideology that promotes a better future as a kind of
miraculous escape from the pain of present reality does
not connect with the life experience of the people. There
is practically no future for the poor. The poverty is
greater today than 10 years ago, and signs are the trend
will continue. A God who beckons from a victorious
future is a foreign God. Only a God who is bom in the
same subhuman conditions as they and who dies a violent, unjust death like theirs can be real. "Thank God we
are not alone! God is with us. There is hope yet."
It is no great surprise, then, that the two most popular
religious feasts in all of Latin America are Christmas and

14

Good Friday (Ash Wednesday runs a close third). They

seem so different on the surface, but they are actually
one and the same. They are the feasts of God's neamess
to the poor. They are sources of great hopenot a hope
rooted in a distant future, but a hope here and now, as
close and as fleshy as a tiny baby wrapped in swaddling
clothes. God, like us, is on a pilgrim joumey. The resurrection is experienced not as final victory, but in the
recognition of the close presence of the living God who
chooses to walk with and suffer alongside the poor.
Resurrection is joyful and faithful reassurance here and
now.
Anyone who has worked with faith communities of
Latin Americans has celebrated or at least heard of "Las
Posadas," the ritual remembering of Mary and Joseph's
futile attempt to find a safe place for Jesus to be bom. It
is a story of pain and suffering, but the ritual, celebrated
usually the nine days before Christmas, is filled with joy,
singing and often tlie sharing of food at different homes.
The Latin people can relate so well to the story of rejection, because it is their story. They, too, have waited for
attention in clinics and immigration offices, only to be
tumed away for lack of money or the signature of some
remote bureaucrat. The mothers of the disappeared have
stood in plazas and protested for over a decade now in
several Latin American countries, knocking on the doors
of justice, in most cases to no avail. Peasant farmers,
who have always called the land both their home and
their mother, are mn off the land, bought out by large
transnational companies or simply massacred, as in the
case of the El Astillero massacre in Honduras in 1991.
The explanation? "No room at the inn."

.HE POOR OF LATIN AMERICA have no illusions about suffering and pain. They are real. They are
the work of the Evil One. But hope abounds and gives
nourishment for the joumey. For along the pathway of
life they see pregnant Mary and her husband, Joseph,
walking also, looking for a place to rest. They see Jesus
and his friend Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop
of San Salvador, their bodies bloodied by death. They
see so many other pilgrims with whom they share pain
and joy, singing and suffering, a moment of prayer and a
meager meal of bread and wine. And together they
breathe a sigh of profound hope: "Thank God we are not
alone. God is with us."
n

AMERICA APRIL 2,1994