In The Struggle
During this season of Lent, our eyes are turned towards war. While we are not actively under attack, we bear witness to the dominion, subjugation, and exploitation of our fellow humans.
We see the terror, the fight, the resilience, and the unknown. We ask ourselves seemingly unanswerable questions. We cry tears for wounds we can’t heal, we worry over actions we can’t take. We donate money and write to political leaders.
Bearing with the suffering, and moving towards liberation is our daily work.
Against this backdrop, we hear the cry of an oppressed people clamoring for liberation. Today’s poor Lazaruses plead with every modern {expression} for one thing alone: to be taken for human beings, to be allowed to pass from a condition of nonpersons to a condition of persons. The churches must understand the messianic mission with which they have been charged: to stand in solidarity with, to be the mouthpiece of, those with—nem voz nem vez—neither voice nor a turn to express themselves when it comes to decisions that will affect their whole lives. The churches are called upon to suffer, in their own flesh, the painful passion of their people.
No longer do they speak of mere structural injustices. Now they denounce a genuine situation of collective sin. No longer do we say merely that the social diagnosis is a gloomy one. We come right out and denounce this social situation as contrary to God’s plan for human history. Liberation is not only an all-encompassing social process. It is also a form of making concrete and anticipating the absolute liberation of all people in Jesus Christ.
Leonardo Boff, in The Maternal Face of God
In this struggle, we live, bear witness, and make change. As practitioners of liberation theology, we see God in us and others actively at work in the liberation of the oppressed. Your current feeling of the momentous injustices are this truth. Injustice is all around us. Suffering is ours to carry. And God does not sit idle, hoping we will make good decisions and figure it out. The Divine lives and moves and has its being in us. God carries suffering alongside us leading us to liberation.
With hope,
Nikki Sauter
Curious about Liberation theology? Check out these works.
- En La Lucha, by Ada Maira Isasi-Diaz,
- A Theology of Liberation, by Gustavo Gutierrez
- If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? By Angela N. Parker
- A People’s Theology