Building our Pasodas together

I am at my cousin’s place as I start writing this essay. We had a big family get-together last night to celebrate the birthday of his small granddaughter. It was amazing. A large group of immigrants from an insignificant corner of India, still holding on to the values and family ties that they brought with them to this far away land. It all began with one man who landed up here in the early eighties. And through him came entire families. My cousin told me last night how each of these families stayed for months with that first one, till each of them got settled in this foreign land. It was a great show of hospitality. And now, I am sharing part of that hospitality as I am staying with my cousin today.
The chapter I read in “Practicing our Faith” by Bass is titled “Hospitality”. It speaks about practicing the Christian hospitality to the strangers, gaining wisdom from the pasoda experience of many Hispanics and Latinos in San Fransisco. Pasoda (shelter) is a powerful story of keeping your inn open for the Christ child to be born in our midst. It is about the experience of being rejected and being welcomed. It tells us that the stranger at our door can be God in disguise. It reminds us that we were all once strangers and so now we should show hospitality to strangers.
We are afraid of strangers simply because we don’t know what to expect of them. When I see that stranger on the street corner or at the El station in an over-sized dirty jacket, asking for some change, my first impulse is to look away and walk faster (and most of the time I give in to that impulse), simply because I am afraid of him. It is not because I have no money, and surely not because I am not generous. We are just afraid of strangers.
But more than the fear, I think, it is a lack of understanding of what they go through that makes us reject the stranger. I realized this when I was on the streets on a begging pilgrimage as part of my Jesuit formation. I had to beg for food and shelter for two weeks. The rich hardly opened their doors for me. It was the poor who shared with me from their limited resources. I realized that this was probably because they knew the pain of hunger. As Bass says, “those who enjoy comfort and shelter edge their way around homeless strangers. Those whose health is presently strong turn away from the gaunt, blemished faces of those who live with AIDS. The prosperous never enter the poverty stricken neighborhood…”
The Bible traditions tell us that offering hospitality is a moral imperative. It emerges from knowing the hospitality God has shown to us. One of my Jesuit colleagues who work with refugees tells me that though he started the work thinking that he has a lot to offer them, he realized soon enough that he receives much more than what he gives. We have much to learn from the stranger, from the homeless, from the AIDS patient. We enter the circle of mutual hospitality. The guests often bring surprising gifts.
Hospitality is not easy. It involves risk. It involves creating space. We need to learn it. And church is a beautiful place to learn it. When some of my friends from other denominations joined me at the Eucharistic celebration, and were reluctant to take part in the communion, I told them about Eucharistic hospitality. Christ invites us to his table, and he has no discrimination. Who are we to discriminate at his table? Each Christian community must struggle to find ways of creating a posada where all can become free to receive and to give.
My Migliore chapter is on “Confessing Jesus Christ in Context”. The separation of Christology into universal and contextual is pretty archaic now. Theologians especially from the Third World have affirmed more than a century ago that the imposition of First World Theology upon them in the name of universal Theology is not acceptable. It is so against the basic principle of Christianity that believes in incarnation. Incarnation is God acting in a context, though it has a universal significance. It shows that God’s way to universality is through the particular. Unfortunately the traditional (so called universal) theologies have ignored the particular histories and struggles peoples and races in different parts of the world, especially the Third World.
As in the case of the mutual hospitality we spoke about earlier, Migliore speaks about how this situation can lead to a mutual enrichment. There should be mutual correction and criticism between the contextual theology and universal theology. “The contextual Christologies have the potential to show that the gospel of Jesus Christ addresses human life in all its historical and cultural diversity and that nothing genuinely human is alien to the gospel”.
The context of the Latin American Christology is the dehumanizing poverty and its debilitating dependence on First World nations. The quest for liberation from this dependence – economically, culturally, and spiritually – is the context of this Christology. They realize how the message of the cross has repeatedly been used to undercut resistance to injustice and to help keep the oppressed in their place. Cross is not seen as an ideological defense of the suffering caused by exploitation and abuse, but it stands as a protest against unjust suffering as well as a promise of God’s companionship with the oppressed. Last month I went to listen to one of the pioneers of Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutierrez, and the congregation sang Psalm 34: The Lord hears the cry of the poor”. It was so touching. (Listen to the song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI9h7B8L71U).
Black Theology is rooted in the history and experience of African American people. It recognizes their struggle against oppression and the long and brutal mistreatment. Many black theologians declare than Christ is black because of his solidarity with the poor and the outcaste in his ministry, and in his death by crucifixion alongside two criminals. It concentrates on the meaning of the ministry, cross and resurrection of Christ for the poor and the despised of the earth. Black theology is not just a church theology, but also a political theology. Though there is a language of struggle and conflict, it does not endorse revenge or violence, but a non-violent resistance. The envisioned future is a universal harmony of people of all races.
All the liberation theologies (I don’t intent to comment on all the different contexts) insist that confessing Christ is inseparable from following Christ. They are against the damaging separation of theology and ethics, theory and practice. Theology is not just an intellectual exercise, but a way of life. Ultimately it is about hospitality. When I welcome the stranger, I welcome his/her worldview, experiences, fears and joys. I welcome them without judgments and biases, though I may engage him/her in a conversation that would open up both of us to newer perspectives. This flexibility is part of my understanding of pastoral counseling. Our life is a big journey, in search of meaning, towards wholeness. In pastoral counseling, we journey together, helping one another, being hospitable to one another, creating space for one another, and doing our theology together. Let us make our lives a pasoda for one another.