From Nine Years Ago

Friday, December 5, 2014

Their Insights Need To Be Noted Well By Those Of Us Who Live More Comfortably

On the other end of the spiritual-literal spectrum, no one is more attuned to the liberating implications of Mary's song than those actively engaged in struggling against their current situation of economic, political, ethnic or spiritual subjugation.  Groups as diverse as Western feminists and Latin American campesinos have recognized in this text a revolutionary strain that has inspired their own visions.  Their insights need to be noted, and noted well by all those of us who live more comfortably with our surrounding culture and thus seek to explain away that revolutionary strain.  As we proceed in our study of the Magnificat and its potential to encourage resistant negotiation of the reality of empire, the voices of people who experience a comparable domination in our own time must be considered.  Theologian Dorothee Sölle, for example, in the following poem reinterprets Mary's words in light of the feminist movement:

It is written that mary said
he hath shewed strength with his arm
he hath scattered the proud
he hath put down the mighty from their seats
and exalted them of low degree
Today we express that differently
we shall dispossess our owners and we shall laugh
at those who claim to understand feminine nature
the rule of males over females will end
objects will become subjects
they will achieve their own better right

Even more striking are the readings of Latin American and African interpreters, from farmers and laborere to theologians and professors.  They read ot of their own oppressive situations, from what Leonardo Boff calls "a privileged hermenutical locus for the reading of Mary's Magnificat and for becoming hearers of its message."  Such readers have perspectives that are much closer to the first-century experiences of a Galilean peasant or an urban artisan of Asia Minor than anything most Western scholars like myself can even imagine.  One source of such discussions is Ernesto Cardenal's transcription of the Sabbath conversations of the Solentiname congregation of Nicaragua.  Regarding the Magnificat, their conclusions are clear;  in the words of a woman named Andrea, "[Mary] recognizes liberation.... We have to do the same thing.  Liberation is from sin, that is, from selfishness, from injustice, from misery, from ignorance - from everything that's oppressive.  That liberation is in our wombs too, it seems to me."*   Especially intriguing for our study is these "uneducated" and "unofficial" interpreters' grasp of nuance, even in their most revolutionary ideas. In a discussion about whether "the proud" automatically equates to "the rich," some argue that even a poor person can become "an exploiter in his heart" if she or he years to be rich and acts in a correspondingly exploitative manner.  Others regard God's humbling of the arrogant, rich, and powerful; the exploiters must be liberated,according to Solentiname resident Olivia, "from their wealth.  Because they're more slaves than we are."

Amanda C. Miller Rumors of Resistance: Status Reversals and Hidden Transcripts in the Gospel of Luke

* Here is how that conversation continues from that point:

The last speaker was ANDREA, a young married woman, and now OSCAR, her young husband breaks in:  "God is selfish because he wants us to be his slaves. He wants our submission. Just him.  I don't see why Mary has to call herself a slave. We should be free!  Why just him?  That's selfishness."

ALEJANDRO, who is a bachelor:  "We have to be slaves of God, not of men."
Another young man:  "God is love.  To be a slave of love is to be free because God doesn't make us slaves.  He's the only thing we should be slaves of, love.  And then we don't make slaves of others.'
ALEJANDRO'S MOTHER says:  "To be a slave of God is to serve others.  That slavery is liberation."

I said that it's true that this selfish God Oscar spoke about does exist.  And it's a God invented by people.  People have often invented a god in their own image and likeness - not the true God, but idols, and those religions are alienating, an opium of the people.  But the God of the Bible does not teach religion, but rather he urges Moses to take Israel out of Egypt, where the Jews were working as slaves, He led them from colonialism to liberty.  And later God ordered that among those people no one could hold another as a slave, because they had been freed by him and belonged only to him, which means they were free...

From Contemporary Latin American Social and Political Thought:  An Anthology edited by Ivan Marquez

It goes on from there at the link and is all a lot more impressive and instructive than any blog conversation among bored, contented, first-world, college and grad school grads I've ever been involved in.

With the recent monitoring of what the first-world presents as liberal journalism, it's clear we are all distracted with frivolity to the extent we can't really understand something like this from our experience.  As the first passage said, these people have insights gotten from their daily experience that we can't begin to imagine which gives them understanding unavailable to us except through their telling us.  As Olivia said, you can be enslaved by wealth.

The US backed Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Samosa, bombed the Christian base community at Solentiname out of existence.  Its social gospel was such a danger to him and the oligarchs who ruled over the poor people of Nicaragua. And death is always a risk of following the law that the prophets articulated.  But the terrible history of that country and the support for the oligarchy and its dictatorship by The United States government would take longer to go through than I can today. As Niebuhr said "If a gospel is preached without opposition, it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross."