World Social Forum - a retrospect

Ten years ago I attended a World Social Forum for the first time. I led  a Canadian delegation of about 12 people to the first World Social Forum held outside Brazil.  In addition to participating in the Forum itself, I attended a preparatory meeting of the International Council, the body that oversees the direction of the Social Forum movement; I also attended an evaluation meeting of the Forum in India following the event. Our delegation participated in an international gathering on the right to water, which was held in New Delhi during the week before the World Social Forum in Mumbai. At that meeting activists from all over the world gathered, including Vandana Shiva, Ricardo Petrella, Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke as well as representatives of more local struggles in Vanuatu,  Bangladesh and union representatives from the New Delhi water works struggling to avoid a diversion of the Ganges River system.

After the experience of the Forum in India, I was also invited by the World Forum on Theology and Liberation to attend the World Social Forum held in Senegal where we tried to engage Muslims in a dialogue about common foundations of our religious traditions.

Years have passed since those events. Water has been generally recognized as a basic human right; some work has been done to advance inter-religious dialogue with the Muslim world though the general situation preoccupies many of us.  

For some reasons, my entries on the World Social Forum have continued to be accessed almost every day. Perhaps this is a reflection of the enormous network the WSF movement has created.

The World Social Movement has led to new vitality among social movements throughout the world – unprecedented in human history. The social media have opened up extraordinary new avenues of communication and coordination across the world on a very wide variety of issues that have common underlying foundations that we continue to explore.

I offer this update just to say thank you to all who come to visit here and to encourage you to continue in your search for that better world that is possible.

Emptiness

Many of us spend much of our life organizing ourselves so that our time is well occupied. This becomes more evident when we reach the age of retirement. We look for things to do: volunteering, visiting friends, tourist trips, reading. Some of us find ourselves watching more television, going more often to the movies or concerts. Much of this is both enriching and meaningful. But, how many of us spend time doing nothing: I mean just being still, not even thinking, paying attention to what “comes to us?”

I have been reading some of the correspondence of John Howard Griffin. You will remember that he wrote “Black Like Me” after ingesting, in the 1960s, a chemical that turned his skin black. He then spent about a month living as a Black man. His book caused a sensation in those days of the struggle for civil rights. What is perhaps a little bit less known is his struggle with the aftermath. The chemical wore off but provoked a cancer, diabetes, severe heart problems.  He endured years of extreme pain, blindness, and amputations. Through it all he displayed an enormous humanity. He did not at all see himself as a hero. Quite the contrary he was very conscious of how he rebelled against his fate.

All this leads me to consider what is at the heart of the human condition. Most of us want our lives to be meaningful. But what about those times, years, when there is no sense that what we are living through has any meaning at all – either for ourselves or for others: Times when we are totally isolated, in pain of one sort or another, feeling perhaps even that we are a burden to others?

In the Christian tradition, there is a strain – one I often refer to – that insists that God is the ultimate source of goodness and meaning in our lives. We live for the encounter with that ultimate “ground of being,” as Paul Tillich, used to refer to it. Yet, God is also always well beyond us, a call that draws us but to which we never really “arrive.”  Victor Frankl, a psychoanalyst, survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and a friend of Griffin, referred to this journey in his book “The Search for Meaning.”

In this context, the experience of God can only happen when we have been emptied of everything else, everything that could distract us, everything that could take God’s place. St. Paul refers to this in the letter to the Corinthians when he speaks of Christ’s kenosis, of how the Divine Word did not cling to divinity but came among us as human, divesting itself of all the divine prerogatives even to the point of death and death on a cross.

It is very hard, in practice, to actually make the option for emptying, that is to say, accepting that, at some point and at some level, what life offers us is empty and emptiness, and that we opt to embrace that emptiness as the threshold to the presence of God.

I remember a priest from Colombia giving us a talk long ago about how to deal with the enormous physical and psychological violence that was consuming Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. He suggested that we might be tempted, as indeed I was and at a very deep level, to feel that God was absent. No, he said, this is precisely the time when we should be attentive to God’s presence, in that deep and very dark void. For it is only there that the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, will be found.  Easier said than done!

Yet, he was right and still is. Those who embrace that path manifest enormous strength and provide hope for others. It is a privilege to meet such people along the way of life and it is even more a gift to be able to make the same option.

The God of Moses.

 I haven’t entirely thought this through, but it seems to me that it would be a wonderful thing if the Christian Churches, or at least the mainstream ones, would clearly declare that they do not believe in or promote the God of Moses. (I don't have any illusions that the more "evangelical" groups would do this.) Moses' God  is an absolute monarch who rules, decrees, demands and punishes. The God of Moses is patterned on that of the rulers of the time in the Middle East. Not only that, this is a God patterned entirely on the principles of patriarchy, hierarchy and submission. (Obviously, I am speaking here of the idea of God.)
The covenant proclaimed by Moses is exclusively reserved to the Jews and the land offered them excludes every other people. Conquoring that land included acts of genocide.
Frankly, it is the God Jesus railed against.
However, it is not the only way in which God was understood by the Jews, even of Jesus’ time. There is also the God announced by Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and other prophets. There is also, even in the Mosaic tradition, a number of calls for recognition of a God of compassion and welcome for all peoples.

Perhaps it is our desire to alleviate the friction between Jews and Christians that has led us to be somewhat loose in our acceptance of the Mosaic tradition. While not everything is bad there and I certainly, do not want to denigrate the Jewish faith, which also in many ways is discerning in its way of interpreting Moses treatment of God, as a Christian, I do not believe in the God of Moses. Moses serves as a kind of cultural, historic reference for understanding God as announced by Jesus. But this God, Jesus’ God, is very different.  When in the world will the Churches make it very clear that Christians do not believe in a God of vengeance, a patriarchal absolute ruler? Our God is full of compassion, faithful forever, one who advises, counsels and encourages. Our God opens paths for us and walks with us.

Unfortunately, it is not just the evangelical sects who promote the God of Moses. The mainstream Churches – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox have also done so and as a result huge numbers have left the Church and rail against it.