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The Book of Gratitudes
An Encounter between Life and Faith
Pablo R. Andiñach
The Book of Gratitudes
An Encounter between Life and Faith
Copyright © 2016 Pablo R. Andiñach. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0788-2
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0790-5
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0789-9
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 05/09/17
Opening Remarks
The monotony of the Biblical scriptures where one person begat another, and that one another one, and so on and so forth, reveals that no one was made alone and that we all come from, and to a great degree owe what we are, to those who came before us. Just as the Elamite believed he was discovering new words in Pentecost, when they had actually come from the depths of his history, so these pages have some pretense of originality, but are nothing more than bringing to light what we have taken from so many different sources. For this reason, the reader is holding a book full of gratitude. The characters, readings and places that appear in these tales, are the visible components of many others that remain in the dark. I have put into writing only a few, but I dedicate these pages to them all.
P. R. A
For the English Edition
I want to thanks my colleague Dr. Hugo Magallanes, Director of the Center for the Study of Latino/a Christianity and Religions at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and The Henry Luce Foundation for the grant which allowed the translation and edition of this book. My special thanks to Dr. William Lawrence, former Dean, colleague in ministry and friend for his support and enthusiasm for the edition of this book in English. I want to thanks the translator Elda Bedford who made a marvelous and careful work on a difficult text. And my very special gratitude to my friend Ruth Ramanauskas who read the book, made plenty of style suggestions and translated “The Crucified God,” “Julie Adelaide Hope, a Teacher in Paraná” and “The Land of the Wichis.” Through her comments and sensitive reading the text has improved its quality and became more beautiful and clear.
P. R. A
Inhabitants of the Pleistocene
Human beings are inhabitants of the Pleistocene Age or, if we wish to be more precise, the Holocene Era. Anthropology tells us that the Homo species became what we now call Homo sapiens some two hundred thousand years ago. This “claiming to know”—this is what the word sapiens means—should not keep us from reflecting upon our behavior and acknowledging the fact that in many cases, we are closer today to some irrational ancestor, than to a well-balanced being capable of facing reality with utmost consciousness.
However, further specification was sought and thus Anthropology tells us that closer to us, only some fifty thousand years ago, stands Sapiens sapiens, that is, the Homo who knows he knows; the human being of today, in other words, us. But this maximum knowledge of our species grows dim when we consider the performance of men and women, our contradictions and violence, our ravings that seem to be guiding us to some sort of collective suicide, our pettiness that distance us from those whom with must live with and build an inhabitable world.
The knowledge which has allowed us to dominate nature to such an extent that we have almost eradicated age-old diseases, to be aware of things so small that it is hard to imagine they exist, or something so large that it exceeds all efforts to understand it, this same knowledge has not served to eradicate the poverty and starvation of our own brothers and sisters. Moreover, at times it seems that more intelligence is dedicated to perfecting the structure that creates poverty on the one hand and superabundance on the other, than to overcoming this scourge.
There is no doubt that humans are the most intelligent beings on Earth and that we are capable of noble and heroic acts. Despite our erratic and even unhealthy behavior, we are even dying for something practically undefinable that we call love.
As biological beings, we have bodies that strive to find food and water, and to ensure those two or three minutes of oxygen essential to the continuity of life. However, together with this indisputable material reality, we as human beings perceive a deep dimension in our lives that has to do with the ability to see beyond the surface of things, to conceive reality as a space greater than mere visual or tactile appearance. Also, to know that the life that beats inside is more than the body that is exposed to the weather or modestly covered. The poet Walt Whitman said it with characteristic beauty:
. . .and am not contain’d
between my hat and my boots.
(From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)
In the Beginning, Those Words
In the beginning, God was busy creating things which He gave to Adam to name. At first they were mostly animals, and easy to define. But then came more complex objects, and as time passed, the horizon expanded and more words needed to be found. It wasn´t an easy task.
Then came Eve, who also had to take up this essential task of naming objects. As their eyes observed the unfolding surroundings, their skin soaked up sensations through their pores, and their ears were struck with all kinds of sounds.
And so it was that they felt the hardness of an object and called it stone, from which sprang the words stony, sandstone and stoning. They perceived the vastness of their surroundings and called it land, setting the base to the much later use of landscape, landing and landmark.
Adam must have called the color of the celestial vault blue, and Eve was sensitive to the lightness and puffiness of those traveling spots which seemed so delicate to her and she called them by a word so soft that it seems to float: cloud. One night they startled awake, looked at each other and said together: tremor, earthquake. That night they knew and named fear and anguish, and they no longer slept.
But something unsettled them, something for which they could not find the right word. An inexplicable vibration asked to be named. Eve was so pretty when he saw her exploring among the stones and studying the fronds of a fern, thought Adam; Adam looked so vigorous when he climbed up high to reach the ripest fruit, mused Eve. How could you put into words these intimate feelings; what sound could reflect them? It was strange and it was new. To be sure, it was one of the hard words, those that did not come at once.
We do not know who first uttered these words, whether it was Eve or Adam. But from the innermost depths,
