Monday, October 26, 2015

COOKING AND PASTRY CLASSES FOR ALL

Nairobi Rodríguez found out about the Cooking Program at the new Cultural Integration Center of La Sagrada Familia parish in Sabana Yegua. Not knowing how to read, she initially feared that she wouldn’t be accepted into the program. Nairobi has plenty of spunk and determination, so she decided to enroll in the program and to bring along her daughter, who is in the first year of high school, to take notes for all the recipes.  In this way she was able to finish the 60 hour Basic Cooking Class. This new program is made possible by INFOTEP, a public institution for professional and technical formation.

The Cooking Program is already very popular. Both groups of students who took the Basic Cooking class are so enthusiastic that they will now continue the program by enrolling in the 180 hour Pastry Class. This is a major challenge! They will need more ingredients and utensils and will have to see where they can get some funding, for even though the course is free, it is necessary to acquire some things so that, afterwards, they will be able to delight family and friends with their new-found cooking and pastry-making skills.

Nairobi is very grateful for the cooking class and she too will join the pastry class. The most important thing for her is that now she has regained the courage and determination to continue and finish her schooling. Having successfully completed her cooking classes has helped her realize that she would be able to go much further if she knew how to read. Therefore, even though she works in the mornings and then in the afternoons she has to care for her five children, she is now determined to get organized for success. One thing about which she is very clear is this: she does not want to be illiterate anymore.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

REFLECTION
 
 
IMMOBILITY, CHANGE AND THE GOSPEL
Martí Colom
 

Brother Roger Schutz, the founder of the ecumenical community of Taizé, used to say that “God does not condemn anyone to immobility.”[1] It is a beautiful saying from someone who understood that we are made to advance and evolve, someone who was always concerned about the lack of horizons in the lives of people and institutions and who wanted to live, as he put it, in a state of permanent uninstallation.

 
One of the paradoxes of our age is that we experience quick changes and a constant acceleration of the pace of life and at the same time there is a significant immobility under the surface of things. The technology to which we have access evolves so rapidly that it is often hard to keep up with it. What a few years ago was unthinkable has become normal, and yet will soon be dated in order to give way to new tools and devices that will fill up our lives and allow us, among other things, to communicate in new, faster and more precise manners. We experience the permanent uninstallation of our daily habits, since yesterday’s routines (how we shared information or accessed it, how we bought a book or a train ticket, how we learned a language, how we took notes in a meeting…) have been radically altered by the new media, which have even modified the way we relate to each other. Yet, it would be a mistake to presume that this constant acceleration makes us immune to immobility. For, as we stated before, it is a shallow transformation, a change of what’s external, of the outer “bark” of our lives, which is quite possible to manage in such a way that our inner core, our substance, remains untouched.

 
It is in the realm of our intimate choices and ideas, of our personal and collective system of values (and there technology’s impact isn’t that critical) where immobility should be a concern; for it is here in our core where immobility usually reigns and where it is at the same time more harmful. In spite of the rapid technological transformation our age does not see an equally fast evolution of our mentalities. On the contrary we, as individuals and societies, continue by and large to be entrenched in a variety of small ideologies and beliefs that very often create conflict, or promote old antagonisms, prejudices, suspicion, and an incomprehensible absence of dialogue with those with whom we disagree.

 
This immobility is harmful because in the rigidity of our spirit we lose the greater opportunities to move on and to identify new ways of mutual understanding; the inflexibility of our ideas cripples us. Immobility, in short, is really a condemnation because it hinders our growth. Cardinal Newman said it well, more than a century ago (in a phrase later made famous by Winston Churchill): “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”[2]

 
In the vibrant moment in which we find ourselves in the Church today, in the midst of what some are calling “the spring of Pope Francis,” it is important to remember the voices of people like Schutz and Newman. Without ever forgetting the richness of tradition they invite us to mistrust rigidity, and to see ourselves as a people in motion, members of a pilgrim Church, of a dynamic community, spirits on the move that do not want to be sentenced to immobility. As Christians, we know that we should never forget our roots but rather to deepen, every day, in the wealth of Jesus’ message. John XXIII said it perfectly: “It is not the Gospel that changes: it is us, who begin to understand it better.”[3] Ultimately, we will only advance in such a new understanding of the faith if we let go of immobility in our hearts.


[1] K. Spink, Hermano Roger. La vida del fundador de Taizé. Herder, Barcelona, 2009, p. 80.
[2] J.H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Longmans, Green and Co., London/New York, 1900, p. 40.
[3] Quoted in G. Gutiérrez, “La recepción del Vaticano II en Latinoamérica”, in G. Alberigo;  J. P. Jossua (eds.), La recepción del Vaticano II. Cristiandad, Madrid, 1987, pp. 213-237; quote in p. 217.