By Jim Harney

In these exciting times there is a place from which to seize opportunity and possibility: to historicize knowledge in a praxis of liberation. How best do we find that place so that we´re able to look honestly at discourse, get behind it, and take on the social dimensions that form it? A discourse predominates that says the market rules and anyone outside of it has no chance of living a human life. How does the perspective of the crucified challenge this language? How do the crucified bring us into the thick of a reality based on exclusion and terror? How does it bring us to think twice about the term democracy when it´s used so flippantly by whatever political persuasion, yet fails to notice starving children?

With the crucified in mind we can tell stories with clout. They bring us to the center of life where stories come out of our flesh wounded by institutions. Reality influences stories. They aren’t static. Wherever we encounter the poor we see the sin of the world in all its nudity. In such a place, in the presence of the violated, a sense of agency and empowerment occurs. That´s the gift of an honest presence before the crucified, the only real place for doing a theology that espouses liberation. Outside of that there can´t be any church, any community and no ability to speak of a beloved community.

A theology that comes out of the world of the crucified supports community and juxtaposes itself to a sterile individualism supported by the world of the dominant. For the others, the marginalized populations of the world, bear the effects of a structural situation that indorses freedom as the ability to dominate and impose. All those who live outside the reach of capital are expendable and they are the ones who bear the brunt of history “as a slaughter bench.”

But the slaughter lies hidden, unnoticed by the mass media. The task that comes with a spirituality nourished around the crucified is to expose the terror that continues unabated. Spiritualities unfolding from parts of the world where people die before their time are challenged by the necessity to take people down from the cross. As crucifixion continues as an essential part of history then freedom will limp for it will always imply someone else´s slavery, victimhood or exclusion. There will be no world of reciprocity. The face of the other will always have to be masked as Zapatistas pointedly make known to us. The task of a spirituality that comes out of the “majority world” as Ellacuría called the place where the poor live will be to privilege the victim and the struggle to sustain a notion of agency that journeys with those exploited and terrorized. I think of Romero, Santo de las americas. He jumped into the cauldron and with a passion warned never to touch the idol of capital, for to do so means that one will be burnt.

Ellacuría pushes the consequences of a world controlled by capital. We can´t continue to go the way we´re going prioritizing growth to the detriment of the planet. It would take a couple of planets, he noted, to provide everyone in the world with a life style enjoyed by the North. Susan George makes the point that the world now produces the equivalent of what was produced in 1900 in just two weeks. Daunting. Challenging.