The tourist said to the guide: “I congratulate you because your city is full of temples. You can see that the citizens love God very much.” “They may love God very much, but you have no idea how much they hate each other,” the guide replied with a wry smile.
God is back in the public arenaIn many ways: from former “pagan” singers who release Christian songs, or albums with a religious nature, and supplications to the powers of heaven that seem to interfere in political life; Everything from heavenly powers to Francis’ missionaries.
This supplication to God makes us wonder, What god are we talking about? This use of religion for the benefit of a group, and often, to the detriment of many, has already occurred over the centuries. Pascal said that “God created man in his own image and likeness and paid him with the same coin.” The Frenchman was not lost. The claim that God is on our side often has significant contradictions.. For example, mentioning “the powers of heaven” and then despising immigrants or the poor as lazy, criminals, and “schemers”; Or also, in the name of some progressive doctrine, cancel out or overpower (literally) those who advocate another idea.
It is known that all theology is political, meaning that every talk about God has political consequences. You don’t have to be innocent. It’s another matter. Theologian John Sobrino wrote that one of the great problems in Latin America is not atheism, but the idols that Christians made Christ live by. We churches risk making God an idol, an image that we can manipulate at will. This is idolatry. In the face of a mysterious God who does not allow us to be manipulated, we construct a God to benefit our faith or political intentions. Ancient and modern history provides many examples.
The basic characteristic of what is associated with God is love. The truth that best manifests itself is love, especially tenderness towards the suffering, the weak, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick and the migrant. Simone Weil has stated that she “knows whether someone believes in God not by the way he talks about God but by the way he talks about his fellow human beings.” Christ said it directly: “It is not he who calls me Lord that will enter the kingdom, but those who do the will of my Father.” And I saw what I saw, Mentioning God can be shameful (and scandalous) if specific actions and choices generate hatred, cruelty, and invalidation.
In the end, in the face of all this rhetorical smoke about God, perhaps we will find that God’s best friends are not those who proclaim Him to the four winds, but those who silently and anonymously, often without any religion, help the poor, visit the sick, defend the pensioners, welcome immigrants… those who, in the words of Borges – in “The Just” – “save the world without knowing it.”
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