Managua and Reflection

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Managua

I’m sorry I am posting so late today. I had to go to Managua (the capital) this morning with the director and pick of supplies. I must admit it felt great riding down the highway in an air-conditioned truck. Since I have been here I haven’t felt much A/C and I also haven’t ridden in a car for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s funny how the luxury of having a car and being able to get around with very little effort is overlooked, until it's not available.

Managua is essentially a conglomeration of a bunch of little slums. A dictatorship, a failed socialist government and several earthquakes and hurricanes have left the city desperately decentralized. There are a few pockets of modern shopping centers and hotels scattered amongst a sea of squalid shanty towns.

Riding through the slums today I started thinking about the lives of the people I am working with in a local drug rehab facility. When I got back I wrote a few words that I needed to send off to my professor and so I guess it’s appropriate to share them with you as well.

Theological Reflection

Recently I was reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic and in its preface he writes “If it is dangerous to entertain great moral ideals without attempting to realize them in life, it is even more perilous to proclaim them in abstract terms without bringing them into juxtaposition with specific social and moral issues of the day (ix).” What I have found is that there is also danger in attempting to bring moral ideals into physical reality in one’s life.
My Divinity School education gave me credible methods to deconstruct my theological structures. However, now I find myself desperately wanting to find a way to connect believing in goodness with daily work and occupation. But in the day-to-day ups and downs of engaging poverty and hopelessness I find myself teetering between a desire for faith and a dark abyss of nihilistic thoughts. Each of the residents that I have talked to has stressed the importance of belief in God in the process of their recovery from drugs and poverty. I see clearly the importance of faith in the journey to wholeness, but I also see that they have no guarantees.
It seems that although their positions can be traced to specific self-destructive behaviors, their lot in life can also be justified, by escaping into explanations of social location and resource exploitation. If these young men had not been victims of the cruel machinations of national and social forces they may have had different experiences regardless of their behavior. I am finding that those groups who are most successful in changing the destructive nature of the human beings are the groups that stress personal responsibility and have little time for sociological or political explanations. No matter how important governmental policy or social structures may be in creating these social ills. Ultimately it seems that only those who take responsibility for who they are and what they do, have any chance of transformation.

This brings me to the question of Redemption for humanity, something that seems to be unpopular in more learned theological circles. However, it seems to me now to be invaluable in overcoming the demons of one’s past. Is humanity ultimately good or evil? I must tread carefully because by stepping to far either way, one has the ability to do much damage. But at this point I have resolved that fully embracing human desire as tending towards the good is a self-indulgence that is at best childish and at worst morally and mortally destructive. It wouldn’t be fair unless I completed Niebuhr’s thought, he at the end of his preface after wrestling with the place of a theologian and a statesman in society, writes “The moral achievement of a statesmen must be judged in terms which take account of the limitations of human society which the statesman must, and the prophet need not, consider (xii).” I have resolved that although society has proved there are limitations to effectiveness and human ability to be moral, it cannot be used as an excuse to abandon grand moral vision.
Although I find it much easier to embrace inclinations of selfish desire I have found it pays so much more to be disciplined even when it hurts. This is a lesson that everyone in the drug rehabilitation program must learn, in order to succeed. But I must admit it’s a principle that often seems to be a duty unworthy of being kept. If one of these young men states to me that they would rather die chasing the euphoria of drug use, than take their chances in this disastrous economy, I’m not sure I have the right to reprimand them.