Turning from God to God - "Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope": Unfolding the Eighth Assembly Theme

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 1998 by Jaci Maraschin

Since joining the faculty of the Methodist University of Sao Paulo in the 1970s, I have learned to be a minister on a university campus as an Anglican in a Methodist milieu. The students, of course, are in the majority neither Anglicans nor Methodists. Their religious allegiances range from none at all to a great variety of churches, denominations and spiritualist cults. For the most part, students prefer soccer and sex with the hope of having, in the future, a job and a decent salary to survive in the economic jungle of my country.

This diversity among my students is a mirror of the country as a whole. Brazil is a huge place, with millions of inhabitants of many races, colours, customs and social conditions. The history and present reality of the country has been marked by these differences and contrasts. Its riches are unjustly distributed. In recent years there has been a growing popular movement in favour of agrarian reform. The neo-liberal government has been slow in facing the issue, and the president seems to be under pressure from the big landowners throughout the country. Farm workers, tired of waiting for a just policy of land distribution, have organized themselves in what is known as the "landless movement". Encouraged by segments of the Roman Catholic Church and of some Protestant churches as well, they now have the valuable sympathy of large groups of society. A recent declaration of Pope John Paul II on the subject was received here with enthusiasm and hope.

Land is not the only problem we face. If the Brazilian government has been successful in the fight against inflation, the cost of this success has been increased unemployment, poverty and social unrest. Corruption and criminality hover over our institutions and threaten the welfare of the country. Programmes of social health and public education do not work. We are still facing the ghost of illiteracy. And the rich continue to become richer and the poor poorer.

Who is God and what is God like?

What is the role of religion in such a disturbing situation? Turning Paul Tillich's insight upside down, I would say that religion is not the substance of our culture, and culture is not the form of our religion. Let us begin from the assumption that religion expresses itself through symbols and signs. In Brazil, symbols and signs, seductive though they may be, work much more on the surface of life than in its depth. To use an expression of Baudrillard, it is much more like a "superficial abyss" than the depth spoken of by the mystics.

In this "superficial abyss" God is also superficial and peripheral. He (this God is always a masculine being) acts as a king in the skies trying to protect the faithful and showing satisfaction when we do good works. He is "Brazilian", as many would believe and say in this country: that is, God is still able to look after us even if things are not so good all the time. In this way Brazil is an extensively religious country. There are churches and shrines all over the place. In an upside-down contextualization, we have succeeded in creating God after our image. Our Brazilian God reigns over the people in the great festivals of Candomble in Bahia, mixing his powerful wits with the Catholic processions and Pentecostal frenzies. And he explodes in rhythm and many fantasies during Carnival. He is, of course, an image. Our creature. A caricature. A simulacrum.

Our God also serves the political power. In our Houses of Deputies and in the Congress he is present in the form of a crucifix. He is there, laying upon the cross, dying or already dead. This is good for the politicians. They know that images do not criticize. They are mute and blind. The politicians claim to be at his service. They talk about morality and reason. Since they belong to the age of Enlightenment, their God is moral and rational, a God of "principles". He is just like they are. Their image. Our Constitution, like many others in the Western world, speaks "in the name of God". This is, of course, the God of the "superficial abyss".

This peripheral God is the patron of electricity and is responsible for the electronic revolution. Our frenetic media come from his hands (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that they come from his luminous rays). The well-known futurist artist Filippo Marinetti imagined a theatre very similar to what came to be MTV, able "to wrap the audience in a thunderous sensorium, `a theatre of amazement, record breaking, and body-madness', erotic and nihilist, whose hero would be 'the type of the eccentric American, the impression that he gives of exciting grotesquerie, of frightening dynamic, his crude jokes, his enormous brutalities'."(1) The electronic revolution has given us the new world of communication, which is the basis for globalization. Our peripheral God reigns through television stations and sends his message through many "angels" and "saints" which are the powerful networks of the First World, full of promises and futilities.