By Rolando Lazarte
Should almost nothing else to be said about this, so obvious it is: the human being needs to develop himself/herself in harmony with these three fundamental values. But since there are institutions abomining the pleasure, and conceiving the human being just as a sinful, they abomine the sex, and render the human love something so much abtract, that it looks as if all of us were not born from the love of two human beings, we should surely say something else about.
The happy person should not be dominated. So was created the sin, the guilt, the condemnation. Therefore, we should remind the human being that his/her natural condition is kinked to happiness and innocence. And this means accepting himself/herself, his/her body, desires, sexuality, affectivity.
I remember a text written by Rubem Alves, a theologian and psychanalist, who said: If the pleasure was a sin, God wouldn´t endowed us with so many organs of pleasure: our entire body is an organ of pleasure. According to Max Weber, a Christian sociologist and economist, churches are organizations for the administration of the forgiveness of the sins. In order to render themselves able to profit from the sin, they create the sin, and convince people that sin exists.
But in the same way as the sin is created, it also creates the notion of sin. But in the proportion as the sin is created, it is also created the notion of sin. It is demanded the creation of a humanity based on values such as self-acceptance, of his/her body, of the affection and sexuality as well. It is created the notion of liberation.
And liberation path has inspired ideas and practices leading to the recovery of the human person. The liberation vis-à-vis the class society (Karl Marx), the liberation of the opressed (Paulo Freire), the liberation of the excluded people, socially rejected, the liberation of the marginalized – those who believe they can´t, at all, who do not have any right to exist, the victims of the system (Adalberto Barreto).
Osho, such as Wilhelm Reich, helped to develop and to implement the liberation of the notion of sin and guilt from the perspectives of a liberating religiosity and the Social Psychanalysis, respectively. But there´s a whole social programming perpetuated by several Christian churches, especially by the Catholic Church, which insist on playing the role of spiritual allied churches to capitalist domination.
José Comblin, a sociologist who lived in Brazil, is one of the most notable figures of the Liberation Theology. His inspired and inspiring books bring us a living seed of liberation, and this requires an acceptance of the body, of the sex, of the affection, of the love. In this same line concerning Liberation Theology, we must underline the work developed by the Liberation theologian, anthropologist and psychiatrist Adalberto Barreto, who has created the Integrative Community Therapy. Integrative Community Therapy is a technology of care, a social practice and a way of knowledge, which is based on the new meeting of the communitarian “self” of the people concerning all the social classes. A recovery of identity, memory and social place of people who felt excluded.
A revaluation of affective ties, the family and social networks. Such a technology of care was created in Northeastern Brazil, in the slum of Pirambu, in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará, then it was expanded throughout Brazil, and other Latin-american countries (Argentine, Chile, Venezuela, Europe and Africa).
On September 2013, it will be held in João Pessoa the VIIth Brazilian Congress of Integrative Communitarian Therapy, and the International Meeting of Integrative Communitarian Therapy. Their motto: strengthening links and social networks, in order to cross borders. Overcoming borders requires an integration of knowledge: the scientific and the popular one. It also presupposes that we are doctors in our own experience. It´s the recovery of knowledge: of our ancestors Indians and Afrodescendents, European Immigrants, and other ethnical roots.
Humanity can´t keep away vis-à-vis the challenges presented by the third millennium. The weakening of social ties and the psychological conditions of people imposed by the current way of capitalist domination, denounced both by Adalberto Barreto, in his conference on the psychological consequences of globalization, or by José Comblin in his book “Prophecy in Church”, require the empowerment of people and the the communities, families and social networks. Only this way they will be able to resist the destructive forces lead by such a soulless system serving Mammon god.
I would like, at least, to remember some notions of Max Weber, about life and religions, in modern times. Max Weber said these things, in the beginning of the 20th century, but the current situation still renders them valid. It´s what concerns the small communities in which the prophetic pneuma took refuge, in the past, so as having burned down entire societies. In modern societies, marked by bureaucracy, by the extreme appeal to the reason, the intellectualism and a somewhat greater routinization, the sense of the sacred remains in these small communities by affinity, in which direct and fraternal relationships predominate, and which are lightly moved by this prophetic pneuma who, in the past, had burned down with a tremendous fury.
I think that nowadays Max Weber´s words are even more pertinent than at the time they were spoken by him. This is an alert for the societies: they need strengthen the communitarian dimension, the networks, family ties, as a kind of affective antidotes to stop human destruction, the capitalist exploitation.
It concerns, of course, the society as whole, then what concerns each society, it also concerns churches, among them the Roman Catholica Church.
José Comblin´s photo.
(Translated by Alder Julio F. Calado)