Pope Francis meets author Austen Ivereigh at the Vatican in October 2019. The pope collaborated with Ivereigh on the book, "Let Us Dream: The Path to A Better Future." Photo: CNS When we no longer see the natural world as something to be nurtured; the powerful seize and extract all they can from it while putting nothing back, writes Pope Francis
In times of crisis and tribulation, when we are shaken out of our sclerotic habits, the love of God comes out to purify us, to remind us that we are a people. Once we were not a people; but now we are God’s people (I Peter 2:10).
At the beginning of the story of every people is a quest for dignity and freedom, a history of solidarity and struggle. For the people of Israel, it was the exodus from their slavery in Egypt. For the Romans, it was the foundation of a city. For the nations of the American continent, it was the struggle for independence.
Just as a people comes to an awareness of its shared dignity in times of struggle, in war and hardship, so, too, a people can forget that awareness. A people can become oblivious to its own history. In times of peace and prosperity, there is always the risk that the people might dissolve into a mere mass, with no unifying principle to bind them.
When this happens, the centre lives at the expense of the margins, people divide into competing tribes, and the exploited and disrespected might burn with resentment at the injustices. Rather than thinking of ourselves as members of a people, we have competition for dominance, turning contrapositions into contradictions. Because, in these circumstances, the people no longer see the natural world as their inheritance to be nurtured; the powerful seize and extract all they can from it, while putting nothing back. Indifference, egotism, a culture of complacent well-being, and deep divisions within society, spilling out into violence — all these are signs that a people has lost awareness of its dignity. It has ceased to believe in itself.
A people thus weakened and divided easily falls prey to very different kinds of colonisation. But even when not occupied by a foreign power, the people has, in a larger sense, already surrendered its dignity. It has ceased to be a protagonist of its own history.
Calamities
Every now and then, however, great calamities awaken the memory of that original liberation and unity. Prophets who have sought to recall the people to what really matters, to its first love, suddenly find eager audiences. Times of tribulation offer the possibility that what oppresses the people — both internally and externally — can be overthrown, and a new age of freedom begin.
Such calamities for a time throw us off balance, yet, paradoxically, they can allow a people to recover its memory, and therefore its capacity for action, its hope. Crisis has shown that our peoples are not subject to blind forces but in adversity are capable of acting. Calamities unmask our shared vulnerability and expose those false, superfluous securities around which we had organised our plans, routines, and priorities. They reveal our neglect of what nourishes and strengthens the life of the community, how we had shriveled within our bubbles of indifference and well-being. We learn that in our restlessness and frustration, in our fascination with new things, in craving recognition in manic busyness, we had failed to pay attention to the suffering all around us.
In their response to that suffering is measured the authentic character of our peoples.
Memory
As we awaken to the memory of our people’s dignity, we start to grasp the insufficiency of the pragmatic categories which have replaced the mythical category that gave us our true way of life. The people of Israel in the desert preferred the pure pragmatism of a golden calf to the freedom to which the Lord called them. In the same way we had been told that society is just an amalgam of individuals each pursuing their own best interests; that the unity of the people is mere fable; that we are powerless before the might of the market and the state; and that life’s purpose is profit and power.
But now, come the storm, we see that it is not so.
We must not let the current clarifying moment pass us by. Let it not be said, in years to come, that in response to the coronavirus crisis we failed to act to restore the dignity of our peoples, to recover our memory and to remember our roots.
The feeling of being part of a people can only be recovered in the same way as it was forged: in shared struggle and hardship. The people is always the fruit of a synthesis, of an encounter, of a fusion of disparate elements that generates a whole which is greater than its parts. A people may have profound disagreements and differences, but they can walk together inspired by shared goals, and so create a future. Classically, a people gathers itself in assemblies and organises. It shares experiences and hopes, and it hears the call of a com- mon destiny.
Soul
It may seem strange to say it, but it’s true: the people has a soul. And because we can speak of the soul of a people, we can speak of a way of viewing the world, an awareness. Such an awareness is the result not of an economic system or political theory but of a personality shaped in key moments of a people’s history. These milestones have imprinted on the people a powerful sense of solidarity, of justice, and of the importance of labour.
When the people prays, what does it ask for? For health, work, family, school; for a decent place to live; for enough money to get by; for peace between neighbours, and a fresh chance for the poor. These aims may not seem revolutionary or high-minded. But the people itself knows all too well that they are the fruit of justice.
A people, then, is not merely the sum of individuals. It is neither a logical nor a legal category, but a living reality that is the fruit of a shared integrating principle. You can try to describe the people as a concept, in terms of a paradigm, to try to define where it begins or ends, or to impose some legal or rational definition of it. And you can analyse a particular people in terms of its culture or characteristics, to try to name what defines, say, the French or the American people. But ultimately the exercise is futile. To make the people a topic of research is to put yourself outside it, and in so doing, to lose sight of what it is. Because ‘the people’ is not a logical concept, it can really only be approached through intuition, by entering into its spirit, its heart, its history and traditions.
The people is a category capable of generating symphony out of disconnection, of harmonising difference while preserving distinctiveness. To speak of the people is to offer an antidote to the perennial temptation of creating elites, whether intellectual, moral, religious, political, economic, or cultural. Elitism reduces and restricts the riches that the Lord placed on the earth, turning them into possessions to be exploited by some rather than gifts to be shared. Enlightened elites always end the same way, imposing their criteria, and in the process scorning and excluding all those who do not conform to their social status, moral stature, or ideology. We have suffered for too long from these reductionisms.
To speak of a people is to appeal to unity in diversity: e pluribus unum. For example, the 12 tribes of Israel were gathered into one people, harmonised around a common axis (Deuteronomy 26:5) yet without giving up the distinctive characteristics of each one. The People of God, in this case, takes up the tensions which are normal in any human grouping, but without needing to resolve them by one element prevailing over the others.
Explaining
I realise that explaining this thought category is not easy, not least because we have become so used to speaking of identity in categories of exclusion and differentiation. That is why I prefer to use the archetypal term ‘mythical category,’ for it opens up a different way of describing reality, one that allows us to forge an identity that is not determined by exclusion and differentiation and dialectical opposition, but through the synthesis of potentialities that I call overflow.
If, faced with the challenge not just of this pandemic but of all the ills that afflict us at this time, we can act as a single people, life and society will change for the better. This is not just an idea but a call to each of us, an invitation to abandon the self-defeating isolation of individualism, to flow out from my own ‘little lagoon’ into the broad river of a reality and destiny of which I am part yet which at the same time lie beyond me.
This is an extract from ‘Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future’ by Pope Francis which was published on December 1.