Walls & Books

(…) all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate (…)  He (Ezra) read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday (…) ‘This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. Nehemiah 8:1,3,9

In the ancient and medieval world, the identity of a people, its way of being and existing, its character, its language, its worldview and idiosyncrasy were defended and preserved by walls and built by books, epics, literary works. There are still many fortified cities in the world, such as the Óbidos and the Marvão, and castles and walls such as the one that divides England from Scotland, built by the Romans; and the famous Great Wall of China, thousands of kilometres long, which divides China into two.

The walls can also be understood figuratively. The gypsies have no homeland and no language to call their own, they live scattered in practically every country in the Western world, and yet they do not intermix and are easily distinguished by the way they dress, and by their customs and traditions.

What truly creates a people, however, is its literary work. The Jewish people is unthinkable without the Torah, the books of the law and the prophets. What defines and characterizes the Greek people is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; the ex libris of the Italian people is Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy; what defines the character of the Spanish people is Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha; the Russian soul is found in Dostoyevsky, in his book The Brothers Karamazov. 

The English soul is represented by Shakespeare, and finally, the Portuguese or Lusitanian soul is found in Camões' Lusíadas. The soul of Colombia or of the entire Latin American people is represented in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

The Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking communities’ national day is not the day of King Dom Afonso Henriques, the first and the longest reigning king of Portugal, he reigned for 57 years. The National Day of Portugal is the day of Camões, because our nationality, rather than by the stroke of a sword, was born by the stroke of a pen, by the pen of Camões. 

For King Dom Afonso Henriques, Portugal was his lands, his dominions. It was Camões who created our nationality; it was he who gave us a pre-history of the deeds of the Lusitanians, it was he who described our character and our history in the course of our nation’s great epic of discovery of the sea route to India. And he was faithful to the roots of our language, writing in verse, in the style of the cantigas de amigo sung in Galician-Portuguese by the troubadours of the Camino de Santiago. 

If I were to gather together a group of Portuguese emigrants forced to live in a foreign country by the vicissitudes of life and recite to them: "The arms and the Barons who have left the western shore of Lusitania for seas never before sailed..." I am sure they would weep at being touched to the depths of their being, just like the Jews returning from exile in Babylon wept when they heard Ezra reciting the book of the Law of the Lord. 

Where is our identity, what defines us as Catholics? We have stopped praying the rosary as a family to instead watch soap operas; a family that prays together stays together; our divorce rate is the highest in the world, exceeding 70%. 

We do not go to Mass on Sundays, and excuse ourselves with the oft-repeated refrain "those who go there are the worst"; we create the anachronism of "non-practicing Catholic", as if a pianist could be a non-practicing pianist; or a scientist could be one in name only. The only people who bless themselves are the footballers when they enter and leave the field. 

The Master told us to be salt of the earth, but now what we are is earth; to be the light of the world so that when people see our good deeds, they may glorify God, but we are the world, no longer the light; to be the yeast of the dough, but what we have become is just the dough; coffee without caffeine, tobacco without nicotine, beer without alcohol, in short, washed-out stuff.

I wish we were like the gypsies or the Jews, who, by having a strong identity, manage to survive in the most adverse culture.

Conclusion – Like the Lusíadas is for Portugal, there are literary works that sum up in the idiosyncrasy of a people. Books create a cultural identity, walls defend it. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC