Some phrases become famous because they are spoken by famous people. Any phrase spoken by Einstein or Gandhi, for example, becomes famous "ipso facto" because it has the signature of a famous man, but many of these phrases say little. They are like the mediocre paintings by a famous painter, which despite their mediocrity, they are sold for millions because an intrinsic value is automatically assigned to them.
The author of the tridimensional quote that we chose for the title of this text is not universally known like the authors we mentioned. Therefore, it was not his fame that gave popularity to the quote, it was, on the contrary, the quote that gave popularity to the author.
The popularity of this saying comes from the fact that directly or indirectly it appeals to the truth of our existence. We are spatial-temporal beings who occupy a space for a brief period of time. This is why our life needs a justification, it needs to make sense to us, to God (if we are believers) and to others, that is, our social environment.
It is true that, as it is written, the phrase belongs to José Martí; but it contains an idea that had already been expressed by Muhammad many centuries earlier, and the Cuban poet drew his inspiration from it:
The reward of all the work that the human being does, ends when he dies, except for three things: an ongoing charity, a beneficial wisdom or knowledge, and a faithful son who prays for him when he is in the grave. Muhammad
Although the truth of the saying, or the original version that inspired Martí, goes beyond what the author himself thought, as it is truly an original and even somewhat unusual thought, it is only fair that we say a word or two about the identity of the author who made it popular.
Who was José Martí
Cuba's national hero and symbol of the struggle for independence from Spain, he is recognized as the most universal thinker of the island of Cuba. Poet, journalist, author, philosopher, politician, soldier and apostle of Cuba's independence from the Spanish rule; in this sense, he inspired other struggles for independence that followed in Latin America. Despite being a great thinker and writer, he did not die of old age doing what he liked, but died young in combat, on May 19, 1895 at the Battle of Dois Rios. With his effigy, coins were minted in Cuba and today, the International Airport of Havana is named after him.
The lyrics of the internationally famous and popular song “Guantanamera” were written by Martí. The quote that inspired this article is not an isolated case in relation to Martí's work and thought, but is corroborated in the context of so many others that reveal Martí as a great humanist. As José Martí is Cuban, a fierce fighter for freedom and independence of Cuba, we can mistakenly call him a socialist or a communist.
For those who have this temptation, I remind them that Martí was a contemporary of Marx when no communist revolution had yet taken place, and only Fidel Castro's father was alive at the time. In fact, Martí was very critical of Marxist thinking and its system of government. He understood that what was valuable to Europe was not valuable to Central America.
· Against the dictatorship of the proletariat, he said: The right of the worker should not be hatred of capital, but harmony, conciliation, approximation between the two.
· Against the abolition of private property, he said: The nation is rich when it has many small owners.
· Against the deprivation of freedom which would be one of the characteristics of states that exert communism, as it is still happening in China today, he said: Freedom is the essence of life, everything that is done without it is imperfect. (...) It is a disgrace to freedom that this becomes a political party.
· As a humanist, he said: The human being needs to go out of himself to find rest and to reveal himself. (...) Racial animosity cannot exist because there are no races (...) Humanity is composed of two classes of men, those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy. (Letter to a Cuban farmer)
Ars longa vita brevis
Art is eternal, our life is brief. Generally speaking, art means all human activities linked to manifestations of aesthetic order. Our concept of art goes beyond materialistic human activity. Inspired by Erich Fromm and his work, The Art of Loving, we understand art as all human activities that cultivate and aim to develop a human value.
Love is an art, dialogue, harmony, non-violence, even peace is an art. The expression Fine Arts in the sense of aesthetic arts, referring exclusively to painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater and literature should disappear, because all arts are aesthetic.
Art is eternal because it refers to the cultivation of a human value. But arts do not cultivate themselves, rather they are cultivated by temporal beings, that is, by us. In my opinion, both from the human point of view and from the point of view of faith, we acquire eternal life insofar as we cultivate values that are eternal.
Mozart and Beethoven, for example, gave their temporality to music, made it progress and raised it to new highs. Picasso did the same with painting, Gandhi and Mandela with nonviolence, etc. Between these authors we mentioned and the art to which they dedicated their lives, there was a symbiotic relationship: they gave their lapsed and mortal temporality to their art, and it in turn rewarded them with its eternity.
When we cultivate eternal values we write our names in the history of mankind, because we acquire a name, a popularity, a fame which in this sense are synonymous with "eternity" and at the same time, we also write our names in the "Book of Life", an expression so often cited in the Bible as synonymous with Heaven and eternal life with God.
By contrast, when we cultivate temporal and lapsed values, that is, when we dedicate our time and energy to cultivate realities such as wealth, power, physical beauty, luxury, ostentation, and physical pleasure in all its forms and possibilities, we alienate our life because we are using it to cultivate death.
If during our lifetime, we use our life to cultivate death, what do we expect to find when death eventually knocks on our doors? It is evident that eternal death is another way of understanding hell. Our temporal life leads to eternal life if we cultivate eternal values, and to eternal death if we cultivate temporal values (that is, if we use temporality (our life) to cultivate more of the same: temporality).
Tempus fugit, carpe diem
This expression, especially the second part, "carpe diem", has been used as a justification for enjoying life to the fullest. However, in the proper context of its former meaning, it means exactly the opposite. It is an exhortation to action: as our time is short, we should not waste it but must make good use of it, overcoming laziness or "dolce fare niente"; "don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today"; "do it now as sometimes later becomes never".
Time escapes us. Let us make good use of the day to become eternal in the cultivation of the art that our talents point to. In God's mind, no one comes into this world by chance, or by accident. All those who are born, are born because God desired it and they enter into this world with the project that God has outlined for them. In this sense, God gives each one sufficient talents to make his life viable.
It is up to each person to discover them, taking risks and trying things to find out where his talents lie: one will only know if one tries, or "Nothing ventured, nothing gained", a person will only know if he has the talent of singing if he opens his mouth and lets out his voice.
On the other hand, we should not waste our time admiring and even worse envying other people’s talents. While we are focused on their talents, we waste the time we need to discover our own. Worse still, if we try to imitate them, we're pretending to be who we are not. We can only be the best version of ourselves. But when we try to imitate or copy someone else, we are easily outdone by that person's originality. Following the road that has led others to succeed does not in itself guarantee that we will also succeed. Each must follow his own path.
According to José Martí, the three things that we are called to do to justify being born, or to make our lives productive, and leave behind more than what we found, are:
Planting a tree – a clear reference to ecology, to sponsor a development that does not compromise the health of the planet and the lives of those who come after us. It encourages us to overcome the sole care for the present moment and consumerism, or that donkey mentality that says "after I die I don't care whether or not the grass grows, I won’t be eating it". It makes us think of the long term.
Having a child – in Heaven, as Jesus says, people are not given in marriage because there is no death. Because there is death here, there has to be reproduction. But Martí was not only referring to the physical act of continuing the human species, but to the education of this new being that we bring into the world. A new world cannot be formed by old men; a better world cannot be formed by lesser men.
Writing a book – in addition to a book, it can also be a music score, a play, the creation of a vaccine, a scientific discovery etc. After contributing to the improvement of our habitat, which is our planet, making a better world by forming better people, it is now a matter of contributing to the advancement of science and technology, philosophy and all other arts and sciences that will improve the living conditions of future generations.
TREE
"He who before his death planted a tree, did not live in vain." Indian proverb
Last year we wrote about sustainable development and we said that it is one of those tridimensional realities because, in order to be sustainable, any economic development must carefully consider the environmental impact that the project in question will have, and whether it is economically and financially sustainable, profitable and lucrative. Finally, we must consider whom such a project serves, who are the people positively or negatively affected by it, who receives the profits, and whether or not it will create social inequalities.
As we have already dealt with this issue extensively in an article written last year, we reproduce here excerpts taken from two well-articulated speeches on the subject, presented at two historically important ecological forums: first, in Rio de Janeiro given by Fidel Castro in 1992, and second, at the UN General Assembly given by 15-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on September 23, 2019.
Your Excellencies:
An important biological species — humankind — is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction.
They were spawned by the former colonial metropolis. They are the offspring of imperial policies which, in turn, brought forth the backwardness and poverty that have become the scourge for the great majority of humankind.
With only 20% of the world’s population, they consume two-thirds of all metals and three-fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have weakened and perforated the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer. (…)
If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, wealth and available technologies must be distributed better throughout the planet. Less luxury and less waste in a few countries would mean less poverty and hunger in much of the world. (…)
Make human life more rational. Adopt a just international economic order. Use science to achieve sustainable development without pollution. (…)
Now that the supposed threat of communism has disappeared and there is no more pretext to wage cold wars or continue the arms race and military spending, what then is preventing these resources from going immediately to promote Third World development and fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet?
Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago. Thank you. Fidel Castro, Rio de Janeiro, 1992
We’re watching you, international leaders. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. (…) You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away?
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. (…) the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. (…) The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. Thank you. Greta Thunberg, 15, address to the UN General Assembly, 23 September 2019
The bottom line is that the economy must be rethought, we must abandon the idea that it can grow indefinitely. In a purely physical sense, an economy in continuous growth can only be possible on a planet that is also growing, that is, on a planet where the resources are continuously growing. It goes against the laws of physics or just plain common sense that an economy strongly based and dependent on resources that are finite can grow indefinitely.
The present petty interests of some are preventing us from seeing the problem in its entirety. On November 2, 2019, the indigenous leader Paulo Paulino Guajajara, one of the so-called Guardians of the Forest, a group of indigenous people dedicated to protecting the Amazon rainforest from environmental destruction, was murdered by a group of illegal loggers on the indigenous lands.
According to NASA, on August 16, 2019, an analysis of the satellite data indicated that the total number of fires in the Amazon in 2019 was close to the annual average of the past 15 years. The importance of this forest is linked less to its oxygen production, as most of this comes from marine algae, and more to the absorption of carbon dioxide - the forest is the earth's air filter.
As intelligent as the human race is and as scientific as research on climate change and rising sea levels, flood and drought disasters, contamination of oceans and ecosystems, and diseases that pose a common threat may be, human beings remain selfishly stuck in an attitude of denial, hiding their heads in the sand. Everyone thinks that the worst will not happen in his or her lifetime, like the donkey aforementioned thought, but when that end time comes there will be nothing left that can be done.
"He who plants dates does not reap dates"
The world's best date palms are planted in the world's oldest and lowest city: Jericho. Coincidentally, this palm tree is late in bearing fruit. Hence the proverb that tells us that whoever plants date palms does not get to collect the fruit of his labor, someone else will.
It is this way of thinking that we must adopt in rethinking our world, which is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the donkey that only cared about its own sustenance in the here and now of its existence. Those who eat dates today are eating from the toil of those who planted them and did not get to savour them. This is how we must think about future generations: plant today the dates they are going to eat. We must prepare today the environment where they will live or at the very least, not ruin it for them.
CHILD
If you want to make peoples, make men. Jose Martí
The previous section was about the kind of world we leave to our children. This section, no less important or worrisome, is about the kind of children we leave to our world. Adults who smooth things out for their children at every turn, even absolving their misconduct, taking all their problems out of their way, solving their smallest problems, do so by telling themselves "I don't want my child to go through what I went through at his age”. In taking this education stand with their children, they forget that they are who they are today because of the hardships they themselves went through as kids.
One of the rules of a good education is to hold the child accountable from the moment he is able to take on a new task or responsibility. If a child is old enough to help around the house then he should be helping; if he can wash the dishes, then he should wash them, if he can make his own bed, then he should make it. If he can already solve small problems as they appear, then he must solve them on his own, because this will make the child grow stronger and be better prepared for more serious and difficult problems that will come in the future.
We gave them all their freedom too soon and neglected, at the same time, to set any limits, that is, never said no to them. Now they do not know what they want, and are incapable of making decisions. They say "I want to keep all my options open" and, in fact, many do keep their options open for most of their lives, without committing to anything or anyone. Many young adults nowadays no longer want to leave their parents' house because they are not ready for life on their own. These young people waste time at this roundabout or intersection in life, and before they know it, at the age of 30 or older, they still do not know what to do with their life.
Because they do not decide or make a commitment, the State is obliged to create laws that consider them married when they live together for a certain period of time, activating divorce if they decide to separate. Choosing means saying yes to one path and no to all others. Eventually, many of these individuals become parents when they are old enough to be grandparents.
Absent parents
Failures of children are almost always the responsibility of the parents. The school is the same for everyone, the streets too, what makes a boy or girl fail in school and dropout, or worse, join a street gang and become victimized by others or fall into the world of illicit drugs, juvenile delinquency or having sex too early, is the education that he or she receives at home. This can either strengthen or weaken the young person to face the school and the street environments, which are always more hostile compared to the home environment where he or she receives unconditional love.
Many parents not prepared to be such and therefore, end up repeating the same mistakes their own parents made with them. This world attaches a great importance to the technical and professional preparation of workers, but none to education. There are no courses for learning how to be a good parent. The child is abandoned, lives abandoned. He spends most of his time in school where he is not educated but only formed professionally. He comes home late and tired, just like the other members of the family. There is only time for dinner and sleep, because he has to get up early the next day.
Despite the millions of years of evolution that separate us from the primates and other mammals, the human family is still very much a single-parent family, as it happens with mammals. The father remains absent, in many cases, and hands over the education of the children to the mother who, depending on whether or not she works outside the home, is more or less omnipresent. The father does not follow the child's life and is relegated to the role of a supreme court and exercises this role only on issues that the mother cannot resolve; in the old days, the father was the punitive power that enforced the laws.
In a family where the father is absent, the boys grow up without a model of identification, and they end up having little connection with the father figure. The girls grow up without the first male experience. Freud was right in this: the relationship we established with the parent of the opposite sex will later be largely repeated. Girls who lack a father, date earlier and tend to fall in love with boys older than them, that is, they are unconsciously not looking for a boyfriend or a friend, but the absent father.
If we think of the famous people, those who have achieved fame in the world of politics, arts, literature, medicine or music etc., we will see that most have devoted themselves entirely to their art, neglecting their children and ended up being bad parents. These are parents who are not known by their children, and these children of theirs tend to be anonymous to the world, inheriting absolutely nothing from their parents.
Have children or have pets
"Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs."
Mark 7, 27
There are couples who equate having pets with having children. If they were married by the Church, the marriage is invalid because they had promised to have children and educate them according to the Catholic faith. For those who do not believe in the resurrection and eternal life, children are the only way for the human person to immortalize himself. Their genes will not die out, they will live in their children and then in their children's children and so on, from generation to generation.
The amount of money a family in the West spends to maintain a pet is enough for a family in a poor country to live on for months. According to the book of Genesis, we learn that animal is at the service of man; a pet in a house does not provide any service to man. Dogs can guide the blind, help in police work, help the shepherd, and guard a farm; cats hunt rats. Nowadays, what service do pets provide to man? None. It is the man who is at their service.
Having just moved from Ethiopia to Spain, and while I was in a park in Barcelona waiting for the parish Mass to start, I saw a lady walking her dog. At one point, the animal relieved itself and the woman took out a bag from her pocket, picked up the animal’s poo and deposited it in the nearby trash. Then she also took out a tissue paper from her pocket, and cleaned the dog up. I was scandalized, this world humanizes animals and dehumanizes humans!
I heard about a cat that was connected to a machine which was artificially maintaining its vital functions; the veterinarian called the pet owners, informed them that there was nothing else he could to do: in addition to kidney failure, several other vital organs were also no longer functioning, so he suggested turning off the machine and asked for their permission. The cat owners, who even introduced themselves as the cat's family, besides not allowing the machine to be turned off, called the veterinarian cruel.
In a radio show about pets from a London radio station, a woman asked the announcer why her cat, whom she treated like a son, slept with her one day and with her husband the next. I do not recall what the announcer said, but I do remember very well that he was clearly aghast at the question.
Being a father and a mother is the vocation of every man and woman
As there are many birth parents who never become real fathers or mothers, so there are parents who are not birth parents. For both the child and the adults who act as adoptive parents, the most important point is not the birthing of the child, a task that takes a few minutes for a man and 9 months for a woman. The most important thing is to educate the child.
A colleague of mine, a Consolata missionary like myself, called his birth mother aunt and his aunt mother. They were two sisters, one had a son by accident and later found a boyfriend who wanted to marry her, but did not want the child. So she gave him to her sister, who showered him with much love and raised him with great care. She did not intend to marry and in fact never did, she lived for that boy who later became a great missionary.
No one would deny Mother Teresa of Calcutta the title of Mother, and yet she never gave birth to any child; but she behaved like a mother to hundreds of orphaned children and, with her religious sisters, raised and educated them. Catholic priests who neither marry nor have children are called father, or priest, while Protestant and Orthodox priests who marry and have children are not called fathers. The reason a priest does not marry is precisely to be the spiritual father to his faithful, educating them in faith and so often humanly.
A shot in the foot
The Western society is not having children. Most families in the West cannot afford to have more than one or two children because it is very expensive to raise them. We live in a rich world where life is hard and expensive. For young married couples, both having just gotten their first job, it is not easy to pay for the house and the childcare expenses, which can cost more than the expenses of a university student.
That's the shot in one’s own foot that the West is taking. No young couple can afford with their minimum wage salary to send their son or daughter to a preschool childcare, although things do get easier once the child enters kindergarten. This is, in my view, one of the reasons for the low birth rates: it is less a question of ill will on the part of families, but more a question of economic difficulties that makes raising a child a thing of luxury.
BOOK
(…) All the people gathered together into the square (…) He (Ezra) read from it (the book) facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, (…) 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, language, worldview and idiosyncrasy were defended and preserved by walls and built by books, epics, and literary works. Today, there are still many fortified cities, such as the Óbidos and the Marvão in Portugal, castles and walls such as the one built by the Romans that divides England from Scotland; and the Great Wall of China which is thousands of kilometers long that divides China in two.
What truly creates a people is its literary work. It is unthinkable to imagine the Jewish people without the Torah, without the books of the law and the prophets. What defines and characterizes the Greek people are the Iliad and Homer's Odyssey; the ex libris of the Italian people is the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri; what defines the character of the Spanish people is the Don Quixote de la Mancha of Cervantes; the Russian soul is found in Dostoyevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov. The Portuguese or Lusitanian soul is in Os Lusíadas of Camões.
Read and travel
"The man who seeks to educate himself must first read, and then travel in order to correct what he has learned" says the proverb. In the ancient world, the trade routes such as the Silk Road, the incense route, the metal route, not only served for the exchange of products, but also for the exchange of ideas and scientific discoveries. Gunpowder was discovered in China, but reached the West via the Silk Road; the trebuchet or the first projectile launcher was engendered in the West, but arrived in China through Marco Polo.
The peoples that developed and progressed the most were the ones that established the best means of communication. It is no coincidence that the most developed peoples were born around the Mediterranean and the great rivers that were, in themselves, trade routes. Isolated peoples, such as the Aborigines in Australia, or the Amazon Indians, have remained primitive to this day.
The book is a vehicle of communication, and transfer and exchange of knowledge. It is more effective than the trade routes because it not only unites peoples in the present time, but also of one generation to the next. The book has replaced the culture and oral tradition of passing on knowledge from parents to children. Through oral tradition, knowledge was lost, through book culture, nothing is lost unless books are burned, which is what happened to the library of Alexandria, the best and most extensive library in the ancient world.
Today there are other means of communication, such as radios, televisions and the Internet, which are much simpler to use than the book. That is why books, newspapers, magazines are disappearing as vehicles of culture; but perhaps they will not disappear completely. Some recent studies indicate that we retain more of what we read in a book than what we learn through television or radio. "Words are carried in the wind". I would say that words that come to us orally, through sound, are carried away by the wind because it is the wind that brings them to us in the first place; however, words that come to us through reading stay with us.
Similar studies have been carried out comparing typing on a computer to writing by hand which also seems to be disappearing. These studies prove that we retain much more of what we write by hand than what we type on the computer. This conclusion is important for students who are preparing for exams: instead of just reading the exam materials, it is good to write them down, making summaries by hand, copying them from books.
Throughout the Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1439, the distribution of books was made by copyists; thousands of monks in the West devoted themselves to copying books so that these would not disappear. The Renaissance was possible because during the Middle Ages there were monks who copied the classics and kept them safe by hiding them in secret places.
During the time of the copyists, the Bible was certainly the most copied book, and with the invention of the printing press, it was the first book to be printed. It is to this day the best seller in the world. Books are published as long as there are people who read them: here also enters the law of supply and demand.
The Bible continues to be published because it is the ex libris of Christians and Jews, because it is the Revealed Word that does not pertain to a particular time, but to all times, it does not belong to a single culture, but to all cultures, and it does not belong to a specific people, but to all peoples. It is the encounter between God and Man and the salvation history that they have built together.
Libris ex libris fiunt
Books are born of books, says the Latin proverb. Progress at all levels, whether scientific, spiritual or philosophical, is like a relay race. Each of us receives the state of the culture, science, philosophy or theology of our parents’ generation, as a testimony, and during our active lives we develop this culture, science, literature, philosophy or theology, putting our contribution into it before passing this very contribution to our children’s generation.
Made in the image and likeness of God, we are also creative and creators like God. The only difference is that God creates from nothing while man creates from existing elements, through deduction or intuition, by mixing different elements.
In this sense, the Latin proverb that says that books are born of books is revealing. No one writes without having read, investigated and absorbed all existing advances in the art or branch of science that he cultivates. If one writes without investigating, one risks reinventing the wheel or the gunpowder and being ridiculed by one’s peers.
Conclusion – If we are created in the image and likeness of God and are called to be perfect as He is perfect, let us remember that He planted the tree of life and of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, had a Son - Jesus of Nazareth - and inspired or wrote a book - the Bible.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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