By Ana Karen Barragán, Resident Minister and MA in International Studies Graduate Student
Today, I imagine you sitting on the cross. I see you contemplating the reality of our world. In your gaze, I find pain, not for the thorns or the nails or the wounds in your body, but for “the shadows of this enclosed world” (Fratelli Tutti,p. 3), that continue crucifying your people.
In your face, I see tears for those who are cast away or locked up in different kinds of prisons, some narrower than others.
For example, the wide Mediterranean Sea that has been a cemetery for thousands of migrants, the trauma of thousands of children in Syria who, when they hear an airplane, their lives are taken away, yes, their lives and their desire to dream in the face of the nightmare of reality, Syrian children who, together with other Palestinian and Central American children, have been locked up in different types of physical and mental cages. Closer still, here, the streets of San Francisco where cement has become a bed for hundreds of people. And even more intimate, the thousands of women who have been raped to death in their own homes, for the simple fact of being a woman. The cases do not end, the victims extend from south to north and from west to east. Dispossession, threats, intimidation, harassment, discrimination, contamination, corruption, impunity, hate, hate, hate, hate.
I find you in that silence that screams, in that wound that does not heal, in that heart that is desolate to see this reality that overwhelms us. Tears also come out of my eyes and meet yours, they seek your embrace and inhabit you because you are love in all its dimensions, you are the hope that every year is renewed in me, but you are also that reality that is not hidden, that pain and that fear that you lived before your death and resurrection. I am looking for your hand so that I can go with you to the mountain and pray for a while.
Do not let me go, please do not let me go, for in your love and companionship lives my hope to live in a world more like the one you taught us and dreamed of, that kingdom of the Gospel.
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