A
Martyr in the Amazon
For
the month of April the Jesuit 2014 calendar, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the restoration of the
Society of Jesus, focuses on Vicente Cañas, a Spanish Jesuit brother who lived
among the indigenous tribes of the Amazon for nearly twenty years. Paul
Martin SJ thinks about the life of a man who, ‘through the Spiritual Exercises,
found the interior freedom to offer his very self to Christ’.
When
I was asked to write these words on Vicente Cañas, the guidelines given were,
‘don’t concentrate on dates, places and events – people can get all of that
from Wikipedia. Make it
more a personal reflection.’
Well, naturally, before writing I thought I myself had better
first checkWikipedia! Following a link from there led me to the Aragon Jesuit Provincewebsite
where an article (thanks to the wonders of Google
Translate) gives even a non-Spanish-speaker a good sense of the ‘dates, places
and events’.
Along with this article there are a number of striking
photographs. So, before knowing even a single date, place or event you are
caught up into something of the spirituality and mysticism that weave those
‘dates, places and events’ into the unity that was the life of Vicente Cañas
–offered with total generosity to God and laid down in love for his friends.
In the first photograph at the beginning of the article, a group
of indigenous Amazonian children stand laughing in the company of an adult man.
At first glance the adult appears to be another Amerindian – the father of some
of the children perhaps? The beads he wears over his bare chest, the large
wooden earrings, the hair cut in a clear line high over his ears, the cord tied
around his upper arm... each feature in every way identical to the children he
is with.
But for those who know indigenous people, one thing is strange
and out of place. It is the man’s thick beard – a thing unheard of among the
native peoples of the Amazon whose facial hair runs at most to a few wispy
strands under the chin. It is the beard that gives this man away as a European.
So who is this European and what is he doing there? The smiles
and laughter that he shares with the children are the clue. Here, there is
mutual recognition; here, there is understanding; here, there is respect; here,
there is encounter.
The children belong to the ‘Enawene-Nawe’, one of over 200
different tribes of indigenous people that live in the Amazon forest. In
1974 they were considered an ‘uncontacted tribe’, their lives untouched by the
‘outside world’. For them, the bearded man is their ‘contact’. He is the
face of the ‘other’. How beautiful, therefore, is the smile on this man’s face
and the answering laughter from the children? He does not threaten, he does not
impose, he neither ridicules nor rejects. He understands, he accepts, he
identifies with, he recognises that mysterious bond of shared humanity that
unites as equals the forest-dwellers of the Amazon and the sophisticated
twentieth-century European.
Sadly, in the 500 years since Columbus set foot in the ‘New
World’, contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the Americas has
rarely taken this form. Violence, invasion, domination and death have been, by
far, the more usual characteristics of contact. First come the miners looking
for gold and diamonds, then the loggers ripping out the lungs of the world for
the money to be made from the sale of timber, and behind them, the ranchers who
put more value on the price of beef than on the human beings that once occupied
the land their cattle now roam. The violence is blatant – even in our
twenty-first century, indigenous people are killed and their villages burned to
clear them from the lands they occupy. For this reason it is naive to argue
that the uncontacted tribes should be ‘left in peace’. Contact is bound to
happen. The only question is whether that contact will be made by those driven
by greed for profit, or by men and women, like Vicente, who desire that the
indigenous people might be recognised and respected as human beings with
rights.
Vicente’s first ‘encounter’ with the indigenous world came
in 1969 when, as a young Jesuit brother newly arrived in Brazil from Spain, he
was called on to form part of a medical team needed to respond to a disaster
among a people known as the ‘Beiço de Pau’. A few months before Vicente came to
work with these Amerindians they numbered 600; by the time he arrived their
numbers had been reduced to a mere 40. In their case, death had come not
through violence but through disease, a disease no more mysterious than the
common cold; but for a people with no natural resistance, the flu caught from
contact with a European proved more deadly than the ‘Black Death’. Vicente was
asked to assist the Brazilian government agency FUNI in a campaign to immunise
the remnant of survivors and then help them move to a new location.
This experience marked Vicente deeply. It sensitised him to the
precarious nature of existence for the indigenous people of the Amazon. Yet, at
the same time, it opened his eyes to the strength and wisdom of the indigenous
culture. They had a way of life that was perfectly adapted to their
environment. They did not need anything from the outside in order to find what
was necessary for existence, and indeed to find fulfilment and joy in their
lives.
Vicente spent the next five years working with a number of
different indigenous groups in the Amazon before beginning the delicate process
in 1974 of making first contact with the Enawene-Nawe, and then identifying
with them and living among them for over 10 years.
I will depart from my instructions just briefly and highlight
one date and event in Vicente’s life. The date is the feast of the Assumption
of Our Lady, 15 August 1975 and the event is Vicente’s profession of final vows
in the Society of Jesus. Most tellers of Vicente’s story might pass over this
date and event as unremarkable but in many ways I think it holds the key for a
true understanding of what made it possible for Vicente, as a European, to
enter so fully into the way of life of the indigenous people of the Amazon, and
what gave that identification its meaning and value.
For priests and brothers alike it is the experience of making
the Spiritual Exercises that lies at the heart of Jesuit formation. Before
final vows each Jesuit will have made the full ‘thirty day retreat’ twice, once
as a novice and again in a final year of formation called ‘tertianship’. Each
year, throughout his life, every Jesuit renews this key experience in a
shorter, eight-day retreat.
The Exercises are an experience of personal encounter – the
direct encounter between the one making the Exercises and the Creator of all
that exists, made possible through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,
‘who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as
something to be grasped. But rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave, being born in human likeness.’ (Phil 2:6 ff)
A pivotal moment in the Exercises comes in the meditation on the
‘Two Standards’. Here, the one who is making
the Exercises is invited to recognise the ways in which he or she is being
tricked into building a false sense of identity out of the riches and honours
that he or she has come to possess. We equate our success in life with our
possession of ‘status symbols’. These need not be the crass material objects –
the large house, the fancy car, the diamond ring, the Rolex watch – that seem
so important to ‘worldly’ people. The academic who thirsts for recognition of
his work or even the philanthropist who prides herself on the number of
hospitals she has founded are still being driven by a false spirit. Our true
identity comes from recognising ourselves to be children of God and that
everything we have comes to us as gift. Paradoxically it is in letting go of
the things the world tells us are indispensible that we come to know who we
truly are.
Because Vicente found his sense of identity in his encounter
with Christ in the Exercises, he was able to let go of all that would normally
define a European man and so enter fully into the culture and way of life of an
Amerindian tribe. He did not observe them from outside, recording and analysing
their culture for anthropological research. He became one with them, taking
part in their daily chores of farming and fishing but also in the religious
rituals that gave a sense of meaning and purpose to these activities. He did
not come to ‘convert’ them, to impose his Western world view. Vicente desired
to learn to see the world as the Enawene-Nawe saw it.
Seeing the world from the perspective of the indigenous people,
he became an outspoken advocate for their land rights. In this way he incurred
the hatred of those outsiders who wished to take the Amerindian lands for
themselves.
At the centre of the Christian gospel stands the mystery of the
Cross. ‘A man can have no greater love than this, that he lay down his life for
his friends.’ (Jn 15:13) In the crucifixion of Jesus,
God’s unconditional offer of love is revealed. Yet at the same time the crucifixion
reveals the human refusal of that offer. The Cross is an invitation to
conversion. On which side do we stand: with Christ or with those who crucify
him?
Vicente Cañas, through the Spiritual Exercises, found the
interior freedom to offer his very self to Christ and to be led to divest
himself of his European culture in order to enter fully into the culture of the
Enawene-Nawe: ‘and being found in Amerindian form he became humbler yet, even
to accepting death... death at the hands of those who would rob the Amerindians
of their lands.’
Vicente, the man of peace, the man with whom the children of the
forest felt so at home, met his death at the hands of violent men. On 5
April 1987, Vicente sent a radio message to colleagues to let them know he was
setting out from the small hut in the forest that he used as a base to go and
spend time in the Enawene-Nawe village. This was a journey he was never to
make. On 16 May some
of his colleagues happened to be visiting his hut. They saw the boat in which
he should have travelled to the village, loaded as if for a journey but half
submerged. On entering the hut they found clear signs of a struggle and
Vicente’s dead body with stab wounds to the stomach. Probably he had been
killed on 6 April.
It is the gap of over one month from his death to the discovery
of his body that is perhaps the most moving part of Vicente’s story. His
colleagues found nothing strange in the fact that he had not made any radio
contact. Their visit to his base was not motivated by anxiety to know where he
was. It was the nature of his life with the indigenous people that he could go
for months without having contact with the ‘outside’ world. In the eyes of that
world, he lived an ‘insignificant life’ and he died unnoticed. Yet, to the eyes
of faith, Vicente’s life and death take on the profound significance of
participation in the mystery of Christ. They become a proclamation of the
gospel with an eloquence unequalled by the finest theologians, since, as St
Ignatius states, ‘love expresses itself more clearly in deeds than in words’.
Our world has become saturated by words. Perhaps it is good,
therefore, to finish this reflection with another image: the photograph of
Vicente and the Amerindian boy on the calendar. Vicente’s death is an invitation
for us all to concern ourselves with how the child might find ‘life – and life
in all its fullness.’
No comments:
Post a Comment