Farmer saints and justice for the land

San Isidro La Cueva procession 2013

Today is the feast of Saint Isidore the Farmer, a Spanish farm laborer who – with his wife Turibia (sometimes known as Santa María de la Cabeza) – is an example of the holiness of workers on the land.

My 24 years in Ames, Iowa, left me with a profound respect for farmers and for all those who work on the land.

In Iowa there is – or, at least, has been – a rural culture of respect for the land and care for others. How many times did I hear of farmers getting together to harvest the crop of a neighbor who had fallen ill.

Yes, many farmers have given in to the desire for gain at all cost. But many still respect the land and some who provide people with wholesome food. Thanks are due to them, including Gary, Ellen, Alice, and others.

But the issues for farmers in the US and here in Central America are not just questions of ecology; they include land tenure and more.

In a 1988 pastoral letter, The Cry for Land, the Guatemalan bishops wrote:

We belong to the earth (Gen 2:7) and it belongs to us because when the Lord created us, he charged us to till it and care for it (Gen 2:15). Thus, work in agriculture appears the quintessential task by which we situate ourselves in the world and before God.

Many scriptural texts express joy at the fruit of our fatiguing labor on the land and our thanksgiving for God’s blessing. When the land bears a crop, we know that God blesses us (Ps 67:7; 85:13)….

The land does not belong to us, but to God, and what each calls property is in reality the portion needed to live. ‘The land and all in it, the world and those who inhabit it, belong to God” (Ps 24:1)….

In Recife, Brazil, [Pope] John Paul II told the farmers: ‘The land is a gift from God, a gift for all human beings, men and women, who are called to be united in a single family and related to one another in a fraternal spirit. Therefore, it is not legitimate, because it is not according to God’s design, to use this gift so that its fruits benefit only a few, excluding others, who form the immense majority.’”

Today, remembering San Isidro Labrador and his wife Santa María de la Cabeza, I pray for all farmers, all workers on the land.

And so I’m heading out in about an hour for Mass in the village of San Isidro La Cueva to celebrate the feast with campesinos and campesinos.

The gift of the land

Today is the feast of Saint Isidore the Farmworker, who lived and worked the land near Madrid.

Not much is known about his life but maybe what is important about him for us is his work on the land.

Procession, San Isidro La Cueva, 2013

He was a farmworker – so poor that he worked for a landowner, as so many people do these days in places like Honduras.

Some campesinos here don’t have enough money to buy land, or the land is overpriced, or large landowners buy up most of the land and use it for grazing cattle or growing cash crops. All too often those who work the land don’t have access to land where they can grown corn and beans for their families.

A few decades ago, the Guatemalan bishops wrote a prophetic pastoral letter, The Cry of the Land. Here are a few excerpts.

We belong to the earth (Gen 2:7) and it belongs to us because when the Lord created us, he charged us to till it and care for it (Gen 2:15). Thus, work in agriculture appears the quintessential task by which we situate ourselves in the world and before God.

Many scriptural texts express joy at the fruit of our fatiguing labor on the land and our thanksgiving for God’s blessing. When the land bears a crop, we know that God blesses us (Ps 67:7; 85:13)….

The land does not belong to us, but to God, and what each calls property is in reality the portion needed to live. ‘The land and all in it, the world and those who inhabit it, belong to God” (Ps 24:1)….

In Recife, Brazil, [Pope] John Paul II told the farmers: “The land is a gift from God, a gift for all human beings, men and women, who are called to be united in a single family and related to one another in a fraternal spirit. Therefore, it is not legitimate, because it is not according to God’s design, to use this gift so that its fruits benefit only a few, excluding others, who form the immense majority.”

Tried for love of the poor

Today is the feast of St. John of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish diocesan priest who was declared a doctor of the church in 2012.

He is known for his close to connection to many Spanish saints of his age, including the Carmelite reformer and mystic Teresa of Avila, the Jesuit Francis Borgia, and John of God, the founder of an order that cares for the sick.

He was involved in education and wrote at least one major work on theology and mysticism. He was also a great preacher, known as the apostle of Andaluisa

He had come from a fairly rich family, of Jewish descent. After he was ordained he gave most of his wealth to the poor

But what struck me this morning as I read Richard McBrien’s Lives of the Saints was his arrest by the Inquisition in 1532.

What was his crime?

He had denounced the crimes of the rich and he was accused of unduly favoring the poor and excluding the rich from heaven.

He was found not guilty and released.

It strikes me that when someone speaks clearly about the dangers of wealth, that person is touching fire.

It is all too easy for people of faith to make broad condemnations of injustice. You can condemn corruption and injustice all you want, but unless you make clear what are the real instances of corruption and injustice around you, I think we might be missing the point.

We can “spiritualize” our commitment to justice – merely praying. Or we can make it real by our words and our lives.

When we do this we may earn the condemnation of the rich and powerful. But we have great examples of persons, like Saint John of Avila, who suffered for their commitment to God and to the poor.

 

Twists and turns of holiness

“God writes straight with crooked lines.”

 The path to God of today’s saint, John of God, was full of twists and turns.

Though not much is known of his early life, he was either abducted from his home in Portugal by a Spanish priest and perhaps abandoned or he ran away. He eventually ended up as a shepherd in Spain and even became the estate manager. In his early twenties he joined the army and went to France and then Vienna. He returned back to Spain, and perhaps made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. He tried to go to trade himself for Christians held by the Moors, but was persuaded otherwise.

In Granada, Spain, he heard a sermon by St. John of Avila and began to preach as well as to practice severe penances, so severe that he was put into a mental hospital.

St. John of Avila visited him there and, in effect, told him to get up and start doing something. John of the Cross was released from care but stayed on as a helper in the hospital.

Eventually he founded a hospital (which was notable for its hygiene) and gathered men around him who later became the Order of Hospitallers of St. John of God. He died after trying to rescue someone drowning during a flood.

There are many stories about him, including one in which John of God recognized Christ in a sick person, and heard the words:

John, all you do for the poor is done for me. It is my hand that receives your alms; it is my body that you clothes, my feet you wash.

There is much to learn from saints like John of God, but what I find most helpful today is the advice the St. John of Avila gave him. Stop punishing yourself for your sins; get up and care for those in need.

In many ways, that’s reflected in today’s Gospel, Mark 12: 28-34. The great commandment is to love God and love your neighbor. That will bring us peace and help us live as members of the Kingdom of God.

Repentance is absolutely necessary as we today’s reading from Hosea 14: 2-10:

Return to the Lord; you have collapsed through your guilt…

But God promises love and forgiveness:

I will heal their defection…and love them freely…

And He calls us to bear fruit:

He shall blossom like the lily…

What a summary of the message of Lent. What a call to renewal, halfway through Lent.

 

St. John of the Cross

Today we celebrate St. John of the Cross, the Spanish Carmelite mystic and doctor of the Church.

St. John suffered much in his efforts to reform the Carmelite order. He was imprisoned twice and treated extremely cruelly during his second imprisonment, from which he escaped. Yet during that imprisonment he wrote many of his beautiful poems that celebrate God’s love.

After he recovered, he went about in the work of reform, only to be the target of ill-will from other members of the reform movement.

His was not a life of outward joy and consolation – but a life lived in the light of the Cross.

But he was faithful. As he wrote in Spiritual Canticle:

Many desire the consoling joy
to which the Cross leads,
But few desire the Cross itself.

Reading these words this morning I recalled a Jesuit priest who led me during a short retreat at the Creighton retreat center in Iowa. I was on a high after a visit to Palestine and Israel. He pointedly asked me:

Are you seeking the God of consolation or the consolation of God?

And yet, when we seek the God of consolation we can deal with the pains and sufferings of life, we can bear the Cross.

I think for people like St. John of the Cross  it may come back to living life with a spirit of thanksgiving, gratitude, and gratuitousness.

In We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gustavo Gutiérrez writes

The experience of gratuitousness is the space of encounter wit the Lord. Unless we understand the meaning of gratuitousness, there will be no contemplative dimension in our lives. Contemplation is not a state of paralysis but of radical self-giving, as we saw in reading passages from John of the Cross. In the final analysis, to believe in God means to live our life as a gift from God and to look upon everything that happens in it as a manifestation of his gift. (p. 110)

That, perhaps is the secret of St. John of the Cross: encountering God’s love even in the midst of prison, living the Cross and being consoled and strengthened by the Cross of Christ who comes and seeks us.

St. Isidore the Farmworker

On May 15, 1130, outside Madrid, Saint Isidore died. Though he is invoked as St. Isidore the Farmer, he might better be called St. Isidore the Farmworker, in Spanish, San Isidro Labrador. He was not a farmer who owned his land, but – as many people do here – worked on another person’s fields.

From  his teens, St. Isidore worked as a day laborer on the farm of a landowner. He led a life of devotion, attending Mass each morning. But he was also known for his generosity to the poor as well as to animals.

A delightful story is that one winter day he was on his way to grind grain. Seeing some hungry birds, he poured out half his sack of grain to feed them. When he arrived at the mill, the sack was filled.

There are also stories of angels accompanying him farming.

An image I have seen here is Saint Isidore with two oxen, pulling his plough. It must mean a lot to people here in Honduras since in the department of Intibucá I have seen teams of oxen carrying materials and even plowing the field.

Saint Isidore reminds us of the dignity of work but also calls us to work for justice for all farmworkers, that they may have land to work so that they can sustain their lives and the lives of their families.

Let us pray today for justice in the land.

Such a call for justice can be heard in the Guatemalan bishops’ statement  The Cry of the Land:

“We belong to the earth (Gen 2:7) and it belongs to us because when the Lord created us, he charged us to till it and care for it (Gen 2:15). Thus, work in agriculture appears the quintessential task by which we situate ourselves in the world and before God.

“Many scriptural texts express joy at the fruit of our fatiguing labor on the land and our thanksgiving for God’s blessing. When the land bears a crop, we know that God blesses us (Ps 67:7; 85:13)….

“The land does not belong to us, but to God, and what each calls property is in reality the portion needed to live. ‘The land and all in it, the world and those who inhabit it, belong to God” (Ps 24:1)….

“In Recife, Brazil, [Pope] John Paul II told the farmers: ‘The land is a gift from God, a gift for all human beings, men and women, who are called to be united in a single family and related to one another in a fraternal spirit. Therefore, it is not legitimate, because it is not according to God’s design, to use this gift so that its fruits benefit only a few, excluding others, who form the immense majority.’”

 

 

An unlikely doctor of the church

St. John of Avila, a Spanish priest, died on May 10, 1569. He was not a member of a religious order, but was friends with St. Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits), adviser of St. Teresa of Avila (reformer of the Carmelites), and aided the conversions of St. Francis Borgia (a Jesuit) and St. John of God (the inspiration for the Brothers of St. John of God who work with the sick). He wanted to go to Mexico to spread the faith but his bishop persuaded him to be a missionary to the people of Andalusia.

He got into trouble with the Inquisition for several reasons. His mysticism led them to think he was a member of the Alumbrados, the Illumined, who were considered heretics since they emphasized personal illumination from God (and looked too much like Protestants, I’d suggest.)

He was also accused of being too hard on the rich, denying them access to heaven. He was charged with unduly favoring the poor.

I also wonder if the Inquisition was suspicious of St. John because of his Jewish ancestry – as they were of St. Teresa of Avila.

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI said that he would be declared a doctor of the church. Again, someone who was thought suspicious in his lifetime by the church is recognized not only as a saint, but as a doctor –  a major teacher – of the faith.

Ah – God’s ways are marvelous.

The New Concise Edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints includes this quote of St. John:

Christ tells us that if we wish to join him, we shall travel the way he took. It is surely not right that the Son of God should go his way on the path of shame while the sons of men walk the way of worldly honor.

Would that we all take this to heart.