To read: a verb that evokes research, or, perhaps curiosity. It is a contemplative and reflexive act that stays between the desire of quiet and rest, to the end of listening to, and the disquiet desire of him who searches with the aim of understanding and extolling the meaning of life.

To read: a verb that is part of the human and cultural evolution of the peoples in the lengthy ethical apprenticeship of historical responsibility, among past, present and future, among signs, symbols, narrations and syntheses. To read is a necessary imperative, if we want to learn how to live, so that the human metamorphosis may continue and the evolving processes of epochs and times may not be interrupted

To read, something that probably was simply sound and gesture, arriving before the words, before every judgement and comprehension. Rhythms that lay within, at the centre of every structure, of every atom, according to some researchers in the area of modern physics.  

To read: a verb linked with listening, but also with seeing; cultivated by the organ of hearing, but also by the organ of sight. It is a verb that allows us to stay in different contexts, sitting at the centre, and not separated. This is why I would not like to increase the news or to jot down data of the actual reality with its consequent reflections; I want rather to bring to evidence the importance of today’s attitude of reading the reality surrounding us.

I would like to cut into fragments the proposed title and to highlight that what we underline as a spiritual and socio-pastoral reading-key, in reality is not what we decide to do:   rather it concerns the dimensions of life, of the reality that we should pick up. They are existential, institutional, political or religious dimensions. Therefore, we read in order to ransom these dimensions, and reading becomes a gesture of affectionate research towards history and mystery.

The reading of reality

We think to be real or reality all that has its own existence, independently from us, from our thought and capacity of observation; something that is given and exists, even if we do not see it because of our being absent-minded, or because we do not take it into consideration. This is why we think that every talk about reality is more similar to an attitude of nearing the mystery, than a simple search of data and certainties. It is a mystagogical gesture, much more than we may think of; a rational and irrational experience, mixed up with cognitive and affective elements.  

Our life is involved in this reading, in its most intimate details and in its most secret  plots: between mystery and experience, evidence and secret. It is a reading not from pages, but from reality: it is what “we have seen, heard, contemplated and touched”, as an adage of John’s Christian Community would say (1 John 1, 1 – 4).

We search in this reality and approach it.  We consider this reality complex, not linear, not orderly, but rather risky, carrying multiple possibilities with itself. A reality full of things and identities. Its subjects are multiple and, therefore, also its protagonists, or those whom we would like to be the protagonists. It is the paradoxical likeness between reality and mystery that leads us to say how every analysis, every reading of reality is insufficient or, perhaps, it is a simple viewpoint, filtered by the context from where we look at it, from the sensitivity with which we perceive and interpret it. For this reason, I think that these reflections, more than adding data and contents to the description of reality, want simply to open a door to the significance of entering  in contact with reality, of reading it, of  studying it, of going deep into it and of being able to see the reality not as a simple and confused accumulation of things and events, but also as creative of elements, among evolutions, revolutions and revelations: the Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz would say: the human and cosmic effort of humanity and contexts.  

The present time

«We thought that knowledge had a beginning and an end; today I think that knowledge is a spiral adventure with a point of historical beginning, but with no end: it must get realised without never stopping, like concentric circles…..» (Edgar Morin). We are speaking of the actual, contemporary reality. An ensemble of dimensions, dynamism and contraction, a non linear or always harmonic creativity: an effort towards interior, secret and evident dimensions. To speak of our time is to speak of all our interior, secret and deep dimensions; the hidden rhizome in our personal and collective history, the humus of the most evident historical processes.

Therefore, every reading is not a simple list of events and even less of a peremptory moral  judgement  on what characterises our epoch, but only a vision and an effort to listen to and to understand; an effort that will go on every day, the whole life through.

I think that today, any analysis is at the same time personal and social analysis; it is the analysis of the individual and political life, conscientious or un-conscientious, personal and collective; a detailed study of the simple daily life and at the same time of the institutions, taking care of life, overcoming the old dichotomy between public and private. We are part of a concrete history, we are contemporaries, children of a historical time; we call this time: post-modernity and –as the term says- this time is not born from nothing. Its beginning went on evolving along the time that has preceded us, even if it is not simple to define it.

From the chronological viewpoint it is a time, but also an extension, a space. It is our time and our space, we do not have another one, and none of us can ignore it, though keeping our eschatological aspirations, or overcoming the historical limits with our own systematic ascesis. 

The post-modernity implies effects of material and existential life. On one side there is the technologic and scientific development, on the other side there is a frustration  before socio-economic models, which promise solutions to social problems and, instead, they seem to worsen the situation.

The neo-liberal economy turns the world into a global market, allowing visible and invisible hands to use the needs of peoples and to substitute them with other totally false urgencies. In our post-modernity we know extremes or paradoxes; it is in this epoch that we discover old dignities and ransom deep roots. The wisdom of the ancestors is vindicated with the raising of identities: ancestral and mysterious art of life, the mystic and mythic  language of a life that does not want to be caught by bourgeois dimensions, which limit the existence, though they assure the economic well-being. At the same time, it is in the post-modernity  that we allow ourselves not to recognise our mystic-sidereal history, to remain comfortable in what it superficiality offers us and get distracted by it. Luckily, post-modernity is not yet the “culture”; in fact, more cultures survive in it or –as somebody says- subcultures…which correspond to different social groups that, as in no other historical epoch, have re-gained their space and have gone back to the same journey. These categories do not get integrated within a uniform panorama; they rather make of post-modernity a fan of differences, among pieces of paradox, harmonies and contradictions. Post-modernity: we are, exist and move in it; once with a strong symbolic power, almost the same as the power exercised on persons by the altars dedicated to the gods of the Greek areopagus, where Paul preached (See Acts 17, 16 – 34). In this area, faith could be presented as an alternative announcement or, instead, it would remain as an extra symbol within this more and more eclectic world, between altars and gods. In this space, our option of life, our choices, suffer the same challenge as that suffered by great utopias and ideologies      

Self-criticism in our time

“Our time”, therefore, is a chronological time and an existential time, kronos and kairós; quantity and irruption, epiphany of meaning. I ask myself whether it is really true that, looking at history, we consider it as “our time”. In fact, often it seems that this post-modern time does not belong to us and that, in the dynamism of this contemporary reality, the only thing we can do is that of criticising and accusing it, just as if we were totally extraneous.  

Then, perhaps, more than to describe, it is the matter of saying that, today, we are trying a methodology of reading, which may allow us to go on walking with history and its evolutions. In fact, its is evident that sometimes, these socio-pastoral readings put us in the moralistic position of him who, in seeing something or somebody, succeeds only in passing a judgement.   Sometimes these perspectives, which we hold to be integral, draw us far from reality, from dialogue, instead of allowing us to deepen it and to go closer to it.

Yet we know another Old Testament biblical adage: a prophetic criticism against a too much worried vision of the ethical and doctrinal canons of official and institutional symmetries,  causes some visions to appear insignificant  or tremendously horrible. They are visions that make us to shout because of scandal or make us to run towards protection, while history follows its intimate labour pains. “He had no form or charm to attract us….one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze…..” (See Isaiah 53), the 4^th canticle of the Servant of Yahweh declares in the book of Isaiah, yet “he carried our pains”, our errors, our distractions.  Yet…Yes, perhaps this is the only thing we must bring to evidence. A social, pastoral and spiritual reading of reality is self-criticism, a criticism against our ways of interpreting reality, against our blindness and our delays in a history that….germinates just now, though we know that the sprout is not the conclusion, it is not the last phase, but a moment of becoming in the ambiguity and sorrow of its effort.

Then, while we read, there is still another question, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” (Ger 1,11-12). What do we see? We pick up what we see,  and the thing which we pick up becomes precious, even if it is only a branch of almond-tree in flower or a pot containing something that boils.

Antonietta Potente
Lecturer in the University of Cochabamba and of La Paz
Casilla 5184 - Cochabamba - Bolivia