Curta reflexão sobre o abraço: tirada do fundo do baú

Estava em busca de um papel antigo e , como sempre, achei outros que não procurava. Entre eles um diário, caderninho de capa dura, que usei durante meus primeiros anos nos Estados Unidos. Nele, em meio a anotações de uma aula de literatura espanhola, em 26 de outubro de 2000, encontro esta notinha, que eu reproduzo abaixo quase na íntegra. Eu prenchi as lacunas oferecidas por meu manuscrito torto. Preencher lacunas, aliás, é criação de memória, mas espero não ter alterado demais o que, naquele momento, buscava expressar.

Queria começar uma história com: “Trocamos um longo e mudo abraço…”. Mas reflito que nenhum abraço é mudo. Pode conter, no gesto em si, um milhão de palavras. Pode suprimi-las, substituí-las, representá-las, evitá-las ou, quem sabe, motiva-las.  Pode, sem dúvida, inspirá-las. Um abraço não prescinde de palavras, mas contém linguagem; uma que se aprende e se apreende no ato de abraçar ou no sentimento abissal de sua carência. A sábia Raquel, mulher que abraça o mundo, diz que há gente que não sabe abraçar. Seria eu uma delas, minha brava irmã? Pois então quero ser aprendiz de abraço. De abraço que não é só envolver os braços em torno de alguém ou se deixar envolver por braços alheios.

Um abraço (de eterna aprendiz) a todos!

Reflecting on religion (or non religion)

This past semester, my son's school adopted world's religion as the main theme of discussions. Students from all the grades were presented with information from faiths and rituals around the planet. Then, during their usual end of the year performance, they gave us all a sample of their findings. We, the parents, were invited to send stories about our own family religion and rituals. The best stories would be selected to be read on the day of the performance. Of course, since we are not religious, I understood my input would not be the one they had in mind... However, some days before the show, the school sent out a message encouraging everybody to send a reflection, even if not a conventional one. The text below is the one I submitted. It was rejected. According to the teacher responsible for the selection, because did not represent most of the families there. But he said he liked my point... Well, in any case, I decided to post the text here. Maybe there other people out there with similar views. Maybe not. It is just a reflection, as most of my posts here, anyway.

I am not sure if a family with no religion can tell a story about religion. In any case, even though we don’t have religion we have religiosity. A lot of people are not familiar with this, and then we try to explain it:  For those of us, mysterious people without religion, God is not a figure with a single human face. In our small family we don’t believe we are made in God’s image. On the contrary, we believe that God is made in our image. This way if we are good, God is going to be good too. Even if we don’t look physically the way a lot of people see God, we can still be part of God, and he or she can have some of our ethnical features too. After all, for us God is a sum of every person’s spirituality and image.

Every single person is responsible for making the human kind into something really divine. If we, the people of the world, want to make a good, caring God, we need to try everyday to be better people. We should not expect passively that God will take care of us, but we have to take care of God. If we hurt another person or if we hurt the environment, we are also contributing to a bad spiritual community and then a bad, selfish God.

As one can expect, in our house we do not conventionally pray; however every single evening, at dinner time, we share a ritual in which we offer our thoughts to a person we love, or a cause we believe, maybe to someone who is in need of help, or someone who passed away and left a lot of memories and examples. Sometimes we simply honor one of our achievements, even a small one, and friends and family birthdays, too. But we also include, in our evening thoughts at the table, people from other parts of the world. This way, Andre will understand that populations around the world have needs, fears, problems and hope and happiness just like we have.

Our religiosity has no dogmas, and we do not envision heaven or hell. We think our spiritual energy one day will be back to this collective, universal energy, or, if one prefers, back to God.