An ethic that screws with the system
During the final Sprunt Lecture, the Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre looks at tricksters in the Bible and in the present
“What happens when the God of liberation simply does not liberate?” asked Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre during the fourth and final installment of the 115th Sprunt Lectures held this week at Union Presbyterian Seminary. The series spanned across three days and included multiple reunion gatherings, worship services, a film screening and a concert with David LaMotte.
De La Torre’s lectures began with a screening and discussion of the film, “Trails of Hope and Terror” that he helped make with his wife and son. The film documents the horrible conditions that Latinx immigrants face while crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. De La Torre is Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.
His second lecture followed up on the topics of the film with an introduction to the immigration crisis and the third, entitled, “A Rejection of Eurocentric Thought,” deconstructed the philosophical underpinnings of that crisis.
His final lecture focused on an ethical response in the midst of such a crisis and within a view of history as one of chaos, not one of order and progress. De La Torre acknowledged the vulgarity of his title: “Ethics Para Joder,” while also espousing its real-world applications and its biblical foundation through the stories of tricksters who overturn the systems that oppress them and others.
“Why the vulgarity? Well, what's really vulgar is how Latinos are forced to live in this country,” he said. “That's what should be offensive, not the word that I'm using, and that's where we need to put the focus.”
“Struggle with me as I struggle with God, to try to see the face of God in the midst of really horrible things that are going on all around us,” invited De La Torre, explaining how for 10 years he read the Bible cover to cover annually and found that sometimes God was not present and sometimes, God even sent evil spirits. His real-life encounters echoed this absence of hope and presence of evil as he taught theology students through contextual learning trips.
De La Torre says he began to struggle when he took a group of students to Cuernavaca, Mexico. When his group encountered a row of dirt huts along an abandoned train station, one student reflected on the horrible conditions of the people living there but detected a glimmer of hope in a little girl’s eyes. Growing up as he did in a tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where his bathroom was a tin can, De La Torre had a more sober understanding of the girl’s future trajectory through a life of poverty than the student did. He wished to reject the tendency to idealize exceptional stories like his own escape from poverty’s downward pull. He described his response to the student’s need to see a hopeful future for a child as an “epistemological meltdown,” which led to his rejecting hope.
The mental reaction he had to his student’s statement of faith was the thought that the young girl in their gaze “was born into poverty, and she will die in poverty, as will her children and her children's children.” He felt for his student and other Christians who project an easy hope, that “the only reason you see hope in her eyes is so that you don't have to do anything about it. You could just trust God to take care of it.”
“What we are doing” he explained in the articulation of hope, “is we are justifying and visualizing and ignoring all the others who don't make it, who remain oppressed, who die in hopelessness,”
In Spanish, the word for hope is “Esperanza,” which comes from the root word meaning “to wait.” De La Torre focuses not on the outcome we wait for, but on the process.
“The ethics that I'm trying to do is, what do I do while I am waiting, as opposed to what may come after the waiting?” he said.
“You see, it doesn't matter if God keeps God's promises or not, that's not what defines my faith. My faith is not transactional,” he said: “I will pray even when God doesn't keep God's promises, and I will pray to hold God accountable to what God is supposed to do.”
De La Torre would rather recognize the chaos and brutality of humanity than justify these aspects of history as progress.
He cited a Korean study that illustrated the frequency of people recognizing faces in random patterns and compared it to the human tendency to look for order in chaos. “You ever notice how Jesus appears every once in a while in a tortilla?” he joked before explaining how since history is “pure chaos,” we try to find Jesus in it, so we don’t fall into desperation.
“I would argue the opposite of hope is desperation,” said De La Torre, riffing on Jurgen Moltman’s famous contrast of hope to despair.
“Desperation is when you know that if you stay, you're going to die, and you might as well go, because you may still die, but at least you might have a chance,” said De La Torre, who believes hope is a middle class privilege. Desperation, on the other hand, “is why people pick up two jugs of water and cross a desert,” he explained.
“If it was despair, they would never leave,” she said: “It is the desperation that propels them into a desert to preach hopelessness propels us to activism.”
“Hopelessness rejects quick fixes” said De La Torre when remembering a colleague’s insistence that “you gotta give them hope.”
Quoting the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, he proclaimed: “I fight for justice, not because I think I'm going to win, not because I'm going to get an extra diamond in my crown. I fight for justice because it defines my humanity and the faith I claim to have.”
De La Torre encouraged embracing actions of the tricksters, referencing mischief makers throughout the Bible from Rachel to Satan to Jesus himself and illustrating how each of them “teaches us about who we are and what our purpose is.” He also looked at examples in contemporary history including the Young Lords of the 1960’s, a street gang in Chicago and New York who held churches, hospitals and urban sanitation departments accountable to their mission.
“By screwing with the system, whether it be the religious systems, the professional systems or the government system, they were able to move the needle a little closer to justice,” De La Torre said. “We may not reach utopia, but we might be able to make things a little bit more just.”
De La Torre concluded his final lecture with, “the ethic that I engage in teaches me — nonviolently, how to lie, so that I could discover what the truth is, how to cheat, so that I could create a level playing field, how to steal, so that I could feed the hungry, how to joke, so I could speak truth when I'm endangered, how to disrupt those laws and policies that have been established to keep me oppressed and silent, and how to deceive so that I could bring about liberation.”
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