A Human Catechism: A Journey from Violence and Collective Woundedness to Peacebuilding

By Joel David Aguilar Ramirez

A Human Catechism is a theopoetic journey. It is the integration of personal experience, theological reflection, and contextual analysis. This book proposes a radical way of discipleship in which we are invited to run the risk of positively imitating one another through the imitation of Christ. If violence happens through the imitation of one another, maybe good things do too. As the reader embarks on a contextually self-reflective journey, this book invites us to take the chance of believing in a God in whom there is no violence. A Human Catechism will be a journey from what seemed impossible, to what became second nature, all the way to becoming responsible for modeling a way of being otherwise to those around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666751413

Joel David Aguilar Ramirez

Joel David Aguilar Ramirez has dedicated his adult life to forming incarnational leaders who love their city and seek its peace in Guatemala City. He has a PhD in practical theology from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, a master’s degree in global urban leadership from Bakke Graduate University, and a bachelor’s degree in theology from the Central American Theological Seminary; he is the academic dean at the Community for Interdisciplinary Theological Studies (ceticontinental.org) and a senior fellow and ordained member of the Street Psalms community (streetpsalms.org). He is married to Annette, and they have two daughters.

Book preview

A HUMAN CATECHISM

A Journey from Violence and Collective Woundedness to Peacebuilding

Joel David Aguilar Ramírez

A HUMAN CATECHISM

A Journey from Violence and Collective Woundedness to Peacebuilding

Copyright © 2024 Joel David Aguilar Ramírez. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-5139-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-5140-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-5141-3

version number 092823

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: In The Beginning

Chapter 2: A Hidden Path

Chapter 3: The Myth Revealed

Chapter 4: Collectively Wounded

Chapter 5: Skeletons in the Closet

Chapter 6: Seeing and Hearing from Within

Chapter 7: Taking Responsibility

Chapter 8: A Human Catechism

Chapter 9: Conclusion (or Lack Thereof)

Bibliography

To my wife, Annette, and our daughters, Mariana and Luisa,

and to the extended family of grassroots leaders, theologians, and practitioners of the Street Psalms community

The glory of God is humanity fully alive, but the life of humanity is the vision of God.

—St. Irenaeus

Preface

In October of 2018, I was in the Dominican Republic in a gathering with a group of friends and colleagues from the Street Psalms community. One afternoon, we took a walk through the colonial part of the city of Santo Domingo. We took a break from the heat and humidity by having something to drink and a snack at a café. I sat down with my friend Nic, and we started having a conversation about the state of the world, technology, and theology. At some point, our friend Kris joined the conversation and we went into a rabbit hole that would change my research interests, theology, spirituality, and even my family life forever.

Our conversation revolved around how contemporary society dehumanizes us in many ways. The economic system pushes for a lifestyle of constant consumption, requiring us to sacrifice our money and possessions. Our work life furthers this dehumanization by asking for the sacrifice of our time to produce any income that can sustain our consumeristic practices. As a result, we sacrifice our family, friends, and community to the idols of the market and instant gratification. In a similar fashion, our faith-based institutions have been permeated by the dehumanization as we also sacrifice our resources to grow and expand the belief systems that we agree with. In sum, the religious, economic, and cultural systems are dehumanizing us as they constantly ask for something or somebody to be sacrificed.

As the three of us sat in that café, I said, It seems like we have forgotten how to be human—we need to teach one another to be human in the same way Jesus was human. Kris interjected in the conversation and asked Nic if he was willing to share the idea that he had been ruminating over for quite a while. Nic told us that it was not an idea, so to speak. It was more of play on words that had come to him. Then he said, "In order to relearn how to be human, we need a human catechism."

It was there and then that the concept of a human catechism was born. In the few months after that, I was in the middle of writing my PhD dissertation. I felt that I needed to invest some time in developing the idea of a human catechism. After I made my mind to move my dissertation in that direction, I grabbed my phone and texted Nic to ask if I could use his words in my dissertation. Nic responded in a non-rivalistic, human way. He said, Yes, of course, a human catechism does not belong to one person.

It is with that spirit that I have written this book. The concepts and ideas that I am presenting here are the result of the influence of mentors, friends, and colleagues from whom I have learned along the way. The research elements have been edited from my PhD dissertation. And the stories that I share make this human catechism a theopoetic narrative journey that is deeply connected to who I am.

Joel D. Aguilar Ramírez

June 22, 2023, Guatemala City

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my wife, Annette, for her unconditional support throughout this project. I am thankful for your patience, love, and encouragement. Your ideas and feedback were vital to make this book what it is today.

I also want to express my gratitude to my friends and colleagues from the Street Psalms network, CETI Continental, and the unRival Network. I have learned from all of you. I hope this book is a tool that you can use in serving the most vulnerable of our world.

This book would not have been possible without the insight of Dr. Stephan de Beer, who was my dissertation advisor.

I also want to thank Kris Rocke. You have walked with me for over a decade as we try to believe in a God in whom there is no violence.

Introduction

A quote attributed to St. Irenaeus says, The glory of God is humanity fully alive. The first time that I heard this quote was at a theological training for grassroots Christian leaders who worked in marginalized communities. I started attending this training during the second semester of 2008. I had graduated with my bachelor’s in theology a couple years before and was starting a master’s in theology. At first, I thought that this could be a good opportunity to show off some of my theological training and perhaps become trainer. Little did I know, I was in for a humbling experience that would shake me to the core.

One of the first lessons I learned was that the theology I had learned in seminary was not relevant for what people experienced in serving the poor and marginalized. Grassroots leaders did not care about systematic theology or theological anthropology. They cared about their communities, sharing the good news of the gospel, and providing for the most vulnerable through the programs they ran. It is not that theological conversation and reflection is not important. They just did not have the time to think pretty thoughts about God and God’s attributes. They were immersed in serving communities plagued by poverty and violence. They were incarnate theology on the go. After a few months of interacting and building community, I started to realize that we all were becoming friends. We were becoming an extended family. We all had been wounded in similar ways, and we envisioned communities where everyone could flourish.

During those years of conversations, I experienced healing, restoration, and a renewed hope. As a result, the grassroots leaders from Guatemala City called me forth as an academic practitioner who could bridge the gap between the theological academy and the street. In this book, I want to keep bridging that gap. I want to share fragments of my story, the history of my country, and interdisciplinary theological reflection in a way that can help us become more integrated. As you will see, there will be moments in the book when the content will be more story-like. There will be other times when the reading will be philosophical and theological with a connection to everyday life. And there will be areas in which the reading may become dense. For that reason, I want to extend an invitation to walk with me as I open my heart and mind to the reader.

This book has eight chapters that follow the progression of my spiritual and theological journey in community. Chapter 1 is the starting point of this theological endeavor. In it you will find the origin of who I am as a human. I will outline my religious background and how it shaped me. I will explore the themes that mark the beginning of the journey from violence and collective woundedness to peacebuilding. In chapters 2 and 3, I will share the transformational journey that I experienced in encountering the mimetic theory of René Girard. I will articulate how mimetic theory changed my perception of violence, Christianity, and my religious upbringing.

Chapters 4–6 invite the reader to walk with me as I explore my context, Guatemala. In these chapters I use mimetic theory as a lens to interpret my immediate context. In this process I explore the idea of collective woundedness, which I hope can be a tool that anybody can use to interpret their context. I map the wounds of racism, classism, sexism, the religious wound, and the wound of war in the Guatemalan context. My hope is that the categories and the process I follow can be used by anybody to better understand their context.

In chapter 7 I will take the time to bring the idea of collective woundedness to a full circle. I will invite the reader to join me in taking responsibility for the ways in which we have wounded ourselves and others. All of this will bring us to chapter 8, A Human Catechism. A human catechism is the process of imitating Jesus in being human. I believe that Jesus is inviting us to imitate who he is as a direct revelation of who God is. We become more like Jesus—human—when we are in relationship with others, even more so when we are in relationship with those we consider impure and different—the other.

As you read through these pages, I want to invite you to constantly ask yourself, What does this look like in context? This book is for the service of those who encounter it. I hope that it provides ideas, concepts, and a methodology that you can use in your everyday life.

1

In The Beginning

All stories have a beginning. Everything has a place of departure. In the beginning is a powerful fragment of a sentence. For those of us who grew up in the church, our minds go back to two places in Scripture: the beginning of it all, the book Genesis, and the first verses of the Gospel According to John.

My point of departure, my genesis, starts with my family, and it is from my family of origin that I want to embark on this theopoetic journey. Starting a theopoetic journey from my family of origin is quite challenging because theopoetics is the simultaneous telling of a story and a poem; and as with all stories and poems, my family has its beauties and afflictions. This journey marks the beginning of a weak theology; in other words, a theology that abandons the mode of active claiming and gives itself over to a prior being-claimed by something that seizes it.¹ In beginning with my family, I am called forth. I am not the one in the driver’s seat. I am the one responding to a call, to a hunch, to a feeling, to a no se qué, as we say in Spanish.

Since I was a little kid, I had the feeling of being called. In fact, the earliest memory I have is one of hearing my name. The recollection I will share with you comes from when I was two years old. I know that it seems crazy, but I do remember that early. I remember myself becoming aware of my senses, my sight, my touch, the smells. In this memory, I see a warm light, almost like an afternoon yellow glow, passing through a light mist, like being in the golden hour. I can feel a tempered breeze sliding through my skin. I can see myself as a toddler wearing diapers and touching something soft and furry with a caressing warmth. The soft furry texture begins to take the shape of a dog’s ear with brown and black spots. The dog has a sad, gentle look, and I can see its wrinkly face as its wet nose approaches me curiously. Then, I hear my name called softly, Joel. That is as far as I can remember. If I try to remember past hearing my name, the images get fuzzy and disappear.

For many years, this memory came to me in the form of a dream. I called it the dream of being called. I thought that I was making it up; that I was just having an inexplicable sleep experience. However, when I reached my teenage years, I told my mother about this dream, and she proceeded to tell me that our first dog was a basset hound called Puppy. My mother and I were surprised because kids usually drop their early childhood memories around five years old. I remember my mother’s doubting words after telling her about my dream: You can’t remember that far back. Leave it alone.

I think that there is something special in that old recollection. I believe that God, whatever God is, was calling me through my family history. I believe that God is constantly calling us to be more human through or families, communities, and even those we may consider our enemies. My search for a human catechism, the learning process of becoming more and more human, begins with family, and family has accompanied me through my physical, emotional, spiritual, and theological development. In other words, the beginning of a human catechism is a family affair.

In this chapter, I want to explore two themes that mark the beginning of the journey from violence and collective woundedness to peacebuilding. Firstly, I want to engage and reveal the foundational myth my family held, the myth of Angry God that required the child sacrifice of my siblings and me. The theology that justified such behavior was too rigid to sustain me years later as I began working with people who had been crushed by life. That theology was so strong, stiff, and rigid that it broke down to pieces when faced with loss, death, despair, poverty, and violence. Secondly, I will revisit what I consider my