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On How not to Go Mad These Days1

—Cláudio Carvalhaes

You see all these buildings, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down . . . Beware that no one leads you astray . . . And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed . . . all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. ‘Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death. Many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But anyone who endures to the end will be saved. we raise our voices together and hold each other hands2

I have been telling my family and my friends that it is good to be here with my Latinxs community as we see and hear about all of the disasters and horrors done to our people at the borders. Better to be together, to cry together, to go mad together, to sing and pray together, to draw near each other in some form of warmth and solidarity! The brutal immigration policy separating children from their parents and then putting them up for adoption showed us again what this country is made of. Something that the indigenous and the black people of this country already knew way too well. With this uproar against immigrants and especially the Latinxs people, it seems that it is becoming clearer for other people that:

1.We, minority people, live in a viciously angry, merciless and racist country.

2.That the State rules with clear necro-politics of ethnic cleansing.

3.That our identity is that of a foreigner, socially placed at the borderlands, politically placed in the hatred of Republicans and awkwardness of Democrats, religiously placed in old forms of Catholicism, Pentecostal naiveté, and folk mythic beliefs, and psychologically located at the borderline of feelings between madness and lunacy.

4.That the nationalist rhetoric in the United States pivots away from brownness to construct a reality of pan-criminalization for all racialized brown bodied people. Today in the US, to be brown bodied is to be a Muslim-Hindu-Christian-immigrant-mexican-central-american-terriorist-rapist-low-skilled-poor-drug-dealer-illegal-dependent-animal.

5.Our people, immigrants, undocumented, have become the fake news of the content of the president “emergency declaration”!

We see churches and Christian institutions trying hard to learn how to deal with us but at the end, we are always at the tail end of respect, processes of decision, abilities, gifts to offer. The amount of solidarity offered, with important exceptions, is proportional to its expendable resources, guilt and not knowing.

The people at the border are for many, an unfortunate calamity. The distancing from these immigrants at the borders reflects the ongoing distance between white churches and the Latinxs communities. For many institutions, this immigrant disaster is mostly an occasion for a robust declaration against its situation and nothing else. What is always at stake is fear, self-protection, and self-interest. This situation is derivative of the discourse around blacks and whites in this country where other minorities have a hard time pinching in in some more fundamental ways. White supremacy continues to hold on to power, hide its brutalities in administrative legalities, business proper, law and order, state theology and political paraphernalia. All of this done in the name of Jesus!

The hidden perversity of the pleasure of seeing the pain of the children behind cages ripped away from their parents is beyond words. The system of immigration is indeed broken in its fullness when the government does not know how to get the kids back to their parents, when little children have to go to court to respond to judges about the conditions of their immigration status when all that they want is to play with toys and call for their mamas y papas.

Maddening! Whoever is not getting mad with these series of dreadful events are not paying attention, are not seriously taking the position of those parents living in unspeakable pain. We must take their side for their children are our children! So, we must return them to their parents and not to put them up for adoption! It is as if my precious children were in jail and I am rendered completely powerless to do anything. It is as if my kids have been taken away from me and I do not even know where to start to get them back. The situation of loss is such that at a certain point one might even start to imagine that their kids would be better off dead or with somebody else who will take care of them. If our hearts don’t drop to the floor when we see a child estranged from her mama because she hasn’t seen her for months and then seeing pure panic in the face of this mother, we are definitely not paying attention. Our hearts have already been covered by numbness, by privilege, the Spirit of God has left us and the gospel lost its place in our life. “Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it.” (Micah 2:1). Moreover, I think we Latinxs need a new translation for the Psalm 139. One that goes this way:

1 O God, you have searched us and known us well.

2 You know when we cross the desert and when we swim through the Rio Grande;

you discern our fears from far away.

3 You search out the path of our people, the immigrants,

in the desert, you find all of the shoes, toothbrushes, underwear, crucifixes,

and the blood of our people.

in prisons, you find our children alone, completely lost, and parents with a hole so

great in their hearts that they are swallowed by grief.

You are acquainted with all our desperation.

4 Even before a word is on our tongue, or a tear is shed

O God, you know us so completely. You know we are lost for words here.

5 like the heat of the desert and the cold water of Rio Grande you surround us.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for us;

we believe in you so much, you wouldn’t believe it.

7 Where can we go to find your Spirit?

we go to El Norte fleeing from hunger, violence and devastations,

where can we find the security of your presence?

8 If we knock at the doors of churches, we never know if we will be welcomed or they

will call La Migra;

if we try to go to Christian seminaries you will not be there.

For they are afraid of their statues and only concerned with their deep thoughts and research.

9 If we take the wings of the morning,

and go fight on the streets for our people,

they will come with the police and their laws and put us in jail

10 We wished your hand could lead us,

protect us, and hold us fast. But we have nothing.

11 For if we say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around us become night’,

12 Darkness we are;

We are the night that shines as the day,

We are darkness to the world

and to You too.”

Our time can be defined as a time of white supremacy dominion, millionaires and billionaires as political representatives, global regulation by hydro/agri-business, and brutal state control grounded on an endless state of exception that sanctions all forms of violence, the reality of the Empire is translated into a) a myriad of fears wrapped up in patriotism and religious certainties; b) the sooner death of the earth and c) a constant war on women, the poor, indigenous, black and brown bodies.

During such a time as this, when our borderlands are a sign of death, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence separates ninos y ninas de sus mamas y papas, we raise our voices together and hold each other hands. When border crossers are turned into unlawful people who are then prosecuted and have to plead guilty when they are NOT guilty of anything, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence forcibly injects psychotropic in our children as we hear reports from New Orleans of a 9-year-old boy who was kept in a children concentration camp and tried to run away. When a boy is then sent to the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas and the doctor creates a narrative that says he needs psychotropic medication so he is drugged and tamed. His mother has no idea what is happening to her son. We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands

When violence kidnaps our children in the midst of the night to be trafficked as we could see it in a video done by New York One TV in New York city, both cases were denounced by Democracy Now! We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands.

This is the United States of America today! This is American fascism through bio-power and necro-politics fully lived at the borderland in the bodies of brown people! For we are not only the people who live in the borderland, we are the borderland. Thus friends, I must say, we have to place our personal suffering in perspective when we are dealing with this much bigger threat to our lives. We need empathy for our own people. We need to take a step further them, which can be a step away from where we are right now.

I pray to Jesus who said to not be alarmed . . . But in my prayer, I say Jesus, how can we not be alarmed? They are coming in the night; they are coming in the morning. How do we not go mad with all this? Here are some things for us to remember as we go through these times:

First, We Are the Ones Who We Have Been Waiting For

We can’t wait for anyone! Not even for God! For most of our theologies are traps that paralyze us and nurture us with fear and as I said, we don’t have many institutions to back us up and protect our lives. We can’t wait for anybody to come and rescue us. Like Job, we must find a way through our suffering within ourselves and our communities. The only way Jesus will come to us will be thorough each other and some friends. There is no big leader or an assortment of “they” that will come to us to save us. Jennifer Harvey rightfully says:

There is no all-powerful “they” out there who is going to swoop in and stop this. There is no one coming to end these injustices and degradations once-and-for-all. I have to admit something. Each morning, these days, I wake up, and I realize some part of me is holding my breath in anticipation. I’m hoping, maybe even expecting, this: surely today is the day “they” will come. I am waiting for “them.” And when “they” come . . . mothers fleeing war won’t lose their babies. And Black people’s lives and bodies will be secure. And borders will be exposed as arbitrary while the people who cross them are honored as sacred. And trans and queer people’s humanity will no longer be degraded and destroyed, but celebrated and revered. But, beloveds, “they” ARE NOT COMING. There is only you and I and we. You are the one you are waiting for. I am the one I am waiting for. We are the ones we are waiting for (as June Jordan said and Alice Walker cited after). So, we must be that. All of us. Today. Right now. In every moment. In every place. Beloveds . . . there’s something else we need to know about we. We are many. And if we really understand who we are waiting for, we are powerful. We can be that. What do we choose?3

There is none coming for us. We are the ones we are waiting for!

We Must Be Aware of Our History

It is said that a people who don’t know its history tend to repeat it. People who don’t know their own history will not be able to see the traps they are caught up in during the present time. People who don’t know our history will call the recent history a kind of collective unconscious fate, or destiny, instead of seeing what is happening now is due to our choices and positioning in the past. Knowing our history is to excavate who we are, where we come from and see the ways our being is always an interbeing, always connected with the earth and other people. Knowing our history will help us face the fears that surround us and work on our challenges and mistakes, naming the wrongs we did in the historical processes that defined our trajectory. People who don’t know our history tend to not know the difference between coloniality and indigeneity, easily confusing their hunter with their savior. People who don’t know our history tend to go in two ways: they either can’t see specificities, differences and commonalities or they become so self-righteous that they can’t see the interrelationality and the blurring lines between traditions and the expansive common belonging of the people. People who don’t know our history keep working with the tools of the master’s house within the master’s house.

Know the Immigrant Reasoning: Don’t Fall for the Empire Logic of “Conquer and Divide”

Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist said in Critique of Black Reason: “The fierce colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference, leaves behind wounds and scars. Worse, it created a fault line that lives on.”4 We so easily fall prey to this de-classificatory project of undermining our own people, of creating hierarchies of difference, of widening our colonial wounds. Sometimes we don‘t realize that all we do is to fight for the crumbs we are thrown. We must think that our work is to find a safe space for our community and save it from everyone. NO! We must think ourselves as a collective, as a community, as a cloud of living witness and ancestors, of foreigners and strangers, as people interrelated to many other people and the earth. Latinxs people are made up of Afro-Latinos, indigenous people, Africans, whites, yellows and blacks. As we are made of the earth, animals, sentient and non-sentient beings. To fall prey to a certain politics of identity that erases the earth and makes communities into self-enclosed identities, self-sufficient groups and islands of self-proclaimed safety and self-righteousness, is to became weak, disconnected, debilitated, and confused and to fall prey to a victimhood with self-awareness that weakens our collective struggle and common ways of living. We are many! We are the composition of peoples and ethnicities and animals in many humanities. We cannot be communities atomized into itself and in need to defend its identity territory at any cost, even at the cost of trashing somebody else. We cannot live our identity without the identity of the earth and the animals either. We must call on what Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called “strategic essentialism,”5 and even expanding it to the earth and all sentient and non-sentient beings in order to find our commonalities in the common struggle. Instead of feeding a “network of doubling, uncertainty, and equivocation,”6 we must offer mutual trust, assurances for a collective work done for liberation of people. Where spaces for ambiguities are held together.

Be Aware of Our Own Selves: Circulation and Borderlands

Every single human being is a work of many materials, forms and compositions, entities and voices and belongings. Star dust, our common ground is the universe and the earth, humus, where we all come from. As we inhabit this piece of the land around the world, what distinguishes the Latinxs people, among other things, is the complexities of our borderlands. We inhabit many worlds and none of these worlds are full. We are people of no one country. We are the borderlands, No somos de aquí ni de allá. Estranamos a todo y todas. We are in the midst of a state of slumber, numbed, and yet, fully active, fully wired. We are wrestling to understand our walk in the desert, in what poet Paul Valéry called the “leap of no return.”7 In Portuguese Lonjura sem retorno, in Spanish: lejos sin regreso. We are somewhat, not in the same complexity and specificities, like the African people that, in the words of Mbembe, are marked by “the articulation . . . of a thinking of circulation and crossings.8 Our circulation is limited, and our bodies crossed by so many borders: economic, sexual, gender, class. The cultural economy of US demands a form of circulation of goods and cultural artifacts and ways of living that tends to detach us from our own circulation of sources of sustenance and communal living. If we don’t hold to what we learned from our great grandparents we will not be able to know who we are and engage with awareness and fullness into the newness of the new circulations within this country. As we learn about ourselves and the histories of those from the bottom of this country that we are not part of the American “WE.” The American WE is very specific to a group of people, pertaining to a middle upper white class. The WE don’t have allegiance to its own white people either, for the real commitment is around class compromises. The white trash are not part of the WE of this country either. So, it is a naïve move to try to assimilate with the hopes of belonging. Trump’s America has its greatness to his own people. Make American Great Again, MAGA, is not a gathering of all of the US people but rather a political discourse and act on the whiteness of this country. For us it is a wakeup call for discernment to struggle. Yes, we belong, but as a daily act of resistance. Thus, to know ourselves is to know the brown reasoning of ourselves, the circulation of our sources and the ways in which we inhabit the borderland. Gloria Anzaldua has given us our itinerary, our territory and our spirituality: borderlands a spiritual Mestizaje.9

Aim at Changing Feelings too, not Only Ideas

The white reason has impinged on us a “codified madness” so we lose our forms of thinking and resistance. “Race” says Mbembe,

is a form of primal representation. Unable to distinguish between the outside and the inside, between envelopes and their contents, it sends us, above all, back to surface simulacra. Taken to its limit, race becomes a perverse complex, a generator of fears and torments, of disturbed thoughts and terror, but especially of infinite sufferings and, ultimately, catastrophe. In its phantasmagoric dimensions, it is a sign of neurosis—phobic, obsessive, at times hysterical. As Frantz Fanon has noted, “race” is also the name for bitter resentment and the irrepressible desire for vengeance. “Race” is the name for the rage of those who, constrained by subjection, suffer injuries, all manner of violations and humiliations, and bear countless wounds.”10

Under the MAGA “generator of fears and torments and thoughts of terror,” we are seeing the infinite sorrows of our people, the catastrophe of our countries, and the merciless account on the lives of the immigrants, here and elsewhere. We must ponder the ways in which we have to deal with the emotional results of this madness, the ways in which we are drenched into paradoxical relations between feelings and actions, syndromes and disconnections, spiritual injuries, mental illnesses and resentments. How do we access these orbits and convolutions of emotional difficulties when we are the very ones who conjure psychological work as unnecessary and waste of time? As rage is a respondent to all of these calamities, we must muster our own selves, go deep into our own hearts and learn how to deal with it. So, our first movement is towards our soul so we find ways to keep the devouring mouth of rage to destroy us. Once we can understand that and deal with it, we can channel the energy of rage into forms of resistance and transformation and create paths of liberation.

Stay Connected to the Ground

Our ancestors were deeply connected to the earth, they knew their deep relations were done with the ground on which they lived, the animals around them, the waters, the fish, the birds, the seeds, the sky. Our modern life doesn’t allow us to stop and connect with anything. Many of us are always running with projects and deadlines. Many are just trying to survive, just one step away from being completely rolled over by this economic situation. In whatever way, we must learn to pause, sit next to a tree and hear what the tree can tell us. As Job instruct us: “ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.”11 We need to change our whole theological edifice and start from the ground, finding ways to deeply connect with the earth, gain our wisdom form the bio-system and those who have dealt with it for a while. Against the hydro-agri-business system of extractivism. What is the point of fighting for a world that is about to cease? We need to expand the notion of Martin Luther’s King’s beloved community and understand a community with the human and non-human and in a form of life together that does not entail the exclusion of anyone.

Knowing Our People

Our people rise, our people resist and protest. In the most wonderful ways. Our history is filled with moments in history when our people rose and created new worlds. They are resistance everywhere! Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is resisting! The Teachers Movement also in Mexico is resisting! The Landless Movement in Brazil resisting! The Argentina’s Anti-Austerity Movement and the women are resisting! The students in Nicaragua are resisting! The campesino movement in Colombia is resisting! The environmental movement in Honduras is resisting! The queer movements everywhere are resisting! The indigenous communities everywhere are resisting!

And we also resist according to specific challenges with lots of fun. Let me tell you one story. Do you remember when lawyer Aaron Schlossberg shamed a staff person at a Manhattan eatery?” He shouted something like: My guess is they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country. If they have the balls to come here and live off my money—I pay for their welfare. I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do—the least they can do—is speak English.12 All stupidities he said . . . Surely he called for a reaction. What happened in the next days is that “the city came out with several apt responses, one of which was a street party outside his flat—a protest in true Latino form. Lots of people went to the front of his apartment and brought a Mariachi band, tacos trucks, Pinatas with his face and loudspeakers playing reggaeton and Latin pop, with flags of all Hispanic countries. It was a fantastic party!13 We have to know our people well. We are blessed to be part of this fantastic group of people!

Creating an Aesthetics of Life and Death, Tears and Joy

At, under and around the wall, we laugh! We laugh hard! We laugh in time and out of time. We laugh in place and especially out of place. We defy death with our stubborn laughter. We laugh during the day and cry when night comes. We laugh and cry together. When there is the news of a son that was fund alive in the desert, when somebody goes to a detention center, when someone has crossed the desert safe, when someone is raped. We laugh and cry without ceasing!

The borders and the economic crushing of our communities are maddening. So, to find life out of this maddening process we must laugh and we must continue to do theologies as a network of support and sustenance to our people. God is fundamental to our people and we have this gift and this demand to help our people, with our people, to create knowledge, discourses and practices of faith that will defy the maddening and destruction of our communities. So, our theological work is unique.

Our theological work is filled with ambiguities and contradictions. But we don’t shy away from it! We don’t try to even it out or cut the edges so we can create a good proper European theology. Our theologies are broken, nonsensical, ridiculous, outrageous. Half sophisticated, half old fashion. Half written, half spoken. Half conscious, half unconscious. Half clear, half obscure. Half tears, half laughter. Half discourse, half songs. Half academic, half something else, whatever the fuck we want! We do what we want! Don’t tell us what to do or not to do. We know it! The problem is that the academy might not consider it proper because we live in the midst of a magical realism. So, go figure us out! Usted estan todos despistados.

In our theologies, we decolonize the content, the format, the procedures, and the establishment of theological and religious thinking. We dress the way we want and we continue to be scholars. We call on different voices and nobody knows. We draw maps for the feast14 that the gringos read y se preguntan: Estan locos estes cucarachas? Que estan haciendo?

They don’t know that our laughter is like the redeeming power of God in Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ himself a laughter out of place. We are also homo ridiculous! That kind of ridiculous way of living/thinking that troubles the status quo. We console by laughing and admonish by crying. Our accent is our resistance, our smiling faces our gentle dismissal. We are a ball of incongruences and complexities because our lives are incongruent to this white system of thinking; our complexity comes from a mixture of people, sources, images and practices.

Tears and joys compose the main sources of the Latinxs communities. We preach and pray when we write our theologies and when do theology when we pray and preach. Our ears are attached to the ground, and our people matter more than our ideas. We see our people’s brutal suffering; we see the thin line of our social fabric being destroyed faster than ever. We are at the edge of despair every single day. We hang on a thin rope over the abyss. Nonetheless, our tortillas and tamales, our singing and our fiestas will keep us going. As a Mexican avuela used to say: Satanas quieres que desaparescas! But we won’t! We will take our place in this world and continue! For we carry the esperanza transgressora de Oscar Romero. We carry and produce theologies that pulse life in the midst of death, that mark and show the ambivalences of life and death from our people’s main structures of life; namely, a life lived within utter necessities and demanding hopes, continuing disasters and ongoing faith, tears and pain, but also joyful songs of alegria. As the poet Geraldo Eustáquio de Souza said:

Giving up . . . I’ve seriously thought about it but never really took myself seriously,

I have more ground in my eyes than the fatigue in my legs,

more hope in my footsteps, than sadness on my shoulders,

more road in my heart than fear in my head.15

Living for us is a practice of resurrection! For we are seeds! Keep finding people and communities and places where your seed can resurrect! Find the reservoirs of life and give water to your people. Bring matter to what matters. Bring to life what does not matter. Speak beyond positivistic structures, speak and write in ways that go beyond the object/subject relation.

Concluding . . .

We now must come back to the words of Jesus.

“You see all these buildings, these policies, this brutality, this empire, do you not?

Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’

Meanwhile, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray. Do not give up! Don’t fall into desperation! Because “this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” This is just the end.

‘Then they will hand our familias over to be tortured and will put them and you to death

Many will fall away, because they didn’t stick together.

Instead they will betray one another and hate one another because they will fight over who is suffering the most while the poor ones will be killed.

And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.

And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.

But anyone who endures to the end will be saved. “

The endurance that saves is the one that has all its trust in God. The endurance that saves is the endurance that pauses, that gets to know oneself and give attention to our interiors. The endurance that saves faces the daily threats to take away the lives of our people and keep the struggle! By the power of Holy Spirit! Endurance that knows how to sustain a combination of deep breaths, narratives and actions that are able to resist and counter the unruly, irresponsible, vitriolic and viciously violent use of the state machine of our time. The endurance that saves offers sobering courage to rise every mourning and go where people are placed on the cross!

The endurance that saves offers holy anger every afternoon and in a Fanonian way, “demanding human behavior from the other” and the end of unnecessary human suffering. The endurance that saves offers fierce love that resurrects us every evening, fierce love that helps to recollect ourselves so we can make a vigil with the most vulnerable. The endurance that saves stays at the borderland no matter what!

So, go out and get yourself even more committed to the poor, the undocumented, the immigrants and the refugees, join organizations that are working for change on the ground. If you go there, at the border, you will see that the challenges are way too intense and immense and the paradoxes insurmountable. And that it will keep us all very humble! Truly loving our people! And also, fired up so we can endure these times! And keep madness at bay.

May God bless us.

1. This sermon-article combines two sermons with newer annotations preached at the Hispanic Summer Program 2018 at Perkins School of Theology, Dallas, Texas, in June 2018.

2. Matt 24: 1–14, NRSV.

3. Harvey, Facebook page, June 15, 2018 at 9:50 AM.

4. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 218–22.

5. Strategic essentialism is “a political tactic employed by a minority group acting on the basis of a shared identity in the public arena in the interests of unity during a struggle for equal rights. The term was coined by Spivak and has been influential in feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory.”

6. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 381.

7. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 418–19.

8. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 360–62

9. In contrast to the notion that Anzaldúa maps a particular journey applicable only to other individual journeys, this shift from individual to collective perspective indicates that this critical mobility ideally enjoins others in its processes and perhaps achieves greater force through this intensification. It also practically recognizes that the transformations it enacts or foresees might exceed the individual frame, creating necessary collectivities. Her discussion here challenges exclusionary paradigms of nation, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality with the very terms that appear to authorize them, signaling a project of renewal that also requires resignification. Delgadillo, Spiritual Mestizaje, 224–28.

10. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 385–91.

11. Job 12:7–8, NRSV.

12. Wang, “‘My next call is to ICE’.”

13. Magness, “He ranted at Spanish speakers.”

14. Maduro, Maps for a Fiesta.

15. Eustáquio de Souza, “Geraldo Eustáquio de Souza” (my translation).