November 11, 2004

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

As Keiko and I sit here and perspire in this tropical summer heat, it is hard to remember Christmases back in Chicago with Jack Frost nipping at our nose. But we do remember what Christmas is supposed to be about, and we’ll get to it in a minute after this brief report on Salvador.

The longer Keiko and I stay here (nearly six months by the time you get this letter), the more difficult it is for us to generalize. The closest we can come to summarizing this culture for you is to say that Bahia is a land of great (and often painful) contrasts so that practically whatever you say about this place is both true and false.

The same can be said about the city of Salvador. It’s one of the prettiest cities in the world this side of Paris, but it’s also one of the ugliest, with slums you’d have to see (and smell) to believe. Life in these slums is a mess, a waking nightmare, yet slum-dwellers exhibit an amazing social solidarity you do not see in rich neighborhoods. Poor people represent 80 percent of the population of 2.5 million, 85 percent of these poor being Afro, and trust us when we say that these people are really, really poor. They are either permanently unemployed and have long since given up looking for work or are employed at slave wages (Brazil having a “slave-based” economy), and so they have every material reason to be sad. Yet they are genuinely, spontaneously joyful, the way they would not be if they were just forcing themselves to be happy as a survival strategy. This attitude of theirs is both wonderful and terrible because it discourages the kinds of social change that would be required to get them out of the conditions in which they have to live.

We said that this was a Christmas letter, and given the situation in Salvador, we feel we should talk about Christmas as Luke’s Gospel describes it in the Song of Mary: God’s mighty intervention in history, scattering the proud, putting down the mighty, exalting those of low degree, filling the hungry, and sending the rich empty away. Mary’s message may not be so relevant in the United States, but in Latin America, where people in their overwhelming majority are poor and live under the economic dictatorship of an incredibly greedy and self-indulgent minority, this message really hits home. For poor people in Salvador, Christmas means that God sees the oppression of God’s people in Egypt (i.e. Brazil), hears their cry of affliction at the hands of their oppressors, becomes aware of the people’s suffering, and comes to rescue them in the person of Jesus Christ. We Christians know that God does not work alone in fulfilling the promise of Mary’s Song—God uses us. So Mary’s Song is a prophetic expression of great confidence in God, but indirectly it’s also a call from God. Moses was called at the burning bush. We are called at the electrified bush.

Have a blessed Christmas! And may the thought of God’s acting through you to fulfill Mary’s Song be ever upon your mind.

Yours in Christ,

Bob and Keiko