Lent of Liberation by Luis Barrios

6/20/09

In the Christian tradition Lent is a special moment during which we make personal sacrifices with the intent of becoming better human beings.

However socio-theologically speaking I have always believed that any personal sacrifice that does not have as its final goal the capacity to benefit the community can turn into an egoistic action. That is why on the one hand we must always critically examine what motivates our actions while on the other we must advocate a love full of solidarity to reach that goal.

At this moment my imprisonment in the Metropolitan Correctional Center-NYC, as a result of an act of civil disobedience against the School of the Americas, is only a personal sacrifice and the goal continues to be to close this School of Assassins. In addition, the final goal is to bring justice to the victims and to all their families.

For me closing the School of the Americas is a sort of Via Crucis in which they arrest you, take you to court, leave you naked, violate your body, humiliate and punish you with the intent of killing the hope that your sacrifice brings to the people.

Killing hope is possible and the people’s enemies know it very well. This is the way to stop a social movement that can become a mass revolution. This is why there are living people who are dead and dead people who continue to live. They kill the hope of the former but can never kill the hope of the latter.

Now, can we learn anything positive from this prison experience? Of course we can! On one hand I am learning to be more sensitive to my imprisoned brothers and sisters and to see more closely the injustices of systems of exclusion and oppression. On the other hand I am learning to resist these practices of the system in order to create new forms of struggle. I continue learning to identify the interconnections and interdependences between the sins of militarism, annexationism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and neoliberalism, etc.

Lent in prison also gives me the opportunity to destroy the sin of being complicit with injustice in my everyday life. For example, when I opportunistically keep silent and indifferent in the face of somebody else’s pain as if it had nothing to do with me.

My struggle against the School of the Americas brought me to this prison in order for me to continue demonstrating my subversive compassion. Let us not forget that compassion is the way in which we prove what is genuine and the quality of our love full of solidarity, the most important sacrament.

All of this turns me into what I am at this moment, a prisoner of conscience. Therefore let us make the true meaning of Lent a reality and through a subversive Via Crucis let us close the School of the Americas. Let us continue to believe in and build peace with justice.

Fr. Luis Barrios is in prison for protesting at the U.S. Government's terrrorist training camp, the School of the Americas. For more information, see http://www.soaw.org/