Tablet December 08 "Salvador"

Lunch at the Community of the Trinity, in the lower, poorer part of the city of Salvador, in the tropical northeast of Brazil, was very different yet strangely similar to a meal in the monastery. San Sebastiano was the first Benedictine monastery founded outside Europe. It still has the long wide corridors with wooden floors polished by generations of monks and the spacious whitewashed cells of the colonial period. Meals are, as in most monasteries, choreographed rituals of efficient eating and social organization, framed in the language of prayer. As individuals the monks betray little of themselves.

In the Church of the Trinity the community is made up of street people. The food is cooked on a wooden stove in the open air. The young woman responsible for cooking that noon hour seemed anxious because the meal was a little late. Unfortunately it was rice and beans again but the watermelon looked (and was) irresistible. The food was placed on a long serving table and there were rough benches around the peeling walls for the community and their guests. We sat listening as the community’s leader Brother Henrique quietly read from the gospel, prayed and welcomed us. Beside me was Maria a large, deranged but, at the time, exuberant personality. For years she had lived a life of abuse on the streets, regularly made drunk and then sexually exploited. Her toothless smile floated over years of degradation slowly being redeemed by the welcome and sense of belonging she found at the Comunidade da Trinidade. The meal was informal and relaxed but in its own way dignified and orderly. Henrique’s gentle, observant authority, conveyed peace.

The other members of the community are also street people, mostly struggling with drugs or alcohol or coming out of prostitution. Their histories were written in their eyes and in the cautious way they rested in the friendship and love of the older members who had learned stability and how to practice hospitality. Each night they and any others who turn up sleep on cardboard on the floor of the church.

I first met Henrique, short, wiry and ascetic, five years ago when he attended a meditation retreat, and again a few days before on another retreat. For many years he obeyed the call to follow Jesus as he lived and traveled as a homeless pilgrim around Brazil. Like the Russian Pilgrim he prayed continuously as he walked or when he was moved on by the police. When he came to Salvador he began to sleep on the floor of the abandoned and dilapidated church that sits on a small hill in a favella looking over the rough district of the old port. A now extinct French community working for the liberation of slaves had started the church. When others began to take shelter there with him Henrique asked the diocese for the church. The roof was repaired but otherwise the church is still rough, part dormitory, part place of worship.

Morning and evening prayer incorporate a period of silent meditation which the street people love. Outside, a few metres higher, there is a small lush garden and a couple of single rooms which Henrique proudly shows me as their hermitage, They are used by the members of the community and sometimes by priests of the diocese who come to refresh their hard lives working with the poor.

It was when I asked Henrique what happened if the members of the community went back onto drugs or drink that I understood how remarkable this tropical epiphany of the Kingdom - and of life lived according to the Gospel - really is. He said, as any abbot would, that it all depends. Each case, each person is unique. The good of the person and of the whole have to be balanced. Living with a person taking drugs makes life even harder for those trying to quit. The point however is that the community is not a social project, measuring success by the rehabilitation of its clients, but essentially and actually a community.

Easy to mistake for a drop-in centre or refuge for the homeless it is more than that. It is in fact a very real and serious contemplative community that, like any other, has its problems and personalities. Prayer is at the heart of the life and regulates the rhythms of the day like and perhaps even more than in many monasteries. At the heart of the prayer is the spirit of love. When members leave, Henrique said, they are bidden farewell as gently as they were once welcomed. No success, no failure. What matters, he said, smiling with his shining eyes, is that they can remember, maybe at some desperate moment of loneliness on the streets again, that they once had dignity and were truly loved.

Laurence Freeman OSB
-- http://www.wccm.org

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