From the Amazon to the drama of migrationsInterview with Lucia Capuzzi. Christ points to AmazoniaWhich priests do we need? To form missionary pastorsMy name is María del Mar Bosch, but I am known as Marita. I was born in 1973 in Valencia, Spain, although I grew up in Puerto Rico. I am a lay missionary and I have been in the Amazon for 9 years as part of the Itinerant Team.
I studied education at Loyola University in New Orleans, USA (1991-1995). From the beginning of my studies I had an inner certainty that gave me peace: when I graduated, I was going to have a mission experience. It was an inner intuition that guided me and, although I did not know how it would happen, it gave me clarity.
The years of university went by and I cultivated that desire in my heart and looked for opportunities wanting to respond to that deep restlessness. In my last semester of studies I was blessed to meet a Jesuit, Fernando Lopez, who invited me to go to Paraguay where he had already been living for 10 years. So, after graduating at the age of 21, I went to live for six months in a community with Jesuits, lay men and women, located in the large garbage dump of Cateura, in the favelas of Bañado Sur in Asuncion, the capital of the country.
Paraguay
The landfill and the people who worked there, without saying many words, questioned my life. The people at the landfill collected the garbage and separated the recyclable materials for sale. Often, they would also find babies inside the bags that arrived in the garbage trucks that had been aborted or killed at birth and thrown as garbage in the dumpsters scattered around the city, especially from the wealthier neighborhoods.... The fetuses were collected by the recyclers, poor, simple and humble people; they cleaned the little bodies, dressed them in white clothes and placed them in a small coffin made by them; they watched over them and prayed all night long; they "baptized" them by giving them a name and, thus, they became their "little angels"; finally, they buried them in the yard of their little houses.
Needless to say, all that reality hit me and questioned me. The strong smell coming from the garbage made my body react. But the greatest impact was that in the midst of the garbage, going down among the poor and impoverished, I met God "face to face", very close. Those faces awakened my conscience and my missionary vocation. Six months there marked me and gave me the direction and the founding and essential elements of my life. I was confronted with profound questions: What am I going to do with my life? What do you want from me, Lord? Among the garbage, with those "discarded" by society, I had found the meaning of my life.
Touching the poor
The poor were no longer abstract, but concrete faces, friends, dear families with whom I shared stories; they had smells and colors, smiles and pains; they were my brothers and sisters. And this disrupted my daily life and gave depth to what I lived. Hearing a petition at mass "for the poor" would no longer be the same. Now there was an affective and effective bond with them; a vital commitment to the poor sealed by the Lord.
After 6 months in Paraguay, I had to return to Puerto Rico. First, because I had to pay my college loans. Second, because I had promised my family (especially my mother) that I would return. However, what weighed most heavily on my return to Puerto Rico was the questioning of a couple from the Paraguayan Christian Life Community that collaborated in the favela at the "Solidaridad" community radio station.
They adopted a baby girl - baptized as Mará de la Paz - found alive in a small box in the middle of the garbage. She was presented as a sign of life at the priestly ordination of Fernando Lopez sj, which took place in the middle of the garbage dump. One day the couple asked me: "In your country have you seen a reality like this?" And before my negative response, they insisted: "But, have you looked? "Well, no!" - I told them. That made me return to my country with a different look and, above all, with other searches.
Puerto Rico
Returning to Puerto Rico was confronting me with my reality. I was afraid. I thought that all that I had lived in the garbage dump could remain just a simple experience of my youth. Three pieces of advice helped me and help me today as a lay missionary:
1) Prayer, which today, from my experience in the Amazon and as part of an itinerant team, speaks to me of a spirituality in the open;
2) The community, "making community along the way" and sharing these concerns and searches with other people;
3) "Going down to meet God" - this point has given me a lot of light: "Marita, when you feel you are losing your way, go down to meet the Lord in the poor and excluded.". To go down to those concrete faces where God has been and continues to be so present to me. They help me to relocate myself in the deep sense of my life and my mission in this world as a believing woman, as a missionary woman, a disciple of the Lord.
In this new stage of life, back in Puerto Rico, my heart was mobilized and actively restless, looking for how and where to respond to what I had "seen and heard". Thus, I opened my life to several short volunteer experiences: El Salvador (1999), Haiti (2001), Amazonia (2003), Nicaragua (2006) and again Amazonia (2015). Also to various mission experiences in my country over the years: in prison, living in slums with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, in the parish singing group, as a Eucharistic minister and offering literacy classes.
Discovering your vocation missionary
And in all those experiences I had the question and discernment "nailed" deeply in my heart and prayer, where do you want me Lord? And like any vocation, this one has been maturing little by little. God is faithful! I see how this long process was also necessary to discern and prepare my heart to assume today, with joy and freedom, this vocation, leaving my comfort zone, leaving the security that gave me my job at Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola in Puerto Rico, in the area of pastoral care for 6 years.
Finally, the Lord showed the way-river and I arrived in the Amazon in 2016. In the 9 years that I have been in the Amazon as a lay missionary, I discover that being here is a privilege. It is a privilege to be able to join this diversity of peoples and cultures, different ways of feeling, thinking, organizing and living, to have uncertainty as the greatest certainty and to be in the Itinerant Team facing the challenges and solutions of the peoples with whom we are walking and navigating with the founding intuition of the Team: "Walk around the Amazon and listen to what the people say; participate in the daily life of the people; observe and record everything carefully; without worrying about the results and trust that the Spirit will show the way. Courage, start where you can!". Claudio Perani SJ (founder of the Itinerant Team in 1998).
Personal impact
Traveling through the rivers and forests of the Amazon, through its politically imposed borders, I have seen an "x-ray" of this lung that is getting sick daily with extreme drought, fires, logging, agribusiness and pesticides, large port projects, highways, waterways and hydroelectric, mining and oil companies, garimpo and drug trafficking, etc. Who rules is "don dinero". What matters is the profit and benefit of a few without caring about the lives of the poor, or the indigenous peoples, or the other beings that inhabit the Amazon...
These years of mission have helped me a lot to grow: to meet and face my own limits and contradictions, fragilities and vulnerabilities, fears and wounds that I have to work on; to live the mission from a different effectiveness, "effectiveness of the gratuitous presence"; to cultivate a spirituality in the open that trusts that God waits for us at every turn of the river and in the different others; to pray my own history and heal it. It is to live in the (in)security of the Gospel, in geographic and interior itinerancy (which is the most difficult); with less material security, but with greater security and interior joy, full of meaning and gratitude to God and the poor for having helped me to find my way.
From the geographic and interior itinerancies in this Amazonia I am learning to walk in that which we call ".synodality"We must walk together in diversity. That is only possible with the grace of God and the "Joy of the Gospel"; with the help of my sisters and brothers of mission-community on the way. Walking together, trusting in the love of God the Father-Mother, the Son and the Spirit who accompanies us in our fragile canoes.
It is a grace to be here as a lay missionary, but it is also a great responsibility, feeling like an eternal apprentice in the Itinerant Team, as part and midwife of these new ecclesial paths of REPAM, CEAMA, Itinerant Network of CLAR-REPAM, etc.
The Itinerant Team
In my first mission experiences I thought I was going alone. I, personally, without any institution, with my own means and resources. But when I finally took the step to be part of the Itinerant Team, I was told that I had to be sent and supported by an institution or organization.
The Team is not an institution, but the sum of institutions. But I see that, from before, it was already with the mediation of other people who helped me to make mission experiences: from that Jesuit who invited me that first time to the garbage dump of Cateura, where I fell in love with the mission, but also my family who knew how to accompany me without necessarily understanding me, my parish and friends, relatives and people I do not even know... Thanks to the support of many people, spiritual and economic support, but also many other forms of accompaniment that I have received, I have been able to get here. God uses many mediations.
It has been very important to let myself be accompanied by the God present in the different peoples with concrete faces, who welcome us on the other banks and in the different turns of the river that we do not control. God present in the most diverse realities and circumstances: some full of beauty, others full of injustice, pain and death, that stir and push my heart to try to be a docile and faithful instrument together with the crucified and the cut wood, "efficiency of the gratuitous presence" next to the Calvary of the Amazon like the three Marys and John (Jn 19,25). Only in this way can we be planted seeds that make the Integral Ecology that God dreamed of from the beginning and invites us to care for flourish.
"Everything is interconnected" (LS, 16), Pope Francis tells us in. Laudato Si. I am sure that we are all interconnected and that the problems of this jungle have to do with that "other jungle of asphalt and concrete". The solutions are also interconnected. And to the extent that each person places our seed, our gifts, in the jungle where God has planted us, together we will build this Abundant Life that He has promised us (Jn 10:10). May we be able to be silent (like the planted seed) to listen to His Voice in the cry of the poor and the violated Mother Earth, in the voice of our most excluded, vulnerable and forgotten brothers and sisters. They are God's favorites. And God invites us to be missionaries to seek, walk, spend and risk our lives with them on a daily basis.
Lay missionary
