Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique

Author:Jaime Manrique
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2019-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

barrio kennedy

2008

Lucas had no trouble admitting to himself that he lacked Ignacio’s spirit of sacrifice. He was aware that for a priest he enjoyed material comforts too much. He liked to watch old movies until the early-morning hours, which caused him to wake up late some days to say Mass. When it came to dealing with the hierarchy of the church, he avoided contradicting his superiors whenever his position in Kennedy might be jeopardized. Sometimes Lucas thought of himself as cowardly.

He accepted that, by comparison to the magnitude and scope of Ignacio’s projects in Soacha, his accomplishments in Barrio Kennedy were modest. Lucas had never considered himself an envious person but now found he was troubled by Ignacio’s spreading fame in Bogotá. He prayed that his envy would go away, but it didn’t. When he mentioned it during confession, his Father confessor said, “Well, Ignacio’s ambitions are larger than yours. And they have to be: the people of Soacha have much less than the people of Kennedy. If you pray for your envy to dissipate, and it doesn’t, then try to do more for your flock—if you can. Maybe you’ll have to accept that envy is a part of your nature that you’d like to change.”

* * *

Lucas had tried to be a modern priest—friendly, not stern. He wore black jeans, short-sleeved white shirts, and sneakers, except to deliver Mass. His only concession to tradition was to always wear the collar. He had also modernized some of the rituals in his church. Instead of playing solemn religious music during Mass, he introduced singers with guitars, who performed upbeat Christian songs—like the Protestant evangelical churches did. Inspired by the example of Father Jean Baptiste-Marie Vianney, he wrote his sermons in the vernacular and addressed people’s everyday problems. To be a good Christian, he stressed in his homilies, all that was required was to undergo an interior transformation that was reflected outwardly in the ways people treated others and helped the neediest among them.

By the time Lucas had finished his studies at Javeriana University, he had noticed that many Catholics were losing their passion for the church because what they were being taught was so ethereal. Yes, it was true that Jesus was resurrected, and the Virgin Mary gave birth through an immaculate conception—these were fundamental pillars of Christianity he embraced unquestioningly. But he knew that they were also not the main issues regular people grappled with in real life, because they were so abstract that they no longer meant anything to many believers.

Instead of saying to his parishioners, “Love thy brother” (words which made him blush because they sounded hollow to him), he would say things like, “Visit your old relatives who live alone and forgotten—even if you dislike them.”

On some level he remained proud of Ignacio’s accomplishments. His friend began to appear in the press regularly, and there were segments on TV about his most ambitious social projects. Volunteers started arriving in Soacha from far away, and donations poured in from Colombians and others abroad who had learned about what Ignacio was doing.

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