Resurrecting Chicago

Days rush by.  I don’t seem to have the creativity I once had and I know my body is failing in so many ways.  I used to run, now my gait is a pitiful wobble.  Even my meals don’t taste exciting, though I continue to eat them.  My prayer life is routine though occasionally there is a slight lifting of the curtain that separates me and Our Lord. The passion that once ruled my life is now quietly resting.

I haven’t found a book recently that I want to hold in my hand. Kindle contains both the great classics –hard to read– or trashy novels about bizarre, mutated creatures or horrors full of gore and screaming. I’d like to read something nice, but clever and well written.

I am barely holding on to sanity in a culture careening downhill to destruction. It is all me. Selfies, Facebook successes, Instagram tales and TV brutality reign.  The violence troubles me.  And, there is nothing quiet now, nothing private.  The cup is half-full where it used to run over.

Searching around for some information about tomorrow’s feast day, All Saints Day,  I came across some interesting historical facts which relate to one of my saint-heroes, St. Peter Claver, the apostle to the slaves.  Claver along with an entire team of helpers –including translators — would meet the slave ships as they arrived from Africa and docked at Cartegena, Colombia, where he lived. Many captives, of course, died during the voyages.  The slaves that did survive had were ill-fed, naked and suffering from diseases which had passed quickly from one to another deep within the dark holds of the ships.  Claver’s crew washed and fed the captives as best as they could right there on the docks of Cartegena.

What I learned was that five hundred years ago Charles I of Spain authorized the direct transport of slaves from Africa to the Americas.  Until then Africans were first transported to Spain or Portugal and then to the Americas.  From August, 1518 it became much more profitable for the captors to take their slaves to market  in Cartegena (and other ports) since they no longer had to go to Spain or Portugal first.  The slave business flourished.

Transatlantic slave trade brought at least 10.7 million black Africans to the New World (Independent, August 7, 2017).  Peter Claver was a Jesuit lay-brother who with his team met as many of the slave ships as they could.  The helpers would simply do whatever they could do to relieve the suffering of the slaves.  A little food and water, some cast-off clothes, and attention to the sick answered the immediate needs of these degraded human beings.

May 30, 1627. From Peter Claver’s diary:

“Numerous blacks brought from the rivers of Africa disembarked from a large ship.  Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons and sweet biscuits …and other items I can’t enumerate now, we hurried toward them (through the crowds).  Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground…they were naked.”

Peter Claver was a catechist, too.  Together with his helpers, he proclaimed the truths of salvation to those who had no hope for their futures. Many accepted baptism.

In his old age, Peter Claver became unable to get-around and died in a cell, poor and without proper care.  The “Slave of the Slaves” is interred beneath the altar of the main church in Cartegena. You can walk up into the sanctuary and stand or sit just a few feet from the remains which are bare, dry bones which shout out, ” A saint is here!”