Like the Flowing River

We reached the place where she wanted to go. Other beggars were gathered there. The woman took out two packets of long-life milk from one of the plastic bags and gave it to the other members of the group.

'People are charitable to me, and so I must be charitable to others,' she said.

Living Your Own Legend

I reckon that it takes about three minutes to read each page in this book. Well, according to statistics, in that same space of time, 300 people will die, and another 620 will be born.

I might take half an hour to write each page: I'm sitting at my computer, concentrating on what I'm doing, with books all around me, ideas in my head, cars driving past outside. Everything seems perfectly normal, and yet, during those thirty minutes, 3,000 people have died, and 6,200 have just seen the light of the world for the first time.

Where are those thousands of families who have just begun to mourn the loss of someone, or to smile at the arrival of a son, daughter, nephew, niece, brother, or sister?

I stop and reflect a little. Perhaps many of those people were reaching the end of a long and painful illness, and some people are relieved when the Angel comes for them. Then again, hundreds of those children who have just been born will be abandoned the next moment and will go on to form part of the death statistics before I have even finished writing this page.

How strange. A simple statistic, which I happened to read, and suddenly I'm aware of all those deaths and entrances, those smiles and tears. How many of them are leaving this life while alone in their rooms, with no one realizing what's happening? How many will be born in secret and then abandoned outside a children's home or a convent?

I think to myself that I was once part of the birth statistics and will, one day, be included amongst the numbers of dead. It is good to be aware that I will die. Ever since I walked the road to Santiago, I have understood that, although life goes on and we are all eternal, this existence will one day end.

People do not think very much about death. They spend their lives worrying about absurdities; they put things off, and fail to notice important moments. They don't take risks, because they think it's dangerous. They complain a lot, but are afraid to take action. They want everything to change, but they themselves refuse to change.

If they thought a little more about death, they would never forget to make that much-postponed phone call. They would be a little crazier. They would not be afraid of this incarnation coming to an end, because you cannot fear something that is going to happen anyway.

The Indians say: 'Today is as good a day as any to leave this world.' And a wise man once said: 'Death is always sitting by your side so that, when you need to do something important, it will give you the strength and the courage that you need.'

I hope that you, dear reader, have got this far. It would be foolish to be frightened by death, because all of us, sooner or later, are going to die. And only those who accept this fact are prepared for life.

The Man Who Followed His Dreams

I was born in Sao Jose h

ospital in Rio de Janeiro. It was a fairly difficult birth, and my mother dedicated me to Sao Jose, asking him to help me to survive. Jose - or Joseph - has become a cornerstone of my life. Every year since 1987, the year after my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I have given a party in his honour, on 19 March. I invite friends and other honest, hard-working people, and before we have supper, we pray for all those who try to preserve the dignity of what they do. We pray, too, for those who are unemployed and with no prospects for the future.

In my little introduction to the prayer, I like to remind people that the word 'dream' appears in the New Testament only five times, and that four out of those five times the word is used in reference to Joseph the carpenter. In all of these cases, he is always being persuaded by an angel to do exactly the opposite of what he was planning to do.

The angel asks him not to abandon his wife, even though she is pregnant. Joseph could say something along the lines of, 'What will the neighbours think?' But he goes back home and believes in the revealed word.

The angel tells him to go into Egypt. His answer could well have been: 'I've got a carpentry business here and regular customers, I can't just abandon it all.' And yet he gathers his things together and heads off into the unknown.

The angel asks him to return from Egypt. Joseph could have thought: 'What, now, when I've just managed to create a settled life again, and when I've got a family to support?'

Joseph goes against what common sense tells him to do and follows his dreams. He knows that he has a destiny to fulfil, which is the destiny of all men on this planet - to protect and support his family. Like millions of anonymous Josephs, he tries to carry out this task, even if it means doing things that are beyond his comprehension.

Later, both his wife and one of his children are transformed into the cornerstones of Christianity. The third pillar of the family, the labourer, is only remembered in nativity scenes at Christmas, or by those who feel a special devotion to him - as I do, and as does Leonardo Boff, for whom I wrote the preface to his book on the carpenter.

I give below part of an article by the writer Carlos Heitor Cony, which I came across on the internet:

People are sometimes surprised that, given my declared agnosticism and my refusal to accept the idea of a philosophical, moral or religious God, I am, nevertheless, devoted to certain saints in our traditional calendar. God is too distant a concept or entity for my uses or even for my needs. Saints, on the other hand, with whom I share the same clay foundations, deserve more than my admiration, they deserve my devotion.

St Joseph is one of them. The Gospels do not record a single word spoken by him, only gestures and one explicit reference: vir justus - a just man. Since he was a carpenter and not a judge, one must deduce that Joseph was, above all else, good. A good carpenter, a good husband, a good father to the boy who would divide the history of the world.

Beautiful words from Cony. And yet I often read such aberrant statements as: 'Jesus went to India to learn from the teachers in the Himalayas.' I believe that any man can transform the task given him by life into something sacred, and Jesus learned while Joseph, the just man, taught him to make tables, chairs, and beds.

In my imagination, I like to think that the table at which Christ consecrated the bread and the wine would have been made by Joseph, because it must have been the work of some anonymous carpenter, one who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, and who, precisely because of that, allowed miracles to be performed.

The Importance of the Cat in Meditation

When I wrote Veronika Decides to Die, a book about madness, I was forced to ask myself how many of the things we do are really necessary, and how many are simply absurd. Why do we wear ties? Why do clocks move clockwise? If we live with a decimal system, why does the day have 24 hours of 60 minutes each?

The fact is that many of the rules we obey nowadays have no real foundation. Nevertheless, if we choose to behave differently, we are considered 'mad' or 'immature'.