Ernesto Cardenal: Revolution to Evolution

This past month on March 1st, Ernesto Cardenal passed away in Managua. Priest, poet, revolutionary.  95 years old.  He died in the same hospital where Miriam was born, actually.

When I was taking Latin American Literature in college, Ernesto Cardenal was the first Nicaraguan I came across.  I found his story interesting and wrote a few pages about him and his work for an assignment.

He was a Jesuit priest, pulled between the mystical and the practical.  In the 50s, he was part of a failed plot to take out the Somoza dictatorship, and then went to Thomas Merton's Gethsemane monastery in Kentucky.  He decided that wasn't his calling and that he needed to be more involved with his people's struggle. He went to the island of Solantiname in the great lake Colcibolca, believing that the poor need to be the lead theologians and artists in the new kingdom of God.  And then he was part of the Sandinista movement that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. He served as the Minister of Culture through most of the 80s. Cardenal and a other priests who worked with the revolution were at odds with the Vatican and he was famously scolded by Pope John Paul II during the pope's visit. He was defrocked and eventually reinstated by Pope Francis in 2018.

Cardenal defended the Sandinistas consistently through the 80s. But tensions between the leadership grew. When they lost the election at the end of their decade, there was the infamous piñata, a property-grab by government leaders on their way out the door.  This was a breaking point for Cardenal.  For the rest of his life, Cardenal remained committed to a Christianity through a lens of Marxism.  But he was at odds with the Sandinista party for the rest of his life. He focused on his writing, his poetry, his dreams of another kind of kingdom.

After Cardenal's death, I picked up a copy of his book La Revolución Perdida (The Lost Revolution).  I was interested to see how his thinking developed over the years, especially recent years, and what may have contributed to that.  As it turned out, only the last 15 of the book's almost 600 pages really focused on his split with the Sandinista party, in the aftermath of the 1990 election. It was an important book though. There were many stories recounting the tragic violence of those years, as well as the fascinating initiatives such as the literacy campaign and promoting poetry and the arts with the working class.

In 2018, the year that the protests broke out, Cardenal published Hijos de las Estrellas (Children of the Stars) and I had bought a copy.  I reread it in the week after his death, along with a similar book of his poetry that I had picked up in 2017.  Through Cardenal's poetry, in his stream-of-consciousness, unpolished style, he writes of divine love and purpose within the universe.  What will we do with our awareness, our consciousness, on earth? We are responsible for the next step in humanity's existence or evolution.  Will we allow ourselves to be pulled by God's love, a force like gravity?

He had an intriguing comment in the back of the book about the sociopolitical happenings of 2018. He was hopeful about what might emerge.  And while it doesn't seem he had regrets about resorting to violence in the revolution in his day, he affirmed the commitment to nonviolence among the new movement he observed.  So in comparison to the essay that I wrote about Cardenal in college, I am now more curious about how Cardenal's ideas continued to evolve in the last decades of his life.  How are we part of God's emerging new world?

Hijos de las Estrellas ends with these lines (my translation, original in the photo below):

And the certainty that another world is possible
a God, not of the dead, but of the living
the union of the resurrected, the banquet of the kingdom
banquet bread and wine wedding guests
     and a planet that's partying