Book Review - Psalms - by Ernesto Cardenal

When I served as a lay missionary in Canada and in Latin America for six years, when I was discerning a calling to the priesthood while teaching Spanish in the Mississippi Delta at a public high school, there were a lot of priests and leaders of the Catholic faith that served as an inspiration to me.  Ernest Cardenal is many things: a poet, an author, a politician in his native country of Nicaragua, a priest.  He spent time at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky.  He founded at artists' colony on an island in Nicaragua.  He served as the minister of culture in the Sandinista government from 1979 to 1987.  There is a famous photo of Pope John Paul II shaking his finger at Cardenal, scolding him when he visited that country.  This book of psalms is very provocative.  Imagine how someone in our day would write the psalm based on our reality and what we see around us. This book was written in Central America in 1969.  Think about what was going on in our own country at that time.  As I hear about retirees from the US raving about the opportunity to retire in Ecuador, I think of a very different place and time in that country when I served as a lay missionary in the jungles, of seeing someone murdered right before my eyes, of being mugged on a busy city street in broad daylight with a knife held up to my throat, of police throwing canisters of tear gas at people in the streets,  of attempted military coups and frozen bank accounts, of my lodgings being robbed six times in a matter of weeks, the last time with the door being taken off the hinges.  Cardenal reflects the era of revolution, oppression and violence that was going on around him, of the poor who had no opportunities and no hope.  It is easy to label him as a leftist rebel who is an enemy of democracy and capitalism.  But what he says very much resonates with my experiences of Latin America.  My heart was touched by these poems in this book.  Having said that, it is raw, and honest, and not for the faint of heart.