Week III • Wednesday
Chile
Week III • Wednesday
Voices from the Landscape
Between Conviction and Compassion
I was five years old in 1973 when Chile entered one of the darkest and most decisive moments of its history. My childhood memories are simple: school, family life, and a Catholic faith shaped by prayer and discipline. Only later did I understand how close the country had come to collapse.
Many families experienced hunger, fear, and instability under the Marxist government. I grew up among people who believed strongly that communism does not bring justice, but chaos, hatred, and deep social division. That conviction remains strong within me, and I hope Chile never again walks that path.
I also recognise clearly that the first years after the coup were lived under a military junta. During that time, serious human-rights violations occurred. People were imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared. As a Catholic, I believe these truths must be spoken, because silence does not heal.
Later, in December 1974, it became a military government under President Pinochet. My lived experience of those years was of stability and gradual rebuilding. Chile began to recover, work returned, and many families rediscovered a sense of order and hope.
Our country remains divided. Some remember only the crimes; others remember only the fear that came before. I believe reconciliation begins when we can hold both grief and gratitude in the same heart, and still pray together for truth, mercy, and peace.
Keno Toriello
wonderings
- I wonder what it means to honour someone else’s story, even when their experience of the same history is different from mine.
- I wonder where I, like Keno, carry two truths in the same heart – gratitude for what was restored, and grief for what was lost.
- I wonder how God invites me to hold memory without bitterness, and conviction without contempt.
- I wonder whether reconciliation becomes possible when I stop asking “Who is right?” and begin asking “How can we walk forward together?”
Reflection
Chile – Holding Tension, Seeking Truth
Keno’s story invites us into the kind of honesty that reconciliation truly requires -an honesty spacious enough to hold experiences that do not align neatly, and brave enough to name suffering without erasing the fear that shaped the years before it. His memories remind us that history is not a single line, but a tapestry woven from different threads: fear and relief, hope and harm, stability and control.
Chile’s past resists simplicity. For some, Marxist policies brought hunger, division, and the collapse of ordinary life. For others, the military years brought anguish, repression, and loss so profound it reshaped entire families and communities. Keno stands in the aching space between these narratives, neither denying his own experience nor denying the wounds of others. And it is precisely this uncomfortable space -this refusal to reduce a nation’s memory to one story -where reconciliation begins.
prayer
Dios de la verdad y de la misericordia,
tú conoces nuestras historias
mejor que nosotros mismos.
Sana las heridas que aún dividen
a tu pueblo en Chile.
Danos humildad para escuchar,
coraje para reconocer el dolor ajeno,
y un corazón capaz de sostener verdades difíciles sin perder la compasión.
Haznos instrumentos de tu paz,
donde memoria y misericordia
puedan encontrarse. Amén.
God of truth and mercy,
you know our histories
more deeply than we ever can.
Heal the wounds that still
divide your people in Chile.
Give us humility to listen,
courage to acknowledge another’s pain,
and a heart able to hold difficult truths
without losing compassion.
Make us instruments of your peace,
where memory and
mercy may meet.
Amen.
bible reading
John 5:1–18 :
Healing at the pool of Bethesda
By the pool of Bethesda lies a man who has waited thirty-eight years for healing. Day after day he watches others step into the water before him. But sadly, as tradition promises that the first to enter when it is stirred will be made well, he is never first- never that man. His words to Jesus are heavy with sadness, despondency and disappointment: “I have no one to put me into the pool.” This man’s sickness is more than physical – it is the weariness of abandonment, the slow fading of hope after years of exclusion.
When Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?”, it might sound almost cruel. Yet it is a question that cuts to the heart of what healing truly means. The man’s reply does not name desire but despair: he cannot imagine a world where his healing is possible. Into that paralysis of imagination, Jesus speaks a new word: “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” In that moment, healing becomes not a transaction but an awakening. The man rises – not only restored in body but reawakened in spirit, able to inhabit a world beyond resignation.
For the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves, this moment captures the essence of faith: the rebirth of imagination in the face of despair. In Tomorrow’s Child, Alves writes that “hope is hearing the melody of the future; faith is to dance it.” The man by the pool could hear no melody – no music. His life was defined by waiting. Jesus restores his capacity to imagine a future again- to imagine a life restored. This is the heart of reconciliation: not the return to what was, but the creation of what might yet be.
A number of modern theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and Elizabeth Johnson have written of similar hope – that healing is not merely cure but participation in God’s ongoing creativity. Alves calls this poetic theology: the conviction that beauty and imagination are instruments of divine peace. In this story, Jesus acts as both poet and prophet Christ speaks words that reimagine what is possible, and by those words the man is restored to community and to life.
From this perspective, penance is not guilt-driven sorrow but the courage to begin again. It is to trust that life can still be renewed after long affliction. The man’s obedience, rising and walking, is his act of penance: a turning from despair toward hope, from paralysis toward participation in God’s future.
Peace, in this story, is not the stillness of the water but the movement of resurrection. Alves reminds us that peace is never imposed by coercion; it is the fruit of imagination and beauty. When Jesus heals the man, he reclaims his agency .The man is no longer a passive sufferer but a living sign of divine creativity. Peace, then, is the capacity to live differently, to inhabit the world as if it were already being made new.
Reconciliation unfolds in the social ripple that follows. The healed man, once invisible, becomes a sign that God’s mercy and love flows beyond systems and rules. The religious leaders, bound by Sabbath law, cannot see the miracle for what it is. But poetry is stronger than law; the imagination of God breaks open the rigid structures that imprison love. True reconciliation happens when the human heart awakens to beauty, when we see in another’s healing the possibility of our own. It is God’s tenderness reaching into long suffering, not to erase it but to bring hope and life…. the beginning of awe and wonder.”
reflective action
Today, take time to bring before God two people or two groups who remember the same event differently.
Hold one name in your left hand, and the other in your right.
Do not try to reconcile them.
Simply breathe, and offer both to God’s mercy :
“Teach us to hold truth without hatred, and memory without fear.”
journalling prompt
Think of a moment – personal, familial, or national – where the truth was not simple, where pain and hope lived side by side.
Write an imaginary letter to someone who you have had a very different experience of truth and way of seeing an issue.
Write with tenderness, allowing the complexity to remain but showing you have deeply heard and understand their voice.
