Spiritual Growths of Rigoberta Menchu, Gandhi, and Satomi Myodo - Assignment Example

Message from Dear Jessica, this is not yet the final paper. This is still a draft. I will upload the completed, finalized paper this afternoon, 5 pm. Kindly ignore the completed status of your order. Thanks! What difficulties did Rigoberta Menchu, Gandhi, and Satomi Myodo go through in their lives in their spiritual growths and what were their motivations? (discuss the stages of spiritual growth) Rigoberta Menchu Rigoberta Menchu, a somewhat uneducated peasant from Guatemala, has narrated her spiritual growth and vigorous development in her book titled I, Rigoberta Menchu. She writes a testimony of her development from an innocent victim to a socially and spiritually purposeful religious advocate. As the Spanish caption openly declares, ‘this is an autobiography of Latin American native consciencization, told ‘from below’’. Even though she is a small woman, Rigoberta lived her spiritual life with inner strength and faith that is quite remarkable for a woman of her stature. Her cheerful personality and hopeful actions conceal the deep misery she has experienced in her brief lifespan. Her story narrates the unimaginable pain and torment that people are capable of exacting on one another, along with the unbelievable capability of the human spirit to continue with faith, confidence, and determination despite such profound misery. Menchu is a Quiche Indian, an indigenous group in the Americas. She was born to parents Vicente Menchu and Juana Tum in 1959 in Chimel, Guatemala. Her parents made an effort to build a home in Chimel, but were driven out by ‘ladinos’— an indigenous group of diverse Indian and Spaniard descent who look to themselves as superior to the indigenous Indians. Because of this widespread discrimination, the Quiche Indians moved to the mountains, where farming is almost impossible and conditions are harsh. There they contented themselves with wild plants, maize, tortillas, and beans they had sown. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was also thriving in the area where the family of Rigoberta lived. Due to her positive attitude and eagerness to learn, the twelve-year-old Rigoberta was cherry-picked as a catechist. Because the pastor was only able to visit their community every three months, Rigoberta was tasked to impart Catholic teachings to the villagers. She studied the books provided by the pastor, but because she was not able to understand Spanish, she had to communicate Catholic teachings by heart. She tirelessly taught and encouraged her fellow people to pray the Rosary, pray for the ill and the suffering, use Latin in prayers, pull together resources to acquire provisions the village needed, sing Catholic praises and worship hymns, and learn biblical stories and teachings in groups, guiding them toward a lively conversation about living as a Christian. Her task as a catechist paved the way for the eventual political involvement of Menchu, by both endowing a spiritual justification for her mission and training her to bring together and mobilize large numbers of people. But the greatest motivation for Rigoberta’s spiritual growth stemmed from her mother’s teachings, the hardships encountered by her family, and life experiences, in general. Rigoberta’s mother taught her to open up or communicate her emotions and thoughts and not to prevent emotional acts which the men in their community, including her father, could not deal with, particularly during funerals. In their community, the responsibilities of her mother involved planting and preparing food, providing education and health care, auditing, and familiarizing Rigoberta and her siblings to their duties. Her mother familiarized her to beliefs and traditions of her people—gift-giving customs, weather forecasting, planting and harvesting, tribal unity, family life, and preparation for marriage. Nonetheless, the development of the social awareness of her mother was possibly her best gift to Rigoberta. She trained Rigoberta in coping with chauvinism in a marital relationship and with other stereotypes or restrictions of women’s traditional roles. Moreover, Rigoberta became aware of political activism through her mother’s actions: “My mother couldn’t express her views about political things; but she was very politicized through her work and thought that we should learn to be women, but women who were useful to the community.” Such political engagement of Rigoberta’s mother stemmed from her belief about gender equality, buried underneath some fairly unequal roles. Her mother’s admirable bravery in confronting death motivated Rigoberta in her own experiences with pain, suffering, and death. She first encountered death when her younger brother died of starvation and her friend of lethal pesticide spray in the coffee farms— both were victims of the dangerous life on the fields. The Menchu lost their jobs because the burial of Rigoberta’s brother disrupted the tasks and responsibilities of the entire family for a few days. This incident angered the young Rigoberta: “I was both angry with life and afraid of it, because I told myself: ‘This is the life I will lead too; having many children, and having them die.’… I was afraid of life and I’d ask myself: ‘What will it be like when I’m older’.” Apparently, the most painful experience with death arrived at the passing away of her father in 1980 during the overthrow of Spanish consulate in Guatemala, and at the persecution and killing of her mother as a rebel by the military immediately afterward. The brutal death of her parents led her not into hopelessness but into a strengthening of her spiritual growth and determination to fight back. In truth, she had been toughened and primed for these deaths by the abduction and murder of her teenage brother by the military in 1979, an incident she narrates in disturbingly accurate thoroughness. The death of her parents and brother was also the death of Rigoberta’s key motivators in her political and spiritual growth to awareness. Her father had motivated her political learning, activism, and leadership in the community, while her mother had motivated her knowledge and appreciation of indigenous traditions, work ethics, and family life. Her brother was the most immediate eyewitness to the struggle of dynamic activism in her generation. In addition to these family motivators, she expressed gratitude to community leaders, nuns, and priests for her spiritual growth, for they trained her in mountain struggle and taught her Christian values. The Christian values that Rigoberta acquired was a combination of early devotion and a vigorous kind of Catholic tradition, adoration, and teaching that reformed her spiritual life while indoctrinating her life as part of an indigenous culture. Gandhi Mohandas Gandhi was awarded the name ‘Mahatma’, which means ‘Great Soul’. This name was granted to him not only for mobilizing the Indian independence movement against British rule, but also for how he grew spiritually, as a person and as a leader. Gandhi started his calling as a quite timid and unremarkable lawyer who nobody could imagine would become a spiritual leader of the world. After moving out of India in 1891 to take a job in South Africa, the life of Gandhi transformed greatly after he was driven out of a train for declining to surrender his first-class fare after a White person had declined to give him space in the cubicle. Immediately after that fateful incident Gandhi organized social campaigns in South Africa to fight unjust practices and laws to gain more favorable living conditions for his fellow people living in the country. Moreover, Gandhi devoted himself to a spiritual journey, one focusing on sympathy, self-discipline, and simplicity. For him, “truth is God”. From then on, Gandhi’s spiritual life grew until it matures into active resistance. After going back to his homeland in 1914, Gandhi became the representative for Indians wanting to gain independence from British rule. He introduced a new approach to a peaceful struggle, the way of ‘satyagraha’. Satyagraha brings together the principles of truth and firm to imply, factually, “standing firm for truth”. According to Gandhi, the truth component in Satyagraha is God, and to oppose social injustices is to fulfill God’s mission. Not like numerous spiritual leaders who came before him, Gandhi refused to believe that God reveals the truth to him openly. Instead, he was certain that truth arises from sincere, thorough effort, study, and trial. The resistance campaigns of Gandhi were, at that time, both scientific and spiritual. Most essentially, they were peaceful and intended to draw the moral principles and sensibleness of their enemies. Moral principles were promoted not only with spoken words but with nonviolent opposition by Gandhi and his adherents, opposition that usually led to their being hurt, imprisoned, even murdered. The resistance resulted, sooner or later, in violent responses on the part of the officials which, consequently, provoked empathy for Gandhi’s mission, not only among his fellow Indians but also among the British people. Satyagraha was, at that time, a potent political instrument while it championed the spiritual growth of Gandhi. The spiritual essence of Gandhi was also expressed through his self-discipline and simplicity. He ate and dressed frugally. He did not bend to political demands, not to his personal whims and yearnings, but to what he sensed was fair, just, and true, specifically, to God. The main task of Gandhi was to seek God and to abide by God’s laws. Gandhi believed that God is intangible and indefinable and the pursuit of God can be eternal. Yet, God’s indefinability and the necessity to seek for life did not stop Gandhi, for he was confident that seeking God is the sole way to attain one’s purpose in life. Read More