On Earth as it is in Heaven
The Koinonia and mystique of the slum
As we let ourselves be guided through the pages of this
book, it is as if we are being led by hand by its author, who
walks with us in the slum across the magic of the Unknown.
Poverty and wealth are inescapably entwined to the point that
we lose all certainty and sense of proportion. Who is richer –
those who are given everything and have no need of anyone or
anything, or those who are so dependent on others that they
could not survive without help? Is it those who think they can
manage on their own or those who are aware they couldn’t get
by without others?
What hits you on entering the slum (known in Accra as
‘Sodom and Gomorrah’) is the filth, the deafening noise, the
devastating stink, the unmanageable confusion of endless
labour and the feeling of unease that everything seems coated in
the most abysmal poverty. The first impulse on entering the
slum is to turn our backs as soon as we can and return to the
order and hygiene we know. When it dawns on us that there are
no toilets and no running water, no kitchens because they can’t
be fitted with electricity or gas, and yet thousands of people live
here – a question starts to form in our minds. And not to
mention the roads! If you arrive on a rainy day, the flooding and
mud seeps everywhere. There’s no point trying to walk where
it’s dry; you might as well just take off your shoes and go
barefoot like everyone else.
There is a passage in the book where the protagonists
return to their slum equipped with gumboots, and we
immediately sense their distance. They no longer feel the earth
underfoot. For those who leave the slum, there is no going back;
they will never be the same again. Others came from the
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country in search of Eldorado, the city of gold, and settled in
the slum, as if in a dream, to seek their fortune. Our heroes find
their fortune and manage to escape the slum, but at a cost. The
slum itself abandons them – the whole world of the slum, its
infinite world of endless human riches. All the money that they
can throw at the misery of the slum can never match the bounty
of its koinonia, that intimate communion that makes brothers of
us all. The Unknown One’s message falls on deaf hearts: the
Unknown is part of the magic of the slum and won’t appear to
those conspiring to betray it, who think themselves too well
dressed to walk barefoot on its dirty, wet ground. That question
grows and takes shape in our minds.
They say that in Jerusalem a small door remained open
when larger ones close for the night. If you arrived in the city
late, you could always get in through this small, welcoming
door. It was so small compared to the other doors that it became
known as the ‘eye of the needle’. When it was open you could
go through it, but not without effort. The rich merchant had to
make his camel, laden with goods, pass through it, and it wasn’t
easy. The more goods on the camel, the harder it was to get it
through the ‘eye of the needle’. If it really could not get
through, the merchant had to take off all the wares and push the
camel’s head down so that it could cross the little threshold. It
was impossible for all those riches to come into the city without
an act of humility. Perhaps Jesus had this story in mind when he
cautioned the rich people and taught them that the only way
they could enter the kingdom of heaven was to similarly strip
themselves of all worldly goods.
That question has now crystallised: if thousands of
people manage to survive in the slum, they must have
something we don’t, something that allows them to manage,
which we still do not know about, a treasure more precious than
gold, which that can’t be bought. This is the tale told by
Claudio Turina, a tale he tells because he has lived it, has come
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to understand it in his work as a missionary and, earlier, on
embracing Christianity. We can either wear gumboots or take
off our shoes; we can either enter into the slum or just walk
through it; we can either pass through the ‘eye of the needle’ or
be barred because our load is too great. Claudio attempted to
take off his shoes and truly enter the heart of the slum. He was
able to do it because Mother Theresa showed him how. He was
able to tell us about it because he had already experimented
with the idea at other times in his life, as a lay missionary
pilgrim of the world.
So we, too, come into the slum barefoot and try to
unveil its hidden secrets: the dirt is an inexhaustible mine of
small treasures ready to be recycled and exchanged for other
useful goods; the deafening noise is a mix of hypnotising music
and cries of joy containing an irrepressible urge to
communicate; the stink is comingled with the aroma of flavours
evaporating from huge pots, of spices and of wood burning on
the roadside conjuring up meals in the open; the confusion is an
expression of the industriousness of people who must use all
their ingenuity to achieve the smallest necessity, the most
everyday gain; and poverty, which had seemed to coat
everything, suddenly takes on a natural essentiality.
It could not be otherwise: the shacks amassed in an allenveloping
embrace have no room for the extraneous; the
variety of the materials stacked together to build them creates a
unique style made up of infinite colours, glowing under the
light of the sun or reflecting the iridescent magic of a thousand
night-time fires.
The secret of the Unknown begins to reveal itself: the
slum is not the Eldorado we all expected; it does not offer the
gold everyone has desperately been seeking – but riches,
manifold and incalculable, which comprise koinonia, that
sharing of love and worldly goods that underlies the Christian
experience. Life in the slum thus becomes an inexplicably
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natural mystical experience – the fruit not of theological or
spiritual research but of the spontaneous perception of the
essence of things. The spectre of Eldorado in the end turns out
to be the spirit of God; what should have been the city of gold
turns out as if by magic to be the city of God.
This is Claudio Turina’s inner journey: from the city of
men to the City of God. City of God is not only a book; it has
become a project, a website, a life trajectory. Claudio has
written many fine and interesting books, engaging memoirs and
moving poetry. But none has so far affected us with such
invasive human and spiritual energy – so much so as to become
its own creature, walking on its own two legs towards a future
to and transcending its creator.
This is the spirit of the slum, its mystique and its
koinonia, and Claudio has been able to interpret them.
Prof. Daniele Spero