ABSTRACT
Mayra Rivera notices the shame and guilt of some theologians over the harm wrought by colonial and modern ideologies. Seeking to help them, she finds inspiration in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), a French, Roman Catholic philosopher. As she “thinks with” Merleau-Ponty, she notes that he wrestled with his religious tradition’s complicity in the Holocaust. The Catholic view of God contains an ambiguity – God is both interior and exterior. We assume that by going inward, God is immediately accessible, but when we go inward, we turn away from the poor and the stranger. In God’s incarnation, Merleau-Ponty sees a prescription. By becoming flesh, God consented to become externalized. God became flesh, not in the sense of “body,” but in the sense of the relationship between our bodies and things in the world. God thus privileged the world and calls on Christians to do the same. Rivera concludes that her friends’ shame and guilt are best externalized through actions in service of this world.
