Why This Love for Venezuela?
A few days ago I read a phrase I liked very much: “I will die in a rocking chair, looking at El Ávila, in a democratic country.” And I thought: why do so many of us Venezuelans love this country, with all its problems, so “madly”? Some say that “to love, you have to suffer.”
And if anyone has suffered (plenty!) all these years, it is us Venezuelans. It seems that pain has swollen our hearts with a love so strong that some might consider it almost a crazy love.
I remember someone, three years ago, who had just been transferred from Africa to Venezuela and said that we were just like Africa here, and pity anyone who didn’t have the means to leave. I told her that there were many Venezuelans who could have left but decided to stay and fight for their country. That person is being transferred again in a few days, and she says it will be very hard to leave because her family has “fallen in love” with Venezuela.
Could it be that we Venezuelans are very passionate, and that we love to share our passion with others? That passion has grown in us from fighting so hard, day after day, to provide for our families; from waiting so long, year after year, to see a better future; from crying so much over so many separations and deaths; from praying and praying, because of one thing we are certain: God is going to hear us…
Why are so many of us so sure of that? I don’t think it is a coincidence that we are the second country in the world where the Virgin appeared and that, like Mexico, we are the only country where She left an image of herself. Some days ago I watched a documentary by the María Camino a Jesús Foundation, in which the scientists who analyzed the relic of Our Lady of Coromoto show their astonishment at what they found (they describe how it changed their attitude toward God and the Church). One of them says: “We magnified the image with a zoom, and when I focused the microscope on that tiny point of the Virgin’s eye (the size of a pinpoint), I found a perfect brown eyeball, with orb, iris, lens, cornea… It was the shock of my life. No human being could have made that.”
I know some of you must be calling me crazy by now. But do you want me to tell you something? There are plenty of us “crazy people” who love God, our Virgin of Coromoto and our Church “passionately”!
And how could we not be “out of our minds” with love for a country that has an Ávila (or a spectacular landscape in every city) that makes us sigh every time we see it? When we look at our hillside shantytowns and know (because we have seen it) that thousands of hopes live there, studying, working and fighting “silently and tirelessly” from before dawn until after dark.
How could we not love our people when we see how passionately so many defend life and family values? When we see a Church that is exemplary in its dedication to others. When we talk with so many helpful young employees who tell us what they are doing here and what they hope for. How could we not be in love with a country like this, not to mention its food, its climate, its music, its beaches, and so much more?
What hope it gives us to know that so many of us “madly in love” are building on solid foundations so that our children and grandchildren can live in a better country! Because they are the number-one reason for our madness: those “all-terrain” children and young people who have learned to love their homeland like no one else. And how they count on our support and our prayers to keep going!
How could that love not grow when you read phrases like the one I quoted at the beginning, and see thousands of other fighters who could leave but are still here, giving their country everything down to the marrow? So here we will stay, with this “crazy love”! Whatever happens, whatever comes, whatever they say and whatever is done by those who would like to take our dreams away. How wonderful it is to live fighting for what you love! What happiness to know that we will stay here until we reach our final homeland: Heaven!