An extract from two reflections by Casaldálgia, Bishop of  São Félix in Brazil from 1970 to 2005, first published in in 'The Spirituality of Liberation', 1993.

Militancy, like constancy, cannot be kept for the "peak times." It must require a continuity in militancy, a continuity we can call faithfulness. 

"Faithfulness" means virtually the same as constancy in taking up a cause, beginning on a process, defending the oppressed. Here, in effect, the committed sectors, those groups we should call militant, have given proof, are giving proof, and have done so more than ever in recent decades, of this radical faithfulness. 

In the past few years, we have experienced a sort of fatigue, a self=confessed foreseen defeat, as Utopias and ideologies have fallen. And yet the bulletins and manifestos continue to appear, meetings and congresses are still held. There is a great concern to take hold of our Utopia once more. There is a phrase much used in pastoral work with indigenous peoples, and repeated in many documents: "reorganizing hope." In the face of so much hesitation, discouragement, renunciation of Utopias, we are reorganizing hope, being, in an old expression, "defeated soldiers of an invincible cause." 

In this process, we are discovering that we have to be faithful in all areas of life. People were often faithful, even fanatically so, to the aims of the party, to the orders of the resistance movement, and yet fell down in faithfulness within their own families, in control of their own passions. Somehow they fell into the bourgeois pattern of a double standard. 

Total faithfulness places the cause above personal life...A revolutionary spirit will always find, one way or another, a tension between Utopia and reality. Utopia is always so u-topic, so "without a place here," so "in another place," that it is also resistant to lodging in our lives. Paradoxically, it is easier to lay down one's life on the altars of Utopia than to hand it over in everyday faithfulness, in the obscurity of anonymity and the minutiae of everyday living. It is easier to love great causes from a distance than to make them a living part of our everyday commitment. It is easier to make expansive gestures to the gallery than to be faithful in the little details that make up the dim pattern of anonymous daily life.

"It is easier to win freedom than to administer it every day," said Bolfvar. It is easier to win a revolution than to carry it on with a sustained mystique over the following years, as the Sandinista experience showed. A heroic insurrection is easier than the "daily revolution" needed in society and our own individual lives.

The liberating spirit is not a spirit of libertinage, of anarchy. This would be a false liberation. Ours is a disciplined spirituality, even in the cause of the revolution it seeks to serve. We live day-by-day, to a disciplined schedule, giving our work, rest, socializing, prayer, each its allotted time. The more utopic we are, the stronger and more impulsive our mystique is, the more direction and limits we need, so as not to spread ourselves too thinly.

Authenticity is impossible without discipline and self-control to order our lives and activities. The best revolutionaries have always been models of discipline and self-control. Liberty and celebration can easily be misunderstood, exaggerated, pushed to undue excess. Discipline, order, method, planning, feedback, faithfulness in little things, perseverance, tenacity... are the marks of our spirit. This is the "realism" of those who are "genuinely and consistently utopic."

"Utopia has its calendar." Facing up to each day as it comes means living in the actual situation where the struggle for Utopias takes place; it means having the capacity to surmount the misery and failure implicit in all human striving seen closeto in the ring of reality, with no idealization. They alone have true hope who are not scandalized or discouraged by everyday experience.

Being faithful day-by-day, on the individual level, is also what is involved in personal wholeness, in the unity of personal life, in overcoming the split personality implied by being "two-faced" or operating a double standard. Increasingly today, the requirements for personal wholeness and Christian holiness are seen to lie in the ascesis of self-control—ensuring that it is our "adult" rather than "child" or any other of our many selves that increasingly controls our situation—of psychic maturity, of harmonious relationships with others on all levels: family, workplace, pastoral care, union or political party, ecumenical work, leisure, idleness. This is not easy: "Mea maxima poetitentia, vita communis" said St John Berchmans: "My greatest penance is life in community".

Being open to criticism and growing in this true ascesis of communal criticism, as well as forcing oneself to be truly democratic at work, in dealing with people in general and with one's own team, are real spiritual experiences. We also need the ascesis of harmony, of balance: through not knowing how to live harmoniously day-by-day, many militants have destroyed their families, their feelings, their personal balance, their political Utopia... and some Christian militants have also destroyed their own chance of holiness.

Being truly faithful day-by-day implies surmounting the self-deceit characteristic of those who feel great ethical indignation at national or world injustices, those who feel deep "compassion" for the oppressed of distant lands and even contribute generously to their aid, but at the same time have no compassionate sensitivity to the needs of those closest to them, and fail to see where their immediate duties lie: to family— wife or husband, children, parents, grandparents—to community— care of common property, responsible participation in communal works, not being a burden on others, neighbourhood projects, the local environment—to the rest of society— paying taxes, fair business dealings, obeying traffic laws...

Certain classic forms of monastic life, of strict enclosure, valid in earlier ages, are today not necessarily the best ways of responding to the demands of human solidarity and social responsibility. It is not enough to retire to the desert alone to live with God and wrestle with the Devil. The challenge of good and evil also has to be faced in solidarity with others. (This is not to deny the validity of specific vocations to deep contemplation, always in solidarity, as vocations to prayer, to witness to transcendence; these are more needed than ever in the midst of a dark, "short-termist" world.) 

Day-to-day living is where it is hardest to overcome personal contradictions: the gap between Utopia, ideals, generosity, noble and heroic gestures on one side, and the egoisms of shared living (with spouse, at home, in the community, at work), corruption, failure in little tasks, weakness in such human things as gluttony, sexual immaturity, alcohol, on the other. How we behave day-by-day is where those around us perceive the basic vices that we usually fail to see in ourselves: bossiness, self-importance, pride, making use of others, irresponsibility...

Personal harmony requires an inner structural coherence: this means a deep harmony and cohesion between our basic attitude and our specific actions. Only when there is coherence between these can we achieve harmony, authenticity and veracity, and do so on all levels: inner life, individual, family, locality, economic, public. Witness would be the chief sign of veracity, and martyrdom its supreme form.

Those who struggle for Utopia, for radical change, saints marked by the liberating spirit, are all of a piece; they carry faithfulness from the root of their being on to the smallest details that others overlook: attention to the littlest, respect for subordinates, eradication of egoism and pride, care for common property, generous dedication to voluntary work, honesty in dealings with the state, punctuality in correspondence, not being impressed by rank, being impervious to bribes...

Detailed everyday faithfulness is the best guarantee of the veracity of our Utopias. The more utopic we are, the more down-to-earth! There is a saying that "Every man has his price," that for one reward or another (money, power, distinction, honours, comfort, sex, fame, adulation...) , everyone, one day or another, will end up giving in, selling conscience, dignity, honesty. Corruption is a major plague at all levels of most societies; denunciations of it and impotence in the face of it are a common refrain. The new man and new woman, filled with spirit, really cannot be bought, even in little things and on bad days. 

How we act day-by-day is the most reliable test for demonstrating the quality of our lives and the spirit that inspires them. This is where we have to put these counsels into practice, as I have written elswhere: "Be what you are. Speak what you believe. Believe what you preach. Live what you proclaim. To the final consequences, and in the smallest everyday matters." This "day-by-day" has become one of the main forms of "ascesis" in our spirituality: the heroism of the everyday, the domestic, the routine, of faithfulness even in the smallest details. Everyday faithfulness has become one of the chief criteria of authenticity—because, [in the words of the Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, those who have the message of liberation and those who really liberate are not the same."

Tell me how you live out an ordinary day, any day, and I will tell you if your dream of tomorrow is worth anything.

Utopia is not a chimera. It has to tackle the "incredible inertia of the actual" (Romano Guardini) and the "unbearable lightness of being" (Milan Kundera). The Kairos can come only in the kronos. It breaks out in the kronos, and has to be accepted there today, every day.