ACCOMPANING THE PEOPLE OF EL SALVADOR

Over the last five decades, the imagery used to describe missionaries has profoundly changed. Whereas missionaries used to be commissioned to “take” the gospel to every corner, missionaries today are called to discover God’s presence and revelation where it is already present in other regions and cultures of the world and to help nurture, grow, and refine those sprouts.  In other words, borrowing images from Jesus’ parables, missionaries have changed from pearl merchants into treasure hunters.

Memorial Wall with 40,000 Names and the Images of the 4 Church Women 

This change of understanding guided the journey to El Salvador that I recently undertook, just after Thanksgiving.  I had signed up to join a delegation jointly sponsored by SHARE Foundation (www.share-elsalvador.org) and by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (www.lcwr.org), that is, by the association of leaders of 80 percent of U.S. Roman Catholic nuns.

Tomb of Bp. Oscar Romero at the Cathedral in San Sanvador

Based at a simple hotel in the capital, San Salvador, for one week I crisscrossed the country in the company of some 115 others (about 100 of them nuns), traveling to many rural and urban places in three beat-up yellow U.S. school buses. The majority of our meals included rice, beans, plantains, pupusas, and many delicious fresh fruit, such as papayas, pineapple, and bananas.

Garden at teh University of Central America (UCA) with Images of the Six Slain Jesuits and 2 House Keepers

The occasion and timing of the delegation was not a happy one. It marked the 35^th anniversary of the brutal killing of four Catholic churchwomen (three sisters, one young lay missionary).  On December 2, 1980, these four “Gringa” women paid the ultimate price in service to God and their Salvadoran brothers and sisters when they joined the ranks of the about 80,000 people murdered or “disappeared” during the civil war that lasted from 1980-1992. Two of the women were buried in El Salvador, 2 were flown home to be buried in the US.

In San Pedro Nonualco, Gathering around the Shrine Built in Memory of the 4 Church Women

I learned on this delegation a multitude of facts that I had not known previously and heard many first-hand stories about massacres, repatriations, and murdered or missing family members – too many stories to tell in this format.  What stayed with me most clearly, though, was that those commissioned to positions of Christian leadership (as lay leaders, catechists, nuns, priests, or bishops) clearly saw the face of Christ present among the poor, beaten down, abused men, women, and children whom they served. 

Tombs of Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke & Ita Ford, Cemetery in Chalatenango

The sisters did not so much go to Central America to take the Gospel of Christ to the poor peasants and refugees with whom they worked.  Rather, in Central America they encountered Christ where he was already present: in the bereaved, hunted, anguished faces of widows and orphans holding up photos of their missing husbands and fathers, in the hungry refugees in need of food and shelter, and in the brutalized bodies thrown out of jeeps and left by the roadside.  They did not take Christ to them.  Christ was already there.  Christ was present and beckoned the “haves” to join him among the “have-nots.”

Walking toward Mass in a Town in Chalatenango District

Having entered into relationships with human beings suffering unimaginable violence (unimaginable for the vast majority of U.S. citizens), they began to look at the world from below, from the vantage point of the poor. And there, among that suffering people, they were finding Jesus — accompanying the victims, the massacred, the tortured, the families who had found the bodies of their loved ones lying along roadsides. Like the Good Samaritan, they could not just walk by; they stopped to care for the wounded and to see to their healing. But they also knew the suffering would not end unless the root causes were addressed — the injustice and repression of the Salvadoran military regime and its wealthy sponsors.

"...so that the blood of all martyrs may become the seed of liberation" (Mons. Oscar Romero)

To me, the witness of these four women is a testimony to the power of God to transform madness into hope. Most of all, though, it is a witness to the God who joined humanity in their lives by coming to them as a powerless child in a smelly stable.

Cross Designed from the Faces of Salvadoran Martyrs

I wish and pray that we at Bethel would be united in discovering Christ where he is already at work in the world.  Christmas was not only an event that happened 2,000 years ago.  Christmas, the incarnation of God in humankind, still happens in the here and now. More often than not, it happens among those who are as poor and powerless as Mary and Joseph were. May we have eyes to see God’s face, ears to hear God’s word, and hands ready to serve wherever God may lead us!

Mos. Oscar Arnulfo Romero and other Salvadoran Saints

Mural at the Airport in San Salvador & the Church where Mons Romero was Assassinated