The Sacrament of Self-Doubt

Three days after Christmas I went with friends in El Salvador to one of the most painful places to visit there, the village of El Mozote. In 1981, soldiers came into town and rounded up all the villagers, and methodically massacred nearly a thousand people, almost half of them, children. One woman lived to tell the story. Her name was Rufina Amaya, and eventually she was able to get an international team to come in and examine the site. Among the bodies they found, among the remains of children and mothers and fathers, they found bullet casings that were stamped with markings identifying them as having been made for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri. US military advisors had trained the battalion that committed the massacre.
Sometimes I find it difficult to walk around in my North American skin in El Salvador. My country has done a lot of damage, there.
That same day, we went to the Museo de la Revolucion in the town of Perquon. Museum displays in El Salvador might break your heart, not just for what is displayed but for the poverty of the presentation. Old photos and posters were lovingly swathed in thin plastic wrap and hung on the wall, with hand-typed captions in Spanish and English. Over and over again in El Salvador I am bowled over by how much people can do with almost nothing, like those houses made out of sticks and bits of plastic. Here was a museum made of old posters and baggies. And it knocked me over.
After the first room, with its pictures and posters of Monsenor Romero and other, less recognizable, martyrs and heroes of El Salvador, we came to a room of posters from around the world, supporting the Salvadoran people during their years of struggle. I remembered my first big anti-war march in Washington in 1981, shouting "US out of El Salvador!" Somehow, driving all night to a protest march, a very big deal at the time, now felt like a tiny drop in a hole-y bucket. We protested the war," I told my friends. But we didn't stop it.
The next room was even more uncomfortable, and for a different reason. Here were proudly displayed guns and other armaments. Out back was a downed, captured chopper, and we heard the story from our guide. This pacifist Catholic Worker was not at peace. Vulnerable, oppressed people fought a well-supplied army for twelve years using bombs made out of old pipes and handkerchiefs, digging holes in the ground to bury their wounded alive until it was safe to retrieve them, living in tents made of bark out in the jungle. And made enough of a difference to get some dignity in the peace accords, becoming a recognized political party that is now in power both nationally and in Santa Ana. I walked around the room, looking at the displays, my pacifism struggling with my respect for people who did what they believed they had to do. What do I do with this?
My friend Ruth is a Baptist pastor in Santa Ana. It was a comfort to find her struggling in the same way that I was. How does one respond? How did the priests respond when the fighting people wanted to use their churches as a safe place to hide? Where does one stand in such a moment? How do you be true to yourself, and respond in love to the people around you? Are we only on the side of the oppressed as long as they are victims? Do they lose our support when they begin to fight back? It's a pastoral question that all idealists have to confront: what happens when our ideals come up against what someone else perceives as their necessity?
There is violence in a self-righteous perfectionism that says, "I'm following the way of Jesus," while my sisters and brothers suffer. I don't think so. That just can't be as perfect as it appears. I think perfection gets its hands dirty and makes mistakes and learns and suffers and bleeds.
I don't know where I would have stood in the midst of that conflict. My own heart insists on non-violence  - and also on honoring the struggle of those who see violence as the only way out. Especially, we must not equate the responsive violence of those breaking out of deeply entrenched oppression with the violence of powerful governments and armies.
Our guide on the second part of our tour was a man who was once a guerilla. From the age of 16 to 28, he fought, he told us, and he believed in what they were doing. But now, at 47, he wonders. "On both sides," he said, "Rich people got richer, selling arms, while the poor killed each other. Poor people were both soldiers and guerillas, but the soldiers got paid. And for the poor, nothing has really changed." 
War is not a solution. I have no doubt about that. I believe there is another way, a third way, as Walter Wink says, *neither acquiescing in oppression, nor responding with violence. That, I think, is the great challenge for the church to find that non-violent response that lays bare the injustice, to absorb suffering and transform it. We need to be very clear that we are never telling oppressed people to just take it, or to cooperate in their own oppression. And for me, as a North American woman among people my own government helped to repress, I think I need to remain in awe, to listen, to learn. I need to stand with broken heart and ask, each moment, what it means to love.

Oscar Romero Church
An Inclusive Church in the Catholic Tradition
Mass: Sundays, 11 am
St Joseph's House of Hospitality, 402 South Ave, Rochester NY 14603
 

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(to learn more about the El Mozote Massacre, see the UN Truth Commission Report at * HYPERLINK "http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/articles/0197/el_moz05.htm" **http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/articles/0197/el_moz05.htm*)
I am indebted to Walter Wink for the light his ideas have shed on this struggle: Walter Wink, Jesus and Non-Violence: A Third Way (Fortress Press 2003)

Rev. Chava Redonnet
* I am indebted to Walter Wink for the light his ideas have shed on this struggle: Walter Wink, Jesus and Non-Violence: A Third Way (Fortress Press 2003)