How I Got to Where I’m Going #1: The UCA Martyrs

As my time with the Finca draws closer each day, I continually ask myself: 'What brought me here?' Over the next month I hope to answer this question by sharing some past reflections on faith, service, vocation, community, and charity. The following is a reflection that I shared with a group at Georgetown for an event called "Jesuits and Justice in Latin America" as part of Jesuit Heritage Week 2011:

Let’s begin tonight in a rose garden. We are together in a garden behind the Jesuit residence at a university in Central America. It is a Jesuit University, not all that different from Georgetown. It’s a hot, sunny January day—imagine that. Imagine you are walking slowly through this garden looking at the bright red roses. I want you to try to feel something deep inside of you. What do you feel? Are you moved at all?

These are the questions I asked myself as I walked through this same rose garden at the University of Central America or the UCA in El Salvador on my first day of studying abroad there with the Casa de La Solidaridad. I knew that just 20 years earlier the bodies of 6 Jesuit priests lay on that ground in pools of blood. They were teachers and scholars, and they had been violently murdered for doing what few others dared—they spoke out for the poor and urged their students to do the same. For this, the Salvadoran National guard stormed into the Jesuit residence late at night and shot them all.

Even knowing these details of the brutal murder of the Jesuits before arriving in El Salvador, I still struggled to feel something more. I had expected to be overwhelmed with emotion, but I wasn’t. I knew that there they had died, yet I didn’t quite realize, in the fullest sense of that word, that they still live.
10 years later a Jesuit priest named Dean Brackley and young married couple who had served as Jesuit volunteers shared pupusas together (in the same way that we will later tonight), and they discussed a new way to educate students—a way that would break open hearts. In that dinner conversation the Casa de la Solidaridad (which Leslie, Chloe and I have participated in) was born. Over four months of immersing ourselves in the Salvadoran reality, we integrated our class work with praxis; that is, real life experience of building relationships of solidarity with the poor and vulnerable of El Salvador. We heard the stories of Salvadorans in our praxis communities, and we walked with them. We lived simply and grew as a community rooted in Ignatian values. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to tell you everything about the Casa experience, but the point is that students just like you are entering into the Jesuit mission to live in solidarity with the poor.

Fr. Brackley invites students to enter into the Salvadoran reality at the Casa with the following words, and I want you to listen carefully to these words:
“I invite you to discover your vocation in downward mobility. It's a scary request... The world is obsessed with wealth and security and upward mobility and prestige. But let us teach solidarity, walking with the victims, serving and loving. I offer this for you to consider -- downward mobility. And I would say in this enterprise there is a great deal of hope.

Have the courage to lose control.

Have the courage to feel useless.

Have the courage to listen.

Have the courage to receive.

Have the courage to let your heart be broken.

Have the courage to feel.

Have the courage to fall in love.

Have the courage to get ruined for life.

Have the courage to make a friend.”

After my very last class at the UCA, I went back to the rose garden for the first time since that January day. After four months of glimpsing the dreams of the martyrs, I felt it. They were not dead, but very much alive. The blood of these Jesuits cries out from the earth, and today’s Jesuits and their collaborators continue to live in the hope of the martyrs.

Our hope this evening is that when we walk through this garden again maybe—if only slightly--we will feel it. We will know that they are alive.