Study Trip Reflections: Oscar Romero

During yesterday's visit in El Salvador,  President Obama lit a candle at the tomb of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero in the cathedral in San Salvador, which our group will also visit during our upcoming study trip.  From the moment of our arrival in the airport  (where Salvadoran President Funes last year unveiled a mural between Gate 8 and Gate 9 depicting Romero) we'll begin to see Romero's image all around us -- in photographs and posters hanging on walls in offices, in hand-drawn pictures reproduced on pamphlets and book covers, and in larger-than-life-sized multi-colored mosaics and vibrant murals on buildings we will pass on busy city streets and in quiet villages.  If we're really paying attention, we'll also see his face in men and women we meet, and we'll be surrounded by his presence alive in the Salvadoran people who continue to work for justice, end poverty and oppression, and call for peace.  -- CAROLINE

This brief video(Romero by Romero1) includes archival footage of Oscar Romero among his people, as well as testimonies from people who witnessed the power of his presence and his message.  Note - This is a trailer for a documentary by director Evarardo Gonzalez.

Our third pre-departure reflection, posted below, is the bulletin insert Chava Redonnet wrote for this past Sunday at the newly formed Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church where she says mass each week. Chava is a Catholic woman priest who serves as chaplain at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in Rochester, NY. Founded in 1935, the St. Joe's Catholic Worker community provides food, clothing, shelter and spiritually-centered care to its guests.

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Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church
Bulletin for Sunday, March 27, 2011 
3^rd Sunday in Lent

Friends,

This week in El Salvador President Obama will visit the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero, after whom our church is named. It is said that Romero, who had been elected in the expectation that he would be the sort of bishop who would not make waves, had something of a conversion experience over the body of Fr. Rutilio Grande, the first Salvadoran priest to be martyred. Some people believe that when he realized that his friend had given his life for the poor of El Salvador, he became aware that he, too, had to stand with the poor. After that, his voice grew stronger and stronger. He made many enemies as he fearlessly began to walk with oppressed people and speak in their defense. He said things like, “The church that does not unite itself to the poor in order to denounce from the place of the poor the injustice committed against them is not truly the church of Jesus Christ.” The whole country listened to his sermons. On Sunday morning you could walk down the street and hear his voice coming out of every house, as he spoke about the truth of the situation in El Salvador. Finally on March 23, 1980, he spoke a direct challenge to the soldiers who were torturing and killing people. He told them that God’s law outweighed orders from their superiors. “In the name of God,” he told them, “I beg you – I ORDER you – STOP THE OPPRESSION.”

The next day an assassin shot him through the heart as he stood at the altar at the Divine Providence Hospital offering Mass.

Before he died, Monseñor Romero said, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” And it turned out he was right. His memory is alive and life-giving. There are statues, memorials and murals in his memory all over the country. His name is like a code word for caring about the poor.

In 2005 I visited his little house on the grounds of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador. It is full of relics of his life – all his little possessions, lovingly preserved and on display. Most of them seemed strange to me, kind of foreign. But then something stopped me in my tracks. It was a pair of clip-on sunglasses, very ordinary. I could have bought them at the grocery store here in Rochester. I looked at those sunglasses and felt the immediacy, the reality and closeness of his life and work. His work is not foreign. His concerns are still concerns today. The poor still suffer, in El Salvador and all over the world. That horrible dichotomy between the people who have much materially and have the power to shape the world their way, and the voiceless, powerless poor – that’s still ours, today. What are we going to do about it?

The message of liberation theology is that such questions are appropriate for the church, are in fact crucial to the life of the church. We cannot claim to be following Jesus, and ignore the desperate cries of the people, the poor of Latin America, of Africa and India and our own cities. We need to ask hard questions about economic justice. We need to be willing to suffer, ourselves, to let go of the excess we take for granted. And first of all, we need to leave our comfort zones and walk with people who are different from us, and be in relationship, and learn, and see our sisters and brothers for the people that they are – God’s own beloved children, just like us.

Here at Oscar Romero Church we hope to do that in our small way by bringing Mass in Spanish to people who are not attending church because they are afraid of deportation. You are welcome to join us in that project, which will begin later in the spring.

My prayer for President Obama as he visits the tomb of Monseñor Romero this week is that he, too, will have a conversion experience, and be on fire for the poor. May we as a nation become aware of our neighbors to the South as our neighbors, as people with the same desires we have for life, for education and health care and houses, for hope --- and not as the possessors of resources to take for ourselves, or as a threat to our own well-being. May our relationship change, for better and for good.

I am so grateful for the example of Monseñor Romero. A newspaper headline called him a “human rights activist” – which is kind of like calling Gandhi a community organizer. He was a priest, a bishop, a shepherd, a martyr and a prophet. Above all, he was a pastor who walked with his people, who gave them his voice, his energy, his life. Saint Romero, pray for us.

Blessings and love to all,
Chava

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

Study Trip Reflections: Incarnation

Ruth has been finalizing details of our itinerary with Ron, and our study group participants will take part in a conference call on Sunday evening to talk with each other for the first time.  From Santa Ana to Philadelphia... From Rochester NY to Greensboro NC... From Lubbock TX to Takoma Park MD... the anticipation is building!

Our second reflection posted below comes from Barrett Smith, missionary-pastor of the Carpenter's Church in Lubbock:  "We are a diverse group of people located mostly in the Overton area. We've been here since 1998 trying to be a place of belonging to all who find themselves here. Whether we've been pushed to the fringes of society or find ourselves wandering there, we come together to find something different, something authentic, something divine. And we believe we're finding it together, on our journey with God." 


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Mzungu Syndrome, I began to call it. A sort of coping mechanism perhaps. It became my term for the terrifying tendency that I encountered and perpetuated during a brief visit amongst the Giryama people on the east coast of Kenya. I was alarmed as we drove through the countryside - past a large group of children outside their cinder block school. “Ciao!” “Ciao!” They yelled with their hands raised as they ran after us longing for the candy that was supposed to come sailing through the windows. However, the reality of this syndrome penetrated most deeply as I talked with Christian Ministers in the area. They would often describe their difficult living conditions and then turn towards me. With a hint of a sparkle in their eye they would say, “If only I could be in America…” Flustered, I would scramble to defend their way of life and point out every American foible that I could think of while sharing all the good that I saw around me. Still, their pain was often too deep and the “good life” that I proclaimed by my presence was too tantalizing. This presence, despite my counter desires and efforts, tended to bring attention to their lack rather than their wholeness. It tended to point out their communal brokenness rather than their communal health. It tended to mark them as inadequate rather than God’s chosen people. Simply because I had the ability to be there for a short time.

Let’s make a VERY rough parallel and meditate for a few moments on the incarnation of Jesus. What does it mean for Jesus to “pitch his tent among us?” What does it say about who God is? What does it communicate to us, you, me, and the rest of creation?

God’s material, physical entrance as Jesus could not help but point out the difference between Himself and Creation. After all, God was the one who made the move. However, Jesus was determined to break through this false chasm between Creation and God. In Matthew 20 James and John come to Jesus asking to sit at his right and left in the kingdom. One could say that they wished to move to America as reward for the difficulty of life in Judea following Jesus. However, Jesus responds by calling on his disciples to become servants and slaves. After all, he didn’t take advantage of his equality with God. Rather, by his own humanity and his service to creation, he spoke to its goodness. He moved for its wholeness. We are reminded of this today each time that we take the mundane and earthy elements of the Eucharist – bread and wine. It is this world that God entered. It is this world that God served. It is this world that God works to redeem. And he calls all of us into participation in that activity. In so doing, he reminds us that we are all made in his image, and all of creation is good.

Now, I did say that this was a rough parallel! Our identity and action is far from that of God’s; unfortunately, in our world the movement can be interpreted similarly by some.

So, as we visit our sisters and brothers in El Salvador, may we seek relationships that affirm rather than critique. May we in our language, action, and attitude acknowledge wholeness rather than lack. In so doing, may we travel together as we all learn to more fully embrace God’s claim that we are His children, made in his image, loved, valued, and valuable.

Barrett Smith
Carpenter's Church
Lubbock, Texas

Study Trip Reflections: Rutilio Grande

The April 2nd departure date for the Cielo Azul Study Trip in El Salvador is drawing near!  Our participants will be considering brief reflections each week to begin to enter into this experience prayerfully together.  We'll be posting those here on our blog so that you can share this with us.

Our first reflection comes from Ron Morgan, whose enduring relationship with the people of El Salvador began in the late 1980s, during the civil war.  Ron is a member of the Cielo Azul advisory board and member of Central Baptist Church in Wayne, PA.

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Rutilio Grande memorial on the road to El Paisnal

This morning I attended a session of the Alternative Seminary here in Philadelphia. The subject was “THE CROSS OF CHRIST: A Justification for Redemptive Violence Or a Call to Gospel Nonviolence?” One of the themes of our discussion was the “scandal” as theologian Jon Sobrino put it, that by being nameless and faceless, poor people suffer--are ground to bits by structural injustices--without attention being paid to their lives and deaths. But, Sobrino continues, it was the contribution of murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero and Jesuit Ignacio Ellecuria that began to “give a name” to these hundreds of thousands when they referred to them as “Christ crucified in history,” or as “the crucified people.”

We also talked about the historical fact that Jesus was executed by Rome as a subversive threat both to the power of Rome and to the power of the Jewish Temple hierarchy, both of whose authority he undermined with his call to “announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free.” (Luke 4: 18-19)

As I have been anticipating our trip to El Salvador next month, I couldn’t help remembering that March 12th is the anniversary of the murder of the Salvadoran Jesuit priest Rutillio Grande. A friend of Romero’s from their student days, he was murdered for his advocacy of peasant workers and his attempts to “give names” to those who were being oppressed by landowners. Many people think that Rutillio’s death had a profound impact on the more cautious, bookish Romero, pushing him to begin to listen to the stories of the poor.

Here are some of the things people remember Rutillio Grande saying:

• “Some people cross themselves in the name of the father (money), and the son (coffee), and the spirit (especially if it's cane liquor!). That's not the God who is the Father of our Brother and Lord, Jesus, who gives us the good Spirit so that we can all be sisters and brothers in equiality, and so that we, the faithful followers of Jesus, can work to make His Reign present here among us.”

• “Don't be like fireworks—all noise and hullabaloo towards the heavens way up there! We have to fix this mess here on earth. Here on earth! God isn't in the clouds lying in a hammock. He cares about thte way things are going so badly for the poor down here."

• “I've said many times that we have not come with the sword—or the machete. Our work is not that. Our violence is in the Word of God, the Word that forces us to change ourselves so that we can make this world a better place, the Word that charges us with the enormous task of changing the world.”

• “Brother and sisters, I fear that if Jesus were to return today, walking from Galilea to Judea, which for us is from Chalatenango to San Salvador.... I dare say that with his words and actions, he'd never get as far as Apopa. They'd detain him around Guazapa, and they'd beat him up, even silence him or have him disappeared!”

• “The orioles have the conacaste tree where they can hang their nests so they can ive there and sing. But the poor campesion is not allowed his conacaste, or even a little patch of land on which he can live or be burried. Those who have money and power organize themselves, and they have plenty of resources to do so. But campesinos don't have land, or money, or the right to organize so that their voice can be heard, so that they can defend their rights and their dignity as children of God and of this nation.”

• “We are children of this Church and of this country which is named after El Salvador – the Divine Savior of the World. We can't just say: “It's every man for himself, as long as things go well for me!” We have to save ourselves together as a whole ear of corn, a whole cluster, a whole bagful. We have to save ourselves in community.”

(quotes from Memories in Mosaic by Maria Lopez Vigil)

Ron Morgan and Ruth Orantes
during a meeting at The Simple Way

I can honestly say that it has been one of my greatest joys to help folks to visit “the children of this Church and of this country....” I am anticipating our time together next month!

Ron Morgan
Cielo Azul Advisory Board