The Heavenly Jerusalem is a Free Woman

Warning: this has not been proofread, but I want to put it out there before midnight Ohio-time so that I stay true to my every Sunday promise.

My editing friend Dane tells me never to start a paragraph with a quote. I’m quite certain this advice does not pertain to blog posts since they’re a new sort of medium which is happily unorthodox (like most of us!). Avoiding the existential question of whether we’re a new sort of medium too, I will proceed with quoting Lief Enger from his first novel Peace Like a River:

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my blood until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.

While I found the book less than stirring, this passage had its desired effect. In some ways it is an adequate simile for my experience in El Salvador. Here’s my slightly altered Salvadoran version:

And now, from beneath the audible and robust menagerie of bus/car/bicycle and tricycle horns, chucho/cat /cow/pig/turkey/roster and numerous wild birds’ attempts at midnight communication, came a low reverberation, like the heavy dust-filled winds, but from below. It came up through the soles of my sandaled, tanned, closer-to-the-dirt-than-they-have-been-in-a-longtime feet. I stood still (I also ran a helluva a lot) while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my blood until I recognized it as music, although noticeably out of tune, yet fully tuned into something more essential. As language; although a language which I felt more than I understood, to which my natural, guttural, human response was always a joyful (albeit confused) smiling, head-nodding “sí”. And this language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Her; be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation while also viewing a sort of slow re-creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the mountains became what they were some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words, the logos, came clear, and I sang with them in a beautiful, curious, Span-glish chant. And their chant was this: The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is our mother.

* * * * *

Frances scares the hell out of me. Sometimes strong, beautiful women have that effect. I’ll let you analyze that all you want, but I’m not touching it. She teaches Sexto Grado (or 6th grade) and was at first a complete mystery. This is what I have slowly gathered.
• She lives in Chalatenango – at least an hour away
• She has no kids
• She has no husband
• She often stays the night at our principal's house
• She is 35
• She has been teaching for around 5 years
• She is not overtly religious, possibly not religious at all, but chooses to teaches at a Catholic school...what I’m saying is I don’t know if she chooses to teach here or if it’s the only place that would hire her
• She is a diligent note taker in my English class
• She is, be my estimation, breathtakingly beautiful in that unexpected and definitely not know by the person themselves sort of way
• She does not correct me when I pronounce her name incorrectly

Why do I write about Frances? The teachers were once talking about how many kids we wanted to have. I jokingly responded, “20, oh mi esposa, pobrecita!” but went on to tell them that it wasn’t up to me how many kids I had, it was my wife’s decision. All the women looked at me half excited and half confounded. They asked why I would say that. I started, “because my wife’s body is her body, I do not…”, but I couldn’t conjure the verb I needed. After three patient minutes of them waiting, and me wading through a dictionary, I finished “…control it.” The verb I used more likely meant “govern it” and is linked to kingship and ruling. It was the only Spanish verb I could find to describe control. That evening at dinner Frances spoke to me, possibly for the first time, about how she will never marry because she will not subject herself to someone else’s governing, someone else’s rule. In El Salvador, that is what would be expected. She would, to quote a friend of mine's retired archbishop uncle, “dooo whateeevvver HEEEEE tells you.”

* * * * *

The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is our mother.

This line from Galatians appeared in the “Liturgy of the Hours” this week. How it so precisely merges Salvadoran reality and Pauline eschatological jargon haunts me. Because the heavenly Jerusalem, the glorious city on the hill which Paul points to, is for many in El Salvador a free, liberated woman. I mean this quite literally. A woman freed to access education only available to men; a woman free to work; a woman free to not bear children if she so pleases; a woman free to share equally in her relationships; a woman free to…control her own body, destiny, home, livelihood, life, self.

And this haunts me because the opposite is here in El Salvador. Women are not free. They are expected, coerced, prohibited from not, and often physically forced into every kind of bad situation you can imagine. Call it machismo, call it genderism, call it unjust, unfair, unloving, call it whatever you want. Paul didn’t write his letter this way, but I’m shouting his line as an outraged demand: Damn it, the heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman! And she is our MOTHER! Do we know what we’re doing to our mother?

But, as Enger’s character experienced his journey to heaven, so too do I experience El Salvador: O be quick, my soul, to answer Her; be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on! For the women of El Salvador are marching on. The march is slow, its uphill, and they’re carrying a ton of unneeded baggage, but they do not march alone. I speak of this in hopes that Oscar Romero, the Jesuit martyrs, and, most of all, the beaten, raped, and murdered Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford, are listening and doing something up there in heavenly Jerusalem to free the women down here.

Whether they’re responding or not, I cannot prove, but I do know that El Salvador is changing. Women are being educated, working professional jobs, and, like Frances, taking a stand against injustice. As I reflected on this change, “sure enough, my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation while also viewing a sort of slow re-creation, as the women of El Salvador became what they were some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as the voices of women lifted from a great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words, Her words, came clear, and I sang with them in a beautiful, curious, Span-glish chant. And their chant was this: The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is your mother, she is your sister, she is your daughter, build the kingdom, set her free.