Living in El Salvador, witnessing the struggle for food, education, health, freedom, democracy, dignity and all the rest scares me to death sometimes. At timesI buy into Mccarthy's vision of God. I buy into the idea that evil will win, that justice is not possible, that there will always be the forgotten poor and the forgetful rich.
Then from the wilderness I hear a voice. (This wilderness happens to be Rafa's bookshelf and the voice if of Dean Brackley, S.J., who was the first Jesuit to transfer here after the six were assassinated, the author of The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times which happened to be sitting in English with a personal inscription on Rafa's bookshelf, and whom I had lunch with on this week at the UCA.)
Faith affirms that God's Reign irrupts into this world and advances in the heart of history, within and beyond these often-ambiguous movements. In the end, faith is not based on those movements, but on a deeper experience, a shared sense that, despite egoism, suffering, and death, life is worth the trouble. It springs from the internal conviction that sacrifice, love of neighbor, and celebration make sense, less because of apparent facts than despite them. The easy smile of the poor and the severely handicapped and their readiness to celebrate have a basis in reality. While they show us that life is more cruel and evil, more tenacious than we ordinarily admit, they also help us recognize that there is something going on in the world that is much more wonderful than we had imagined. The experience of this quiet assurance - that it makes sense to struggle and to celebrate - is our solid grounds for hope. It is experience of such a kind that we cannot give full account of it. And yet it furnishes sufficient reason to believe in God's Reign, reason enough to trump the evidence to the contrary. Though I cannot always explain why, deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome some day...love and community are possible, and not simply in exceptional corners of an unloving world. And if life and truth and love will have the last word, then history has direction, although it has less to do with conventional measures of progress than with crosses and resurrections.
Dean Brackley, S.J.
And there it is - I'm off to work, to teach English, dignity, love, justice, and to believe those things are possible.
Dear Mark, I know you're back in the U.S., and I can only imagine what your heart is feeling. When I return from El Salvador, there is a prolonged period where everything, and nothing, is beautiful--simultaneously. Our lives here are in such contrast to those we left behind in ES. It's sometimes hard to reconcile the two, and yet we must, for if Dean Brackley is right (and I believe to my core that he is), then we must both mourn AND celebrate and, always in all ways, hold onto hope. You are quite an extraordinary example of the beauty that resides in Norte Americanos at the very same moment that Governor Kasich (and others) try to erase the strides made in caring for the sick and poor of our state; at the very same moment he (and others) put even heavier burdens on our underpaid and under-valued teachers; at the very same moment that thousands scream for the deportation (and even worse)of "illegal" immigrants in our country. I sense that you will keep teaching dignity, love, justice in everything that you do, and that, dear Mark, is gift indeed. Thank you. Peace. Janet
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