To Be Seen by the Crucified People

This is the personal knowledge that does not distance us from the world but brings us into community, face to face. A knowledge that heals and makes whole will come as we look creation in the eyes and allow it to look back, not only searching nature but allowing it to search us as well.
- Parker Palmer

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Forgive me for this final delayed entry. The last ten days have been a fast-paced, no-holds-bar, all-out assault on my body, mind, and soul. The corporal readjustment from hot to cold and beans to no beans would have been enough for anyone, but the last week was more experientially generous than you can imagine. Yes, there was the transition to speaking and spending American, but the real wrestling came with some long-term life/employment questions. A quick summary for those wondering: I turned down the best job for me in CLE+ (an environmental theology teaching position at St. Martin de Porres), canceled all future campus ministry job interviews, and decided to channel Good Will Hunting and say "if the Professor calls about that job, just tell him, sorry, I have to go see about a girl." So yeah, I'll be moving to Charlotte sometime before September. I'd rather have a life than a job.

Yet, through all the chaos of week one stateside, a blog post has been brewing in the depths of my head and heart. Admittedly, I'm conflicted. I want to summarize, highlight, lowlight, reflect, provoke, inspire, honor, cherish and so forth, but all that seems too lofty for this space. What I've decided to leave you with is the reason I go (and the reason I want others to go) to El Salvador.

Often we hear missionaries and pilgrims say that seeing poverty changed their lives. When I returned from the Dominican Republic in 2002 I'm this line played on repeat from the speaker that is my mouth. After four trips to El Salvador, all with students and first time travelers, I believe that its only partial, tangential truth. Years ago I couldn't articulate the deeper, more fundamental experience that occurs when we (read: rich people; and yes, you're a rich person) visit the poor. I am not sure I can articulate it now, but its why I go, so I'll try.

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For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect;
but once perfection comes all imperfect things will disappear...

Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror;
but then we shall be seeing face to face.

The knowledge I have now is imperfect;
but then I shall know as fully as I am known.
1 Cor. 13: 9-10, 12

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St. Paul writes that our self-image is blurry at best, but at the time of perfection we will see clearly, face to face. Our self-knowledge, he goes on, is limited until we are seen fully. I'm no student of Paul. He could as easily be talking about Christ's second coming as he could the fall of the Roman Empire, but reading this through the "Dean Brackley lens" I have come to think this: when we are seen by the "crucified people" of El Salvador face to face we begin to see ourselves as they see us, which is how God sees us. Broken, yet miraculously whole. Sinful, yet wholly loveable. This is not how we were taught to see ourselves. American culture tells us we need to look this way, dress like that, drive one of these, and have sex with one of those. But when they look at us, when we are seen for the God-image that we are, those cultural chains lose their weight. Life becomes lighter, love becomes possible. This is the Salvadoran experience: to know as fully as we are known.

Thomas Merton says this:

"But God communicates Life and Spirit to humanity. It is not God's plan to lure the soul out of the body, but to sanctify the two together, divinizing the whole person so that Christian can say: 'I live, now not I but Christ liveth in me. And that I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God Who loved me.'"

Divinization at the hands of the poor. To live in the faith that the crucified people of El Salvador have seen us and have univocally determined that we are loveable. This is why I go and why I want other people to go.

Encountering this self-image in the eyes of the poor is not without responsibility. Parker Palmer is quiet clear. This personal knowledge demands that we engage the world, demands that we enter into community. Solidarity is not easy with a people who suffer. Sustained community is not easy with people thousands of miles away. But once we take this road, once we are seen and begin to see, nothing seems impossible.