'Receive Me, Lord'

The question of where I find hope in these difficult times misses the bullseye by a fraction of an inch. Hope, it seems to me, is not something to search for. It's not like a game of hide-and-seek: "Is that hope's sneaker under the bushes? I see hope between the rocks! Home free, I found hope!" Instead hope is a constant, whatever the season—stormy, tranquil, foggy. To say I believe in the God of Jesus means that hope is.

The question I wrestle with is this: do I live as a person of hope? The bottom line is always whether I am dancing toward the cross in an absurd and wild affirmation of the victory of life over death.

A few months ago I would have placed myself in the top five percent on any national merit test on hope. Honest. I figured my dossier matched the criteria listed by any authority on hope.

The facts all add up. I believe in a God of life, and I work for a future that brings fullness of life, especially for God's favorites: the poor, oppressed, and marginal. I rub shoulders with the "undeserving poor," and my record for saying no to the forces of death is laudable. I have even been known to embrace a cross or two; one could check my arrest record for proof.

My personal assessment read: faith is adequate, charity needs extra work, hope is excellent. Then I went to Honduras.

I was part of the group of 150 churchwomen who attempted a peace pilgrimage to Honduras in December, 1983. Our plan was to pray for peace in that troubled region at U.S. naval and air bases. Before departing for Tegucigalpa, we spent an orientation day in Miami, and I had an opportunity to get acquainted with hope, to discover her depth and confront my shallowness. It was no earth-shattering encounter, except for me. I discovered I was afraid to die.

Fear was a surprise. I had approached the journey feeling on a par with any martyr. Maybe my first mistake was paging through Cry of the People, by Penny Lernoux, one hour before departing for Miami. The section on Honduras sent the first numbing chill through my bones. I was going to demonstrate in a country where people who think like myself have been baked alive in bread ovens and had their bodies slowly hacked to pieces. On the flight I noticed that sometimes my hands trembled, but I shrugged it off as "first game" jitters.

It didn't help when the sister who picked us up at the airport greeted me with, "Gosh, are you brave. I'd never do what you're doing." Then she detailed vigilante threats and attacks that were taking place in Miami against those who opposed U.S. military aid to Central America. "We've had to keep this whole meeting a secret," she said. "We're afraid of being shot at again."

I wondered what it meant when the Honduran bishops who had originally pledged their support for the pilgrimage suddenly withdrew it. Was it just their conservative bent, or were they trying to send a signal or a warning?

The clincher came when we began the orientation session and were handed a packet of background and organizational materials. The first paper I read outlined our leadership structure and then detailed what to do if the spokesperson, the alternate spokesperson, and the entire steering committee became incapacitated. Incapacitated! Does that mean dead, abducted, or maimed?

Not that I am naive about the terror and torture in Latin America, but this was me walking into a valley as dark as death. I feared the evil and found no comfort in God's staff or crook. For two nights I tossed and turned in bed, trying to calm myself, putting my fate in God's hands by repeating my favorite prayers. But it was no use: I felt nothing but deep, deep fear.

Whether the cause of my fear was real or imaginary or exaggerated does not matter. (From outward appearances the other women didn't seem to share my anxiety.) What counts is that at a new level I recognized the cost of discipleship and recoiled from the cross.

Saint Augustine tells us that hope has two lovely daughters, anger and courage: anger that things are not what they ought to be and courage to make them what they must be. Relief, not anger, was what I felt when the Honduran military boarded our plane on the runway in Tegucigalpa and told us we were not welcome there. I said a prayer of quiet thanksgiving instead of a prayer for renewed courage when the plane flew back to Miami.

In her book Bringing Forth Hope, Denise Priestley captures the struggle between hope and hopelessness by using the symbol from chapter 12 of the book of Revelation: a woman gives birth while a dragon stands before her ready to devour the child. Priestley writes, "The woman had only the promise of God to hold onto as she confronted the dragon and death ... She hopes by looking the dragon right in the eyes and continuing to give birth."

In the staredown between the dragon and myself, I blinked.

The night of our aborted trip to Honduras, NBC was showing Choices of the Heart, a movie based on the life of Jean Donovan, one of the four U.S. missionaries who were raped and murdered in El Salvador three years ago. We didn't get back to our motel until late that evening so I only saw the end of the movie. That was enough.

In a final scene, Jean Donovan was talking about her friend, Sister Ita Ford, one of the other women who was killed. She was recounting how Ita had almost drowned a few months before. During a storm Ita and another sister drove off a road into a river. Her friend was killed, and Ita told Jean that she felt herself drowning, trapped under water.

"I didn't even struggle," she told Jean. "I felt myself going under and said 'Receive me, Lord, I'm coming.'"

Those words fastened themselves to my heart and I listened to them all night long. I can still hear them.

"Receive me, Lord, I'm coming." Amazing. Amazing hope.

Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, was coordinator of the Pax Center in Erie, Pennsylvania, and national coordinator of Benedictines for Peace when this article appeared.