Love in Grief

It is an image that has never left me since hearing of the incident. Marienella Garcia had risked imprisonment and death for years by publicly exposing the human rights violations of the Salvadoran government. In March 1983 she was found dead after being abducted and tortured.

The government forbade a public memorial service in the church where her body lay. Soldiers were dispatched to guard the church entrance and ensure that only the priest would be present at the Mass.

Fearing the consequences if they were to disobey this governmental decree, most people stayed away. But some of the poorest peasants with whom Marienella Garcia had worked went to the church that day and walked right past the guards into the sanctuary. One by one they kissed their beloved friend and advocate and said their goodbyes while the guards looked on and did nothing. Later that night, under the cover of darkness, the army raided the homes of these mourners, arresting the men and raping the women.

Until I heard that story, it had never really dawned on me how the women who went to the grave of their beloved friend that Easter morning had done so at great risk to themselves. For it was the grave of a convicted political criminal. Guards stood watch, ready to report the identities of those who dared expose themselves as his supporters. Why this never dawned on me before is strange, considering that we are told how the rest of the disciples were in hiding, laying low, avoiding guilt and punishment by association.

And it strikes me that the courage of those women is the first sign of a resurrection faith on that morning, even before an empty tomb is discovered or Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and calls her by name. Love has already proven stronger than death as these women arise and go to the grave. The strength of their love, expressed in grief, has overcome the fear that apparently still has the others in its paralyzing, deathly grip.

These women were powerless to prevent his brutal murder, just as they cannot now bring him back to life. But they can refuse to deny or hide their identity as grieving survivors. By going to the grave, they publicly declare that they will not forget who he was, what he meant to them, and what he stood for. And this act of remembering is a far more risky choice than we may at first assume.

THESE FIRST WITNESSES to the Easter event counsel me to look for signs of the Resurrection, and listen for testimonies to it, in unlikely places where I may not always hear the name of Jesus Christ confessed. Like at public vigils in Guatemala, where family members defying the threat of violence gathered to remember the imprisoned and "missing." Or in the homes, hospitals, and clinics of this country where people who are suffering the ravages of AIDS are held and comforted in their dying and remembered in their death as precious brothers and sisters, beloved of God.

Or in the words and deeds of one survivor of Auschwitz who reminds us unceasingly that when we forget the victims - dead or living - the Enemy has won because the Enemy counts on our forgetting and our turning a deaf ear to their pain. By remembering we keep hope alive, says Elie Wiesel; by forgetting, we betray the dead and the God of life.

When Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize, he told how, as a small boy in Auschwitz, he had discovered "the kingdom of night." And that small boy now asks him, "Tell me, what have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?" Wiesel said:

I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.... No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who desperately need us.

The love and faith of these contemporary survivors remind me that he who rose from the dead on Easter morning asked us to remember him. And remembering him means remembering those with whom he was, and is, united: human beings who endure suffering and humiliation.

There are also friends who have helped me through dark times and have witnessed to the light of Easter morning by taking my pain seriously, neither shying away from it nor attempting to gloss over it with moralistic answers. Waiting with me, enduring my pain and their own helplessness, these friends have let me know that I am not alone, that they are there for me, however long it takes. By their faithfulness and love, they have mirrored for me the meaning of God's name.

For in the encounter that took place by the desert bush where God's name - God's deepest self and purposes - was revealed, Moses heard how love and knowing the pain of the other are inseparably related: "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, I have heard their cries. I know their suffering."

A Hasidic tale also says it with simple eloquence. Two people are talking, and one of them asks the other, "Do you love me?"

"Yes, I love you very much," is the response.

To which the first person then asks, "Do you know what causes me pain?"

"How can I know what causes you pain?" responds the other.

"If you don't know what causes me pain," says the first, "how can you then say that you love me?"

Melanie Morrison was a United Church of Christ minister and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.