Where the Rivers Come Together

This readers' page runs from time to time during the year. As one way we can encourage one another, we invite you to share experiences that have lifted your spirits, warmed your heart, or stirred your soul.

Carmen Mendieta, the mother of seven children, was killed in a contra ambush in Nicaragua on December 2, 1987, exactly seven years after four U.S. church women were murdered in El Salvador. She was a member of Christ the King Parish, a sister community to New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, of which the author of this meditation was a member when this article appeared. Jim Luken had just returned from a visit to Nicaragua when he learned of Carmen's death. --The Editors

My town is called Bocana de Paiwas;
Bocana means "the mouth" and Paiwas is the river.
Here the mouth of the river Paiwas
breathes its life into the Old River, the Viejo.
Here, where the rivers come together in the lush rain forests
of Western Zelaya, is where I lived, and still do.
Because the road ends here at the intersection of the rivers,
my gringo friend Tomas calls this town "the end of civilization."
We who live and struggle here,
we members of the parish community of Christ the King,
sometimes discover through our sharing of the scriptures
that Paiwas may well be the "beginning" of the kingdom of Christ.

Our church is the last building before the river.
The new cemetery, with its odd and garish plastic flowers,
is planted there, immediately in front of the church.
I remember seeing the first grave dug here five years ago,
when Padre Jaime carried home Emiliano, our local judge
and the Guardia's first "lesson" aimed at the people of Bocana de Paiwas.
My grave joins the dozens set aside here
for those who have been killed by the contra since.
And my name is on the newest wooden cross...Carmen Mendieta.
I can think of no holier or more beautiful place
for the body of Carmen Mendieta to come to rest.
How I wish you could see it, my good friends in the United States.

If you can picture my spirit looking out from here upon the town I love,
I see the day-care center under construction on the left.
Some of my seven children will go there in the summer,
just as they would if I were still with them and working every day.
Off to the right of the road are the sewing cooperative
and the bread-baking kitchen where I joined with my sisters
sitting at machines as we pieced together the garments of a new life,
or baking the bread that would not only feed our families,
but would help liberate them also.

How it all fits together,
my brothers and sisters of El Norte,
like the ingredients of the bread we bake.
If we here are the flour, you are the water.
If we are the cotton fabric, you are the machines that sew.
If ours are the strong hands working for liberation,
it is your great hearts that keep us from enslavement.
And of course our Lord Jesus is there, too,
as the yeast, as the thread, as the blood poured out.

Companeros,
my death on the road from here to Rio Blanco
does nothing to end what together we have begun here,
in this tiny outpost at the mouth of the Paiwas River.
My life, like the smaller river,
has simply entered the life of the larger, the: Old River.
Death into life, is it not the old mystery, the Mystery of faith?
If we permit it,
that Mystery will carry us together, like the river's current,
toward the kingdom of Christ the King,
and toward the city where God lives among her people.