To Give To Light

In a Guatemalan parish, four men were seized and hung up on a wall of the church. Their captors added to their writhing pain jeering words of torment: "Antonio, do you want some water? Do you want a tortilla?"

Three of the four men died.

In the tragic irony of this scene, we see Christ in his last moments. A spectator at the foot of the cross, in a mocking effort to prolong his agony, places a sponge soaked in vinegar on the end of a reed and lifts it to the thirsty Christ.

This season we celebrate the incarnation. But we cannot gaze long at the humble birth without being propelled to the event of the cross. The poor are still being crucified.

Central America is a land in shock. Each day the death tolls lie buried in the double-digit pages of our northern newspapers: a priest murdered last week, 30 peasants massacred yesterday, an entire village machine-gunned today.

The statistics rolled off my mind for months. Then one day I stopped and pictured the four men hanging on a church wall; the eight-year-old boy who saved his life during a military raid on his village by covering himself with the corpses of his family and friends; the 60-year-old woman who died an hour after a violent rape; and the Salvadoran mother sobbing at a mass grave as she picked through skulls and hoped not to find her disappeared son's: "This one cannot be him--he had a gold filling in that tooth."

The people of Central America are walking through a river of grief that empties into an ocean of martyrs. There are the famous ones, like Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador (see May, 1980, Sojourners), as well as the hundreds of Indians massacred in Guatemala, known as the "anonymous martyrs." There have been so many that Roque Dalton Garcia, a Salvadoran poet, wrote the following:

Every day the dead are less docile...
These dead are different than in the old
days.
Today they are ironic.
They ask questions.
It seems to me that they have begun to
realize
That they are the majority.

How can we live with Central America? Its tragedy has become my despair.

It is for a pound of spice that these poor are being sold, and for an acre of coffee that they are being murdered. Criminal governments, their military security forces, and the support they receive from the United States are creating a tornado of violence that is moving with escalating fury throughout the region.

The purpose of the terror is to control the people by fear. According to the powerful, people hungering for justice must be controlled before the hope and solidarity they possess begin to redistribute the vast wealth of the few. Those who not only hunger for justice but expect to receive it because the Bible promises it represent a particular threat. They are being eliminated.

But control by fear is not working. The government formulas have not accounted for one element. That element is faith. The people of Central America are proving that faith cannot be killed by even the most sophisticated designs of systematic murder.

These are a people who have embraced the peaceful way of Christ; most of all, they have endured his suffering. And they are learning to endure without fear.

Scripture tells us that perfect love casts out fear. It also says that there is no greater love than that of laying down one's life for one's friends. In a region where we hear only of the fruits of hatred, we need to see a land that drips with love, a people who are overcoming the greatest of fears. Governments cannot control a people who are willing to give up their lives, and have already done so to Christ.

Christmas reminds us that Christ is Emmanuel--"God with us"; God with us poor and vulnerable. It makes all the difference that he came to us this way.

But we are forgetful and need other reminders. The people of Central America bring home the suffering of Christ and force us to look at ourselves and our priorities. They are Christ being born again poor. They are Christ bearing our sins of greed and the selfish pursuit of comfort. They are those who weep for their children, embrace one another's tears, and clasp hands in prayer, understanding more about living together as the body of Christ than most of us even dream about.

There are signs of hope. Nicaragua has turned the corner and is living in a new day. This country, still struggling to dig itself out from under the poverty and debris of 45 years of repression and neglect by the Somoza dynasty, has set aside land to grow food for its neighbors in El Salvador, who still bear the yoke of oppression. This is resurrection hope. This is the gift of those who have tasted the dawn.

In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to borrow a Nicaraguan phrase, "the dawn is still a temptation." But in a world where a weeping mother who had just witnessed the brutal murder of her husband and children can still stake her life on the goodness and faithfulness of God, Christ is alive. This too is resurrection hope.

This is the season of incarnation and, as is our tradition in December, we are focusing on people who speak to us of Christ. We honor in this issue of Sojourners those Christians in Central America who have incarnated Christ--those who are living his passion infused with resurrection.

Beginning with the birth narrative, I started a month ago to read the New Testament in Spanish, the language of the people of Central America. I was reminded that the Spanish phrase for giving birth is dar a luz--literally, "to give to light." It is a marvelous and fitting image for the situation of Christians in Central America. Hope is being born again and again, being drawn out by the light of Christ.

God has given us a promise in the Gospel of John: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Even the smallest of lights will fill the darkest spaces with its brightness. Not even the harshest terror can extinguish the witness of God's people.

As I have reflected on the situation of Christians in Central America, my despair has become my hope. For their witness of love, I am deeply grateful.

Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.