Our Final Day in El Salvador

Pilgrimages are not vacations. They are not the usual sight-seeing excursions. Our Global Mission Pilgrimages are journeys to connect with places and people and accompany them in our partnership so that they become part of our story.Tuesday afternoon we flew to El Salvador where Nick Green, our Global Ministries Volunteer from the South Idaho Region (and Montana State Bobcat!), and Irving, our driver and Lutheran Synod/ACT staff person, met us. As we drove from the airport into San Salvador, it appeared to me that we had entered a country that was better off economically with less violence. The war seemed to be in the memories of the past when they pointed out the route was the same one the four U.S. nuns were taking when the Salvadoran Army seized them, raped them, and murdered them. After we checked in at the hotel, we discovered a few changes in our schedule. (Flexibility is a key word on pilgrimages.) I was hoping for a less intense day after saying good-bye to our Nicaraguan friends in Mision Cristiana. Our original plan was to meet with leaders from the Lutheran Synod of El Salvador and I was expecting a pleasant exchange of greetings and information before dinner. Instead we went to the chapel where Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in 1980. We heard the details of his story that is so fresh for many of us. We toured his home, a simple house with his personal belongings as it was the day he left to celebrate a funeral mass of a friend’s mother. In my prayer journal, I noted that I felt a deep reverence in that place of a martyr, reading Monsignor Romero’s words, feeling his spirit. Then we rode the short distance to the university where 6 Jesuits and their gardener’s wife were massacred by the Salvadoran Army Death Squads in 1989. A wonderful young woman gave us a tour of the place that they refuse to call a museum, but instead a place of remembering all the martyrs from the war. We were so intent on listening to this guide that we didn’t catch her name. I’ll call her “Brittney” because she learned English so she could sing like Brittney Spears—picking up the language from U.S. TV shows, since English classes were too expensive. Brittney told us she tries to learn at least one new word from each group. We taught Brittney several English words—including “disclaimer” because she wasn’t afraid to offer her opinions and interpretations that weren’t the official position of the University. She showed us the timelines of 227 massacres that left 9,967 dead in the civil war—with innumerable people who just ended up “missing”, the “disappeared.” [Over 50,000 Salvadorans overall died in their armed conflict—supported by U.S. funds, weapons, and training]. We saw the clothes the Jesuits were wearing when they were executed. We heard that the gun violence was so normal that the gardener sleeping less than 20 yards away thought the noise was the usual street fighting and he didn’t discover the bodies until the next morning. His wife was shot because she was staying in a room closer to the Jesuits where they thought she would be safer after receiving threats. I asked Brittney where she went to church, since she didn’t hold anything back in describing the Catholic Church’s different positions to the violence in El Salvador at that time—captured in a powerful painting we viewed at the entrance. Brittney is a Catholic—but she told me her priest is more like Romero. She doesn’t think that this martyr of the faith will be declared a saint in her lifetime. As we left with the whole story echoing in our heads and hearts, we heard the parrots screeching in the trees overhead. Sounded like a protest to us. Even after those two powerful visits on our Pilgrimage, I was OK. The violence against the church leaders felt like current events, but they were in the past. Then we went to dinner at an open air Salvadoran restaurant along with Pastor Rafael, the representative from the Lutheran Synod who was our main guide over the two days. Teresa asked him a follow-up question about the current situation and we heard how bad it was: Two gangs in the country that make it unsafe for everyone—people can’t even worship at his wife’s church where she is a pastor because they can’t cross gang territory. The restaurant we were in had to pay “protection money” to gangs or they would be shut down or burned out. Pastor Rafael leads weekly youth programs to give the youth hope in the midst of their extreme poverty. He said it’s always different for U.S. pastors who visit El Salvador, because they have a different ambition. Pastor Rafael told us, “Here ministry is not a profession, it is a commitment.” He always encourages pastors from any country to find their vocation for their own context. Then after that day of feeling the heaviness of hopelessness, we found hope…hope in the country and in the city. Pastor Santiago accompanied us to “Fe y Esperanza” [Faith and Hope], a food security project he directs as part of his synodical responsibilities for the Stewardship of Creation program. He works with a whole community, including his sister, Pastora Gloria, and his brother, Pastor Joel: organic gardening, creating compost to renew the earth, tilapia tanks, incubation set-ups for chicks, artisan folk crafts—and more. We could see why Lutheran Bishop Gomez was ordained there. It was a place of life…holy ground of faith and hope. Even in the violence that killed the police officer husband of one of their church members just last week, they live the faith they preach and teach in the church there. The police chief of the community joined us for a delicious lunch prepared with everything from the farm (blessed by singing!)—and he was the first police officer or security personnel I’d seen in the whole country without a visible weapon. We drove back into the city where we visited the Church of the Resurrection. The army came looking for Bishop Gomez and when they couldn’t find him, they confiscated a cross a congregational small group had written on as an educational exercise, because it was “subversive.” The U.S. Ambassador pressured the Salvadoran president to return the “Subversive Cross” to this Lutheran church—where it now hangs proudly on the wall of their sanctuary as a reminder of their witness. Casa de la Esperanza, “House of Hope”, is in that poor neighborhood. A German couple have been serving there as missionaries since 2003. What began as a weekly breakfast for the poor of the community has evolved into daily breakfast and lunch for people—as well as an AA group. They have learned to do ministry with the people, not for them. I hope we’re learning the same thing in our missional churches in the U.S. Pilgrimages aren’t like normal mission work trips, either. We didn’t travel to El Salvador this time to help build something in one of their projects. On this pilgrimage, we were trying to build up the church—the Lutheran Synod of El Salvador and our Church in the U.S. The experience helped me in my ministry of re-building the church, which is the work of congregational transformation. In our closing dinner, we found out again that our mission partners in El Salvador face the same challenges we do. Pastor Rafael and Pastor Santiago met with us, along with Pastor Efrain and Pastora Marina. Pastora Marina is typical of these faithful ministers, who serves two congregations as a volunteer (with perhaps a small stipend) in addition to her low-paid work as coordinator of the Synod’s program on health. In addition to their greater economic challenges than what we complain about in our context, they also deal with the distractions of consumerism, individualism, meaningful youth ministry, maintaining physical facilities, competition with the mega-churches. We weren’t done yet. As we arrived at the hotel to pack up for our 4 am departure, Bishop Gomez drove up after his long flight from San Francisco—direct from the airport. What a privilege it was for us to be blessed at the end of our pilgrimage by this saint who has risked his life for his courageous witness. He made an effort to meet with us because of his special relationship with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—through David Vargas, Bill Nottingham, and countless others, including Disciples missionary Wayne Steinert who accompanied the Bishop personally during the most difficult times. Unfortunately, no one could save Wayne’s life, when he was murdered in South Africa for his opposition to apartheid. As Bishop Gomez told us this story, he also affirmed once again that Disciples of Christ in El Salvador are called “Lutherans.”
With Faith and Hope—Peace, Ron Greene