Within Our Range of Hearing

Memory sifts between past events in ways that focus toward a dream nourished with hope, or a nightmare invested with power.
-Robert McAfee Brown (from "Rethinking Our Histories," in New Visions for the Americas, edited by David Batstone; Fortress, 1993)

One of the most important actions U.S. missionaries in El Salvador took in the Salvadoran civil war was simply to tell the truth about what was going on, especially regarding the effects of their own government's policies. Three recent books written by U.S. missionaries who have accompanied the Salvadoran church in its struggle for justice continue this process: Promised Land: Death and Life in El Salvador, by Scott Wright; Vultures and Butterflies: Living the Contradictions, by Susan Classen; and The Harvest of Justice: The Church of El Salvador Ten Years After Romero, by Daniel Santiago.

Most of the stories in Promised Land
were familiar, whether through firsthand telling or Scott Wright's many articles and newsletters. His experiences in El Salvador cover the whole sweep of the war from 1980 through the 1992 Peace Accords. I know of no one with more varied experiences of the Salvadoran church than Scott Wright; he lived with the refugees in Honduras, accompanied pastoral workers for several years in the war zones of Chalatenango and Morazan, and was part of the pastoral teams in a number of poor parishes in San Salvador.

Wright recorded faithfully through all those years countless biblical meditations, conversations, and his own reflections on day-to-day occurrences. His calm and measured tone belies the incredible, and at times horrific, experiences he shared with the persecuted communities he accompanied. Most of all, Wright tries to bring the voice of the poor within our range of hearing, then offers his own insightful commentary. This work is liberation theology written for North Americans by someone who has experienced deeply the daily struggle for liberation in El Salvador. In the introduction Wright sums up his theological convictions:

It seems foolish, or contradictory, but it is only at the foot of the cross, only from a position of solidarity with the crucified peoples of the world in their struggle to eliminate all crosses-war, racism, poverty, oppression, nuclear and conventional arms proliferation, environmental destruction, sexism, homophobia-that we discover a deeper meaning of life, and of faith, hope, and love. And I believe it is only possible to do this if we build communities and cultures that resist injustice and struggle for life.

SUSAN CLASSEN, a nurse who has worked in rural El Salvador since 1984 under the auspices of the Mennonite Central Committee, lived through similar situations as Wright, but the tone of her book Vultures and Butterflies
is distinctly different from Promised Land. Classen begins with a story that neatly sums up her major themes. She had just survived being caught in the middle of a firefight between Salvadoran soldiers and FMLN guerrillas, and was walking hurriedly along the road to the village where she lived:

Leaving the store we encountered another dead soldier and two hundred yards away a guerrilla patrol. Just before Guarjila we passed a dozen vultures. I noticed them from far off and was afraid we would find another cadaver in the road. I never did see what they were after. As we got closer the vultures reluctantly flew to a nearby fence and I realized hundreds of yellow and white butterflies danced in that same area. We passed through their graceful flight.

Vultures and butterflies. I was struck by the contrasting symbols of life and death. The vultures seemed so big and overpowering but the butterflies were there all along. I wondered about good and evil in my life. Do I let the evil loom so large that I miss the hundreds of small gifts of goodness?

Classen writes in an engaging conversational style, revealing much more of herself and her own personal struggles than the other writers. She frames her story first with her mother's death and ends with her father's passing. Classen's own sense of loss draws her into the pain of the people she serves. She is humbly transparent with her own feelings of inadequacy and frustration, but also generous with her wonderful character studies of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Classen does not attempt to cover as much history as the other writers, but she more than makes up for it with the depth of her reflections and analysis. Especially moving are Classen's descriptions of the violence of poverty, which she brings to bear relentlessly on her own pacifist convictions. She faces squarely the contradictions of her own complicity in the violence as a U.S. citizen, and comes to a clearer understanding of the necessity of faith-based nonviolent resistance.

FATHER DANIEL Santiago's The Harvest of Justice: The Church of El Salvador Ten Years After Romero
is described on its cover as a collection of "critical and reflective essays" on his ministry of six years in El Salvador. Dividing his time each year between his position as professor of anthropology at an American Catholic university, and his priestly ministry in a poor Catholic parish on the outskirts of San Salvador, Santiago has brought his pastoral and academic skills together to produce a vivid and comprehensive narrative study of Salvadoran church and society. He has the writing and investigative skills of the best journalists, but the added advantage of close access to the lives of the people he served as a pastor and colleague in ministry.

Using a method of case histories, The Harvest of Justice
is a fine blend of theology, sociology, and political and economic analysis. For example, the militarization of Salvadoran society is analyzed through the telling of Col. Domingo Monterrosa's story. Monterrosa was responsible for the 1981 army massacre of a thousand people in the village of Mozote. The mechanics of military death squad operations are described in gruesome detail under the title of "The Aesthetics of Terror-The Hermeneutics of Death," required reading for anyone who wonders about the history of the ARENA party, which is presently in control of the Salvadoran government. Any attempts to clean up ARENA's bloody reputation come off as cynical in light of Santiago's review of their history and practice.

Santiago's book is unique in its willingness to tackle head-on the question of injustice on the part of the FMLN. Rather than preach to Salvadorans about their failings, he allows members of the FMLN to speak of their own involvement in human rights abuses. In the tradition of Archbishop Romero, Daniel Santiago holds the FMLN to a high standard of justice and does not back away from dealing frankly with its many contradictions.

Reading this book should temper any romanticization by solidarity activists of revolutionary armed struggle. On the other hand, U.S. citizens' responsibility for their government's history of supporting repression in El Salvador is in no way minimized by these revelations of abuses by the FMLN. Wright, Classen, and Santiago all make it very clear that the most pervasive and original violence in El Salvador is the structural injustice of poverty, which has in turn been brutally upheld by a succession of U.S.-supported military governments. Revolutionary violence is a response to this fundamental violence, and all of it leads a bloody trail back to our own doorstep.

It is clear that the Salvadoran military has been culpable of many human rights abuses, and the church has been courageous, and at times heroic, in its denunciations of those injustices. The cost in martyrdom has been high. But the church is called to tell the truth with consistency, no matter how hard that may be.

Finally, the most important contribution of The Harvest of Justice
is Santiago's detailed description of concrete attempts on the part of poor communities to develop more just ways of structuring Salvadoran society-politically, economically, and socially. And he points out the specific contributions the church can make to support these grassroots efforts for change.

In hindsight, my admiration for the even-handed work of the Archdiocese of San Salvador and the Jesuits of the Central American University has grown significantly since the time I was working in El Salvador. While generally supportive of the popular grassroots movements, they were not afraid of calling the political Left to task when they did not live up to their own professed ideals. In this they were more consistent than the progressive sectors of the Catholic base communities, or the Lutheran, Baptist, and Episcopal churches. Their continual and insistent call to both sides to honest dialogue contributed decisively to the eventual end of the war.

These three authors are not objective, dispassionate observers; they have "chosen sides" with the poor and most of their efforts go to letting the poor tell their own story. But these missionaries' lives are important stories in their own right. We learn from their experiences what the ministry of accompaniment is all about.

BILL DEXHEIMER PHARRIS is an ordained Lutheran pastor presently in a chaplaincy residency program at the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis. He worked with the Lutheran and Catholic churches in El Salvador during 1986-89.