The Presidential Candidate's Story

This is the story of a man running for president of El Salvador.

While were were staying at a hotel in San Miguel, the ARENA political party was holding rally at the hotel for the candidate's seeking ARENA's presidential nomination for the 2009 national elections.

If you thought the U.S. primary season was long.....just imagine. Their general election is not until next year and they're already in the thick of it.

So....he we were at the Hotel Tropic, eating our lunch, being goofy Americans, and surrounded by ARENA supporters with their red, white & blue polo shirts and campaign signs.

Innocents abroad....

Michael & Louise

John & Molly

Connie decides the water is too cold

John & Father Tommy

Connie, Lois & Molly

Now, I must confess that this whole situation did not make yours-truly terribly comfortable, as my politics don't veer to the right much, and ARENA is the right-wing party in El Salvador. And while the gentlmen milling around were wearing polo shirts and not carrying machine guns that I could see, they did look grim and I was certainly not going to provoke them. The candidates, however, were another story. Although surrounded by grim types that looked as though they would just as soon shoot you as break bread with you, the candidates themselves were right out of a talk show....all pearly smiles and well coiffed hair.

A little diversion into current Salvadoran politics before we get to the candidate's story itself. There are two main parties in El Salvador. One is ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) founded by gentlemen like Roberto D'Aubisson, a former president of El Salvador that was widely rumored to have been behind the military death squads and the assassination of Archbishop Romero. ARENA currently controls the national government. The other main party is FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front). FMLN is the political successor to the insurgents who fought the government during the civil war. FMLN controls many city and local governments, including that of the capital, San Salvador, and is particularly strong in some regions, like the eastern part of the country that were guerilla strongholds during the war. The FMLN candidate for president has already been selected. He is a widely popular television journalist named Maricio Funes. ARENA, as I said, is in the middle of it's primary and the leading candidates include the current vice-president, Ana Vilma de Escobar

and the man who until a few months ago was head of the National Police, Rodrigo Avila.

So....we're sitting there eating lunch, and there's this pleasant looking gentlement being interviewed by the television station. Turn's out he's Mr. Avila, the former head of the National Police and current presidential candidate.

Later, Mr. Avila spots us for the obvious Americans we are and walks over to ask me where we're from. "San Francisco", I reply. "Ah! San Francisco! What a beautiful city. My father went medical school at UCSF". So then Rodrigo asks where we've been (when I say Baja Lempo I swear I can see the wheels turning in Mr. Avila's head...Baja Lempo...former guerilla stronghold...now controlled by the FLMN....not my friends....but he continues, friendly as ever), what group are we with in the U.S. etc. He says he went to school in North Carolina, thanks us for helping the people of El Salvador. He also says that it is a little awkward that until a few months ago he was head of the National Police. This seemed odd, but then I could have misunderstood embarassment for pride. Then presidential candidate Avila drives off in a caravan of large SUVs filled with men who are now visibly carrying weapons.

Now, this may not be much of a story, but it's not every day that I get to have a one-on-one with someone running for president of El Salvador....or any country for that matter. And his story did tear at me, because as much as I wanted to think of Mr. Avila and his associates as bad people (and used a bottle of hand sanitizer after he'd driven away) God kept pestering me and reminding me that I am no better than Mr. Avila. That in eyes of God, Mr. Avila is a precious being. So my prayer for Mr. Avila, and Mr. Funes, and Ms. de Escobar, and most especially myself, is that our hearts be broken open by God to the suffering of our fellows in El Salvador, and San Francisco and every other place in the world...and that whatever Rodrigo and Ana and Mauricio and me are struggling with, wherever we need your help and comfort today - I pray God may grant it to us and that we may come to feel and know God's love.

The Acolyte's Story

This is the story of a girl and of her church. She is an acolyte at la Iglesia Anglicano de San Pablo in the settlement of San Juan de Letran in the Baja Lempe region of El Salvador. We attended services there on Sunday morning, March 9, 2008 and shared in Communion with the congregation.

This is a rural area, settled after the peace agreements primarily by former rebel combatants on land purchased and distributed under the terms of the peace accord.


Getting to church at San Juan de Letran involves dirt roads best traveled by cart or on horseback, particularly in the rainy season, when parts of the road must be nearly impassable. But the trip is worth it.

There is evidence of development activity with various NGOs and the European Union in the area. Like much of El Salvador, it is an area poor in material goods, and immensely rich in human spirit.





The new church building is beautiful, situated on a low hillside with shutters on all sides open to the breeze, and views of the surrounding countryside
















The people welcomed us warmly, the worship was heartfelt, and the singing was sublime.






























Click to join in the singing....

After the service we walked across the road to the site of a sustainable agriculture demonstration plot that Audrey, Eric, the deacon who lives a few houses away, and the jovenes, or youth of the church are building

This is also where the new clinic building is located. It is mostly an open air concrete block ramada, with locked rooms in the back to store supplies. A nurse visits the community once a week; the doctor and dentist visit once a month.

The day we visited, the community was getting ready to raise a simple roof over the open air cistern for the church. There was also a new water tank and generator for the agricultural project and clinic.

While I was standing next to the church talking with Eric and Noah and looking out over the surrounding countryside and enjoying the sunshine and warm breeze, I commented on the beauty of the place. Eric and Noah then told the rest of the acolyte's story.

"See that line of low hills about a mile away?" they asked me.

"That is called las lomas de los pajaros....the hills of the birds. During the violence, this area from the Rio Lempa eastward was controlled by insurgents. There was a government army base near the bridge across the river and a gun emplacement on the hills to the right. The government conducted a scorched earth campaign through this area, destroying everything. In October 1981 the soldiers formed a human cordon and swept all the villagers before them into a ravine where the hills of the birds reach the Rio Lempa. There the soldiers massacred 600 men, women and children." The La Quesera massacre is a living memory for the people of this area. Forensic teams sponsored by NGOs and foreign governments continue to search for remains and attempt to identify them. As the scattered remains are identified, they are given a Christian burial. For more detailed account of this work, check the website of the Central Baptist Church's El Salvador Partners Mission Group here http://salvadorpartners.blogspot.com/2007/01/nueva-esperanza-and-la-quesera.html

The Groundskeeper's Story

This is the story of a groundskeeper at the University of Central America. He is the man who planted this peaceful rose garden. His wife, Elba Ramos, was the housekeeper here for several Jesuit priests who taught at the University. Elba and their daughter, Celia Marisela Ramos lived in an apartment in one wing of the building in the background.

This story is not easy to tell; it is not easy to listen to. But tell and listen we must, because each of us has a part in this story.

Senor Ramos planted this garden because his wife and daughter were murdered here 19 years ago by members of the Salvadoran military---murdered along with the six Jesuit priests living here. The priests were the primary target of the death squad. The priests---especially Ignacio Ellacuria--- were considered subversive because of their outspoken defense of the poor and their challenges to the extreme economic disparities and government oppression in El Salvador. The soldiers who murdered the groundskeeper’s wife and daughter along with the priests were from a battalion of the Salvadoran Atlacatl regiment trained by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. I helped pay for the training of these murderers through the tax dollars I was paying as a prosperous young lawyer.

The groundskeeper’s story is told by these roses and by the walls of the building where these people lived and were were gunned down by the soldiers. It is told by the stairs those soldiers ran down on their way to kill Sra. Ramos and her daughter….the stairs my friend Michael now walks down in the warm Salvadoran sun, with birds singing in the rose garden---past the doors to the rooms where the six priests were sleeping, or reading, or praying before they were shot where they stood or were dragged outside through the doors Michael walks past….dragged out in the night to be murdered in what was to become Senor Ramos’ rose garden.

The groundskeeper tells his story through the exhibits in the museum downstairs…the portrait of Archbishop Romero (himself martyred 10 years before)----a portrait which itself was shot at and burned by the soldiers in their rage that night….the clothing worn by the priests when they were assassinated….the small glass containers with soil and blood taken from the ground where their bodies lay.

The groundskeeper’s story is told in the schoolbag, shoes and clothing of a young boy and old man who had the bad fortune of riding in the car with FatherRutilio Grande on the road from Aguilares to El Paisnol when a death squad pulled the car over and murdered them all.

It is told in the pictures of the four American Maryknoll nuns who were kidnapped right after their arrival in El Salvador as they were driving from the airport to San Salvador. They were raped and murdered by members of government military death squad.

The story is told in a glass case holding a few artifacts from the many killing fields of El Salvador----bits of bone, spent bullets that had torn through people’s bodies, part of an automobile camshaft used as a club, ammunition cartridges---the tools of killing.

The groundskeeper screams his story in the paintings in the Chapel at the University. They are called “The Stations of the Cross”, and they are but a few of hundreds of paintings created by a Salvadoran artist as a way of exorcising his memories of viewing these bodies at massacre sites while searching for the the remains of relatives and friends.

The groundskeeper’s wife and daughter were only 2 of over 70,000 victims who died during Salvadoran civil war which raged in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The vast majority of these victims were civilians killed by El Salvador’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads. To put that into perspective, that would be the equivalent of 4.8 million of our family and neighbors here in the U.S. being killed.

The death of the Jesuits brought international outrage and condemnation upon the Salvadoran Government and pressured them to negotiate an end to their country’s civil war. The spiritual conflict continues, however. Four months before our trip to El Salvador, a Lutheran minister and his wife were gunned down in front of their congregation in a poor area in the west of El Salvador. And ARENA (National Republican Alliance), the conservative political party founded by Roberto D’Aubuisson, the former president of El Salvador who is widely rumored to have ordered the assassination of Archbishop Romero, still controls the national government.

The groundskeeper’s story ends on a note of triumph and forgiveness, however. Last year, Robert White, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador during the first years of the violence, came to speak at a University in San Salvador. Ambassador White is considered a truth teller, who has spoken out about his own anguish over the complicity of our government supporting the repressive regime in El Salvador. When Ambassador White arrived at the auditorium, it was filled with campesinos….poor people of the countryside…who had traveled long distances on crowded buses to see the Ambassador. He spoke; they listened and left. Why had they come? Because, they said, they had to find a person to forgive….a real man who symbolized for them the government of the United States. They had to make this pilgrimage of forgiveness.

Praying for our enemies

Having been blindsided by Christ after a lifetime away from the church, I am often bewildered. Old patterns are gone; old mechanisms for acting within the world don’t work anymore; the life-story I wove for myself is ended. I am compelled to follow Christ, and yet the course is unknowable in a way that life never was before. I’m hoping through this blog to make contact with others who can share their wisdom for this journey.

One difficult learning that I struggle with is how loving my enemies and praying for those who persecute me. Linked with that is the prayer to “forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

I’ve been chewing on a piece by James Alison, “Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self” here that my rector shared with me. It gave me a better perspective on what it means to love my enemies, why this is fundamental to my own continuing forgiveness, and how to go about it.

Part of my difficulty with this teaching of Christ, is that I carry a residual misunderstanding of it’s meaning based upon how I most often heard it talked about and interpreted in my life. As Alison says, generally it is either “presented to us as a kind of heroic moral demand, the sort of thing that would make one somehow especially noble, if unworldly.” Or, it is understood simplistically as “Jesus wants you as a doormat.”

Jesus was not, Alison contends, teaching something called “morals”. Rather, he was speaking from complete understanding of who we are and how our “selves” are constituted that we are only now beginning to comprehend. Our identity—our sense of self-- is given to us as we mirror each other in mutual reciprocity. “He knows that we are reciprocally-formed animals; he seems to understand that we are ourselves radically imitative creatures who are very seriously dependent on what others do to us, for what we do.” We are trapped in this cycle of both negative and positive reciprocity that forms our very sense of ourselves over against the other.

God, of course, is not a part of this cycle; God is not part of the same order of being as us. God can hold us in being and loving without reacting against us in any way. And Jesus is showing us how to move out of our reciprocity and to move into relationship with “others” as God does.

The result of this shift, not unimportantly, is our forgiveness of ourselves. It is only in our relationship with others that we have any access to what constitutes us “in here”. “Only by means of a human mirror do we have access to ourselves.” And we can come to see ourselves as forgiven only to the extent that we can see others as forgiven as well.

I could have prayed for years to be able to forgive myself and not got anywhere at all; it was in being able to let the other go, forgive the other, that I began to be able to forgive myself. It is for this reason that I think that telling people that they need to forgive themselves is to place a terrible burden on them. It is to direct them to fruitless introspection and breast beating, since none of us has direct access to what makes us conscious. The only way to forgive yourself is projectively, which is to say, in another person. As you forgive another, so you will find yourself being let go.

This is not easy. In fact, as Alison says, “Living this out is going to look remarkably like a loss of identity, a certain form of death. And living it out as a human is what it is to be a child of God . . . .”

To make this shift, intentions are not enough; this is not an intellectual exercise. For, "it is how we are in relation to others which runs our reason, and not our reason which runs the way we are towards other”. We can’t simply think our way out of this. The act of praying for our enemies is required.

Now I’m fortunate not to have many up close & personal enemies, but there are a great many people out there who push my buttons and whom I perceive as threatening ‘me and mine’. And I rarely really pray for Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Bishop Akinola, etc. This is all new to me.

So what would this practice look like? Your suggestions are welcome!
One person related his simple two-stage approach: First, I grit my teeth and force myself to say: “Lord, help me - teach me - to forgive that bastard!" And then gradually over time (and I do mean time, it may take months or even years in some cases) the prayer evolves into something like this: "Lord whatever they are struggling with, wherever they need your help and comfort today - I pray you may grant it to them."

So now my morning and evening prayers will include at least one named person from the “Enemies List”. Who will that be tonight?