Tag Archives: El Salvador

MCC lessons: They are more useful than ever

Life as the church, The Mission, , , ,

MCC – the Mennonite Central Committee,  has made a profound difference in my life as it keeps making a profound difference in the world. It is to the everlasting glory of the Brethren in Christ and different branches of the Mennonites that they combined resources in 1920 to form a relief, development and advocacy mission, so their small, Anabaptist part of the church could express the grace they  received.

They continue to back up their convictions with their money and efforts and provide the world with an outsized witness of Jesus. There are only  about 700,000 Mennonites in the U.S. and Canada and about 25,000 people affiliated with the BIC. That’s a lot of people (about the size of Oklahoma City!) — but it is not a lot to supply work in the 40 countries around the world where MCC represents us! They have so much love and commitment!

Not too long ago some dinner companions got my wife and me talking about the many immersion experiences and other trips around the world that showed us Christianity with a broader, love-in-action lens. I decided to summarize what I have written about them in this page.

When the evening was over, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for what MCC has done for the world and done for me. The blessing of seeing the work firsthand and the people it impacts stays with me and informs my faith. Having my American, Empire-fueled temptations highlighted has been lifesaving, as well.

I have a lot of stories. But I offer you three to illustrate why I am grateful.

1990 — El Salvador, Honduras

I remember being inspected by 18-year-olds with machine guns when they unloaded our bus, and being served dinner from the refugee rations of my hosts. It is hard to say what was the most eye-opening experience in El Salvador and Honduras. Maybe it was the moment we realized that the cost of one mobile medical unit designed to save the lives of American soldiers should they get into conflict could fund all the the medical outposts in Honduras, like ones we visited and funded, for a decade! The state-of-the art units waited, fully-loaded, on the base, ready to be helicoptered into some remote area someday while the citizens had nothing every day. Day after day of similar facts overwhelmed me with reality. When we did our debrief in Tegucigalpa, my story was about thinking I was going to Central America to solve problems and shine light. I burst into tears. I did not have any answers, and I came from a dark place that was the problem.

Jon Sobrino said he would never go to the U.S. again, it was too dangerous to his soul. I felt I needed to stay, ultimately, since light was needed in the belly of the beast. My parents were Goldwater Republicans. I voted for Nixon. So I can relate to how hard it is to let go of the myth of America and stop worshipping Trump these days. Francis of Assisi taught me to let go. But I think the Salvadorans may have sealed the deal on fighting back. Like Paul told the Corinthians, we don’t fight with the weapons of the world. Our weapons have an eternity of love and power behind them that demolishes strongholds, even if you are poor and powerless. The American Embassy in San Salvador was an embarrassing, but indicative, bunker. Can you imagine?! There are Christians in the U.S. who are sure Trump must build a wall to make America a stronghold!

 2001 — Colombia

 I remember being taught to dance in the moonlight and having the worst case of food poisoning in my life. But maybe I remember the desperate face of a farmer’s wife in Cali most of all. Her family had come to the city from Putumayo where the U.S. “Plan Colombia” had sprayed their farm and killed all their crops instead of coca. This is the same initiative the State Dept. official we met was embarrassed to tell us about. The farm woman told us, with some hysteria in her voice, like this was her big chance, “Go back and tell your government to stop the spraying. You are killing us.” She wept.  I told the government, but they did not stop. It was hard to even get an ear to tell my story. Even though the U.S. spent 1 billion dollars in 2000-2001 for helicopters, personnel and glysophate, most people I encountered in the U.S. barely knew where Colombia was.

For the U.S. war is a tool of social change (now in Minneapolis!). So much investment in armaments has made the 1% our irrational overlords. The One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States! I am no more than a Putumayo farmwoman in the face of that. But it will always be true that God has chosen the weak to shame the strong. Great love lived out in community is the hope for the world.

At-Tuwani

 2011 — Palestine

I remember a sliver moon and an evening star over the Sea of Galilee and the ruins of bulldozed Palestinian villages refusing to stay buried under Canada Park near Jerusalem. My first hotel in Bethlehem had the 30 foot wall for its picket fence. But being in Capernaum, floating in the Dead Sea was priceless. Yet maybe the most enduring memory is standing in the shade at At-Tuwani and learning how Israeli apartheid works. How your house might be torn down for the least bureaucratic apostrophe. How settlers came and killed sheep with impunity and the government bulldozed irreplaceable olive groves. How Israel cordons off all the water. It is hard to know it until you see it.

“Progress.” Nationalism. Racism and now fascism in Israel.  More than ever, I do not put my trust in chariots and horses. More than ever, like the Palestinians taught me, existence is resistance. Living your life and not playing dead (so you will survive, though as good as dead) is how the true faith has always spread.

I am grateful for the lessons MCC taught me about being a transnational Christian, subject to the law of love and convicted to see Jesus in the face of every human. The troubled places where MCC has done many wonders are are being regenerated in U.S. backyards, right now. Thank God we have people, like those serving with MCC, who prepare us to love and serve and hope so well. More wonders are required.

The present U.S. insurgency: Trained for in El Salvador

Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

Way back in 1990 Steve Penner invited one of the BIC’s newest pastors to join an MCC learning tour to El Salvador and Honduras. It deepened my love for those countries, for the MCC, and for Steve that remains to this day.

The immersion experience also proved to be full of enduring cautionary tales. Unfortunately, the prophecies I received have been fulfilled. Central America was a training ground for the militarists who are invading our streets in unmarked cars and masks right now. They are making war on their own people just like the U.S. trained and funded nationals to do in El Salvador and Honduras.

Olga Fedorova / AP, 2025

Our little delegation did not succeed in unmasking what the the U.S. government was doing in Central America and now we are having trouble unmasking ICE on our own streets [CNN].

ERP combatants in Perquín, El Salvador, by Linda Hess Miller, 1990
ERP combatants in Perquín, El Salvador, by Linda Hess Miller, 1990

18-year-olds with machine guns

In El Salvador it was not marginally trained ICE agents rushing into the streets, fueled by the billions provided by the Big Beautiful Bill.  Instead, we were met by 18-year-olds with guns stopping our bus. We were going toward Chalatenango, the mountainous province which was a major stronghold  of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) “insurgents.” The area was the site of multiple massacres committed against civilians by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military during the civil war (1979–1992).

Our destination was the Mesa Grande refugee camp just over the border in Honduras, where we met a man who escaped El Salvador with barely any clothes on as a child and was still in the camp years later. As the young men prepared to inspect us and our documents, our handlers told us to keep quiet and keep our heads down. There was no telling what the kids might do.

Now we have similar people on our own streets breaking car windows, breaking into homes, and sending untried people to Uganda. I was on edge the whole time I was in El Salvador, now I’m wary of what will happen if we go to Home Depot.

The secrets of Soto Cano

Brunswick, GA (where I visited my relatives and alligators when I was 13) is where the U.S. has a huge center for training ICE agents. Further south in the Everglades, Governor DeSantis spent $250 million on Alligator Alcatraz, which was recently ordered closed by  U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams [NPR]. ICE now has 400 field offices in the US and a growing number of detention centers. The money always flows in the U.S. for violent solutions for relational problems.

When we were in Honduras we somehow got an audience with an officer at the Soto Cano Air Base. I’m sure if I hunted for my journal long enough, I could give you his rank. As was my custom (to the dismay of my handlers), I asked him a question I have not forgotten. The officer had just told us the new capabilities the soldiers were learning about combating insurgencies and conducting “low-intensity warfare,” meaning the enemy does not have giant air bases and cannot be distinguished from the population. (Thus Israel destroys Gaza and kills over 60,000 people to fight Hamas). I asked him, “With all this knowledge and new mobile weaponry, what are the plans for subduing future insurgencies in the U.S.?” He said, “We would never apply these tactics in the U.S.” You can see how that worked out.

Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras was a crucial staging ground for US military operations during the Salvadoran Civil War, serving as a base for intelligence, counterinsurgency, and logistical support. While not located in El Salvador, its role was central to US efforts to support its Cold War political and military interests in Central America. Because the U.S. government did not have public Congressional approval for combat missions from Honduras, it downplayed the constant involvement of the U.S. military in the area’s conflicts. This meant that service members involved often received no awards or official recognition for the dangers they faced. Their service was a secret. And most of us assume the “deep state” has plenty more secrets where those came from (as in the Jeffrey Epstein files).

The subversive cross

We also had the privilege of visiting members of Resurrection Lutheran Church in San Salvador where people told us of their subversive cross. Some of the people we met had been imprisoned, themselves, for their subversive activities — like housing battered women.  Others reported loved ones who were still lost to them in the prison system, not in Louisiana or El Salvador, but lost just the same. The squad that whisked them away was also following orders and “keeping the peace” as if they were the police.

CBN, not a bastion of wokeness, reported on what is happening to Latino Christians across the Evangelical community in the U.S. this year:

The story of the Lutheran Church is like a parable predicting today. At the end of 1989, an offensive by the FMLN resulted in a crackdown on dissenters by the government. On November 16 a death squad murdered six Jesuit priests. That same day another squad came looking for Lutheran Bishop  Gomez with orders to assassinate him. He was safely away. His church was full of victims of the offensive and the soldiers sorted them out.  They captured 12 foreigners and 3 Salvadorans, and they sunk so low as to capture and carry off a cross.

The cross is still a special symbol in the church — after all, now they have to deal with  President Bukele. One day, as a special offering to the Lord, the congregation wrote the sins committed against the people of El Salvador upon a plain, white cross.  As they identified the sins of their country and their people, they committed themselves to work toward forgiveness, and to be strengthened for liberation.  The cross also carried messages of hope and love, as a testimony to the transforming power of God.

The Bishop had found safe haven with friends in Milwaukee. Two months later, he returned accompanied by North American pastors. The U.S. Ambassador interceded and communicated with the President of El Salvador and the “pilgrim cross” made a journey from the prison to the Presidential House. There the cross completed its mission of pointing out sins.

Some time later, Bishop Gómez was again accompanied, this time by pastors from Germany.  They spoke with the President and finally “The Subversive Cross” was handed over, and returned to Resurrection Lutheran Church. The cross now rests in their building, still pointing out sins, injustices and the hard labor its members must do in social action and Christian accompaniment.

After eight months of Trump madness, subversion is growing toward Salvadoran levels all over the country and the whole world. A march to Washington is planned for September, originating in Philadelphia. Governors and attorney generals are figuring out how to creatively secede. Judges are handling cases that have finally made it through  the courts — like undoing Trump’s tariffs.

Debriefing turns to degriefing

A lot of us have been checking out for the past few months because of the Project 2025 onslaught (anti-trans people, etc.), and the tech bros onslaught (DOGE, data harvesting, etc.), the economic onslaught (tariffs now impacting everything), the grift onslaught (bitcoin, Trump family graft), and the compassion onslaught (Medicaid cuts, sneak attack on Medicare, USAID dismantling, etc.). It is all just plain overwhelming. Waiting for Trump to die is not enough hope to live on.

Likewise, in El Salvador I realized that even though I was about as woke as I could get in the 1990’s (I had lived in a commune, after all), I was still unprepared for how huge, ruthless, incompetent and unthought-through our military and political machines were. Sound familiar?

As we debriefed at the close of our trip to El Salvador and Honduras, we had just met Jon Sobrino, the priest who was not killed with his brothers in the raid on the Jesuit mission [my post]. He had just gotten back from the U.S. {Sojourners interview] [1990 commencement speech]. He told us he would never go back. He just did not have the strength to stand up to the soul-killing power of our culture. And, of course, he told us about that power snaking into his own small church and devouring its leaders.

As we sat in Tegucigalpa debriefing I was undone. I had to confess I thought I would have solutions and bring some home. But I had none and I brought home few. I admit, as I took my turn to share my feelings, I broke into tears. The past eight months have pushed me to that edge repeatedly. After all, people from El Salvador are still being brutalized in my own country while legally seeking asylum! Fortunately, I have not forgotten the subversive cross and its inevitable power to undermine the evil of the world and finally defeat it.

Andres the refugee: Lessons in powerlessness from Honduras

Building community, Life as the church, The Mission, , , , , ,

Way back in the 90’s I took my first MCC immersion trip to El Salvador and Honduras. It was before cell phones worked well, so I had one scratchy phone call to Gwen in two weeks – that was a first. I remember the trip as my baptism by fire into the reality of white supremacy and empire thinking. This week that memory has seemed important.

When our group took off for San Salvador, I thought I was a rather “with it,” comparatively-activist kind of guy. I wanted to go to El Salvador before the war was over. I was already upset that the U.S. was complicit in all sorts of evil deeds and had hidden a titanic military base at Soto Cano. I felt a lot of love for people in Central America, especially since I came from Southern California where Spanish speakers were childhood friends. I soon found out I was less with it and loving than I thought, but that’s how I started.

We talked to Army officials, U.S. Embassy reps, church leaders, activists, and MCC workers. We met Jon Sobrino, were forced off our bus by eighteen-year-old soldiers with automatic weapons, and took a ride out into the far reaches of Honduras, almost to Nicaragua, where a village had waited up into the night under the one, public lightbulb to greet us. It was a very educational trip. But the most lasting memory has to be of Andres.

Mesa Grande Refugee Camp — Wikipedia/Linda Hess Miller

My upending memory of Andres

I admit that this incident is one of those that may have a lot more meaning than the facts deserve. I was having an “aha” moment, so who knows what really happened? We were in a refugee camp in Honduras for Salvadorans who had been driven out of their homes by the war. They expected to be gone until the soldiers passed on, but that never happened. Many years later they were still stuck in a strange limbo. Some had come as children, literally naked. One person who had fled with nothing but the clothes on his back was Andres. In his imprisonment, he had become a Christian and the catechist for the camp. We were meeting him because he was one of the leading people who should be seeing a group of well-dressed “dignitaries” from the United States.

He was very kind and very hospitable. We sat in his house made of cast-off scraps of wood. I still remember being fascinated as I watched chickens walking in and out of the walls. This sweet, godly, respectable man kept enlightening me as they pecked about. We might as well had come from the moon, as far as Andres was concerned. He had never been to San Salvador, the capital, from which we had just driven. I think I asked him if he ever wanted to own a car. He said he had not considered that, since he had never been in one. (That is one of my memories that makes me wonder if this really happened. Did he actually say that? You’ve never been in a car?). The longer I got to be with Andres, the more I loved him. My preconceptions about him began to fade into the background the more he talked – preconceptions like, “Surely he would want a car” and, “Surely he would like to go to the capitol city”). He was happy with his house and honored to be the catechist. Unlike all his visitors from the U.S. that day, he was content. He did not have big ideas about how to make everything better, and made me a bit ashamed of myself for cluttering up his honest, simple life with my expensive sandals.

Eventually, we were finished with our overwhelming two weeks and sitting in room in Tegucigalpa for the final debrief. At that point in my life I was especially not a crier. But when it came time for me to share, I uncharacteristically burst into tears. “I feel so helpless,” is what I remember saying. Maybe I was just feeling, “I can’t do anything.” I had come to Central America equipped with health, energy and assurance that I could be a part of something great. I would end the war, figure out rural poverty and go back to the U.S. equipped to organize great things to resettle refugees and effect reconciliation. Instead, I was sitting beside the road in Teguci-whatever crying out to Jesus. When He called to me, I told him I wanted to see. The scales of my “imperial gaze” were not removed, as of yet, but I certainly felt blind.

A few, certainly not all, of the lessons I need to learn

As we were in the middle of the always-overdue crisis over racism and police brutality in the United States last week (white supremacy, imperialism, militarism, inequality, etc. etc.), my mind turned to Andres and the things he began to teach me about being powerless and changing things, way back when.

1) People get along fine without western culture

I had never seen just how huge my list of assumptions about reality actually were until that trip. I thought I was a Christian – and I had been in trouble for how radical I was! But the Bible looked a lot more like Andres than like me. Whenever invisible people become visible to the rulers, it is always disturbing. Andres still disturbs me. I never really knew I was a ruler until I sat on a three-legged stool he made out of firewood in his house and realized he was getting along fine without me and my late-capitalist culture, or whatever it is that’s happening.

2) Not everyone wants to trade community for commodities

How in the world can one be so wise and content with a chicken walking through one’s walls? I could not keep my eyes off that chicken! Later that day another refugee family invited several of us to dinner. We shared a soup featuring their one potato as they happily watched us eat it. We investigated to see just how coerced they were to do this, but we were assured they really thought it would be a hoot to entertain us. Is it more amazing that we were flabbergasted or that they shared their potato? Even as a Christian, I am still tempted to have an economic answer for everything.

3) “Poor” people often have ways to get along in the shadow of the monsters that rule them just fine and don’t need instruction from the monsters when they finally deign to see them.

The world has always been full of monsters. Jesus announced their doom when he rose from the dead after they killed him. I was so full of power, I really wanted to fight those monsters. But after that debrief, I began to think that witnessing to their doom by embracing resurrection in their shadow was my best hope at having a life in a world where Bill Barr is Attorney General. Ever since, I keep trying to find a way to live an alternative in Christ in the shadow of the doomed monsters. They are passing away, after all, and what they thought was the Lord’s powerlessness will upend them forever. Plus, even they need a place to which to escape after they have killed and raped and despoiled the earth. I sat with Andres and felt like I deserved to die from my complicity with the monster from the north, but his gentle ignorance of my political plight and deep wisdom of our common spiritual future comforted and directed me.

4) Fighting it out for justice as if it amounted to percentages of a limited pie doesn’t make sense unless you want the pie.

We’ve been having the endless argument again this week after the looters smashed up corporate windows and messed up too many small businesspeople, too. “Thou shalt not steal” vs. “It’s not stealing; it’s just a bit of reparations for what was stolen.” Everyone is stealing, as usual, because in our society we live in a capitalist box. It seems to me that God is knocking on the box like (decidedly white, admittedly) Jesus in the famous painting, standing at the door. Behold, if there is not a better life than succeeding in the capitalist free-for-all, the vortex of injustice, that’s sad. Andres couldn’t have cared less about my car. How did he get so happy without a car? How did he seem so wise without knowing about my 401K? How could he know anything if he was not prepared to fight off the monster lurking in Soto Cano?

I take heart that the protests seemed to get free of the violence this weekend and turn into the morality that is uniting people around the world. But economic inequality is not going away any time soon, if ever. I’m glad I’ve met people all over the world, who don’t follow that inequality around, but follow Jesus instead.

5) There is an alternative that Anabaptists like to talk about but rarely find in North America.

I am happy we talk about the Third Way, and we (I mainly know about Circle of Hope) represent an alternative in a lot of ways. But we spend an awful lot of time sorting out the first and second ways, or whatever binary the media loves to amplify. I admit, I love to fire up my computer and read all the news every day. I might spend more time on that than time in meditation most days! I know an awful lot about the awful Trump, tromping across the street to run humanity-loving Episcopalians off their own porch. I suspect Andres never had a computer.  He missed the endless arguing; he missed the moralizing about moralizing, fury about fury and, exclusion over excluding. Maybe I am over-idealizing him, but I remember him as being strangely at peace. I not only want that peace, I want to make it.

I know I am making “points” as I go along telling these little stories. I’m not trying to tidy up my experience or yours – not really. It’s more of a confession. If you are a so-called white person, you probably have some of your own confession to make. So I am not trying to whitesplain anything, just trying to learn old lessons better. My lessons are not final and it would not be surprising if they aren’t the ones you want or need to hear. So let’s be friends. I just thought I’d tell you about a good man in the middle of nowhere who was driven out of his home and ended up in a refugee camp. He learned faith and it made him remarkable to me. Maybe he had an easier situation in which to learn faith at that point than we have in the belly of this beast – good for him. But maybe we can do it, too, instead of biting and devouring one another in reflection of the monster.

I think MCC made a decent investment by baptizing me. I certainly became better friends with the refugees of the world and with a lot of other people I probably would have continued to otherize. We are so preoccupied with stealing in the U.S., the country has ended up with a lot of stuff. When we ship it off to people with one potato periodically, I feel like some justice is done. Even better, when we get to know them and figure out our whole way of looking at things may not have much of a Jesus lens, love gets a chance to bloom. Then I feel we might be able to see a little bit.

The three things that changed my mind about those “other” people

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In August, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said immigrants legally in the U.S. may no longer be eligible for green cards if they use food stamps, Medicaid and other public benefits. To justify this direction, he cited an 1882 rule intended to undo the words on the Statue of Liberty about welcoming the poor through the golden door by restricting immigration to wealthier people.

Cuccinelli’s intentions are just one of many ways the government is inventing to keep people, especially poor people and people of color, out of the United States. The  administration of Donald Trump (the Nativist in Chief) is so full of enmity and strife they can’t implement most of their threats, but that certainly doesn’t ease the fears of families who are left in limbo and too often separated from each other.

I grew up in a lower middle class family in the 1950s and 60s. My parents bravely clawed their way out of their parents’ poverty. Along the way, they cultured every “white” fear of the “other” possible. As a child, I swam in the nation’s original sin of racism. The family carried a careful disdain for every outsider who somehow managed to get into the white man’s country. This was my father’s creed, even though his grandmother was so poor she tried to get onto the Choctaw rolls in order to receive Native American benefits. As a result of all this training, even now I have a small, inbred instinct that resonates with people who think Ken Cuccinelli makes sense as he protects the nation from “freeloaders” flooding in to steal the fruits of “our” hard labor. I thought “otherizing “ people was just the way things worked until I was in Jr. High.

Friendship

Long about Jr. High I began to wake up to what all this hatred really meant. My mind began to change due to my friendships. I played sports with people who spoke Spanish at home and many were dear friends my whole childhood. I also learned my town’s name was Spanish and the first colonizers of California were from Spain. I had Japanese girlfriends, which really did not go over well, since my dad had fought them in World War 2. California was a major melting pot and I melted in.

The Bible

More important, I began to read the Bible for myself when I was a young man. My parents were not Christians, so they did not have any authority to recast the Bible for me; therefore, I got it straight.  When it came to “other” people, the Bible is clear. Jesus was an “other” and allied himself with poor people and outcasts, all the fancy buildings dedicated to him, notwithstanding. Israel was a nation of freed slaves who were commanded to treat outsiders like guests. Jesus made it clear that if his followers did not go to the ultimate degree with this element of Jewish morality, they were not his followers. “Love as I have loved you” and “love your enemies” are not hard truths to understand. I understood them.

Travel

What sealed my change of mind and helped create new instincts was experiencing other cultures and people first hand. The TV and our many screens makes the world seem small until you are travelling all over it. I’ve been all over. I have five abiding images that continue to stoke my love and reinforce the truth I gained in rebellion from my parents’ manifestly bad example as I followed Jesus.

  • While in Indonesia as a seventeen-year-old exchange student, a legless blind woman appeared in our train car after a stop, a car dominated by our merry band of rich kids en route to Bali. She scared us as she begged. She refused our food, since she was sent for money. Our conductor entered the car and was appalled. He actually had the train stop and they threw her out in a rice field in the middle of nowhere. We cried. I have never forgotten her.
Related image
Homes for the “other”
  • Gwen and I lived in San Diego for a little while before we had children. Whenever we crossed back over the border from Mexico, it amazed us how the air felt different — San Diego was irrigated with water that flowed through California’s expensive water projects and it sweetened the air. When we delivered help to people on the steep, dirt streets of Tijuana, it was our first experience of people all over the world who live on the hillsides without any utility services.
  • My first immersion trip with MCC was to El Salvador and Honduras. It was at the end of the civil war the U.S. financed. More than once our van was stopped by eighteen-year olds with automatic weapons making sure we were doing nothing subversive. We later learned many of them were probably kidnapped and forced to do their duty. In El Salvador we visited some of the “marginalized” people MCC was housing in one-room corrugated homes, for which they were very grateful. We learned the “marginalized,” although they lived in a category, did not officially exist. The territory on which they squatted had no government jurisdiction and they had no citizen rights. They were “others” who lived someone else’s lie.
  • While in South Africa learning mediation from the experts, our group of visibly-Western, wealthy people spent a brief time in downtown Johannesburg enjoying coffee in a sidewalk café. Our handlers began to note the young men who were beginning to circle us. They had warned us that desperate people were on the prowl for unsuspecting marks. It was a bit terrifying to be otherized by the otherized.
“Fumigation” in Colombia
  • In Colombia, again with MCC, we survived a ride through one section of the mountains — where vans had been stopped by kidnappers rappelling down cliffs, to arrive in beautiful Cali. There we met displaced “others” who had been driven off their land by the war on drugs. The helicopters spayed Round-up indiscriminately, so people growing corn to feed their families were punished along with the coca farmers. One of them made sure to tell us to speak to our government about such cruelty. I did.

Jesus makes us safe enough to love the “other”

The government is as cruel now as it has ever been. And a good 40% of the voting population is convinced, as my father was, that there is not a problem a wall could not solve. Purported, Bible-loving Christians are some of the staunchest defenders of people like Ken Cuccinelli.

It is a blessing that I read the Bible, since it has little hope for any kingdom God does not rule and has little hope for any situation that is not seen through the lens of Jesus. Ultimately, being rooted in Jesus allowed me to cherish my cross-cultural encounters with the “others” I have met over the years. Jesus gives me the courage to put my opinions, identity and way of life at risk. Because of Jesus I am ready to be changed by my encounters with others just like God risks to relate to me and you. The process of love is unsettling unless one is settled in love.

David Brooks rightly noted last Friday that millions of Americans are being asked

“to accept high immigration while they are already living with maximum insecurity. Their wages are declining, their families and communities are fragmenting, their churches are shrinking, government services are being cut, their values and national identity feel unstable. Of course they are going to react with suspicion if suddenly on top of all this they begin to feel like strangers in their own place.”

I see what he is saying; I grew up in a house full of those fears. But when have regular people ever felt anything but that? My Dad was just trying to survive, too. He thought it was dangerous to be connected to others and illogical to care about their needs if his own family suffered.

Without that Jesus lens, the points Cuccinelli, Brooks, and Trump make along with their supporters and detractors will be endlessly made, just as the same points have been made my whole life. A friendship may show you another way. The Bible will surely teach us something different. Travel may open one’s eyes. At least I feel I have learned some life-changing things as I have listened to all those things. The big one is: no one is really safe and others are not safe from us unless we are safe in Jesus.

For the Cadets on Jean Donovan Day

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Last night the president had some uphill sledding to do with his speech to the cadets at West Point. I admit I did not listen very well to every word, since I was also reading a magazine and writing our Christmas letter (sorry Barack). But I did notice that the poor man could not get any applause for the longest time! And, if nothing else, he is a good applause-getter! He finally loosened them up with the sheer power of a great speech. But the cadets didn’t get their hands moving until he complimented them! It was glaring. They were either feeling reticent about showing too much emotion (they were apparently instructed not to smile until the end – attenshun!) or they were reticent about him. But they finally got clapping when they were essentially clapping for themselves!

Applause for ourselves?

Am I making too much of this? I doubt it. I think we have been raising people to be aggressively self-centered and amazingly entitled for twenty years, now. Of course the cadets applauded for themselves! I wouldn’t be surprised if the line was purposely inserted in the speech to make sure they would get what they wanted. Why wouldn’t the president be a deliveryman for one’s self-interest?

It may have been more interesting than that. There was a lot of politicking going on in that speech. Obama talks to the cadets, then he turns to the camera and talks to the nation. He turns back and talks to the military in general, then he turns to the camera and talks to the world. He’s good. Plus, he was doing some slight variations on the stock, “We’ve got to pull out the stops and keep the war going” speech that people will be talking about today. The pundits were already being amazed that he was saying “We’ve got to build up so we can pull out.” And John McCain was already doubting that ever having an end point to a war is a good thing. I think his point is, “Even if it bankrupts us and we can’t really hope to dominate them, we need to try.”

Or applause for Jean Donovan

It is quite jarring to think about all that when I go to bed and then wake up and realize it is Jean Donovan Day. She was martyred by a Salvadoran death squad on Dec. 2, 1980, when she was twenty-seven years old on a two-year mission with the Maryknoll sisters. She was supposed to be advancing literacy among the campesinos and ended up a disciple of Oscar Romero burying people caught in the crossfire of the government’s attacks on “subversives.” Her famous note to a friend, a few weeks before she was raped and murdered, said: “The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave… Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

Yes, I do want the cadets to care about the children and do unreasonable things to serve peasants. They will certainly find enough of them in Afghanistan! Honestly, I think a lot of the cadets would like to do that, too. So I want the president to help them change the world in the Jean Donovan way. Honestly, I think he might like to do that. So I want Jesus to keep defeating evil for us so we are not so foolish and controlled by self-destruction, and so the president gets to do what he must really want to do. In the meantime, I hope each of us will honor Jean Donovan today because she knew how to be in league with Jesus in a very practical way.