September 9, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20 I have set before you life and death: choose life.
Psalm 1 Beatus vir qui non abiit
Philemon 1-20 No longer a slave but a beloved brother
Luke 14:25-33 Sit down and estimate the cost of discipleship
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Jeremiah 18:1-11 Spoiled in the potter's hand
Psalm 139:1-5, 13-18 Domine, probasti
or
Deuteronomy 30:15-20 [see above]
Psalm 1 [see above]
Philemon 1-21 [see above]
Luke 14:25-33 [see above]
In the summer of 1985 during the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against the people of this land, I came for the first time to Nicaragua, with the North American solidarity group called Witness for Peace. We wore white clothing and sailed down the Rio Escondido on the Bluefields Express, a riverboat on a route in which its predecessors had been sunk several times by the Contra. The Nicaraguan government promised we would not have guns on board, so the usual squad of armed women and men soldiers was not with us. We were witnessing for nonviolence. But the government unbeknownst to us but not to the Contra had sent a huge gunboat down the river behind us as an escort, and the Contras, even more frightened than I, stayed away. Nothing so alarming or life-changing had happened to me since the earthquakes of puberty and the dawning discovery at the age of twelve, that I was gay.
I had met Mexican migrant workers in the sugar beet fields of Michigan, when in college, and first offended the academic powers-that-be by writing of their misery in the campus newspaper that I edited. (Owners of the beet fields were wealthy and pious patrons of the presbyterian college which would try to expel me for being gay. But I had the highest grades in class, and refused to leave.). But I first met Latin America later as a draftee in the U.S. Army of occupation in Puerto Rico in 1954, and was sunstruck by the struggle there for life and liberation. We draftees were forbidden to speak Spanish at Fort Brooke, in old San Juan, but I learned some anyway at the Episcopal Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, and was befriended by Jim Amo, a gay priest there at the English congregation, and Francisco Reus-Froylan, a strait priest at the Spanish congregation, and later Bishop of Puerto Rico. After the Army I went to Seabury-Western, in Suburbia, U.S.A., and of course heard not a word of Spanish again for three years. As a young priest, I began again to meet Latin Americans on Chicago's West Side, and my friendship of many years with Padre Rex Bateman, at St. Luke's, Western Avenue, in Chicago, amounted to another seismic shift in my consciousness. Rex rendered the missal into Spanish, all the minor propers, wrote masses for his Hispanic flock, and helped to edit the Spanish Hymnal. After 30 years at St. Andrew's, a ghetto mission, Bishop Frank Griswold asked me to go to Nicaragua to implement a companion relationship with the Episcopal church here. I drove a station wagon 4,440 miles here in 1989 to found Casa Ave Maria and begin a whole new lifetime and a whole new way of living. I have flown back to Gringolandia three or four times a year since then, and each time I make the trip it is a culture jolt--a dislocation that shocks and disturbs, that howls in the mind and heart for weeks afterwards. The trip northward to Chicago is both cushioned and corrupted by the comforts of the robber capitalism that dominates El Norte. The avalanche of goods and services and people for sale from the airport onward is an endless Vanity Fair, most of it calculated to fatten or hide the fat and gristle. The flight southward to Managua is always bittersweet, for as I embrace the poor of Managua when I return, I know that I do not have to embrace their poverty, their impoverishment, their exile from a decent minimum of nutrition and health care. The capitalism of which northamericans are so proud (and so in love with) has given us a corner on survival and medicine, if not on life and health, and left the world behind. I have had to have seven heart bypasses in these years, but none of that is possible in Nicaragua, and the poor die here for lack of the surgery and care that is taken for granted in Gringolandia.
We have so much of the world's resources here in the U.S.A., hoarded on our plate, our elbows on the table. I have to shift economic gears when I land in Chicago, where I will spend $30 plus tips for a taxi from the airport into town--a couple weeks wages for a teacher in Nicaragua. I spend $50 to take a friend to dinner in Chicago, the amount I pay a teacher monthly to teach piano or recorder to a class of kids in Managua for an hour each day. We Gringos have sat ourselves down in the highest places at the banquet of life on the planet, which Jesus noticed in last week's gospel, but more important guests, in his opinion--the poor of the earth--have been bidden to come up higher and are now at the door. We will soon be bidden to give place, and begin with shame to move ourselves from the high table of unshared luxury.
In 1986 I talked with some little children, scrubbed and well dressed, sitting on the steps of a humble house in Matagalpa, a city north of Managua. One little girl guessed that I was from Los Estados Unidos and said, "Su pais es muy bonito" -- "Your country is very beautiful. . Pero Nicaragua es muy feo" But Nicaragua is very ugly. Shocked, I remember that I asked her why she would say such a thing. Had she been there? No, but she had seen television. "En los Estados hay muchas cosas muy linda, pero aqui no tenemos nada." In the States there are many pretty things, but here we don't have anything. I choked up and blinked away a tear.I struggled to answer in Spanish, and told her that was not true, that in the States we have only cosas, things, and lots more of them, than Nicaragua, but here, I said, you have beautiful skies and hills, wonderful flowers everywhere, and beautiful little girls and boys. And you have had a revolution and now have your own country, I said. . . you don't have Somoza any more, the rich people don't own Nicaragua any more. .
All the children laughed then, and clapped and I gave them all Number Two pencils and asked them to sing me a song, and they did: "Ay, Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, la flor mas linda de mi querer, abonada con la bendita, Nicaragüita, sangre de Diriangen! Ay, Nicaragua, sos más dulcita, que la mielita de tamagás, pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, yo te quiero mucho mas." (Oh, Nicaragua, little Nicaragua, the most beautiful flower of my desire, fertile with blessing, little Nicaragua, offspring of Diriangen! Oh, Nicaragua, you are sweeter than the honey of Tamagas, but now that you are free, little Nicaragua, I love you so much more!"
Jesus our Liberator teaches us today about the cost of liberation, the cost of discipleship. It is not cheap. In the hyperbole of his ardor, he says that "if any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his or her own life, they cannot be my disciple." He's scheduling priorities, of course, and it may indeed come to our detesting the ways of our forebears and families, who perhaps have given us full bellies and empty hearts. It may come to despising our own "lifestyles", organized as they are around "muchas cosas lindas" for Jesus asks of us far more than the Church has ever done, or will ever feel a need to. The Church may ask us to memorize this or that, to devote a bit of cash to its support, to attend innumerable meetings, and above all to be nice. But Jesus says to sit down and get some counsel before you get into this because if you decide to follow him you are in for a bumpy ride. "What King, going to encounter another in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?" Ronald Reagan, drawing just the opposite conclusion that Jesus drew from his rhetoric, invoked it to justify spending half our national resources on weapons of death and destruction and gringos loved it. But Jesus invokes it to negotiate our way into the Reign of God from a position of strength, and the way to do that is to divest ourselves of the impedimenta to radical change: selfish wealth, racial privilege, class power, family connections, imperial citizenship: all of the things that carry with them the "muchas cosas bonitas" that the little Nica girl in her innocence envied the gringos for. What privilege we have maintained on the backs of our slave nations, huddled in their slave cabin nations round about us on the finca, the plantation we have made of the Western Hemisphere.
Nicaragua when I first went there was like Onesimus, an escaped slave. The Revolution, though wounded, was alive and proud. She was alas tracked down by bounty hunters and, as Reagan promised in his dirty war, forced to cry "Uncle" and forswear her autonomy and virtue for a while. But the wind is rising once again, and the banderas of liberty are whipping the skies in the barrios. One hears again the songs of Nicaragua's joy in her own courage. A Sandinista Jewish brother has been elected mayor of Managua.
In Paul's letter to his friend and former slave owner Philemon, he urges him to receive Paul's cell-mate and rap partner Onesimus back as a sibling and not as a chattel. Onesimus (a word that meant "useful") Paul says had been Useless to you as chattel, but now that he's free you must take him back as Useful to you at last, as a sibling. Let us think of this letter as addressed to us north American slave-owners, whose slave colonies are slipping away one by one. Even Puerto Rico is demanding more than its status as house slave-- commonwealth colonia. We all profited in our privileged life from the sweat of slaves, through the puppet dictators we set over these lands. (Remember FDR's famous line, about Somoza, "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch.") We still run much of the world through OUR hegemons and hounds. But they will be less and less "Useful" to us as satellites and subjects of our domination, and we will one day have to adjust to a reorganized world. Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon for Philemon's own good--the former slave has a mission to liberate the slave owner--and that is the model that the New Testament lays out for the liberation of the domination system.
Nicaragua like Onesimus will return to a different relationship with the United States of Arrogance, and will set an example for the rest of our slave states. This will be the best of gifts to this land of ours, and to Nicaragua and all the other lands of Latin America, the great Mother Country of the Hemisphere. The United States is a place that has gone certifiably insane with power, wealth, greed, and bloodshed, blissfully unaware (like the village idiot) that in the eys of the rest of the world it is a pariah. Its slavish press calls any country that behaves the same way it does with weapons "a rogue state" and cannot see where the roguishness is born and raised into brat-hood.
Jonny Chavarria, aged 11, wrote his analysis in Nicaragua:
El campesino trabaja.
Los ricos ven al pobre sufrir.
Mientras el campesino come frijoles
el rico carne todos los dias y
lo que quieran.
El pobre se viste con ropas rajadas
el rico se viste con ropas diolén.
El pobre vive en casas de cartón
y los explotadores se ríen del campesino.
The peasant works.
Rich people see poor people suffer.
While the peasant eats beans
rich people eat meat every day and
whatever they want.
Poor people dress in rags,
rich people wear clothes of polyester.
Poor people live in houses made of cardboard,
and the exploiters laugh at the peasant.
+ + +
The gospel is to be our liberating therapy, what will restore us as a
people to religious and mental health, and allow us to be received as a
sibling once again by the Two Thirds World, and not as slavemaster.
"Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my
disciple." "See, I have set before you this day life and death, good and
evil. . . if you are drawn to serve other gods, I declare to you that you
shall perish. I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day,
that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore
choose Life." The cost of discipleship, of liberation, for Nicaragua,
has been high, and continues to be so. She lost as many daughters and
sons to bloodshed in the war with the United States in the eighties--nearly
55,000,--as the U.S. itself lost in the Vietnamese war, another
slaughter in which the Vietnamese lost millions of sons and daughters, to
Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger's hubris. . Some of
these war criminals walk around loose and breathe the same air as we do.
As I write this in Managua on the 11th of August, 2001, El Nuevo Diario
carries the glad news that an Argentine judge has begun the legal process
to "interrogar al ex secretario norteamericano de Estado, Henry Kissinger"
about the plan of the military dicators of the Southern Cone to eliminate
their opposition in the 1970's. "Plan Condor" was the form the American
eagle took to coordinate the dictators of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,
Paraguay and Uruguay in their war on the possibilities of change, of hope
for the poor..
In September of 1986 I stood in a hospital in Esteli, in the north of Nicaragua, and saw five wounded soldiers, still in bloody battle dress, carried into the emergency ward for attention. Seven others had been killed that day near the Honduran border by the bandit contras armed with guns and bullets from the U.S.A., paid for by the taxes I used to pay when I lived there, and it was a strange and horrible feeling to know that with Thomas Merton I was a guilty bystander.
We friends of Jesus cannot be bystanders to the history of our time, nor observers as the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent bear it away. Jesus says, "count the cost of commitment" and Paul says, "I look for some benefit from you" and the God of Ancient Days commands us, "Look, I have laid before you life and good, death and evil. Therefore choose life."
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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