My Experience in Guatemala by Justin Colville

(Amistad Newsletter.)

MY EXPERIENCE IN GUATEMALA by justin colville

Things are different in Guatemala, starting with the water.  They do not have clean drinking water from the tap, and in the part of the city where we were staying, the water only ran for a few hours very early in the morning each day.  Even something as simple as washing dishes was not the same because, since the water wasn’t completely clean, you always had to be careful to wipe off your cup a second time before using it.  It was also surprising to see that, almost everywhere you went, there were at least  four soldiers standing on every corner, guarding something. 

I am Justin Colville, and I have a pretty easy life.  I know that there are people who grow up without even having a house to live in, and that is partly why I wanted to go to Guatemala.  I wanted to help people more than I already do. I also thought it would be fun to see how people live in a different country. My two sisters made trips to Colombia with my parents when they were my age (12), and I always wanted to share in a similar experience.

I went to Guatemala with my Dad, our neighbor Herb, my friend Ammon and his Mom from the Hartford Catholic Worker, and a new friend named Cristina whom I’d not met before.  One of our main work projects while in Guatemala was rebuilding Casa Juan Gerardi, the new Catholic Worker community house in a poor neighborhood called Zona Diez, or Zone 10.  We spent many hours breaking stone, mixing and pouring cement, repairing the roof, refinishing wooden furniture, cleaning and painting.  We worked side by side with about twenty five Guatemalan friends and neighbors.  It was hot when the sun was out, and it also rained quite a bit, but we had a great time and got a lot of work done.  Usually by the end of the day somebody would take out a soccer ball and all the kids would play in the street.  Father Tom would celebrate mass with everyone at the dining room table, and then we’d have a dinner of rice and beans and tortillas.  

We visited many places in Guatemala, but the one that had the biggest impact on me was the city dump.  This is a huge place where poor families build their homes out of trash and things that others had thrown away.  They survive there by scavenging in the dump, finding things to recycle or sell or use in some way. In the sky right above them were many vultures, just lurking.  We spent some time talking to them and we brought some candy and rubber balls to give out.  The strange thing about it was that the people who lived there seemed happy, or at least happier than people I know who seem to have everything they want.  

Also in Guatemala City we visited a school called Monte Maria, which is Spanish for Maryknoll.  This is an all-girls school, and the students are very involved in service work like we were doing.  We painted a large mural there with the theme of empowerment of women.  Father Tom told us that almost all of the women in Guatemala who are changing the system for the better are graduates of that school.

Later, we took some trips outside the city and into the beautiful countryside of Guatemala.  We swam in the Pacific Ocean, and while we were on the beach there, we experienced an earthquake.  Some of us were scared by this at first, but the people we were with said that earthquakes happen all the time.  

Then we traveled to a famous lake called Atitlan.  Atitlan is located next to a town called San Lucas, which is Spanish for St. Luke.  We seemed to arrive there at just the right time because it was during the feast of St. Luke.  The whole town was closed to cars for the festival, and there was a huge carnival going on.  The priest in the church there, Father Gregorio, is from Minnesota, and he told us that he had been in Guatemala for the past 45 years.  Father Gregorio shared some stories about his earlier days there, when he began to realize that the thing the people needed most, but did not have, was land.  So he spent several years raising money in the United States, and used it to buy enough land for over six hundred families to have a small plot for growing coffee.  Today, in the hills surrounding San Lucas, these families harvest their coffee and sell it to a coffee cooperative set up by the parish.  The farmers get a better price for their coffee beans than they can get anywhere else, and this makes it possible for them to feed and clothe and educate their children.  So, with the help of Father Gregorio and the leaders of the church there, many families have been able to get out of poverty.

The food in Guatemala is mostly rice and beans and tortillas, but they also have other things such as tacos and McDonalds.  The difference about McDonalds in Guatemala, however, is that poor people can’t afford to eat there!  Meat is considered a luxury for most families.

Guatemala is a beautiful country, and I had a great time and made many friends there.  I hope to go back again some day.

A Little Space in Guatemala by Mark Colville

(Amistad Newsletter.)

“We are not able to stop the killing, at least not now… So, we are simply trying to find a little space.  A little space to do something good, something peaceful, something life-giving for the people.  And we believe that God will work with that and multiply it… if we can open a little space…”  (Paraphrased portion of a conversation with a Maryknoll Sister in Guatemala during the 1980’s)

A LITTLE SPACE IN GUATEMALA by mark colville

The killing in Guatemala began with the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected and extremely popular government of Jacobo Arbenz, in a coup engineered by the CIA under President Eisenhower.  From the mid-1950s until the mid-nineties, more than a quarter of a million people- over 80 percent of them indigenous, and about 95 percent victimized by government-sponsored military and paramilitary groups- lost their lives to the violence. 

In 1995 there were peace accords signed between the government and its main armed opposition, and this “opened a little space” for the people. A process of recovering the historical memory of these dark times was commissioned by the Catholic Church under the direction of Bishop Juan Gerardi, an undertaking which took three years and involved the investigation of over six hundred massacres.  Several of the investigators were assassinated.  On April 26th, 1998, Bishop Gerardi released the report, several volumes in length, entitled “Guatemala, Nunca Mas”.  Two days later, Bishop Gerardi himself was brutally murdered by military personnel in his garage at the church of San Sebastian.  In the decade since his death, Bishop Juan Gerardi has become widely recognized as a martyr, and a great symbol of faith and courage in the struggle for justice and reconciliation among the people of Guatemala.

Our visit to Guatemala from October 10-20, 2008, took place in this historical backdrop, among a people struggling to nurture the seeds of justice and reconciliation sown by Bishop Gerardi and so many more like him.  We came at the invitation of fellow Catholic Worker friends, Father Tom Goekler, Mario and Danilo Torres, and Carlos Flores.  They have opened Casa Juan Gerardi,  a tiny house of hospitality in Zona Diez, a barrio in Guatemala’s huge capital city.  The group began arriving there eight months ago from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where for eight years they had grown a very successful program of outreach to youth in the street (Jovenes en la Calle) and built dozens of houses for families who had lost their homes in the devastation of Hurricane Mitch.  For the Casa Juan Gerardi Catholic Worker, the work at hand thus far has been simply to build a presence, and they have done little during the past eight months besides live an intentional commuity life (common prayer and meals, work, study) and develop relationships with their neighbors. As for the coming year, they expect to move deliberately toward raising issues in the neighborhood- mostly focusing on confronting and reducing the violence- and to begin reaching out more substantively to people in need. [see p. 6]

  The arrival of our group- Jackie and Ammon Allen-Doucot from the Hartford Catholic Worker, Cristina White (a student at Central Connecticut State University), Herb Turner, Justin Colville and I from the Amistad House- coincided with the beginning of a work project designed to expand the living space of the house of hospitality.  More importantly, this work brought together people who normally would not encounter each other, because of the social and psychological barriers inherent in the disparity between wealth and poverty in Guatemala.  The Casa Gerardi community is working to break down these barriers, to build a local movement among the poor that is oriented toward justice and nonviolence.  And so we soon found ourselves working side by side with campesinos, middle-class Guatemalans from a nearby parish and neighbors from Zona Diez.  We were all laboring to open a space- a physical space for people to gather and find one another.

For me, this was the highlight of a trip in which the Casa Gerardi Community showed us more of Guatemala in ten days than a seasoned tour guide could probably have managed in a month.  We saw all sides of Guatemala City, including an excellent school run by Maryknoll Sisters, the Church of San Sebastian (where Bishop Gerardi was killed), and a large municipal dump at which many families live and scavenge to survive.  We swam in the Pacific Ocean, drove through the mountains to Lake Atitlan, and celebrated the feast of St. Luke in a town of the same name, with a priest from Minnesota who has been serving there for forty five years. We toured the old city of Antigua.  

Along the way, we seemed to be engaged in an ongoing clarification of thought meeting, with Father Tom incessantly challenging us to examine our consciences, our attitudes and our position in the world.  “Poverty means to have no options,” he reminded us more than once, “and we will never be poor, because we have options.”  To work effectively with the poor, he’d say, it is best to start with the conviction that poverty is my fault.  The violence and oppression in Guatemala is both a byproduct of a system that I benefit from, and a reality that I aid and abet with the choices I make.  To deny complicity in the oppression of the poor is to delude myself, and to ignore it is to refuse the grace of God that comes by way of repentance.  

In short, we were not about to hit the airport with little more than a feel-good experience.  We were held responsible for what we saw and heard.  We were invited to put aside our own agendas and enter into a process of community building among the poor, a process in which we were neither the directors nor the main focus. And it was clear by the end of our stay that whatever work we were able to do was far less important than being present to, and in relationship with, the people of Zona Diez as they began to move together toward a more peaceful reality.  it is our hope to continue in colaboration with Casa Juan Gerardi and to be in solidarity with their ongoing struggle.

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    In any society, no matter the people or country, the distance between cultures or customs or languages spoken is never as great as the distance between the poor and the non-poor.  It is always the gulf created by wealth and poverty more than anything else that divides us, walls us out or fences us in, sows fear and violence, and constructs boundaries to the reach of our love and commitment and solidarity.  To come to terms with the call of Jesus to universalize our love, we must learn to violate those boundaries, to cut holes in that fence, to jump that wall…

    The Amistad Catholic Worker is a community of faith dedicated to the daily practice of the Works of Mercy, voluntary poverty, personalism and prayer.  We practice nonviolence, both as a personal lifestyle and as a method of confrontation with the principalities and powers that perpetrate war and the myriad other forms of violence against the poor.  Our home is open as a house of hospitality offering sustenance and companionship in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut.  This newsletter is distributed free of charge.  We sustain ourselves by the free-will offerings of those who support our work.  We invite your participation in this work through the sharing of time, service, resources, collaboration in the struggle for peace and justice, and responses to the ideas we promote.  Members of our in-house community include: Luz, Mark, Keeley, Soledad, Justin and Isaiah Colville; Mario Fernandez; Vincent Folet; Fr. Tom Goekler; Esmilda and Heriberto Ramos

 

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Blackwater Is Put On Trial

[Note: On September 16th, 2007, 17 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and at least 27 wounded, in an unprovoked attack by para-military contractors (mercenaries) employed by a US government contract with a company in North Carolina called Blackwater USA (now Blackwater Worldwide). The dead and wounded were simply sitting in their cars in a traffic jam in Nisour Square when the Blackwater contingent approached in military vehicles and opened fire.  To this day, no Blackwater employee has been prosecuted by any court for this atrocity, one of dozens which have allegedly been perpetrated by such military contractors with impunity.  On October 20th, 2007, seven activists (Steve Baggarly, Elizabeth Brockman, Mark Colville, Peter DeMott, Mary Grace, Laura Marks and Bill Streit) entered the property of Blackwater's headquarters and staged a dramatic re-enactmant of the Nisour Square Massacre.  After arrest and two trials, they were found guilty of trespass and resisting or refusing to comply with an officer.  Prior to sentencing, Steve Baggarly offered the following statement:]

 

 

A joint study released in October 2006 by the Johns

Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al 

Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimated Iraqi

casualties from the March 2003 US invasion to July

2006 at 655,000. Using internationally accepted

methods for determining casualties in war zones, and

with 90% of interviewees presenting death

certificates, the study found that about 2.5% of

Iraq’s population died as a consequence of the war up

to that point. It estimated that over 1/3 of those

were killed by US violence. During that time, Iraq

suffered the equivalent of 17 Virginia Tech massacres

per day. The US invasion created the climate of

violence and abuse against all of Iraq’s people which

the occupation sustains daily. The past 18 months the

violence has continued. It stands to reason that

several times the number of fatalities have been

wounded, orphaned, widowed, blinded, raped,

terrorized, tortured, or driven mad by the war. Add to

that some 4.2 million Iraqi refugees and one gets a

picture of an entire nation being destroyed, its

people killed, maimed, and forced out, its children

targeted and traumatized. 

In Nisoor Square Mohammed Hafiz was driving four

children when Blackwater mercenaries riddled the car

with bullets. His 10 year old son Ali was shot in the

head. Mohammed had to gather up pieces of the child’s

skull and brains for the burial. During one point in

the massacre Blackwater operatives concentrated fire

on a passenger bus. A small boy fled the bus in terror

and was shot down as was his mother who ran after him.

The Nisoor Square massacre is the Iraq war in

microcosm. 

As the rubble of World War II still smoldered, French

philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “What the world 

expects of Christians is to get out of their

abstractions and stand face to face with the bloody

mess that is our history today. Christians must speak

out and utter their condemnation in such a way that

never a doubt, never a single doubt, can arise in the

heart of even the simplest person.”

On October 20th we tried to speak out clearly by

reenacting the Nisoor Square massacre on Blackwater’s

front doorstep. We tried to vividly depict for the

American people that the Nisoor Square massacre and

the vast suffering our nation has heaped on Iraq is no

abstraction. We also hoped to condemn the 2003 US

invasion and occupation of Iraq as an illegal war of

aggression under International Law and to expose US

law and courts as complicit in their execution.

Indeed, US law has immunized Blackwater, both in Iraq

and at home, allowing it unrestricted license to kill

and a five year reign of terror. For starters, under

Nuremburg Principles VI and VII the Nisoor Square

massacre and the shooting of hundreds if not thousands

of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater are crimes against

peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The courts pretend that adherence to the law is what

makes for an orderly and peaceable world, while, in

fact, US law and courts stand idly by while the US

military and private armies like Blackwater have

killed, maimed, brutalized, and destroyed the homes

and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In

the end US courts trample International Law, as well

as God’s law of love for all people, by

rubber-stamping every US war and military

intervention, invasion, incursion, occupation, police

action, and special forces operation coming out of the

Pentagon—and they are many and constant.  Our courts

even protect our world’s largest stockpiles of weapons 

of mass destruction despite international treaties and

laws that declare them illegal and demand their

disarmament. US courts make sure that if our weapons

of mass destruction are one day used to destroy the

planet and all life on it, to undo all of God’s

creation, that it will be perfectly legal.

So, what are we to do when the laws of the land are

murderous? Laws everywhere that protect militarism in

all its guises are a scourge upon the earth and its

people. On October 20th we hoped to join those around

the world who are opposing the forces of death by

breaking such laws. We hoped to add our voices to the

global outcry for Blackwater to leave Iraq

immediately. Blackwater and the entire US military

presence in Iraq need to be repatriated today and

tonight we must begin massive reparations to an entire

people we are destroying. There is blood on all of our

hands, we are all enmeshed in the structures of

militarism, we all participate in such atrocities

through our votes, our dutiful payment of taxes and

our silence. We must repent, disarm, and redistribute

the planet’s wealth.  We must stop heaping corpses upon

the altar of national security and instead worship God

who resides in its victims. 

As an aside, judge, I won’t cooperate with a sentence

of community service as I feel that our action at

Blackwater was a community service, and neither will I

pay any fines as I believe that everything belongs to

God and thus try to render as little to Cesar as

possible.  

Faith and Resistance: My First Arrest

by Keeley Colville

Each summer, the Atlantic Life Community hosts a Faith and Resistance retreat in Washington, DC. It is held during the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945. We use this time to remember the dead and to raise our voices and say, “Never Again”. I went along with my dad this year.
After holding demonstrations against war and nuclearism at the Pentagon, the Department of Energy and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of the Military, our final stop was the White House on the afternoon of August 9th.. I was arrested there after participating in a die-in along with two men, Steve Miller and Start Loving. We laid out in hundred degree weather on hot concrete, bearing signs with pictures of atomic bomb victims. Steve, Start, and the protesters not risking arrest were at my side and giving me encouragement. Mary Grace came to give us water and my dad stood behind us with a sign to shade our faces from the sun until the police had given us the second warning. (The law requires the police to warn us three times to leave the area before they can arrest us for tresspassing.) An hour and three warnings later, the three of us were arrested and taken to the main processing center, Anacostia.
I was frisked, relieved of my shoelaces (so that I wouldn’t commit suicide, I guess!), and put in a cell at Anacostia. My cell had a metal chair not quite big enough to lie down on, a metal toilet and a camera in the corner. With very little to work with, I had ample time to reflect on the previous few hours and honestly, I began to doubt myself.
What example could I possibly be setting if I was locked up in a cell where no one could see me? Was it worth it? I spent an hour out on the concrete where I could’ve sworn I had gotten third degree burns and now I had to wait around until they let me out? Who in their right mind would do this? My dad is crazy to have done this so many times before. He once stayed in jail for eleven months, while I couldn’t even last three hours.

A very slim, balding woman came to talk to me and had me call my mom. This was the first instance where I actually felt like a prisoner. She talked down to me more than any other adult had before, seemingly trying to intimidate me. She asked if my dad made me risk arrest, and after having no luck getting through to anyone at home, she sent me back to my cell while she tried some more. She returned later confirming that my dad hadn’t abducted me and forced me to refuse the three warnings I was given. I wished I’d had someone to laugh with. I couldn’t believe she could possibly be serious, but apparently, she was.

The next time she came they took me out of my cell and put me back in handcuffs as she told me what was going to happen to me; walking through every step with wide eyes and a stern tone. I would be taken to a juvenile processing center where I would have to wait until I was fully put in the system She even threatened me with having to stay in for three weeks! However, the fact that other teenagers have been arrested for similar actions comforted me. I was sure I’d be out of there that night.

The policewoman transporting me from Anacostia to the juvenile center had an obvious dislike for my actions. During the entire ride, she talked about me to someone on the phone and at that point, I wasn’t afraid, I was angry. How could she be so disrespectful? How could she even disagree with what I had done? I should not be treated like a prisoner for going against the norm of the citizens in this country and trying to put and end to killing. Who do these people think they are? I was patted down again and fingerprinted twice before being left for thirteen hours in what may be the most insanity-provoking room imaginable. With its whitewashed walls and unbearably cold temperature, I began to feel like a mental patient more than a prisoner. There were two large windows which made it easy for them to see anything I did—not that there was much to do. I could hear them talking about me, asking each other what I was there for. After all, I was the only girl and for that matter, the only white girl in the whole facillity.

That night, fifteen other kids were arrested; all male. They were allowed to share rooms while I was by myself. At one point I was escorted to the bathroom and as I was coming back, I saw noses pressed up against the windows as though they had never seen a girl before. Was I in some kind of zoo? I regretted doing the action even more. As I was being let out, one officer posed a question that caught me so off guard, I didn’t know what to say: “So I guess you won’t be doing this again, huh?”
Would I? After all I had been through in those thirteen hours, hating it as much as I did, would I go through with it again?

The next morning, I met up with some friends of ours and headed off to court. They kept congratulating me and telling me how brave it was to have done that. They passed on messages to me from other people and asked me so many questions about the night before. Within an hour, my mind had changed about the entire experience. My action had the potential to influence someone else, just as my own dad’s actions have influenced me. If what I’d done could move just a few people to participate next time, they could get others to as well. Just think, all we need is a chain reaction to get going and before you know it, the whole country could be demanding peace! I might have made a difference in someone’s life that day, whether we were out there on that pavement for an hour or three days.
Would I do it again? Absolutely. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that I’d be willing to risk arrest again. Just the fact that I followed what my conscience said and attempted to make people aware of injustices in the world made the whole trip worth while. Not only that, but it made an amazing story, and after relaying it to friends at school, I felt like I had finally done something that I was meant to do. I used this story for my college essay and I hope to be studying journalism this time next year. Perhaps by writing about the movement I can make a difference as well. I encourage everyone to join with the effort to raise issues and promote peace. By giving yourself to this, you can make it possible to end war and to attain social justice and equality everywhere.

 - – - -

Keeley under arrest at the White House. August 9th, 2007

A Man of the Church, A Child of God: Eulogy for my Dad

Written by Mark Colville

George Thomas Colville, 2/16/30-2/24/07

My sisters and brothers and I are grateful, and we are humbled by the outpouring of love and support from all of you who have come to honor the life and mourn the passing of our dear father. Our extended family, most of whom have traveled great distances to be here today, has in less than two months now lost two of its giants. Bert Powers, my uncle, left us the day before Christmas, and we want to acknowledge the great influence he, too, has had on our lives, and his presence in spirit with us today. One of the things that was most on my father’s mind these past few weeks was a desire to be in attendance at the memorial service for Bert in New York a few weeks from now. I trust that they are enjoying a more joyful reunion today. And now, two days ago our sister-in-law-Jill has lost her mother. May Rose also be part of that great gathering.
What can I say about my father? It won’t do him justice. I could begin by repeating the unsolicited comments that I and my sisters and brothers have all received over the years, from people of many walks of life, people who knew George but in most instances didn’t know each other. They all indicate that he was a man of grace, a man of integrity and principle and class, a man to be trusted, with a kindness about him that was understated but unusual. He had a unique ability to recognize the moment when someone needed his help and then to go the extra mile with that person… and then to keep his mouth shut about it. He did his best to keep his good deeds quiet and secret, like the gospels say we should but most of us don’t. So I am certain that when I speak of his kindness I am speaking out of turn because I don’t know close to half of the things he did to lift people up. And that’s why, even though I’m in tears today over losing my oldest friend, I’m looking forward to the future because my father is in many ways like a present yet to be unwrapped. I haven’t yet found out the whole story of the paths he walked, just as I have yet to fully understand or live his example. I know that as I walk around New Haven for the rest of my life- the place where he was raised- I will from time to time run across people who knew him and they will tell me another story about him. I will enjoy that. And I will never look on the faces of my brothers and sisters and children without seeing my father. That is part of the gift of family, the thing my father and my mother taught me to cherish above all in this life.
My father did not wear his religion on his chest-which is something that I’ve been accused of on occasion (mostly by policemen and prosecutors)- but he knew who he was; a child of God. He was a man of the Church, and he suffered because of his love for the Church. He became bewildered at times by its changes, and then later he became even more bewildered by its refusal to change, while all the time internalizing the very best of its teachings. And the end result of this, the finished product, was a man who did not judge, and a man who loved unconditionally. At the end of the day, that is all God wants of us- to treat each other the way God treats us- and all a child could ever wish for from a father. I can honestly and without reservation say that my father saved my life. It was my father’s unconditional love that delivered me from the hell I created for myself as a young man. He was there. He recognized the moment. And he pulled me up. So if I ever manage to do anything good for the world- and I plan to– it is because he lived.
My father battled several serious health issues over the past several years, including diabetes, congestive heart failure, cancer on the liver, the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, stinky feet and bad taste in music. (Let’s put it this way: the siblings will not be fighting over who gets the Rod Stewart CD’S.) He also bore for six years the loneliness of losing his wife, our mother Pat, his true love, and this was a loneliness that we and many of you could dispel for a while but never fully quench. (Incidentally, dad was hardly the kind of person who ran around looking for ghosts or signs of the afterlife, but one day recently he mentioned that mom came to him and spoke to him quite often, usually at night when Maura or Pam or another of us had gone home and he was sitting at the table alone. Was this real or imagined?… Who cares; it was real enough to him. So one of us asked him, “What does she say?”, and dad said
“Usually she says “Go to bed, you old fool.”
“So, then what do you do?”
“Well… I go to bed.”
And if you ever sat down with him and ran down the litany of his ailments, he’d probably respond by saying something like: “Aside from all that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” Through it all, through all the doctors appointments and chemo treatments and blood tests and pills and insulin injections and the pain of walking from here to there, I saw him get tired, but I never saw him belittle a nurse or raise his voice to a doctor. I’m convinced that it was his sense of humor and his gracious attitude, along with a great love for his children and grandchildren, that kept him with us for so long, and kept him from ever being bedridden despite all that he suffered. But in the end, he did get tired. And when he took his leave of us, he did so in the same way that he had always walked among us; with grace, with a devotion to our needs and with his sense of humor intact.
When my sister Maura called early Saturday morning and said “I think he’s gone”, I jumped in the car and started driving. And all the way over to the house I kept thinking “I’m not ready. I’m not prepared to wrestle this world without him in it. I haven’t got it yet. I need more time.” That feeling has not left me yet, but somehow I know it will. Our father has not left us unprepared. He left us many presents to unwrap. He left us with each other, stamped with his likeness and filled with his goodness. And so while it’s true that we are entitled to our tears today, I intend to leave mine on the altar and at the cemetery. He believed in the promises of Christ and he lived that way, and whatever any of us thinks about this life or what awaits us after this life, I say you’re wrong: it’s much better than that. Somewhere in the Bible it says: “Precious in the eyes of our God is the death of his faithful one”. Dad’s joy is now complete. As for us… we have presents to unwrap. We have people who need to be pulled up. Let’s get busy.
THANK YOU DAD….

Rosette Street Ramblings – Advent 2007

“Do not be afraid, for behold, I proclaim to you Good News of great joy that will be for all these people. For today in the city of David a Savior has been born for you, who is Messiah and Lord.” Luke 2:10-11

One of the blessings that comes from living at the Catholic Worker is that it tends to make one scarcely able to take up any moral or ethical or political question of the times without putting a specific human face on it. For instance, whenever I hear people talking about the so-called “crisis” of “illegal immigration” these days, I think of a guy named Pedro. He’s fifty-something, from Colombia as I recall, and when the federal enforcement branch of Homeland Security came into New Haven over the summer and started conducting raids on people’s homes and workplaces- eventually seizing over 30 members of families in our community and locking them up in federal prisons- he came to stay with us because he was afraid to go home. Pedro is a painter- of houses, not portraits- and general handyman who has been working hard and making a home and building relationships in this city for well more than a decade. But then immigration suddenly became the fodder for cable news talkies and congressional debate. New Haven took the bold step of becoming the first city in the nation to allow all its residents the opportunity to secure a municipal I.D. card. The federal government decided to retaliate… and Pedro needed a place to hide. While he was here, our five-year-old Isaiah took a real shine to him. Despite the language barrier, Rene found a kindred soul with whom he could engage questions ranging from politics, to physics, to whether or not the Apollo moon landing back in 1968 was in fact a hoax. It was clear, though that Pedro was not going to be able to find his comfort zone again, and after a few weeks he left the state to start over somewhere else. Watching him amble down the front steps and onto the sidewalk, alone, I tried to imagine what it must be like to have every thing and every relationship and every plan for today and tomorrow conditioned by the possibility of suddenly being declared unwelcome. And the whole encounter, just like so many others over the course of the past thirteen years, left me absolutely unable and unwilling ever again to be “fair and balanced” about this “issue” of immigration.

The scripture readings during Advent are a good reminder that the image of justice that we see at most courthouses throughout this country- the statue of a blindfolded lady holding a balance scale- most certainly did not come from the Bible! The God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ, is a God who takes sides. God stands with the poor, the prisoner, the “illegal” and the subversive, and with a finger firmly pressed down on the scale. Nowhere is this more evident than in the accounts of Jesus’ birth, with the Holy Family being identified among the homeless, the undocumented immigrants, the hunted and the exiles, and Herod confounded in his attempts to find the child and destroy him. But we tend to miss much in these readings by not understanding- as the early christian communities certainly did- the intentional use of subversive language that they contain. The words “Savior” and “Lord”, for example, were hardly invented by the early Church. They were stolen. These were the very monickers reserved exclusively for Ceasar- even appearing with his face on the Roman currency- until they were expropriated by the resurrection communities and used to identify Jesus of Nazareth. “Gospel”, or “Good News”, was commonly understood as the latest reports from the frontier, the sound-bites about conquest and annexation of other lands and peoples by the Roman military apparatus. Luke’s good news for “all the people” was not a reference to the socially or politically connected, nor to the financiers of the Pax Romana; it meant glad tidings for the poor, the invaded, the alien and the occupied. The good news for them was the birth of a disarmed, homeless, exiled illegal alien Savior, whose “peace that the world cannot give” was poised to turn Rome on its head.

I remember being in Chile in the mid-1980’s, during the Pinochet dictatorship, and visiting a soup kitchen in a large poblacion (slum) on the outskirts of Santiago. In reality, it was nothing like our soup kitchens here. Everyone was poor, there was no outside help coming from the government or private sector, and very little available from the churches. The food was provided by each family bringing something from the little they had. From this, everyone was able to eat from a huge common pot, and thus have at least one square meal a day. This experience deeply moved me, with its obvious resemblances to the Gospel stories of Jesus feeding the five thousand from the few loaves and fishes. But as I hung around awhile and talked with some of the people there, it began to dawn on me that something even more remarkable was going on. In a nation that had succumbed a decade earlier to the brutality of a paranoid dictator who had shut down the congress, imposed martial law, closed the universities, massacred civilians and empowered the secret police to torture and disappear people at will; here in the poblaciones the new Chile was being imagined, discussed and birthed. The poor were not only getting fed. They were getting organized. Expelled students and fired professors had set up underground universities. Relatives of the disappeared were uniting with church-based human rights ministries to demand information from the government on their loved ones. The neighborhood people were learning to govern themselves and become self-sufficient communities, all around a common table where everyone came to be fed. And it seemed like everyone was talking about God and politics in the same breath! Looking back, this was probably the first moment that I began to understand that feeding the hungry could be, and perhaps should be, a subversive act.

I think this must be what the neighborhood that Jesus was born into looked like, with everyone being thrown together in Bethlehem because of an arbitrary decree from a paranoid dictator called Caesar Augustus, who demanded they all return to the town of their birth to be counted. This must have been a severe hardship on the poor, traveling such distances and with no guarantee of lodging or food upon arrival. And then the massacre of the Holy Innocents, another spasm of violence from a government obsessed with ego and control. How could those people have survived at all if they did not come together and build a dream of a future? And in the end it was the birth of a child in their midst that became for them the “Good News” that changed everything.

The more our own nation deepens its long-standing (though increasingly less veiled) foray into fascism and empire- through unchecked militarization and war without end, secrecy and impunity, corporate control of government, mass-incarceration, indiscriminate surveillance and legalized torture- the more urgent it becomes to understand ourselves as living in a context that bears striking similarities to that of Christ and the early Church, or even to that of Chile in the ‘70s and ‘80s. There is a growing consensus among many that the United States has already undergone a coup. That is, the legal apparatus has already been put into place- through the USA Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act and the presidential use of signing statements to nullify congressionally ratified law- that will enable this or the next president to suspend whatever remains of the democratic process in this country permanently, and essentially outlaw all dissent. (Daniel Ellsberg has a chilling take on this, called “A Coup Has Occurred”, which can be found at www.consortiumnews.com.) According to this line of thinking, the only thing that’s needed is another 9/11-like event, which could in fact be produced by following through on the threat to invade Iran.

Currently we are giving food and a sense of community to upwards of thirty people, three times daily. Increasingly, though, it feels like we are operating in the shadow of an empire that is losing its stability, and even at times its grip on reality. Last week I went on trial in North Carolina, where with six other Catholic Workers and friends I was found guilty of tresspassing onto the grounds of Blackwater Worldwide and dramatizing the September 16th massacre of 17 civilians in Iraq. A jail sentence is on hold, pending appeal. Blessed with the gift of being back on Rosette Street for the Holidays, I can’t help but think that there is a great storm coming, and that we are somewhat less than fully prepared. It is a good time to get close to the Gospel, to read and eat and sleep and live and dream it, today. Because tomorrow, I think, we will be called forward to much more risky and subversive acts of faith; we will have to give flesh to the hope that is in us.