Sunday, March 23, 2008 Mercado: 'Strain to hear the song' By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
(FOR this Easter Sunday issue, may I yield this space to Fr. Ron Rolheiser. He serves as president of the Oblate School of Theology in Austin Texas. Below, he writes of a song that can not be silenced --JLM)
Easter is about many things. We celebrate God's power to overcome death. But we also celebrate the voices and wounds of those who died on Good Friday.
One such voice is that of a nameless young woman raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers in 1981 at a village fittingly called: “La Cruz.”
Journalist Mark Danner reports soldiers telling they were haunted by her songs. She was an evangelical Christian, serially raped and subsequently tortured. However, throughout all this, the young woman sung hymns.
“She kept on singing, even after they had shot her in the chest…Stupefied, the soldiers shot her again. And she sang still. And their wonder turned into fear---until finally they unsheathed machetes and hacked her neck. At last, the singing stopped." (The Massacre at El Mozote, N.Y., Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 78-79)
Gil Bailie recounts this story in his book on the cross and non-violence. He notes both the similarity between her death and that of Jesus: Resurrection meant their voices lived on despite their deaths.
Christ died on a lonely hillside, abandoned by his followers. No one would have predicted this would be the most remembered death in history.
The rape and murder of this young woman occurred in a remote place. And all witnesses were killed. Yet her voice survives. And it will grow in importance, long after all those who violated her are forgotten.
Powerlessness and anonymity, linked to a heart that can sing, “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing!" while being violated, ultimately become power and immortality.
Such deaths scar the consciences of perpetrators and sympathizers. They also leave a permanent echo that nobody can silence. What God raises up, after Good Friday, is also the voice of the one who died.
A New York Times critic, reviewing Danner's book, tells how, after reading this story, he kept "straining to hear the sound of that singing.”
Easter rekindles that creed within ourselves. Upon experiencing the resurrected Jesus, the early Christians spontaneously voiced a one-line creed: "Jesus is Lord!"
That says it all. In essence, we say that God is ultimately in charge of this universe, despite the brutality and rape. At the end of the day, violence, injustice, and sin will be silenced and overcome. Graciousness and gentleness, manifested in Christ, ultimately anchors all reality.
This brutally violated young woman has been raised and lives in God. Her death, like Jesus', is redemptive. Like Him, she too, in the face of helplessness before the worst brutality, could still say: "Forgive them for they know not what they do!"
To celebrate Easter is to affirm that all of this is true. But that also asks something of us.
It asks, as the New York Times critic aptly puts it, that “we strain to hear the sound of that girl's singing.” We must struggle to keep her song in our hearts. She is alive in God's heart. But we must keep her alive in ours too.
Why? Not simply because her story is exceptional. It is. We must keep her alive in our hearts because her song is the leaven, the yeast, of the resurrection. And that alone can raise us up to become exceptional too.
On Easter, we must to strain to hear the voices of Good Friday.
