I AM A QUAKER BUT

 I keep reading Catholic writers. 

Yeah, I sort of fell off the planet for awhile. Had some medical problems. It's taken awhile to find my voice again. So maybe just maybe I'm going to do a little south of the border exploration. Those refugees at the southern border are there for a lot of reasons. And most of those reasons have roots in US foreign policies going back decades. I mean who would choose to leave their homes, their families, their country? Who would make an endless journey, many on foot, unless they wer certain they had no choice? Ronald Reagan I hope, wherever you are, you are forced to confront the death and destruction that can be laid at your feet. 

I wish  I could find a picture of this man. He stands there. A man in the patched working clothes of a Salvadoran peasant.Who knows? It may be that's all the clothes he has. In front of him? Three small, simple crosses. No names. They mark what looks like a mass grave. The forest will probably claim them in a few years. Even the man won't be able to find them. Who were they? A wife? Children? A mother? A father? Stangers caught trying to get out of the war zone and couldn't keep going? A stranger digging graves and committing unknowns known only to God. 

 Archbishop Romero is the figure with the glasses. Surrounded by the peasants who called him Monsenor. From the time he began to speak out for justice for the poor he pretty much accepted that he probably wouldn't die in bed. 

"Nothing is as important to the church as human life, especially the lives of the poor and oppressed. Jesus said that whatever is done to the poor is done to Him. This blood, these deaths are byond all politics. They touch the very heart of God." Archbishop Oscar Romero March 16, 19680. A week later he was dead. Shot down during mass. One of his last homilies (sermons) included a call to the police and military to ignore orders to kill their own people.

Funny how we hear the quote that the "poor will always be with us" as an excuse to pretty much ignore them. Even from the supposedly "Christians." And we seldom hear "And the king will answer them, 'I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me.' Mathew 5:40 That ends the passage about the prisoners, hungry, widows and orphans. The actions that will separate the sheep from the goats. 

Most of us assume He meant everybody was our brother or sister. There are others who obvivously have a much narrower definition of brothers and sisters. 

The words on the left side of the window "Let my death if it is accepted by God, be for the liberation of my people and as a witness of hope in the future." For his people Romero was regarded as a saint long before the church made it official. It took thirty eight years and a pope from Latin America. 

Well this one took the bit in its teeth and went where it wanted to do.