by Susan Classen, MCC El Salvador

1. Which side have the people I work with chosen?

"If we were to remember everything the army has done to us and all the hardships we have endured, we would go crazy," said 28-year-old Julia shaking her head. The tangled jumble of undealt with memories came rushing out on top of each other making her story almost impossible to follow. She talked about fleeing the death squads in the middle of the night, finding her sister's family piled on the floor in a bloody heap of dead bodies, stumbling over a dismembered corpse, and bombs exploding around her as she ran in panic.

Angela was more articulate. "We were at the Rio Sumpul during the massacre. It was May of 1980, and about 1,000 of us who had been fleeing the army found ourselves trapped as the soldiers drove us like cattle towards the river. We started crossing the river, but the Honduran army on the other side met us with gunfire. I managed to get across and my husband swam back and forth helping the others. We lost track of our 10-year-old son. We were sure he had been killed, but we found him a month later in the refugee camp. The Salvadoran soldiers acted like savages. They threw little babies in the air and caught them on their bayonets. A Honduran soldier saw one of the Salvadorans do that and he shot him from across the river. Not all soldiers have lost their humanity. A helicopter came and also fired on us. Lots of people drowned in the river because they couldn't swim. About 600 were killed. People downstream knew that something had happened because the river was red with blood and they started finding bodies."

Another woman shared her story. "If it weren't for the guerrillas we would be dead," she stated frankly. "Several hundred of us had been running from soldiers for a week. They shot anyone they found so we hid in caves during the day and walked at night trying to break through the ring of soldiers surrounding us. My daughter was carrying a 15-day-old baby. One night it was pouring rain so we put the baby in a plastic bag to keep her dry. My husband and daughter were walking single file ahead of me. They crossed a fence. Just as I started across there was an explosion. It felt like something burned my leg. I looked down and saw that my shoe was full of blood. A piece of shrapnel had hit me in the shin. We wrapped a piece of cloth around my leg and kept going. I tried to help my daughter carry the baby, but I fell so she took her back. At dawn we met the guerrillas. They saw that we were too exhausted to continue fleeing so they decided to try to fight their way through the soldiers surrounding us. Before the battle started they shouted 'Revolution or death!.' Several of them died including our neighbor's son, but they managed to drive the army back for us."

The difference in atmosphere when the army or guerrillas are in town confirms which side the people have chosen. At dusk, when theday's work is done, the civilians and guerrillas mingle freely. They sit on the sidewalk and chat or lounge on benches in the plaza. Many people in town have been combatants, cooks, or health workers themselves. They take for granted that part of the food they raise will go to help support their cousins, sisters, brothers, sons or daughters who are currently with the guerrillas. If a large group of guerrillas arrive, several community members go house to house collecting flour sacks full of tortillas. The army, on the other hand, passes through town on full military alert. Guns cocked and ready, they walk through single file looking as if they expect to be attacked at any moment. All activity stops when the army comes. Women stop grinding corn and stare. Others lean out their doors and windows watching in silence. Even the constant din of shouting children is temporarily quiet as they line the streets to watch. I was at the river one day when someone arrived with word that the soldiers were coming. The 20 women and children who were bathing immediately pulled clothes on their wet bodies, packed their still soapy wash, and headed home.

The people I work with have clearly chosen the side of the revolution. As a matter of fact, it would be more accurate to say that they are the revolution.

2. What does it mean to identify with people who are involved in a revolution?

Maria's 12-year-old daughter, Marta, suddenly got sick with diarrhea and fever. Maria scraped together the bus money to take her to the hospital. After waiting five hours, it was finally their turn to see the doctor. The doctor glanced at the girl as they walked through the door. "Why are you wasting my time?" he said to the mother. "She doesn't even look sick. Can't you see I have more important things to do?" And he threw them out of his office. Marta got worse and worse. No amount of pleading could convince Maria to take her daughter back to the hospital. Marta died four weeks later.

Guns are only one of many tools of violence. It is unlikely that Marta's doctor would deliberately kill someone, but his negligence was instrumental in a child's death. And what business executive would purposefully deny food to a starving child? Yet many children die of malnutrition because good business principles dictate under- paying the workers so that the corporation earns more money.

I talked to a guerrilla about the use of violence. "Thousands of Salvadorans were killed before 1980 and no one paid attention," he said. "But as soon as the poor rose up in arms to put an end to their suffering, the whole world suddenly became concerned about violence in El Salvador. Violence existed before the war." Our hands are bloody whether we realize it or not. Discussions about the violent revolutions of the poor must be based on the humble recognition that our failure to recognize the many forms of violence against them contributed to the situation that ultimately resulted in war.Military violence is just one aspect of a revolution. The FMLN-FDR is no more or less contaminated by violence than any government that uses an army to promote its own ends. The criteria for deciding how a Christian with a theology of non-violence relates to a revolution must be broader than whether or not guns are involved. What values do they claim to stand for? How do they go about promoting those values? How do they exercise authority?

There are positive ways to support a revolution that includes non-violent strategies. The successful return of 4,300 refugees from Honduras is an example of the power of nonviolent change. But the line between violent and nonviolent strategies can be fuzzy. "The guerrillas are the ones that enabled us to come back because they created the space (through violence) necessary for us to live here and work the land again," stated one of the former refugees. "The government resisted us all the way, but the fact that we came anyway is a victory for the pueblo (people) of El Salvador." Whether it is deliberate or not, supporting the refugees' return also supports the revolution.

"We want to join the FMLN," two young men told a guerrilla leader last year. "What are you doing in your communities?" the leader asked. Their involvement was limited. "Go back and start working in your communities. That's where social consciousness develops," he told them. The young men are now working actively in a farming cooperative. Because the revolution values cooperatives, supporting cooperatives automatically supports the revolution.

Father Miguel Ventura, a priest working clandestinely in the guerrilla-controlled territory of northern Morazan explained his view: "The church and the revolution are distinct but where the values of the revolution overlap with our Christian values we can work together."

The criteria for determining if one can cooperate with a revolution are no different than the criteria for cooperating with a government. But the tendency is to harshly judge revolutions while we cooperate with governments by default.

3. What are the implications for pastoral work?

John Howard Yoder suggests that Jesus felt the suffering of the poor so greatly that his one greatest temptation was to accept the world's violent methods to liberate them. What are our personal struggles and temptations? What does it say about our identification with the poor if we don't even feel tempted to use violence to free them from the injustice that is literally killing them?

Matthew 5:44 takes for granted that we have enemies and commands us to love them. Choosing sides is one step towards identification but it is often an intellectual response. One can choose sides intellectually without the gut level recognition of having an enemy. Can we understand what it means to love our enemies if we haven't first passed through the stage of hating them? "I hate thesoldiers," said a young woman, her teeth clenched with emotion after being told that the army had just killed her husband. "My heart races and I feel like an iron band is tightened around my chest whenever I see solders," explained another. Oppressed people have been wronged by their enemies. They need the assurance that it's okay to express their emotions so that they can move through the hatred towards love. Pastoral workers who remain aloof from the emotional struggle with hatred force people to either suppress their feelings and make pious statements of forgiveness or reject Christianity as irrelevant to the reality of their experience.

"Why is it that Christians who believe in life after death are less willing to die than us humanists?" asked a Marxist guerrilla leader. "You would think that those of us who believe that this life is the end would be less willing to sacrifice it for a cause than Christians, but that hasn't been my experience." Guerrillas involved in violent revolutions have dealt with their own death in one way or another. "Revolution or death!" they shouted as they started the battle to free the trapped civilians. Time has proven that that is what they mean.

"It isn't that I have anything against Christianity," explained the same Marxist leader. "I started out a Christian but Christianity gradually became irrelevant." The majority of guerrilla leaders in El Salvador became socially conscious through their church involvement but they became disillusioned when it came to applying the principles of the kingdom of God. Christianity lost its meaning as they saw Christians back out of commitments to suffer and die by spiritualizing the call to take up the cross and follow Jesus. If pastoral workers aren't willing to match the revolutionary's commitment to die for what they believe, then the church will soon be irrelevant.

"Have you felt the presence of God despite your suffering?" I asked a number of people as they shared their stories. "Of course!" has been the unanimous response. "We wouldn't be alive if it weren't for God's presence with us." Oppressed Salvadorans find comfort in a God who is present in their pain. Many First World Christians, on the other hand, experience a crisis of faith when life brings pain and suffering. First World theology promotes the idea that God will protect faithful Christians from hardship and that prosperity is a sign of God's blessing. But the Bible was written from the perspective of people experiencing literal poverty and oppression. It brings comfort and hope to the innocent victims of greedy oppressors. We need to study the book of Job and repent of our tendency to bring the kind of condemning "comfort" that Job's friends brought him.

Salvation depends on our response to those who are hungry, thirsty, sick and in prison (Matt. 25). Will we be among those who ask genuinely perplexed, "When Lord? We didn't hear you crying out or see your pain." God longs for us to "see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts" so that we would turn toward our poor neighbors and facilitate both their healing and our own (Matt. 13:15). Proverbs 21:13 speaks clearly, "If a man shutshis ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered." Identification with the poor is a gradual process of recovering our sight and hearing. Our senses sharpen to the degree that we allow relationships with the poor to heal us and destroy our false idols of materialism, power and pious religiosity.