Last year around this time, we were celebrating Dia de los Difuntos and remembering the massacres at Copapayo and the Central American University. This year, as has happened every year since the 1989 killing of the six Jesuits and two of their colleagues, there was a major demonstration at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where the UCA assassins were trained.
Closer to home - far closer to home - more commemorations. November 20 is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It is an annual day to remember and celebrate the lives of those trans sisters and brothers who have been killed. At a worship service on Friday night, we lit 270 candles to remember the trans people who have been killed throughout the world in the last year. (And those are only the deaths that are known - many murders of trans people go unreported due to fear or police involvement.) One of the angels we remembered was Shelly Moore, who was killed in Detroit last month. This was a brutal act that my mind and soul are still working to comprehend. I avoided posting any articles to facebook for several days because I couldn't find the right words to accompany them. Then I realized, there are no words. But while there is a time and place for powerful silence, this is not one of them.
Shelly's mother was one of the speakers at the commemoration on Friday. We had read through a third of the names, lit a third of the candles, at the point at which she got up to speak. And the first thing she said at the lectern was, "God is good - all the time," to which the congregation replied, "and all the time, God is good." Forget everything else she said - every other powerful word Ms. Nelson spoke about her daughter and her pain. That she could find that profession in the midst of her grief amazes me.
How can a woman who is sitting in the depths of hell be so bold as to proclaim the goodness of God? Last November at the community mass at the Suchitoto cemetery, on the Day of the Beloved Departed, Padre Carlos talked about Mary. Too many of the people gathered remembering their loved ones were there to honor people who had been killed at the hands of the government. Padre Carlos reminded them that Mary and Joseph understood that grief profoundly. In this case, too, I find myself again seeing Mary is a mother who lost her child because she pushed boundaries and frightened people by speaking truth. A mother who can say "God is good - all the time" in the midst of anguish. I find myself without adequate words again, this time from awe.
But I do have "nunca mas" - "never again." How do I bring together "never again" and "all the time, God is good"?
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