It was 20 years ago today that 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were killed at the University of Central America in San Salvador. I marked the anniversary at UCA with a delegation of students and faculty from my school. Romero is also widely memorialized too, and the 4 American churchwomen who were also martyred. Most of all, we must remember the thousands and thousands of Salvadorans who were caught up in the horrors of that time, both those killed and those left with deeply painful memories of loved ones lost to the casual savagery of others.As I ponder the UCA martyrs, though, I am brought back to what I imagine to have been the texture of their daily lives. Classes to teach, papers to grade, another faculty meeting, an essay overdue, laundry to do, a group to work with at a base commuity, another meal to cook for the community, and so on and so on. The small joys and hassles, the tiredness, the happinesses and the worries--not least the stark fear of violence--that made up their days. The massacre that ended their lives causes the rest of us to be silent and take note of the causes for which they lived. Their challenge, I think, is less that we each be willing to die for a cause, than that we live for one. In and through the daily stuff, the warp and woof of our lives, is the martyrs' question:"Yes, and through it all, animating it all--with whom and for whom do you stand?" I am grateful for their question.
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