Tag Archives: Jon Sobrino

The present U.S. insurgency: Trained for in El Salvador

Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

Way back in 1990 Steve Penner invited one of the BIC’s newest pastors to join an MCC learning tour to El Salvador and Honduras. It deepened my love for those countries, for the MCC, and for Steve that remains to this day.

The immersion experience also proved to be full of enduring cautionary tales. Unfortunately, the prophecies I received have been fulfilled. Central America was a training ground for the militarists who are invading our streets in unmarked cars and masks right now. They are making war on their own people just like the U.S. trained and funded nationals to do in El Salvador and Honduras.

Olga Fedorova / AP, 2025

Our little delegation did not succeed in unmasking what the the U.S. government was doing in Central America and now we are having trouble unmasking ICE on our own streets [CNN].

ERP combatants in Perquín, El Salvador, by Linda Hess Miller, 1990
ERP combatants in Perquín, El Salvador, by Linda Hess Miller, 1990

18-year-olds with machine guns

In El Salvador it was not marginally trained ICE agents rushing into the streets, fueled by the billions provided by the Big Beautiful Bill.  Instead, we were met by 18-year-olds with guns stopping our bus. We were going toward Chalatenango, the mountainous province which was a major stronghold  of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) “insurgents.” The area was the site of multiple massacres committed against civilians by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military during the civil war (1979–1992).

Our destination was the Mesa Grande refugee camp just over the border in Honduras, where we met a man who escaped El Salvador with barely any clothes on as a child and was still in the camp years later. As the young men prepared to inspect us and our documents, our handlers told us to keep quiet and keep our heads down. There was no telling what the kids might do.

Now we have similar people on our own streets breaking car windows, breaking into homes, and sending untried people to Uganda. I was on edge the whole time I was in El Salvador, now I’m wary of what will happen if we go to Home Depot.

The secrets of Soto Cano

Brunswick, GA (where I visited my relatives and alligators when I was 13) is where the U.S. has a huge center for training ICE agents. Further south in the Everglades, Governor DeSantis spent $250 million on Alligator Alcatraz, which was recently ordered closed by  U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams [NPR]. ICE now has 400 field offices in the US and a growing number of detention centers. The money always flows in the U.S. for violent solutions for relational problems.

When we were in Honduras we somehow got an audience with an officer at the Soto Cano Air Base. I’m sure if I hunted for my journal long enough, I could give you his rank. As was my custom (to the dismay of my handlers), I asked him a question I have not forgotten. The officer had just told us the new capabilities the soldiers were learning about combating insurgencies and conducting “low-intensity warfare,” meaning the enemy does not have giant air bases and cannot be distinguished from the population. (Thus Israel destroys Gaza and kills over 60,000 people to fight Hamas). I asked him, “With all this knowledge and new mobile weaponry, what are the plans for subduing future insurgencies in the U.S.?” He said, “We would never apply these tactics in the U.S.” You can see how that worked out.

Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras was a crucial staging ground for US military operations during the Salvadoran Civil War, serving as a base for intelligence, counterinsurgency, and logistical support. While not located in El Salvador, its role was central to US efforts to support its Cold War political and military interests in Central America. Because the U.S. government did not have public Congressional approval for combat missions from Honduras, it downplayed the constant involvement of the U.S. military in the area’s conflicts. This meant that service members involved often received no awards or official recognition for the dangers they faced. Their service was a secret. And most of us assume the “deep state” has plenty more secrets where those came from (as in the Jeffrey Epstein files).

The subversive cross

We also had the privilege of visiting members of Resurrection Lutheran Church in San Salvador where people told us of their subversive cross. Some of the people we met had been imprisoned, themselves, for their subversive activities — like housing battered women.  Others reported loved ones who were still lost to them in the prison system, not in Louisiana or El Salvador, but lost just the same. The squad that whisked them away was also following orders and “keeping the peace” as if they were the police.

CBN, not a bastion of wokeness, reported on what is happening to Latino Christians across the Evangelical community in the U.S. this year:

The story of the Lutheran Church is like a parable predicting today. At the end of 1989, an offensive by the FMLN resulted in a crackdown on dissenters by the government. On November 16 a death squad murdered six Jesuit priests. That same day another squad came looking for Lutheran Bishop  Gomez with orders to assassinate him. He was safely away. His church was full of victims of the offensive and the soldiers sorted them out.  They captured 12 foreigners and 3 Salvadorans, and they sunk so low as to capture and carry off a cross.

The cross is still a special symbol in the church — after all, now they have to deal with  President Bukele. One day, as a special offering to the Lord, the congregation wrote the sins committed against the people of El Salvador upon a plain, white cross.  As they identified the sins of their country and their people, they committed themselves to work toward forgiveness, and to be strengthened for liberation.  The cross also carried messages of hope and love, as a testimony to the transforming power of God.

The Bishop had found safe haven with friends in Milwaukee. Two months later, he returned accompanied by North American pastors. The U.S. Ambassador interceded and communicated with the President of El Salvador and the “pilgrim cross” made a journey from the prison to the Presidential House. There the cross completed its mission of pointing out sins.

Some time later, Bishop Gómez was again accompanied, this time by pastors from Germany.  They spoke with the President and finally “The Subversive Cross” was handed over, and returned to Resurrection Lutheran Church. The cross now rests in their building, still pointing out sins, injustices and the hard labor its members must do in social action and Christian accompaniment.

After eight months of Trump madness, subversion is growing toward Salvadoran levels all over the country and the whole world. A march to Washington is planned for September, originating in Philadelphia. Governors and attorney generals are figuring out how to creatively secede. Judges are handling cases that have finally made it through  the courts — like undoing Trump’s tariffs.

Debriefing turns to degriefing

A lot of us have been checking out for the past few months because of the Project 2025 onslaught (anti-trans people, etc.), and the tech bros onslaught (DOGE, data harvesting, etc.), the economic onslaught (tariffs now impacting everything), the grift onslaught (bitcoin, Trump family graft), and the compassion onslaught (Medicaid cuts, sneak attack on Medicare, USAID dismantling, etc.). It is all just plain overwhelming. Waiting for Trump to die is not enough hope to live on.

Likewise, in El Salvador I realized that even though I was about as woke as I could get in the 1990’s (I had lived in a commune, after all), I was still unprepared for how huge, ruthless, incompetent and unthought-through our military and political machines were. Sound familiar?

As we debriefed at the close of our trip to El Salvador and Honduras, we had just met Jon Sobrino, the priest who was not killed with his brothers in the raid on the Jesuit mission [my post]. He had just gotten back from the U.S. {Sojourners interview] [1990 commencement speech]. He told us he would never go back. He just did not have the strength to stand up to the soul-killing power of our culture. And, of course, he told us about that power snaking into his own small church and devouring its leaders.

As we sat in Tegucigalpa debriefing I was undone. I had to confess I thought I would have solutions and bring some home. But I had none and I brought home few. I admit, as I took my turn to share my feelings, I broke into tears. The past eight months have pushed me to that edge repeatedly. After all, people from El Salvador are still being brutalized in my own country while legally seeking asylum! Fortunately, I have not forgotten the subversive cross and its inevitable power to undermine the evil of the world and finally defeat it.

The sad history of Christians co-opted by the powerful

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Doing Theology, Life as the church, Spiritual direction, , , ,

The good things Jesus creates and recreates in the world are always threatened by some power that wants to co-opt them or just eliminate their alternativity. The history of the church being co-opted keeps repeating itself.

Way back in 1990 I had the amazing privilege to travel to Honduras and El Salvador with MCC where I met some Jesus followers who were hard to co-opt. It was the first of several immersion trips that have changed and enriched my life. The visit took place two years before the civil war in El Salvador (1969-92) officially ended, and ten years after Oscar Romero was martyred. It was less than a year after six Jesuit priests were murdered for speaking out against the government of El Salvador and advocating for the poor.

Jon Sobrino in 2015

On the trip I met the seventh priest, Jon Sobrino, who had been teaching missionary students in Thailand about liberation theology when his housemates and caretakers were attacked and killed. He was gracious, sober, and still grieving the loss. When he heard we were Americans, before long he said, “I can never go there again.” He had recently been interviewed on U.S. TV about the scandalous actions of the death squad. “It is too, debilitating, too tempting” he said, or something to that effect. “It is a spiritual desert which thinks it is an oasis.” Sobrino could not be co-opted by the media machine, or wealthy donors, or the colossally power. But people tried to exploit him for his story, to reduce his suffering to “news.”

Ever since then, he has been an inspiration for soul-keeping for me, as in “What does it profit you to gain the whole world, at the cost of your soul?” I wish for you the same conviction and courage Sobrino continues to display.

In the history of Christianity, it is amazing how the best people are often co-opted by the established powers: the government, the media, corporations, the church, etc. They lose the battle Sobrino has regularly won. They bend their freedom to the rules. They dim their inspiration for the fearful. They lose their courage in the face of the gullible herd. They let their joy be stolen and their best selves conformed and compromised. Or they just get rolled over, as many would say is just what happened to Jesus.

I’m especially thinking of two of my favorite examples from the past: Teresa of Kolkata and Francis of Assisi. I’ll mention the Evangelicals, too. The movement Francis led (d. 1226 at the beginning of European capitalism) is quickly taken over and neutered by the church even before he dies. Teresa (d. 1997 during the flowering of neoliberalism) is boxed like another brand by the media machine and I think the exposure dims her light. The American Evangelical church plummeted in influence and authority when it was co-opted by the empire’s ways and means, especially during the pandemic. It’s division into “left” and “right” has to be one of the main reasons there are more “nones” than white Evangelicals for he first time this year.

Teresa

Mother Teresa’s media presence was wildly successful in raising consciousness and funding her work. But I still wonder if her conversion of the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was also a means of him converting her, too. His book Something Beautiful for God (1971) still sells over 100 copies a month in its “beatification edition” from 2003! He was a boon to her and she to him, as far as making money goes.

I love how she gets her message out. But I wonder what the screen is doing to her: the faux intimacy, the chattiness, the objectification and reductionism. Perhaps her faith transcends the screen. Or maybe the screen reduces it to another story in its world of truthiness. Here is an example of her on screen with Muggeridge from 1971. [link]

Francis

In 1266, a generation after St. Francis died, the general chapter meeting in Paris ordered Franciscans everywhere to destroy their writings about Francis written before the minister general’s, that is Bonaventure’s, new biography was published. It was a breathtaking attempt to “control the narrative.” Twenty years earlier, the chapter had asked people who had known Francis to write down all their memories, which they did, copies of which survived the purge. These surviving records are what Jean Paul Sabatier rediscovered and included in his biography of Francis in 1894. I recently read an annotated version by John Sweeny: The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis: 120th Anniversary Edition. It is an inspiring and sobering book.

Francis died a sad, transcendent man. His prolonged stay in Syria after inserting himself into the battles of the Fifth Crusade, created a rumor he was dead and caused a brother to go find him.  Upon his return, Francis found the “Cardinal Protector” of the Franciscans, Ugolino di Conti (later Pope Gregory IX) had imposed the Benedictine rule on Clare’s community and influenced the men Francis left in charge to loosen their vow of poverty and act more like other monks.

Sabatier says:

It was the first movement of the old spirit against the new. It was the effort of people who unconsciously, I am willing to assume, made religion an affair of rite and observance, instead of seeing it, like St. Francis, as the conquest of freedom that makes us free in all things. This is the freedom that leads each soul to obey the divine and mysterious power that the flowers in the field adore, that the birds of the air bless, that the symphony of the stars praises, and that Jesus of Nazareth called Abba, or, Father.

For the last five ears of his life Francis endured the incremental co-option of his brotherhood into the orders of the church, their freedom mediated by the Pope. By the time of Bonaventure, his life was a glorious but impractical relic. Sick, exhausted, and leaning into death, bearing the wounds of stigmata, Francis began to move toward his desired resting place at Portiuncula. He said good-bye to Mt. Verna and spent time recuperating at San Damiano with Clare’s community. As he gained strength there, he composed the famous “Canticle of the Sun.” Here are the SVD Brothers and their recent version. [link]

Just four years after Francis dictated his last will and died, Pope Gregory declared the Brothers Minor were not bound to observe it. His reinterpretation of the rule Francis never wanted to write, resulted in a divided order: the “Brothers of the Common Observance” and the “Spirituals.” The latter were disciplined and one was even killed for wanting to be a Francis-like Franciscan. Francis’ first disciple, Bernard of Quintavalle, went into hiding for two years as he was being hunted.

Evangelicals

You may see your own experience in the lives of these saints. You may have tried on a simple faith and watched it eroded by the ways of the world. You may have been in a freedom-feeling community and watched it driven into the divisions of politics and power-seeking. I have experienced several versions of those ills. Next year I expect a book to come out that recounts the life and transition of a church I loved and led for decades. In some sense, I think it may be the same old story.

The Evangelicals, as a movement, began with a fervor for truth and a passion for evangelism. They made a huge difference in the world and continue to do so. But then Jerry Falwell (d. 2007) and others decided they needed to “take back” America. I think, as Sabatier might, they did that because America had taken them back. Their conformity to the ways to the empire led Falwell’s descendants to back the godless Trump to lead them. And their leaders have become more Trumpy ever since.

I keep asking Francis’ question these days, “Who are you Lord? And who am I?” I still burst into songs in the sunlight. I still feel my freedom in Christ and exercise it. I still care about and care for the poor. But am I just a part of the American story? Just another part of the news cycle? Did the powers succeed in taking over and ordering my world? Do I despair of an alternative now that an author will consign my past to history, into some reduction, like Bonaventure tried to do with Francis? We need to keep praying those questions.

Meanwhile, Jon Sobrino keeps getting disciplined by Rome for sticking with his decidedly anti-establishment teaching, saying things like,

[R]eality is known—in this case oppression and liberation, suffering and hope—in the disposition of taking charge of these realities in a praxis (en la disposición a
encargarse de ellas en una praxis), to carry these realities (a cargar con ellas)—running risks and the persecution that reality generates—and shouldering the weight of these realities (dejándose cargar por ellas)—accepting gratefully the kindness, generosity, and solidarity that there is in reality, and above all in the underside of history.

Jesus, Teresa, and Francis all built an alternative from the underside of history. No matter how many times those kind of people get rolled over, they are likely to rise again. Brother stone will cry out in praise or sister bird will sing the truth if the humans are silenced. But the Spirit incarnate in the body of Christ is hard to control for long. I don’t think the powers will keep it down. The creation will have to keep groaning as God awaits the next outburst of the light of the world from the Lord’s co-workers.

Andres the refugee: Lessons in powerlessness from Honduras

Building community, Life as the church, The Mission, , , , , ,

Way back in the 90’s I took my first MCC immersion trip to El Salvador and Honduras. It was before cell phones worked well, so I had one scratchy phone call to Gwen in two weeks – that was a first. I remember the trip as my baptism by fire into the reality of white supremacy and empire thinking. This week that memory has seemed important.

When our group took off for San Salvador, I thought I was a rather “with it,” comparatively-activist kind of guy. I wanted to go to El Salvador before the war was over. I was already upset that the U.S. was complicit in all sorts of evil deeds and had hidden a titanic military base at Soto Cano. I felt a lot of love for people in Central America, especially since I came from Southern California where Spanish speakers were childhood friends. I soon found out I was less with it and loving than I thought, but that’s how I started.

We talked to Army officials, U.S. Embassy reps, church leaders, activists, and MCC workers. We met Jon Sobrino, were forced off our bus by eighteen-year-old soldiers with automatic weapons, and took a ride out into the far reaches of Honduras, almost to Nicaragua, where a village had waited up into the night under the one, public lightbulb to greet us. It was a very educational trip. But the most lasting memory has to be of Andres.

Mesa Grande Refugee Camp — Wikipedia/Linda Hess Miller

My upending memory of Andres

I admit that this incident is one of those that may have a lot more meaning than the facts deserve. I was having an “aha” moment, so who knows what really happened? We were in a refugee camp in Honduras for Salvadorans who had been driven out of their homes by the war. They expected to be gone until the soldiers passed on, but that never happened. Many years later they were still stuck in a strange limbo. Some had come as children, literally naked. One person who had fled with nothing but the clothes on his back was Andres. In his imprisonment, he had become a Christian and the catechist for the camp. We were meeting him because he was one of the leading people who should be seeing a group of well-dressed “dignitaries” from the United States.

He was very kind and very hospitable. We sat in his house made of cast-off scraps of wood. I still remember being fascinated as I watched chickens walking in and out of the walls. This sweet, godly, respectable man kept enlightening me as they pecked about. We might as well had come from the moon, as far as Andres was concerned. He had never been to San Salvador, the capital, from which we had just driven. I think I asked him if he ever wanted to own a car. He said he had not considered that, since he had never been in one. (That is one of my memories that makes me wonder if this really happened. Did he actually say that? You’ve never been in a car?). The longer I got to be with Andres, the more I loved him. My preconceptions about him began to fade into the background the more he talked – preconceptions like, “Surely he would want a car” and, “Surely he would like to go to the capitol city”). He was happy with his house and honored to be the catechist. Unlike all his visitors from the U.S. that day, he was content. He did not have big ideas about how to make everything better, and made me a bit ashamed of myself for cluttering up his honest, simple life with my expensive sandals.

Eventually, we were finished with our overwhelming two weeks and sitting in room in Tegucigalpa for the final debrief. At that point in my life I was especially not a crier. But when it came time for me to share, I uncharacteristically burst into tears. “I feel so helpless,” is what I remember saying. Maybe I was just feeling, “I can’t do anything.” I had come to Central America equipped with health, energy and assurance that I could be a part of something great. I would end the war, figure out rural poverty and go back to the U.S. equipped to organize great things to resettle refugees and effect reconciliation. Instead, I was sitting beside the road in Teguci-whatever crying out to Jesus. When He called to me, I told him I wanted to see. The scales of my “imperial gaze” were not removed, as of yet, but I certainly felt blind.

A few, certainly not all, of the lessons I need to learn

As we were in the middle of the always-overdue crisis over racism and police brutality in the United States last week (white supremacy, imperialism, militarism, inequality, etc. etc.), my mind turned to Andres and the things he began to teach me about being powerless and changing things, way back when.

1) People get along fine without western culture

I had never seen just how huge my list of assumptions about reality actually were until that trip. I thought I was a Christian – and I had been in trouble for how radical I was! But the Bible looked a lot more like Andres than like me. Whenever invisible people become visible to the rulers, it is always disturbing. Andres still disturbs me. I never really knew I was a ruler until I sat on a three-legged stool he made out of firewood in his house and realized he was getting along fine without me and my late-capitalist culture, or whatever it is that’s happening.

2) Not everyone wants to trade community for commodities

How in the world can one be so wise and content with a chicken walking through one’s walls? I could not keep my eyes off that chicken! Later that day another refugee family invited several of us to dinner. We shared a soup featuring their one potato as they happily watched us eat it. We investigated to see just how coerced they were to do this, but we were assured they really thought it would be a hoot to entertain us. Is it more amazing that we were flabbergasted or that they shared their potato? Even as a Christian, I am still tempted to have an economic answer for everything.

3) “Poor” people often have ways to get along in the shadow of the monsters that rule them just fine and don’t need instruction from the monsters when they finally deign to see them.

The world has always been full of monsters. Jesus announced their doom when he rose from the dead after they killed him. I was so full of power, I really wanted to fight those monsters. But after that debrief, I began to think that witnessing to their doom by embracing resurrection in their shadow was my best hope at having a life in a world where Bill Barr is Attorney General. Ever since, I keep trying to find a way to live an alternative in Christ in the shadow of the doomed monsters. They are passing away, after all, and what they thought was the Lord’s powerlessness will upend them forever. Plus, even they need a place to which to escape after they have killed and raped and despoiled the earth. I sat with Andres and felt like I deserved to die from my complicity with the monster from the north, but his gentle ignorance of my political plight and deep wisdom of our common spiritual future comforted and directed me.

4) Fighting it out for justice as if it amounted to percentages of a limited pie doesn’t make sense unless you want the pie.

We’ve been having the endless argument again this week after the looters smashed up corporate windows and messed up too many small businesspeople, too. “Thou shalt not steal” vs. “It’s not stealing; it’s just a bit of reparations for what was stolen.” Everyone is stealing, as usual, because in our society we live in a capitalist box. It seems to me that God is knocking on the box like (decidedly white, admittedly) Jesus in the famous painting, standing at the door. Behold, if there is not a better life than succeeding in the capitalist free-for-all, the vortex of injustice, that’s sad. Andres couldn’t have cared less about my car. How did he get so happy without a car? How did he seem so wise without knowing about my 401K? How could he know anything if he was not prepared to fight off the monster lurking in Soto Cano?

I take heart that the protests seemed to get free of the violence this weekend and turn into the morality that is uniting people around the world. But economic inequality is not going away any time soon, if ever. I’m glad I’ve met people all over the world, who don’t follow that inequality around, but follow Jesus instead.

5) There is an alternative that Anabaptists like to talk about but rarely find in North America.

I am happy we talk about the Third Way, and we (I mainly know about Circle of Hope) represent an alternative in a lot of ways. But we spend an awful lot of time sorting out the first and second ways, or whatever binary the media loves to amplify. I admit, I love to fire up my computer and read all the news every day. I might spend more time on that than time in meditation most days! I know an awful lot about the awful Trump, tromping across the street to run humanity-loving Episcopalians off their own porch. I suspect Andres never had a computer.  He missed the endless arguing; he missed the moralizing about moralizing, fury about fury and, exclusion over excluding. Maybe I am over-idealizing him, but I remember him as being strangely at peace. I not only want that peace, I want to make it.

I know I am making “points” as I go along telling these little stories. I’m not trying to tidy up my experience or yours – not really. It’s more of a confession. If you are a so-called white person, you probably have some of your own confession to make. So I am not trying to whitesplain anything, just trying to learn old lessons better. My lessons are not final and it would not be surprising if they aren’t the ones you want or need to hear. So let’s be friends. I just thought I’d tell you about a good man in the middle of nowhere who was driven out of his home and ended up in a refugee camp. He learned faith and it made him remarkable to me. Maybe he had an easier situation in which to learn faith at that point than we have in the belly of this beast – good for him. But maybe we can do it, too, instead of biting and devouring one another in reflection of the monster.

I think MCC made a decent investment by baptizing me. I certainly became better friends with the refugees of the world and with a lot of other people I probably would have continued to otherize. We are so preoccupied with stealing in the U.S., the country has ended up with a lot of stuff. When we ship it off to people with one potato periodically, I feel like some justice is done. Even better, when we get to know them and figure out our whole way of looking at things may not have much of a Jesus lens, love gets a chance to bloom. Then I feel we might be able to see a little bit.