El Salvador: What Are You Going Through?, post by Mark

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”  It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in  certain way.--Simone


Simone reminds me of the following passage on the mothers of the disappeared from Daniel Berrigan’s Steadfastness of The Saints: A Journal of Peace and War in Central and North America. Therein, he writes about his visits with Salvadoran women during the U.S.-backed bloodbath of the mid-1980s:  “And after each interview, the mother would invariably walk to the far end of the table, to a heap of photo albums laid there. Would take one of them in hand, gravely turn page after page, these images out of the national abattoir, the tortured, raped, amputated. The photos that stood horrid surrogate for the young men, absent from streets and homes and churches and factories. The disappeared generation. I could scarcely bear to look at the faces that dared look at such images, and not be turned to stone. How much can one bear? I did not know. But I sensed that the measure of what could be borne would be revealed neither by psychiatrist nor politician not bishop. I must go in humility to these unknown, despised lives, upon whom there rested the preferential option of God.”