Jesuit Speak XVI
The Jesuit paleontologist priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. wrote a prayer entitled Patient Trust. The opening line is simply, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God”. It is a prayer that I personally struggle with as I often push my desires forward; at times perhaps forgetting the deeper desires of Christ. Chardin was no stranger to controversy: religious or political. Exiled from his native France, he was also exiled from Rome, then China, and died in New York; buried quietly, his brother Jesuits misspelled his name on his tombstone.
I was an undergrad at Seattle University twenty-two years ago this November. Our morning classes were cancelled as Jesuits, students, and faculty slowly filed out of buildings to gather at the center of campus. The radio and TV were alive with the news of six Jesuit priests assassinated along with their housekeeper and her daughter by an elite Salvadoran military unit. It was a day that awoke Jesuit university communities and the public around the country to the horror and injustice of the El Salvadoran Civil War. Hundreds of American students would flock to Latin American to fight injustice and serve the poorest of the poor. Within a year, my sister would move to Honduras to spend two years teaching orphans, I would follow to Haiti a year later. Thousands more would protest at the School of the Americas (the US Army supported school which trained thousands of Latin American soldiers; many of the Salvadoran soldiers trained at the SOA). All twenty-eight Jesuit Universities send contingents of students and faculty to the annual Ignatian Family teach-in to educate and remember the Jesuits, two women and all killed senselessly by those trained at the SOA. I still remember a Jesuit priest that morning, one of my professors, a good strong man, with tears in his eyes as he described one of the Jesuits executed whom he had known.
In May, twenty-two years after that dark night on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador an international court stepped forward and indictments were passed for twenty soldiers. One, the man who ordered the killings, General Rene Ponce, died in July. On Thursday, August 18th, nine soldiers quietly turned themselves in Salvadoran authorities to face justice. Ten former soldiers are still free, (one, Inocente Orlando Montano, openly lives in Everett, WA!).
A later line in Chardin’s prayer is “Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you”. It is hard, I admit, but being led by God sometimes requires patient trust.
C. Hightower, S.J.