The following essay appeared in the spring 2001 issue of Out of Line.

I live by the seasons. Perhaps my traditional Roman Catholic background is responsible for this sense of respect I have for liturgical cycles. And this is particularly true during the six weeks of Lent that precede the festivities of Easter Sunday. Situated in the middle of the season, the month of March provides a time of amazing grace. While much of the country observes the fading of winter, and the arrival of crocuses, lady slippers, and early spring gardens, the liturgical lovers among us also observe our inner landscapes: we see the persistence of spring, yet we adjust to the Lenten season of remorse for things and people who have died. For me, the most important day of the season is March 24, the anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador. In 1980, Romero was shot to death by government security forces while celebrating the Eucharist. His crime was begging the government to stop its violent repression of El Salvadoran people.

I often wonder if I (as a white middle class North American) am alone in my almost canonical veneration of Monsignor Romero. His portrait hangs in my office. I look to him for guidance as I engage in the struggles of my daily life. Oscar Romero lived a comfortable life among the Catholic bishop class until he could no longer ignore the government sponsored death squads once they began killing priests and friends working for social justice in his own archdiocese. It was the death of a close friend, Rutilio Grande, that pushed Romero to the limits of his conservative piety. He began to hear the cries of the poor in his own country, and eventually started speaking out against the human rights violations committed by the military. Bishop Romero made a decision to "cross the line" to stand with the poor and oppressed of El Salvador. His weekly sermons denounced the death squads and commanded them to disobey orders to kill other Salvadorans: "…In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you, stop the repression. The decision to represent the prophetic church cost Monsignor Romero his life. His example humbles me, and I find myself asking, "Will I ever really cross the line?"

In the early years after his death, I organized liturgies and in my town to celebrate Romero's memory. But as each season passed, I felt increasingly compelled to bring this witness into the college classroom where I was teaching. The texts in my courses began to change, to include testimonies and analyses about the social reality in Central America. I will never forget the day that I brought one of the famous Co-Madres (the Mothers of the Disappeared from El Salvador) into my classroom. Maria Teresa Tula stood in front of my students with her 18 month old son Oscar (named after the archbishop), perched heavily on her hip, while she told her story of giving birth to him in the Mariona prison on the outskirts of the San Salvador. Like so many women in the working class, Maria was unaware of the political situation in her country until security forces captured her husband after a union-organizing meeting. She took the fire of her love into the streets of San Salvador and demanded the return of relatives detained and disappeared by the government. Her activities landed her in prison where she was interrogated, tortured, and raped. Amnesty International successfully rescued her from prison, but her status as a political refugee was not recognized in the United States. The fact that I brought an illegal alien to my class was upsetting to many of my students. Most of us, however, responded to Maria by asking what we could do to help. Her answer was to take ourselves to El Salvador and personally witness the violence against her people, so that we could come home and demand justice of our own government.

I remember sitting in the audience and thinking, "I could never go to El Salvador. I am a mother of three children. I am not in a position to risk my life. Someone else needs to do it." But as I said these words to myself, I also knew that Maria risked her own life every time she spoke out against the violence in El Salvador. Moreover, she carried her young son Oscar, the same age as my youngest Patrick, with her. Like it or not, I was connected to Maria through our shared motherhood.

When we met to discuss Maria's lecture, students challenged one another about the morality of U.S. policy in El Salvador, and the rights of political refugees in our country. The most jolting moment came when one of the students called out, "And what are you going to do about Maria's call to visit her country, Peggy?" I could not have been less prepared for that question. I literally lost my balance. My student's question forced me to confront my liberal leanings, including my archetypal tendency to avoid the real world by studying it from the safe distance of the academy. Before I knew it, I heard myself saying, "I guess I will have to go to El Salvador." That moment in the classroom changed my life.

Now I regularly organize travel seminars for students and faculty . During the years I am not traveling, I write to those who have journeyed to Central America with me, to remind them that life after Romero's death is in our hands too. For most of us, the re-membering and re-witnessing helps us keep focused on values of justice and love which undergird our professions as students and teachers. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Oscar Romero's death, and I decided to share my homage to Romero's life with a community of women who come together annually to celebrate the birth of spring.

My assignment in the mid-March ritual was to tell the story of spring's genesis. It had been thirty years since I read the myth of Persephone, so it came as a surprise to me that the Greek interpretation of seasonal changes was the story of a mother and daughter. But most striking to me was the similarity between the Demeter tale and the stories I have heard from the Mothers of the Disappeared. The myth is worth re-telling.

One day Persephone was picking narcissus flowers with her friends. Without warning, the earth opened and out came Hades, the god of the dead. He grabbed Persephone, raped her, and carried her off to be his bride. The earth goddess Demeter heard the desperate cries of her daughter, and sped like a bird over sea and land in search of Persephone. But no one dared tell what had actually happened, for fear of their own lives.
Nine days passed but there was no sign of Demeter's missing daughter. At last the sun god Helius, who sees everything, told Demeter what happened. Furious, she approached the great god Zeus to petition the rightful release of Persephone from her captor. But since he was the brother of Hades, Zeus did nothing.
Full of grief and rage, Demeter remained on earth where she tended to other women and children. Eventually the earth itself joined in her mourning; leaves fell off trees, and the grains in the field withered and died. There was fear of famine and untimely death from starvation.
Rhea, mother of Zeus, saw what was happening and worked out a compromise with her sons.She decided that Persephone would live half of the year above the ground with her mother and the other half in the land of the dead with her husband, Hades.
Unfortunately, a compromise of this nature is difficult for a mother. And so, each year when Persephone has to return to the underworld, Demeter and the earth lament her departure. Leaves turn brown and fall from their branches, and the grains and vegetables shrivel and die. But each spring when Persephone returns to her mother, the earth rejoices and brings forth new flowers and plants to revive the lives of people and animals that depend on her.

Demeter's story reminds me of the painful accounts of the Mothers and Relatives of the Disappeared Oscar Romero I have listened to over the years. My experience as a Latin American solidarity worker has taught me the central role resurrection plays for people struggling for life in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Demeter is herself a "mother of the disappeared," who searches in vain for her abducted daughter. No one will help her because a climate of terror surrounds the events of the day. Finally, the sun god Helius, admits to the whereabouts of Persephone, but by then it is too late. Persephone is gone. And her mother knows the kind of suffering she has already endured. But instead of returning to her comfortable place in the heavens, Demeter chooses to remain on earth, helping other women, so that they can be spared the pain of losing their children to death and suffering.

Many might think this tale is too late to carry meaning for those of us striving to live by the standards of mercy and justice here in the United States. After all, the dirty war in Argentina ended in the early 80's; El Salvador struck its own peace accords in the early nineties; Nicaragua's civil war stopped with the 1991 election of Violeta Chamorro, and the violence is subsiding in Honduras and Guatemala. But my last trip to Central America informs me that the work of the Mothers of the Disappeared is taking on a new, if not more salvific importance. Maybe for all of us,

Recently, I organized a travel seminar to Nicaragua for a first hand look at the role that women have played in the church and society since the Sandinista Revolution. Our delegation met with women's groups all over the country and we even stayed with families in the rural area of Chacaraseca (recently destroyed by Hurricane Mitch) outside of Leon. It was the one-on-one interaction that moved members of our group. Perhaps most touching was the morning we spent with the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs in downtown Leon.

Walking through the carefully maintained Gallery of Heroes and Martyrs, we saw hundreds of 8 x 10 school pictures, framed and hung in museum style. We listened to Madre Cone, one of the original founders of the Gallery, tell the stories of various young men and women, mostly under twenty-one years of age, whose lives were taken in the Nicaraguan insurrection and subsequent Contra War. At points along the walk, we could see articles of clothing, notebooks, and even eyeglasses worn by these young people during the period of their civic activity. Most of us were saddened to tears as Madre Cone calmy recollected the stories of young Nicaraguans whose lives were shortened largely because of U.S. policy in the region. Particularly wrenching was the story of five brothers, four of whom were shot by the National Guard while literally clinging to the mother's skirt. Many of these young people were gunned down for participating in clandestine meetings or peaceful demonstrations to protest the economic misery of the country. Madre Cone also told us about Maria Mercedes, killed on the 7th of July 1979, the day a major Sandinista front was liberated. When she told us the young woman was her daughter, we wept from our depths, and wondered how Madre Cone could return to that place of suffering every time she led a delegation like ours through the gallery.

In the discussion which followed, we learned that Madre Cone as well as the other mothers throughout the country, are still struggling for justice. The purpose of the Gallery is to keep alive the nation's history at a time when the Sandinista Revolution is being erased from Nicaragua's textbooks. The Gallery and the mothers themselves subsist without help from the government. Within the past two years, the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs opened a store with high quality artisan productions from around the country, the proceeds of which help pay the rent and provide meager salaries for the mothers running the gallery. North Americans like ourselves gravitate to shopping opportunities, and we were no exception that day.

From our perspective, the actions of these women make them national heroines too. The profound courage and resilience of the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs was more than most of us could comprehend. Like Demeter, these women regularly revisit the death and suffering of their offspring. But what we came to see is that the remembering of the dead is also a celebration of their lives. Like Persephone, these disappeared children regularly return to the larger community. This is the secret of resurrection that Central Americans understand so well.

We can begin to appreciate the meaning of Easter for Latin Americans if we look to the recent movement in El Salvador to articulate a "Theology of Memory."(1) Throughout the rural areas women have undertaken the project of counting the crosses and resurrections of those whose lives were taken in the U.S. sponsored civil war there. In keeping with the imagery of spring, Salvadoran women also refer to the season of resurrection as the "theology of blossoming." The memories of the dead "blossom" in the hearts and minds of families and community. These recollections give rise to new actions and reflections in the name of life's potential for love and justice. The meaning of blossoming here is particularly life giving because it invites the voice and expression of poor women whose words have not been heard before. The process of rendering theological legitimacy to women whose knowledge arises from their bodily experience of pain and suffering during the war contributes to the growth and transformation of females who are the majority survivors of El Salvador's long civil war.

But it is not only women in El Salvador and Nicaragua who stand to grow from the "Theology of Memory." The challenge to blossom is also here for people like me. My vocation to "cross the line" may take on meaning if I decide to follow Juliet Shor's (2) or Peter Singer's (3) recommendations to eschew the small to medium-sized luxuries I regularly enjoy, from beach trips to expensive educational programs for my children. Instead, I could send significant amounts of money to women's groups struggling to rebuild their communities after the war. I have met them. I know their addresses. I could add a litany to my daily prayers, helping me to remember the $1.5 million dollars a day our government spent over a ten-year period to make El Salvador safe from communism. And the Contra War illegally financed by the White House during the same period. Bringing these memories back might help me to follow Monsignor Romero's footsteps. For the truth is that children, women, and men continue to pay a high price for our recent history. The devastation of land and buildings and the economy have left Nicaragua and El Salvador, in particular, in desperate financial straits.

A North American practice of "Theology of Memory" could bring the present struggle of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans back into our own lives. We might know the joy of solidarity that comes from reflecting on our past and present policies toward the Central American region, and then act on behalf of Central Americans who really are part of our extended family. Looking to the example of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Nicaragua and El Salvador, we may each find a starting point for a new understanding of resurrection. And we can even thank the Greek goddess Demeter for showing us the way.

1. See Marcella Althaus-Reid, " Doing the theology of memory: counting crosses and resurrections" in Life Out of Death: The Feminine Spirit in El Salvador, Eds. Marigold Best and Pamela Husssey, (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations), 1996.

2. See Juliet Shor. The Overspent American . (New York: Harper), 1998.

3. See Peter Singer."The Singer Solution to World Poverty, New York Times Magazine, Sept. 5, 1999.