We're watching Romero tonight!

We'll be watching the movie Romero tonight for anyone who wants to join at 7PM at St. Luke's Parish House, 431 7th Street in Hollister. If you're reading the book I'd encourage you to rent or borrow a copy of this movie and watch it. It is a fairly faithful retelling of Romero's story and gives a good sense of the context in which his words were written.

Chapter 4: Don’t Pull Them Up

This chapter’s title refers to the weeds among the wheat, and reflects Romero’s attitude toward those who persecuted the church and ultimately killed him. In this chapter we begin to see more of the awful reality in which Romero and his contemporaries were immersed, and his response of very personal, incredibly deep faith.

“God is the exquisite likeness of a mother with child. God bore me in his womb and loved me and destined me and already thought of my days and of my death. What will happen to me doesn’t matter to me; God already knows it. Let us not be afraid, brothers and sisters. We are living through difficult and uncertain days. We do not know if this very evening we will be prisoners or murder victims. We do not know what the forces of evil will do with us. But one thing I do know: even those who have disappeared after arrest, even those who are mourned in the mystery of an abduction, are known and loved by God. If God allows these disappearances it is not because he is helpless. He loves us, he keeps on loving.” P. 72
Such a beautiful feminine metaphor for God, and an incredible, “nevertheless” faith.


“… we must lose ourselves in the beauty, in the sublimity of God, giving him thanks for favors received, begging pardon for our infidelities, praying to him when the limitations of our power clash with the greatness asked of us. We must learn to understand that we have such a capacity and that God desires to fill up that capacity.” P. 79
Great people like Romero and Mother Teresa, people whose lives have been spent in love, are not greater than the rest of us, but have submitted more to the greatness God wills for them, and for all of us. Immersed in prayer, they have allowed God to “fill up their capacity” for selfless love.


“Therefore dear brothers and sisters, especially those of you who hate me, you dear brothers and sisters who think I am preaching violence, who defame me and know it isn’t true, you that have hands stained with murder, with torture, with atrocity, with injustice—be converted. I love you deeply.” P. 88
This message of love and call to conversion of those who considered themselves his enemies is a constant refrain in Romero’s preaching.


“God does not identify with human thinking. Many indeed would like, as the song says, a pocket-God, a God to get along with their idols, a God satisfied with the way they pay their workers… How can people pray the Our Father to that God when they treat him as one of their servants or one of their employees?” P. 90
God's thinking turns human thinking on its head. Do we want a pocket-God, or will we allow ourselves to be challenged, stretched, and toppled by the word of the Living God?

Chapter 3: The Idol of Self

“Holy Week is a call to follow Christ’s austerities, the only legitimate violence, the violence that he does to himself and that he invites us to do to ourselves: “Let those who would follow me deny themselves,” be violent to themselves, repress in themselves the outbursts of pride, kill in their hearts the outbursts of greed, of avarice, of conceit, of arrogance… this is what must be killed, this is the violence that must be done, so that out of it a new person may arise, the only one who can build a new civilization: a civilization of love.”
This is the violence of love of which Romero speaks—killing the idol of self.


“A Christian’s authenticity is show in difficult hours… it is in difficult hours that the church grows in authenticity. Blest be God for this difficult hour in our archdiocese. Let us be worthy of it.” P. 43-44
Amazing to read that Romero blesses God for the “difficult hour” his church and country are living through—the murder of priests and lay-workers, the disappearances, the slaughter of the innocent. He blesses God for all of this! But blesses in the sense of the Beatitudes… “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven…” (Matthew 5:11-12)


“A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’ skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that? Very nice, pious considerations that don’t bother anyone, that’s the way many would like preaching to be. Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed, so as not to have conflicts and difficulties, do no light up the y world they live in.” p. 44
Very challenging words for any preacher and every Christian! Do we light up the world that we live in?


“Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering.” P. 48
See Matthew 5: 3-11 & Luke 6: 20-26 Amen to the upside-down logic of God!


“Suffering will always be. It is a heritage of the first sin and a consequence of the other sins that God permits, even after the redemption. But the redemption converts into power of salvation when suffering is undergone in union of faith, hope, and love with the Redeemer’s divine suffering and cross. Suffering is the shadow of God’s hand, which blesses and pardons; and suffering unites people in solidarity and draws them near to God.” P. 51
This is another very difficult one to wrap one’s mind/heart around. Suffering is a consequence of human sin, yet God allows suffering, and suffering can be sanctified, made holy, if we suffer for/in God’s love. What do you think? What is your experience?


“God has eternity before him. Only God has security. It is for us to follow humbly wherever God wants to lead, and blessed are those who stay faithful to the ways God inspires them to go and who do not, in order to please others, live with an uneasy conscience in the place where others believe security is to be found.” P. 58