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?
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