wfn.org | Re: United Methodist Daily News note 3101

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"UNITED METHODIST DAILY NEWS" by SUSAN PEEK on Aug. 11, 1991 at 13:58 Eastern,
about FULL TEXT RELEASES FROM UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE (3156 notes).

Note 3154 by UMNS on Sept. 9, 1996 at 16:15 Eastern (6772 characters).

CONTACTProduced by United Methodist News Service, official news
agency of the United Methodist Church, with offices in Nashville,
Tenn., New York, and Washington.

:    Ralph E. Baker                              440(10-71B){3154}
          Nashville, Tenn (615) 742-5470             Sept. 9, 1996

Seminary professors find Guatemala
filled with terror and courage

                          A UMNS Feature
                         by Paul Jeffrey*

     Vincent Harding said he'll never forget the piles of bones
laid out neatly on the tables of a forensic laboratory in
Guatemala City. Along with 15 other professors from United
Methodist-related Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Harding had
come to the lab to meet an international team that is slowly
exhuming victims from hundreds of clandestine graves scattered
throughout this Central American country.
     Harding said the bones spoke to him about both terror and
courage. "The bones were such sad things to be around, remembering
that they were once real people. But they also represented the
tremendous courage of people who are breaking the bonds of fear
and beginning to dig up the past," Harding said. 
     "One of the things we constantly set aside in our description
of Christian life is courage, but we were graphically reminded of
it in Guatemala by these suffering people who refuse simply to be
victims and who with great courage have done what they needed to
do so that the bones could speak to us and to others."
     The forensic lab was but one stop on the busy agenda for
Harding and his colleagues from Iliff in Denver, Colo. For seven
days in late August and early September, the group met with church
leaders, indigenous activists and human rights workers. Many of
the group's contacts continue to receive death threats from
paramilitary groups, and several of the discussions closed with
faculty members laying their hands on the threatened people and
praying for them and their families.
     Rather than taking their yearly faculty retreat in the
mountains of Colorado, as usual, the faculty was encouraged to
go to Guatemala by Iliff President Don Messer, who had traveled
there several times in recent years while serving as a director of
the denomination's General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM). The
board provided partial funding for the trip. The Iliff group
returned to Denver Sept. 5.
     Several professors had expressed reluctance about the trip,
concerned about safety in a country where a 36-year guerrilla war
still lingers and where crime recently has skyrocketed following a
purge of high-level military officials. Yet after traveling
through the mountainous western highlands to visit Mayan ruins and
talk with survivors of the government's brutal "scorched earth"
counterinsurgency campaign of the decade past, the scholars said
they were glad they had come.
     According to Joretta Marshall, assistant professor of
pastoral care and counseling, the retreat helped her "understand
how, as people of God, we relate to people outside the United
States, how we connect as a global community." She claimed the
journey will "help Iliff break out of our isolation, so that we
don't just teach people how to serve in Colorado but rather ... to
serve in a world that is economically, socially and religiously
very complex."
     Marshall said she was particularly impressed by the "profound
faith of the women we met, a faith that has carried them through
incredible suffering."
     The group met with poor women both in the capital city and in
the countryside, several of whom recounted the violence of the
1980s in which many of their husbands and sons were killed.
Faculty members also interviewed several prominent women leaders,
including Julia Esquivel, a Presbyterian poet who recently
returned from years in exile, and Manuela Alvarado, an indigenous
activist elected last November to Guatemala's National Congress.
     Pam Eisenbaum, assistant professor of biblical studies, said
the trip exposed her to "the context from which liberation
theology emerged, a theology that has played an important role in
influencing how we read the Bible from a global perspective."
     She said she was surprised when several Guatemalans used
what she termed "the language of holocaust survivors" to describe
what they had lived through in recent years. "I'd read about death
squads in Central America before, but I'd never, until that
moment, connected what's happened here with my own memory of my
relatives dying at Auschwitz and in the Warsaw ghetto," Eisenbaum
said.
     Harding,  professor of religion and social transformation at
Iliff, is a veteran civil rights campaigner in the United States.
He said the bones reminded him of part of his own history. "They
reminded me of all the bones and bodies hidden in the deep south
in the United States. I kept recalling all the people I've known
who were threatened in the same way when their loved ones were
left hanging from trees and they were told ... to leave them
there, not to cut them down. And I recalled what it meant for
people finally to break through that fear and say, 'You cannot
stop us from being human.'"
     Following the group's discussion with members of the forensic
anthropology team, Harding asked the group to hold hands around a
table covered with bones. He then led them in singing "We shall
overcome."
     Harding said he also was impressed by "the magnificent way in
which the people we've met have refused to separate their deep
personal piety from their tremendous politically-conscious human
organizing. For them it is no contradiction to say they leave it
in the hands of God while at the same moment they organize the
people to work for change."
     The faculty heard from several Guatemalans a request that
they work to change U.S. foreign policy toward the region. "Go
back home and close the School of the Americas," Mennonite
psychologist Olga Piedrasanto told the group. "That's where our
soldiers learned to kill so efficiently."
     As a result of the visit here, in coming months Iliff will
explore establishing a relationship with the Central American
Center for Pastoral Studies, a Guatemala-based ecumenical
theological education program. On Sept. 4, Del Brown, Iliff's
academic dean, extended an invitation to Rafael Escobar, an
educator with the center, to visit the school during October.
     Harding called the faculty's experience here "painful,
magnificent, and blessed," and said it would "give another texture
to our discussions and our life together."
                              #  #  #

     * Jeffrey, a United Methodist missionary in Central America,
is an award winning photojournalist. 

EDITORS NOTE: Photos available by request to (303) 744-1287.

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