Today, December 2, 2016, marks the 36th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of the four US Catholic Missionaries in El Salvador who stood with the thousands of El Salvadoran people who themselves were martyred for the cause of justice and the gospel of life.

Today we remember that Advent is a season that runs like a path of justice toward the Feast of the Nativity and the season of Christmas which celebrate the mystery of the incarnation.

We remember that salvation comes by way of accompaniment — Emmanuel, God with us — and that the call of the incarnation is for us, as it was so courageously shown by the four women missionaries, the call to be with those who are most vulnerable and most susceptible to the injustice and violation perpetrated by others.

THE CONTEXT: the ongoing repression and brutal death squads of the El Salvadoran government in the 1980’s. This was a culmination of many decades in which the poor peasants were being exploited and oppressed by the ruling oligarchy and military dictators with the knowledge, and aid of the U.S. Government.

THE SCENE: Jean Donovan, the young American lay-missioner who left a well-paying job for the poverty of El Salvador to distribute food to the poor and to refugees and to coordinate family education programs. After the violence increased (for example, Archbishop Romero was killed in March of that same year), Jean’s parents, fiancé, and friends pleaded with her to leave El Salvador because the terror and danger were so great. Members of the Peace Corps and others were departing. She was wrestling with the sensible thing to do versus the summons of her soul which was quietly nudging her to stay.

THE QUOTE: She wrote in a letter to a friend these now famous words:

The danger is extreme and they were right to leave. Now I must assess my own position because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.

Shortly after, on December 2, 1980, together with Catholic sisters Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford, Jean Donovan was raped and murdered by the National Guardsmen in El Salvador.

In a country in the Middle East salvation was birthed and laid in a manger at the back of a backwoods town. Nearly 2000 years later in a country named after that child and riddled with human greed, abuse of power, cruelty, violence and death, salvation was mediated again in the midst of terror and fear, again by a young women. Here it came not as the wholesale removal of that which was inhumane, ignominious, and despicable, not as an immediate end to the suffering, but as is often the case — in the embodied presence and the action of grace, in the incarnation of compassion and courage to be with others who are suffering “in a sea of their tears and loneliness.”

REFLECTION QUESTION: Who is suffering around you to whom you can offer your presence?