Violence is something that a lot of people claim to understand; there are many anthropological and sociological studies about its causes. But, the truth of the matter is that violence is a mystery that comes with being human. I can’t say that I actually understand how violence works. What I can say, is that I am in search of a better understanding of violence in order to also understand peacemaking and conflict resolution. In most of the communities where we work, violence is a constant. What is interesting to me is the result of the violence I see: Internal violence usually ends in suicide and external violence usually ends in murder.

One sunny afternoon in 2005, my friend Brady (who is from Knoxville, TN) and I were hanging out with Clemente, Kevin, and other kids from a slum in zone 3, Guatemala City. Most of them teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 years old, with the exception of five-year-old Rigo and his seven-year-old brother. Rigo and his brother were playing with marbles on the floor. Chepe and I were talking with the kids, cracking some jokes and having a good time laughing at the “gringo” with the funny accent. For some reason, one of the two brothers lost his marbles and wanted the other one to give him his. I assume Rigo was the one who had the marbles, but I do not know that for sure. Out of nowhere the atmosphere filled with violence and the next thing I saw was a fight between the two little kids.

I have seen kids fighting for toys before, but this time it was just vicious. Rigo’s brother was on top, with his fists closed, beating Rigo down. I do not even know if I have the words to describe the scene, but the fight was brutal. The guys we were hanging out with were fueling the fight, cheering and yelling “Come on! Come on! Harder! Harder!” Brady and I could not intervene. We did not know what to do. I was really afraid the little kids were going to hurt themselves for real. I did not know how to react and stop the fight. Somehow, Rigo made it out of the beat-down and saw his mom walking down the street. Dropping his marbles on the floor he ran as fast as he could to embrace his mom’s legs. He was looking for protection. For a moment I thought, thank God she just showed up, now I do not have to stop the fight! Amazingly, when Rigo hugged his mom’s legs, instead of finding care, security, and love he found a kick right into his belly and an angry voice yelling, “Don’t be such a pussy! Go fight your brother like a man! That is how you learn dumb ass!” I could not believe what my eyes were witnessing. It felt like being right in the middle of an intense Flannery O’Connor story.

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As a kid I ran from brokenness. Whenever a fight broke out at school while some excitedly gravitated toward it I’d subtely turn tail and literally walk away in the opposite direction. I remember doing this often. Whenever I found myself in proximity to deep hurt, sickness, or wreckage my sensitive psyche wanted nothing to do with it so in my fear I’d flee.

The front yard acts as dinner room and homework lounge after 2pm.  The first and second grade classrooms become dorms after 7pm.  Precious Moments is the most space-efficient school I have visited in Guatemala. There is always something going on; people in the neighborhood know the school and the family running it well because of their enthusiasm, energy and faith. And their marching band.  That was where I met Danilo, playing the drums in addition to running around, coloring, doing his homework and goofing around with the other kids after school. A teenager acting like a young boy. Maybe he was trying to make up for time lost to a hard life.

Martha has a sweet heart and spirit. On a normal day she is a wife, a mom, a cook,  a counselor, a friend, a salesperson, a devoted Christian AND the school director at Precious Moments (that also includes an after-school program and foster home.)   She is also part of the CTM network in Guatemala City.   She has hosted interns, vision trips and local leaders in her ministry, and melted our hearts every time with her incredible life and devotion to the Lord, and the kids in this community in zone 13.

Danilo went to live at Precious Moments after his mom couldn’t provide for him anymore and because of the danger of the zone where they lived.  Martha took him in as her own child and raised him for almost 10 years. His mom stayed in the picture, but Martha and her family became a new concept of “family” for him.

So I went pale when I first read the short message that Danilo had been shot and killed.  I couldn’t believe it.  No way… Not him… Retaliation for something that his cousin did… Refusing to join a gang… The versions of the shooting were confusing and often incomplete, but he had died in front of the school, in the middle of the day in front of friends and family. As hard as it is, this type of death has become a new “normal” for young men that live in hard places.

After a few weeks of mourning and trying to make sense of this tragic loss, our staff suggested the Moment of Blessing Liturgy as part of our commitment to suffer alongside our friends and to join them in the midst of their pain.  I showed up for the reading and a bunch of young kids jumped around me chanting “Miss Liz! Miss Liz!”.  “Uh oh…”  – I thought to myself. “Who is going to stay with the kids while we have the liturgy?”  I was trying to come up with ideas when Martha showed up.  She instructed the kids to make a circle with chairs and seconds later we had 15 kids sitting around and paying attention. These children were going to be our Moment of Blessing participants! Five adults joined shortly after.

I wasn’t sure how to proceed.  The Moment of Blessing talks about death, about tragedy, about justice… words that are hard for adults to process, and even more for kids.  But they paid attention.  They followed the reading with their little fingers.  Their eyes opened wide when I read Danilo’s name on the page.  They started coloring and making hearts and little stars around his name on their copies of the blessing.  Talk about a precious moment.   That was the Moment of Blessing for them – a way of learning and praying in the midst of death.  A little heart by his name, a smiley sheep next to Psalm 23. They remembered a life lived with love and the Scripture reminded them not to fear in the face of the valley of death. The drawing of their brother, their friend, their teacher, connected with words and prayers of hope for a difference in their street, in their neighborhood and their lives.

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I came across a dirty onion tossed out in the sun
Abandoned trash that could not be of use to anyone
It lay upon the filthy ground with darkened, withered skin
That did not let me scrutinize the contents held within

With curiousness, I picked it up and then began to peel
The outer layers off to see what insides might reveal
And as I went about my task reducing surface size
The onion fumes brought searing pain and tears welled in my eyes

Hardened, tainted layers were the first that I removed
But inner rings were softer and the quality improved
And when I reached the onion’s center finishing my tour
I found the core was undefiled; was tender, fresh and pure

I came across a youth in jail his body scarred, tattooed
An outcast of society his manner violent, lewd
Curious I then sought to know how was this youth inside
What was the nature of his soul what feelings did he hide

His outer shell was heartless, hard and tough to penetrate
But as I slowly gained his trust I found a different state
He shed the armor he’d built up throughout his sordid past
To guard against the threats he’d faced that left me quite aghast

Abandoned, starved, despised, abused, rejected through the years
The angst released from woes peeled off brought searing pain and tears
The surface layers of this youth were vicious, mean and wild
But in his depths I found the love and meekness of a child

How can we reach that tender heart, what ways can we devise
To break through callousness; remove what causes youths’ demise?
Not jails but God’s transforming grace should be our fervent goal
Peel off the layers, reach the core, set free their yearning soul

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Following up from the previous post on Phyllis Trible and Texts of Terror, here is a message on another troublesome passage in scripture. A link to the text can also be found here.

Dr. Ellen Davis has been a Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School since 2001. She is a lay Episcopalian, and has studied at the University of California at Berkeley (A.B.), the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and Oxford University (M.Div.), and Yale University (Ph.D.). Dr. Davis previously taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Yale Divinity School, and Virginia Theological Seminary. Her most recent book, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2009), integrates biblical studies with a critique of industrial agriculture and food production. Other publications include Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Cowley 2001), The Art of Reading Scripture, a volume of essays co-edited with Dr. Richard Hays (Eerdmans, 2003), and Wondrous Depth: Old Testament Preaching (Westminster John Knox, 2005).

Editor’s note: We follow last week’s word on the power of the poem by a powerful poem from Street Psalms Community member Sam Trujillo. To  read more thoughts on Advent by Sam go here.

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They are bleeding.
They are bleeding and you watch them bleed.
They are bleeding from the wounds of life
Caught between the crossfire of gang warfare
Shot down as a maddened animal in need of relief from itself
And yet you watch them bleed.
Tell me Holy One
Where do the wounded travel for a moment of blessing?
A moment behind the storage shed of life in the midst of the concrete universe they call home?

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They are bruised.
They are bruised and you watch them bruise.
They are bruised from the beatings life hails on their fragile bodies
Caught between the violence of the streets
Crushed bones by the weapons of breath
And yet you watch them bruise.
Tell me oh Holy One
Where do the beaten search for a moment of blessing?
A moment behind the soreness of flesh to find exquisiteness in their face within the walls of a prison they call home?

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They are shamed.
They are shamed and you watch them shamed.
They are shamed from the countless naked moments life rapes their souls
Caught between the language of love entangled with the thrust of lust
Forcibly taken against their will and tormented by a story of lies
And yet you watch them shamed.
Tell me Holy One
Where do the shamed journey for a moment of blessing?
A moment behind the veil of inhumanity where the purity of their soul can be saved while still they remain in this basin of poverty they call home?

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(Photo: Clix)

The following is a reflection on one of the intensives that CTM offers called:  In The Belly Of The Beast – Seeking Peace In A Violent World. Colin is a public school teacher and has participated in CTM’s intensives for the last few years.

My hometown is by no means a hot bed of unspeakable violence.  The 7,000 citizens of the town in which I was born go about their daily business as you might expect in any small community.  They are a communal, loyal, and patriotic people.  Growing up in a tight knit community like mine made me feel that violence was about as close as Mars.  My experience at the Street Psalms intensive—In the Belly of the Beast—showed me a violent world that is in my own backyard, in my own being, though it is violence I had scarcely taken note of.

It’s been almost a decade since September 11, 2001.  The attacks that day did a strange thing to towns like my hometown, and the country as a whole.  We were unified.  People banded together across social and economic lines to rise up in the face of tyranny.  The overwhelming emotion spewing from the masses was rage.  The overwhelming aim of the masses was revenge.

Each February my hometown gets together and puts on a carnival.  This is not all that uncommon in the rural southwest.  There are the traditional carnival games, and some that may be unique to the smaller, more western towns of the nation.  My favorite game was one where you were handed an automatic BB gun with 100 pellets in it, the goal being to eliminate a star printed on a piece of paper from roughly 15 feet away.  There was no age restriction on playing.  As I am aware, small children are shooting to their hearts content to this very day.  The February after 9/11, I was at the carnival and went to play my favorite game.  I was shocked to see the line over 50 people long.  It wasn’t till I got to the front of the line that I realized what all the buzz was about:  the goal was no longer to blast away the star, that picture had been replaced by a photo of Osama Bin Laden.
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It was around 1 a.m. on March 15^th this year, when James heard his dad cry for help. When he woke up he found out that his dad’s house was on fire, but as he ran in an attempt to quench the fire he fell and hurt his knee so badly. But because he loves his dad, he got up and went on to try and put out the fire together with some other concerned citizens who responded to the  fire. As they were struggling to put out the fire they saw in the distance the group of young men who were responsible for lighting the fire, laughing as they walked away from the scene.

During a recent pastoral visit to James, he narrated this whole scenario to me and we reflected on the issue more deeply. In our discussion several questions arose that I thought are pertinent if we are going to be faithful to the context of Mukuru.

• What does Mukuru mean, and what does it mean to live in Mukuru?
• Where was the local authority in all this?
• How do we, the Mukuru community, respond to this situation?

The word Mukuru means “a valley” in Kikuyu, one of Kenya’s native languages. This translation has some significance because valleys in Nairobi are either places where slums are located or they are dumping sites. In this case, the village of Mukuru is a dumping site for factories in Nairobi’s industrial zone where James and many others live. The type of waste that is discarded in this valley is industrial toxic waste that is quite harmful. Indeed, some of the villagers have respiratory problems due to the type of waste that they interact with on a daily basis. To the industries, Mukuru is a valley for dumping. To the members of Shalom Kuchemba (a group of Mukuru’s residents who live and work in the Mukuru dumping site) it is a valley that they call home. So, for the men, women, and children who live in Mukuru, it means that they have to interact with industrial waste for the better part of their lives. (Kuchemba is slang that is used to mean scavenging. Initially the group called itself Wanakuchemba which means “a group of scavengers”. When I met them three years ago, we explored the whole issue of Biblical Shalom and then we formed the group Shalom Kuchemba which is still comprised of members from Mukuru slum who live by scavenging. The name implies that we are a group of scavengers who work and await the realization of Shalom in Mukuru slum.)

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