We have arrived safely back at Union. Thank you all for your support in following the blog, car care packages, crosses, phone calls and more. The four of us each intend to write and post a follow up to our experiences in the next few days after some more prolonged reflection. Thank you again for all the ways that you have supported our trip. Specifically, we would like to thank the Student Life Office, all the Students for Peace and Justice, the Worship Office and the entire Union Community, as well as Nancy Allison our host in North Carolina, and CB Stewart for the use of the car. The four of us who traveled felt deeply blessed by the generous communal outpouring of support that carried us through this past weekend.

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As the Union community commissioned us on our journey we all took up crosses together in James Chapel to bear witness to the death dealing power of injustice, oppression, and war in our world. Tonight those same crosses, lifted up and placed in sand in James Chapel, are wedged in the fence surrounding Ft. Benning as our community’s witness against the violence that facility represents.

Today we joined your chorus to our own as we sang ¡Presente! and invoked the memory of the martyrs as a peaceful means to resisting violent oppression. Thank you for all the ways that you as a community have come with us on this journey.

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– 1 Corinthians 12: 24b-27

The crowd has dispersed.  The narrow avenue to Ft. Benning is no longer lined with idealistic rabble-rousers, politicized street vendors, and revolutionary artists.  Lingering notes of Freedom Songs are no longer lifted into on the voices of the people.  The veterans, feminists, Buddhists, Christians, communists, Nuns, Monks, puppetistas, musicians, survivors and allies no longer obscure the pavement of the road.  Save for a small contingency of folk who remained behind to help break down the stage, and the blessed, courageous souls who leapt over the fence to get arrested, those in attendance at the vigil have returned (or are in the process of returning) into the myriad worlds from which they came.

For a moment, we converged.  For a moment we felt our deep connection to people we had never seen before, who moved in us and through us and with us, who made themselves present in embodied art and song and witness.  For a moment we lifted our ideals, our rebellion, our resistance into the heart of a body much larger than anything any one of us could ever hope to become.

Names of the disappeared and the murdered were lifted into the clear blue sky, and after each name, we collectively sang the refrain presente, invoking each individual life and existence, each individual heartbreak and joy, into this sacred space.  Each of us carried a wooden cross, lifting it into the air as each name was brought forward, as we walked in solemn procession to the chain link gate of Ft. Benning.  And then we wove the crosses into the fence, each cross on top of another, until we could no longer distinguish one cross from the next – until what had before been the chain link fence of a military base was now a collage of names and ages and hopes and dreams and outrage and suffering and joy and wisdom and witness.  We became a body – Christ’s body – and we lay that body at the entrance of the School of the Americas.

Now, however, we disperse.  We go into the world, carrying the brokenness of our brothers and sisters with us.  For a moment, we come together and are one body.  If we are to share witness to the body of Christ that lies within us, then we must break the body we have created apart.  We must go into the world as the broken body of Christ and offer our whole beings as the transforming bread and the liberating cup.

- Lucas

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- Luke 23:26-28

We gathered in silent prayer for several moments at the Ft. Benning fence, holding hands in a small circle.  We had placed the crosses we had been given during the vigil and those we carried from Union in the fence. In many ways, it was finished.

We had responded with a sung “presente” – which translates from Spanish as “here” or “present” – to each of the hundred and hundred of names intoned.  Each name was that of a person who had been a victim of violence perpetrated by graduates of the School of the Americas.  Although it is often easier to connect to a story than a statistic, these names, by their sheer number, represented a conflation of the immensity that statistics abstractly represent and the weight of so many family members, friends, and strangers.  The most difficult names to hear chanted were those of children whose ages were sung after their names.  “…five-years old.”  “…eight-months old.”  “…sixteen-years old.”  As we stood together in silence, the tears that had been welling in my eyes for several minutes began to fall more freely.  I watched my tears, in tiny pools, darken the pavement of Ft. Benning Rd.  I began to feel the immensity of so much suffering, combined with exhaustion, breaking into my body.

S’bu Zikode is the president of the Shackdwellers Movement, the largest militant poor people’s movement in South Africa.  During his first US tour to the United States S’bu spoke at the Poverty Initiative’s seventh Strategic Dialogue, a gathering of 75 grassroots organizations and individuals committed to building a social movement to end poverty.  He spoke on importance in organizing of creating a space where people can come together to cry.  One of the major victories of the Shackdwellers Movement has been the creation and protection of an alternative space.  This is a space where people come to laugh, love and cry.  S’bu shared that if one’s tears fall “inside” oneself, they become poisonous and can cause great damage.  But if they are allowed to fall “outside,” they can fall on the ground.  When the ground is watered by our tears it becomes fertile soil for building a movement.

Women in wartime are often portrayed as those who receive the bodies of the dead, lost brothers, fathers, uncles, and sons.  The iconic “Pieta” portrays Mary holding the lifeless body of her crucified son in her arms.  As Jesus was being led by Roman soldiers to the place where he would be crucified, in Luke’s gospel, he turns to the women who are following him.  They are already publically grieving, bearing witness to Jesus’ torture at the hands of Rome and his inevitable, imminent execution.  Jesus turns to the women and says, “Do not weep for me, but for yourselves and your children.”  Perhaps Jesus foreknew the women, men, and children of Latin America, a crucified people, that would also mourn their dead.

The SOA Vigil’s funeral procession is a protected space, a public act of mourning.  In a culture that pathologizes and isolates the grieving, this communal witness is a powerful counter voice that attempt to sanitize spiritualize death and violence.  To be present in that space, remembering those that have died, in solidarity with the grieving, we stared into the face of violence and death.  In taking that grief into our bodies, in letting our tears fall, it is my hope and prayer that they will fall in the fertile soil of liberation.

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Morning Political Discussion

It has been seventeen hours from New York, New York to Columbus, Georgia in the faithful “chariot.”  For two days we have been in almost constant motion, stopping for gas, food, and sleep.  We arrived on Ft. Benning Rd. in Columbus early this afternoon, a space claimed by the SOA Watch organizers earlier in the week.  The road leading to the gates of Ft. Benning was lined on both sides with tables hosting everything from Food Not Bombs to a first aid station, leftist book sellers to faith-based social justice organizations, artists and the Coalition of Immokolee Workers.

The motion of the last thirty-hours ended abruptly at a fence, three fences in fact, at the gates of Ft. Benning.  Local police lined the both sides of the road, behind the tables and vendors in a liminal space between the SOA Watch and Ft. Benning proper.  A few military police walked around inside the perimeter fence.  Columbus police department and US Army watch-towers loomed both outside and inside the perimeter fences.

Morning Political Education

After a quick tour through the vendors and organizations tabling and listening to the speakers and performing on stage for several minutes, I noticed John in his bright red Union t-shirt farther down the road.  He was sitting on the road, just behind “the line,” staring through three sets of fences and barbed wire.  When protesters cross “the line” they commit acts of civil disobedience by trespassing onto Ft. Benning property and are immediately arrested.  I decided to join John as he sat just behind the line.

Sitting on the ground, looking through the fences at the military personnel and equipment, I felt fully present in a place for the first time since the commissioning service on Thursday.  We sat quietly just behind “the line” that separated us from them.  Although we were not risking arrest by sitting on the pavement, we were putting our bodies on the line in such a militarized space.  We could sense that we were being watched from behind the tinted windows of the watchtower.

As Christians we are called to put our bodies on the line, because as his followers, we are called to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.  Jesus was chased out of his hometown, risked mob violence for healing the sick, and was ultimately tortured and crucified for proclaiming the a gospel of love and liberation for all people.  In being fully present, in prayerful silence in that space, in challenging the oppression of our Latin American brothers and sisters made possible by US foreign policy, I pray that we might learn more and more what it means to love as Jesus loved, with his body on the line.

Rally at the Gates

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Then goddesses of hope, imagination, and resistance join them. The hydra begins to tremble in fear as the heartbeats of the people grow louder and louder, as their strength grows before him and he can no longer consume their bodies. He will burst before their energy.

And burst he does. His chest cracks open with an explosive drum beat, and a brilliant blue goddess of liberation comes pouring out of him, trailing behind her all the living bodies of those he had consumed. These bodies, broken before, yet now somehow whole, go forth to the people, who dance before crumbled body of the hydra; who dance with the goddess which had been living within him. The people dance with their sisters, fathers, children, brothers, and mothers now restored to them. They dance no longer in the imposing shadow of the hydra, but instead in the joy of the hope, liberation and resistance that pours out of his now broken state.

We stand at the mouth of the School of the Americas and give witness to bodies that have been broken and consumed by the overwhelming greed of American foreign policy. We give witness to these bodies as the body of Christ, and we give witness that this way of consuming the body of Christ is betrayal of Eucharist.
The body of Christ remains within the belly of the beast, and if Eucharist is to be shared with God’s people, then it is that beast’s body that must be broken open, and the bodies that it has consumed must be remembered to the people. We are called to break that body open – the body of evil and empire – and to share the liberation that pours out of such a body with our brothers and sisters. -Lucas Milliken

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And so, in stilted manner, we stumble through Christ’s words to his followers at the last supper, each of us taking a word at a time.

Lucas: “On”
John: “The”
Crystal: “Night”
Jenn: “He”
Lucas: “Was”
John: “Betrayed”

… and so on, until bread has been broken, and the bread for the journey has been passed around, and we anticipate the second part of the meal, not having anything like a cup, wine, or grape juice.

John: “Then, in like manner, he took the Nutella…”
Crystal: “And after giving thanks, gave it to his disciples, saying
Jenn: “This is my blood”
Lucas: “Um…stuck in a jar, for the forgiveness of sin.”

When using Nutella as the blood of Christ, intinction seems to be the only way to go.  It is sticky, and messy, and crumbs spill into the jar and onto the car seats, but the hazelnut chocolate flavor of the spread seeps into the honey-wheat baked into the dough, and I cannot recall ever having consumed such a delicious host.

There is a fantastic tension present in this particular Eucharist.  It is at once irreverent and solemn.  Our dear friend Hannah McIntyre made this Communion Bread with deep love and compassion.  The Nutella was given to us with deep love from our dear friends in the Students for Peace and Justice Caucus.  And in that gifting, they travel with us on our journey – in our irreverence and in our solemnity, embodying their care for us.  We chuckle at the absurdity of the meal as we partake, but we also profoundly remember that we are far more than four in our communing.  We are carrying with us the compassion and care, the prayers and dreams and deep love of our dear friends.

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There was a migrant workers’ union alongside ukulele-playing, protest-song-singing undergrads on stage today. This evening, I ran from the workshop on the “Low-Risk Non-Federal Arrest” option to one entitled “Woman Ordination Matters: Gender, The Gospel, Global Justice.” Seth sat in on a presentation on US intervention in Guatemala while Emily, Emily, and I were next door hearing about life in Gaza. We all share a similar theo-ethical sensibility here, and so can entertain some diversity of topic in the midst – it makes things interesting.

It’s something similar with the five of us. In between thoughtful, self-critical conversations, there is discussion of NPR theme songs and a hunt for peach cobbler. We talked for an hour while sitting in a field, went to the above-mentioned workshops, and then drove off to fulfill what someone on Chowhound said ought to be the 11th commandment, “Thou shalt eat at Macon St Barbecue before you die.”

Tomorrow morning – bright and early – is the vigil. We’ll be mourning, holding crosses aloft, and will focus today’s scattered energy into a communal time of prayer, solidarity, and direct action. I don’t know what will come of it, but tomorrow we seek to unite in one voice. It’s a blessing to know that Union supports us in that. Sleep first, though.

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