The four U.S. churchwomen—Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan—who were killed in El Salvador in 1980, lived the virtue of nonviolence in the midst of horrific violence, accompanying the Salvadoran people whose faith and courage helped to create a beloved community. Their witness offers powerful inspiration for the paradigm shift from violence to nonviolence that our world so desperately needs.

By the way they died—but especially by the way they lived—these women helped us to see with new eyes the reality of an impoverished and brutalized people and to identify the connections between our way of life, U.S. foreign policy, and the suffering of our brothers and sisters in El Salvador.

They were ordinary in many ways. They simply agreed to locate themselves in places where they would encounter those who were impoverished, excluded from the benefits of society, on the receiving end of horrific violence. They witnessed the many faces of brutal violence in El Salvador and did not run away. In fact, the reality they saw in the day-by-day lives of ordinary people riveted them without exception to El Salvador and to the struggle for justice and peace there. Their mission was shaped by relationships with real people who could not be easily left behind.

The women quickly learned the profoundly pastoral and radically nonviolent task of accompaniment—of walking with impoverished, oppressed, violated people without solutions or answers. Their determination and hope reached out to meet the faith and courage of the Salvadoran people, who walked daily with a God who had made a covenant with them that they still, incredibly, believed namely that a Promise that one day the New Creation would fully flower in their broken land.

Maura, Ita, Dorothy, and Jean helped many of us to experience the Gospel in living color and to create a much wider moral framework within which to practice our faith. They helped us to understand the importance and the gift of diversity, of respectful, just relationships across borders, of nonviolent witness in a crucible of brutality. The challenges we are facing now are at once the same and yet vastly different from the ones the four churchwomen faced, but the essence of their witness still serves us very well.

Just as we were drawn into new relationships with the vulnerable communities in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America when the four women were assassinated, we are now being invited to expand the framework of relationships that guide our sense of integrity. This new frame includes the human rights and social justice that were lifted up so powerfully by the lives of the four women, but its cosmic character is demanding from us new leaps of faith and new courage. Breathtaking insights into the diversity and order of the natural world are forcing us to acknowledge that we must fit the contours of human endeavors into the boundaries of a limited planet.

Just as those of us in the United States had to reshape our way of life and our public policy to live in solidarity with the people of El Salvador in 1980, so once again do we have to reshape our fossil fuel dependent way of life and our public policy to live in solidarity with the people of Bangladesh and Vanuatu, the Philippines and the Marshall Islands, who are carrying the burden of a changing climate. Another dimension of contemporary reality is the growing presence of terrible violence that feels random and out of control. A few years ago I had the gift of spending a day on retreat with a circle of peacemakers from different faith traditions.

The question for our reflection was “How can we speak about peace and nonviolence in such a violent world?” Yvonne Delk, an elder African American UCC pastor, challenged us simply to be human, to love, to forgive, to be nonviolent even when nonviolence seems utterly foolish. That is exactly what Maura, Ita, Dorothy, and Jean did. El Salvador in 1980 was overwhelmed with violence. Terror stalked the communities where these women lived and worked. Brutality as vicious as that of Vladimir Putin, ISIS, or the Assad regime in Syria was occurring daily.

Yet they chose to accompany a people made profoundly vulnerable by war and by repression. The fullness of their own humanity enabled them to overcome their fear and to simply stay. They were never neutral. They loved deeply and lived the virtue of solidarity. When they were killed, they put a familiar face on the thousands of Salvadoran lay people, religious and priests who also were martyred in those years. The Salvadoran martyrs gave great energy to a whole movement who learned from the suffering people of Central America what it meant to be human, to love, to act in solidarity, even to be nonviolent in the face of horrific violence.

People of privilege have always assumed that we were invulnerable – that our security could be guaranteed with high enough fences, big enough weapons, fierce enough protectors. Marginalized people have never harbored those illusions. Salvadoran communities in 1980 were not safe and they knew it. But Maura, Ita, Jean, and Dorothy chose accompaniment thereby assuming their vulnerability because there they found life and deep meaning. The paradox of that reality holds vital lessons for us in these times.

In fact, I believe that deep inside our collective fear and our frenetic pursuit of national and personal security is a growing recognition that we walk a path riddled with the landmines of increasing violence and so reach for an empty psuedo-security where we seek to protect what is mine at the expense of others. This may well be the best moment to make a break
toward nonviolence.

To be human is to be vulnerable. To be human is to love, to forgive, to cherish life. And that, I think, is only possible in the beloved community. Maura, Ita, Dorothy and Jean, were part of the beloved community. Each found in El Salvador a community vibrancy enabling its members to cope with extreme violence that simultaneously nourished them with the Word of God and the Bread of Life to be fully alive and thus fully human.

Deep in the human heart, I believe, is an indelible sense of the value of each human life and an instinct to be human, to love—an instinct for solidarity that accompanies, responds to, needs to shape our conversation around the topic of security that is too often manipulated for political gain or ideological reasons, yet will be central in many ways to the future of the human community and the integrity of creation.

The experience of solidarity between U.S. people and the people of Central America in the 1970s, 80s, and, 90s taught us about interdependence and about security rooted in the transnational community. That deep experience of solidarity exposed the lie that the security of a wealthy and powerful few is threatened by the majority’s desire for and right to a dignified life. In fact, we learned what the poor of Central America already knew: the security and the very survival of Earth and its inhabitants are profoundly threatened by the desire of the wealthy and powerful to maintain wasteful and destructive lifestyles.

It seems to me that the global groaning we are now experiencing is about shifting (especially in the global North) from one definition to the other. Rather than build higher walls, stronger fences, or hire fiercer guards while inventing more powerful weapons systems to dominate the global economy, we are shifting towards pursuing security through the adoption of a cosmovision that sees and values the whole community of life. The shift in vision means moving from a logic of violence to a logic of nonviolence to ensure the basic needs of all are met everywhere.

I believe the roles of the Church, faith communities, and universities are as differing facilitators of such a shift, enabling us to live with the needed vulnerability to ensure faithful living in solidarity with the majority of people who are always vulnerable. Accordingly, we are urged to nurture a spirituality of nonviolence , inculcating in us right relationships with all others, including Earth. The shift moves us from individualism to lived community as we work to create a global beloved community.

“Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” ( John 12: 23–26) The last words of Archbishop Oscar Romero were about the price of liberation—the cost of living as humans in the context of horrific violence. His witness and that of Ita, Maura, Dorothy, and Jean can give us courage to move in that direction—courage to birth a solidarity that is decidedly nonviolent and fitting for the integrated, bitterly divided, and violent world of the 21st century.

MARIE DENNIS is the Senior program director of Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, Pax Christi International.