"one time I even ate salt. I tell them, just salt, I tell them"

The next text that the peasant theologians of Solentiname took up was the cries of the mothers of the slain children.  While I was reading it slowly and typing it out I kept wondering about how the mostly men who are quoted seemed to steer the passage away from children being murdered, certainly by men, soldiers, police power, and how it was women who were lamenting the deaths of their sons.  As I typed it out, though, I realized they understood things about the text that I couldn't see.  Their lives provided a deeper hermeneutical lens through which to see deeper meanings than life as a white male living in the United States could provide me.  That the violence of Herod murdering a number of babies to get at the one he believed was a threat to his wealth and power was part of the wider continuum of violence, including hunger caused by economic injustice is a commentary on this text I've never heard of before.  It makes the quibbling of scholars trying to estimate the number of male babies in that village,at that time seem, especially in the typical 20th-21st century academic debunking mode, repulsively frivolous.  So much in the culture, popular and academic, of ripe, ruling empires turns to such stuff.

That said, what Natalia the mid-wife said about her work, the terrifying situation she was in when things in a labor were going wrong and she didn't have any ideal what to do, seems to have been too uncomfortable for the men to deal with.  I'd have liked to hear more from her.

In this way was fulfilled what was written by the prophet Jeremiah:  "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great lamentation;  it is Rachel who weeps for her children, and she will not be comforted for they are dead."

LOREANO:  "I remember what happened in Chile, where they killed thousands of people, just because freedom was being born there;  many people were taken up in airplanes and thrown out into the sea.  But they can't put freedom down, just as Herod couldn't put Jesus down."

FELIPE:  "And as I see it, Ernesto, we are taught here that to be powerful isn't necessary to have money, because Christ was born very poor (Herod could not distinguish him from the other children of that village) and Christ was very powerful, so powerful that they were afraid, and they tried to kill him, and afterwards they did kill him but even after his death he was even more powerful.  So we are taught that we, even though we're very poor, must not feel humiliated, unfit, as they say, as though we had no right to live."  

ELVIS:   "The importance of the birth of Christ is that it was the birth of the Revolution, right?  There are many people who are afraid of the word as they were afraid of Christ because he was coming to change the world.  From then on the Revolution has been growing. It keeps growing little by little, then, and it keeps growing and nobody can stop it."

I:  "And it has to grow here also, doesn't it?"

PANCHO: "We hae to get rid of selfishness and do what Christ said and go on with the Revolution, as ou socialists say.  I' not a socialist, I'm not a revolutionary,  I like to hear the talk and grasp what I can but really I'm nothing.  Although I would like to see a change in Nicaragua."

MANUEL:  "But if there's going to be a change you have to cooperate with it,  you'e got to cooperate."

PANCHO:  "But how do you do it!  I'd like somebody to tell me:  'That's the way it's going to be done.'  But you can't!  When we rise up they kill us."

ALEJANDRO:  "But look, they killed him too."

PANCHO:  "Correct, but he was Christ and we're never going to compare ourselves with him."

MANUEL:  "But I heard there have been other men, like Che, who have died for freedom."

PANCHO:  "Right.  You can die, you, and tomorrow we'll all be dancing and we'll never think that you died for us."

WILLIAM:  "Then you think that those deaths are useless?"

PANCHO:  "They're useless.  Or they're almost useless!"

Young MYRIAM:  "I say that when there's someone who will free our country there will be another Christ."

My brother FERNANDO (to Pancho);  "When you say, ' What can I do?  Nothing!' I agree with you.  But when you ask another 'What can we do?'  I would say everything.   And that day when you ask each  other 'What can we do?' you'll already know what you are going to do.  And the poeple all united are the same Jesus that you see in this manger scene, against whom Herod couldn't do a thing."  (Fernando pointed to the clay manger scene, made by Mariita,  that we had put at the foot of the altar during the Christmas season.)

A young man from Solentiname who now lives elsewhere but who occasionally comes back:  "I who have been away notice that the child is being born in this community.  And I see the difference between this and the people who live in other places up the mountains.  Of course, up in the mountains it's different.  If I sing a song there, they tell me I'm a communist.  The way it is up there where we are,  if anybody says anything against the government, they say:  'Go and find out who the communist is so they can come for him.'"

And his brother, who lives in Solentiname;  "Ernesto, I'm going to tell you now about my brother.  My brother, he knows what a Nativity scene is.  We're brothers, after all.  I'm going to say a little more.  Since he went away,  he always has the idea of clearing his conscience, he talks and talks there.  Many farmers say,   'communist!' and they don't know what a communist is.  Now he talks to them a lot, because he's told me, he talks up there to the young people.  My brother has told me that some of them agree with him, others don't.  He says he's not making much progress.  I tell him; Don't be afraid, say what you know, even if it's only a little,  I tell him, I know you'll get to them."

NATALIA, who is a midwife and has been present at the birth of so many children in Solentiname, said:  "Well, as I see it, the birth of the child Jesus is also all of us,  this unity that we have here.  Because in ourselves we are seeing things clearly.  But we must all help with this birth of Christ.  Like when a baby is being born, and maybe you don't know anything, and they say to you:   Come help me.  Well, you go, not because you know anything,  you don't know anything, right?  But because a poor child is being born.  See, I grabbed my petticoat, or if I have on my apron I put it on him!  Because he's being born in need."

I:  "That must be difficult,  the birth of a child . . . "

NATALIA:  "Oh yes, of course it is.  Horrible, isn't it, terrible to see yourself in a fix like that, and maybe you want to know more, know something more, and you see the fix that your friend is in.  But you tell her (even though you're dying),  'Don't worry!  Even though I was trembling,  if y friend was trembling,  I said,  'Don't worry.  Don't worry, you'll be okay.'  And you see the problem, and you're covered with cold sweat.  This has happened to me.  A friend calls me because maybe she thinks I know,  and I don't know anything, or nothing more than what her faith puts into me, something."

OSCAR:  "Ernesto,  I want to say something.  Do you know how I understand birth as I'm listening to Natalia?  Very important, the birth of a child and even more to raise a child (I feel this deeply as the father of a family),  but that's not the birth that this Gospel is telling us about.  Do you know what I understand by a child here?  It's the poor people!  They are children with respect to the rich.  I mean we, then, since we're poor, we're children, we're always beneath the rich, and we feel maybe;  'I'd like to be like that one who's taking it easy over there.'  Enjoying what I'd like to enjoy, and I can't because they don't let me, understand?  It seems to me, then, that's what this birth means,  a little child who suffers.  We ourselves, even though we're adults, are like children:  the poor.  But I say,  the child is not always going to be tiny.  I say to my brothers, my comrades:  Hell, they're screwing us!  We're giving them everything we have!  Let's fight!  That's what Christ did.  He suffered, but he conquered.  It's true that he died, as they say, on the cross, but for me he didn't die.  And he's talking to us in parables;  I understand them so I'm relying on that.  I think he's telling us to fight and establish justice.   We ourselves are going to give justice to the earth,  we the children, to those who are imposing injustice on us.  Don't you believe that the child is always going to be crushed and hungry.  I mean the birth that the Scripture tells us about here is not like the birth of one of these kids romping around the church.  No, this child is me, you, everybody.  But the rich have always tried to crush us like we crush the snake,  by the head, wham!

ALEJANDRO:  "And as I see that Jesus who was born in a manger, like a child is born here in the mountains,  in a farmhouse or in a boat, is the liberation that's also being born here, in a humble form.  And even in those kids who are still so young, who are playing there, and who have been born like this, inside them, even though they don't know it, something is being born:  freedom."

Another young man:  "They're learning.  The child laughs and makes noise and racket,  but inside him freedom is being born."

After a pause:  "Since I was a small boy I've realized that.  I don't know anything about politics.   I don't know anything about other things either.  I'm not a reader or anything.  I understand all right but I can't express myself.  It bothers me and I want to express myself but I can't.  Some people tell me I ought to be happy with this regime because we haven't had wars.  You're a young man they say,  and since you were born you've never seen a war and you don't even know what war is.  Hell, I say to the,  I don't know about those wars, but do you know what war is for me?   Hunger,  I tell them, because I've suffered hunger,  I tell the, together with my mother;  one time I even ate salt.  I tell them, just salt, I tell them."

The deaths of children under the negligence, perhaps worse under the United States Department of Homeland Security - I wonder if the name wasn't so Nazi-like if it might have inspired better behavior - was the inspiration for meditating for several days on what that  text reads like for people who, first, have direct, first-hand experience of the modern equivalent of such state violence, now violence through the rule of their neighborhoods, villages and country by gangsters.  Second because the United States, the Rome of their experience, had a direct hand in creating the conditions of violence they are fleeing.  They might know that life for them in the imperial "homeland" will be difficult but they also know that, as opposed to the economic colonies they live in with direct violence, violence is somewhat quelled within the "homeland" for reasons of safety of the oligarchs here and for administrative efficiency.   We are Herod to the extent we participate in and tolerate that being done with our country, in our name.