Threatened With Resurrection

                                                         The quetzel is the Guatemalan national bird and symbol. Legend has it that it sing again when freedom is restored.

Below is one of the most remarkable poems I have ever read, written by a remarkable woman. Julia Esquivel lived out her exile from Guatemala still loving her homeland and her God. She has been described as one “determined to pray through hurricanes” and one for whom “the strongest power for transformation came from a place of stubborn grace.” 

Stubborn grace seems an apt description of something that simply will not quit.

When aligned with grace, the free non-transactional flow of love and mercy, the concept catches me up short and more importantly feels like hope. We don’t often think of love and mercy, grace and compassion, or resurrection for that matter as relentless characteristics but Esquivel’s language changes all that. 

How many of us consider resurrection at threat? How many of us comprehend that there is a mysterious force, an ineffable source, which is creating and saving all the time. 

The poem causes me to think of God in terms which are disorienting yet formative because I feel called to remember God in the mess and the chaos, in the suffering and pain, pushing up and through like a persistent infant. If we won’t recognize resurrection life any other way, then God will simply have to threaten us with it until we see a marvelous danger! Today I will ponder what is it that is keeping me awake to wonder in the midst of fear, “in this marathon of hope”. 

THREATENED WITH RESURRECTION by Julia Esquivel

It isn’t the noise in the streets
that keeps us from resting, my friend,
nor is it the shouts of the young people
coming out drunk from the “St. Pauli,”
nor is it the tumult of those who pass by excitedly on their way to the mountains. 

It is something within us that doesn’t let us sleep, that doesn’t let us rest,
that won’t stop pounding
deep inside, 

it is the silent, warm weeping
of Indian women without their husbands, it is the sad gaze of the children
fixed somewhere beyond memory, precious in our eyes
which during sleep,
though closed, keep watch,
systole,
diastole,
awake. 

Now six have left us,
and nine in Rabinal,
and two, plus two, plus two, and ten, a hundred, a thousand, a whole army
witness to our pain,
our fear,
our courage,
our hope! 

What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with Resurrection! Because every evening
though weary of killings,
an endless inventory since 1954,
yet we go on loving life
and do not accept their death! 

They have threatened us with Resurrection 

Because we have felt their inert bodies, and their souls penetrated ours
doubly fortified, 

because in this marathon of Hope, there are always others to relieve us who carry the strength
to reach the finish line 

which lies beyond death. 

They have threatened us with Resurrection
because they will not be able to take away from us their bodies,
their souls,
their strength,
their spirit,
nor even their death
and least of all their life.
Because they live
today, tomorrow, and always
in the streets baptized with their blood,
in the air that absorbed their cry,
in the jungle that hid their shadows,
in the river that gathered up their laughter,
in the ocean that holds their secrets,
in the craters of the volcanoes,
Pyramids of the New Day,
which swallowed up their ashes. 

They have threatened us with Resurrection because they are more alive than ever before, because they transform our agonies
and fertilize our struggle, 

because they pick us up when we fall, because they loom like giants
before the crazed gorillas’ fear.

They have threatened us with Resurrection, because they do not know life (poor things!). 

That is the whirlwind
which does not let us sleep,
the reason why sleeping, we keep watch, and awake, we dream. 

No, it’s not the street noises,
nor the shouts from the drunks in the “St. Pauli,” nor the noise from the fans at the ball park. 

It is the internal cyclone of kaleidoscopic struggle 

which will heal that wound of the quetzal 

fallen in Ixcán, 

it is the earthquake soon to come 

that will shake the world 

and put everything in its place.

No, brother, 

it is not the noise in the streets 

which does not let us sleep.

Join us in this vigil 

and you will know what it is to dream! 

Then you will know how marvelous it is 

to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake, 

to keep watch asleep, 

to live while dying, 

and to know ourselves already 

resurrected!

(the poem was written in several pieces; i have spliced them as best I could)