Dear Enemy

In writing you I implicitly argue that you mean a great deal to me. If you were a Rorschach test ink-blot the compendium of the English, Spanish and Arabic dictionaries could not exhaust my search for expression of what you mean to me: in a word, suffering. My heart longs for God too much to devote myself only to you and so, I went to bed last night depressed, saddened. Many nights here at the White Rose I toss in agony, unable to reconcile infatuation, friendship, spiritual companionship or true love from all my love for God who is the one I wrestle all day with and spoon with all these evenings. God is my hero and I follow Him to the cross. His example had repulsed me, though I respected it. But now as I have made steps to take up my cross, new understandings adhere to me as though I were a bee drawn to a flower to whom pollen clings. I long for God and what sticks to me is the SOA action, now eight years! And you ask how it is healing—how is Jesus, a healer, taking up a cross not an answer to your question? The cross is not the action, not the potential prison time, don’t we both agree the cross is U.S. Imperialism, our Hegemony. I am personally taking responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands maimed, slaughtered, disappeared and tortured, surviving with horrific PTSD, disempowered by cruel and inhumane structures of Government—me, a lamb.

Enemy—I hate your doubt, despise your failure to perceive the light, ridicule your vapid assertion that “these acts are sometimes our alternative rigidity, our insistence on continuing to the priests.” How inane that you have this “sometimes” qualification of resistance. I speak as warrior, not as lover, when I condemn your paltry understanding of insidious Empire now enchaining most of the world. How demagogic of me, right? How banal my analysis of the mythical beast. Simple we both may be, but I will pretend to show myself to you, enemy. I will dress up in Christ’s armor, stand before Ft. Benning and innocently enter the base with the memory of my comrades. You would understand; how could you accept rescue while your fellow prisoners await torture! You would be in jail before me I’m sure of it. In fact, I would not be surprised if this very year you too crossed the line at SOA. Why? To be in union with our God, the prisoner of the world’s hegemonic power. We, together can say in plain and unequivocal language, the testimony of our bodies, that our God is an awesome God. Herod, do you hear? Pilate? All you Egyptian pharaoh’s? The time is now. I cannot afford to spare time with the RAW memory of four American women raped and killed in El Salvador. It was yesterday!! It could have been you.