Talking about the spirituality of Óscar Romero is tricky.
When speaking of someone’s spirituality, we might mean, on the one hand, a person’s own individual practices that incarnate for him or her what it means to be a follower of Christ. Along with those come the imagery, concepts and narratives (including the narrative one constructs for one’s own life in the presence of God) that make sense of those practices and give the strength and the hope to persevere in them. In this regard, a spirituality is intensely personal and resistant to the academic theologian’s probings, as it should be.
On the other hand, one might mean some specific, uniquely structured approach to the spiritual life that has stood the test of time and has become a “classic,” as it were. For example, St. Francis of Assisi’s spirituality takes shape down through history as “Franciscan spirituality.”
I am pretty sure that San Óscar would urge me not to make such a claim about his spirituality. He always understood himself as a loyal son of the church and not an innovator or trailblazer. Of course, Francis, Ignatius and Teresa of Ávila would say the same.
My intent is more modest than either plumbing Romero’s heart and soul, or working out a “spirituality of the followers of St. Óscar.” I will follow a hint from Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., who reminds us that theology is language enriched by silence, and that the purpose of that language is to proclaim the good news. This is very much in line with the motto of Gutiérrez’s Dominican order: contemplata aliis tradere, “to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation.” If we follow that clue, we can start with Romero’s preaching, his own exercise of handing on to others what he found in contemplation, in those long hours of silence which, witnesses attest, preceded the composition of the Sunday homilies.
What I would like to do is take a few markers of these contemplata in Romero’s homilies, and tarry a bit with them using some of the technical language of theology—not because that theology then gains control over this “silence” at the core of Romero’s presence to God and to us, but so that we might understand it a bit better and be invited into it. We have the advantage that Romero took one of his obligations as a bishop, to catechize, very seriously. So what he found in contemplation is thoroughly and helpfully fleshed out in the faith of the church, to which he felt obligated, an obligation that gave him great joy.
At the risk of oversimplification, I would categorize his spiritual convictions on the resurrection in four ways. First, a belief that resurrection is an act and fruit of the Spirit, even now; second, resurrection is a communal, historical reality; third, resurrection is a process of ongoing conversion; and fourth, resurrection is always an eschatological event.
Jesus was raised by the Father in the power of the Spirit, and it is that Spirit that makes resurrection a reality for us now.
A consistent theme in Romero’s preaching on the resurrection is the presence and agency of the Spirit, and our participation in the resurrection now comes from our share in that Spirit. In one reflection, he wrote:
The Holy Spirit who guided Christ and gave divine value to his death on the cross, this Spirit who was the power of God raising Jesus from the dead, is the same Spirit who is given to all of us.... Even though that Spirit now seems invisible, even though we get old and get sick and die and are buried, still, Saint Paul tells us, we carry within us the seeds of resurrection.
Romero often contrasted this action of the Spirit with the animating power of the Spirit, or “breath” of God in creation. Creation, originally animated by the Spirit but marred by sin, is reanimated by the Spirit through Christ’s resurrection. We are becoming new creations—all creation becomes new. This is why, for Romero, the full force and fruits of the resurrection come not on Easter Sunday, but with Pentecost, the giving of the Spirit.
Resurrection is a communal, historical event.
The first-person singular pronoun is virtually absent from Romero’s preaching on resurrection. His view of resurrection is to go as far as it is possible from the idea that resurrection is about my individual survival or resuscitation at some point after my biological demise. Resurrection, for Romero, is something we experience as a community—something already clear from his emphasis on Pentecost. And the church is given the gift of the Spirit, which empowers resurrection, in order to give that gift to the world. From a homily during Holy Week:
The church…is not an abstraction. She is the depository of redemption; she is the faithful witness of the risen Christ…. The Church I preach is not an abstract church somewhere in the clouds; she is a church that journeys with her feet upon the earth, even when she bewails her sins and seeks to be converted and do better. This Church of ours has experienced many beautiful things during this Holy Week.
This means transforming the history in which the church is embedded. “God keeps on saving in history” is a frequent refrain in Romero’s preaching. But this means that resurrection is a reality for history as well. In his preaching on Lent and Easter, he frequently refers back to the journey of the people of Israel, Passover, Exodus and Sinai. The church is a people that continues this journeying and in so doing animates its history:
The God of our impoverished peoples is also constructing the history of salvation, with El Salvador’s history and not with fake, made-up histories. History made alive by the Holy Spirit provides, in the resurrection, a wonderful incentive for the Christian people. The Spirit who raised up Christ has provided in the risen Christ a model for history. All histories must journey towards the resurrection: to create persons who will rise to freedom after living the way of the cross—indeed, to a freedom to be savored on this earth, but that will not be definitive until we enjoy it in the fullness of God’s kingdom.
A life conformed by the Resurrection is a life of ongoing conversion.
Resurrection entails ongoing conversion—rising to freedom after living the way of the cross. In his book Revolutionary Saint, the theologian Michael Lee has given us a thorough and nuanced understanding of how to understand Romero’s “conversion.” Lee points out that conversion need not entail absolute discontinuity or simple continuity (even the continuity of evolution). Conversion is empowered by the Spirit that makes all things new, but these “things” are recognizably my individual history, or our history. As Romero often preached in his own Salvadoran context, God works with El Salvador’s history, providing through the power of the Spirit a resurrection-transformation of that history—one that is both in continuity with what came before and full of unexpected, if perhaps hoped-for, discontinuity.
For example, just a little over three weeks after Rutillio Grande, S.J., was assassinated, Romero preached on Easter:
This is Easter, the Easter that the church continues to experience as a community transformed by the breath of that Christ exhaled over us in his profound sigh of creating the church. He transmitted to the church all his paschal power, that is, the power of that passage from death to life, with all that those two words imply. For death is sin, mediocrity, injustice, turmoil, abuse of human rights, disorder in all human realities—all of this must be buried in the tomb of the Lord and then raised to new life. It must pass from death to life. Life means justice. Life means respect for the human person. Life means holiness; it means every effort to be a little better each day…
Ongoing conversion is simply the way that our life and our history unfolds in the presence of the Spirit who raised Jesus and helps us in our journey toward resurrection.
Second, Lee notes the connection Romero makes among resurrection, conversion and seeing, most aptly in a homily he gave on Ascension Sunday. Romero tells a story of a sailor who climbed the rigging on a ship being tossed and turned by a violent storm and became dizzy at the view of the storm-tossed sea. The captain noticed this and said, “Young fellow, look upwards,” which quelled his fears and enabled him to finish his job calmly. Romero continues:
This story comes to mind because most of our fellow Salvadorans find themselves in the same situation; they see the stormy seas of our history and feel confused and almost hopeless. Quite opportunely, then, the liturgical year now offers us a warning cry in the midst of these historical circumstances: “Look upward, it’s the feast of the Ascension.” We see that human body—which is at the same time divine—rising above the flux of earthly things in order to help us to view transient things from the perspective of eternity. I think this is the best orientation for us in this time of confusion.
But this looking upwards, this “view[ing] transient things from the perspective of eternity,” is not an invitation or impetus to escape the violent storms of history:
In a word, we are called to celebrate the ascension of the Lord at a time when everything here below on earth tells us not to flee—for true Christians never flee—but rather to incarnate ourselves even more in history, but always with the perspective of heaven. Christians judge history by the criteria of eternity.
This “seeing” enabled Romero to see, in a new and penetrating way, his historical reality, in the many ways that astonished (or provoked and angered) people after he was named archbishop. It worked one transformation, in particular, that is particularly worth mentioning. In this same homily, Romero quotes Mark’s Gospel and the First Letter to the Ephesians to talk about the glory that Christ takes up and makes manifest in the ascension. In his 1979 Pentecost homily, he said:
Pentecost is celebrated as the fullness of Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven; it also marks the coming of the Spirit of Christ, sent by the Father and by the Son, as the Lord had promised: “It is better for you that I go because if I do not go and am not glorified, I cannot send you the Spirit” (Jn 16:7).
With his eyes “turned upward,” as it were, toward the glorified risen Christ, how did Romero come to see and incarnate this resurrection-vision of glory in history now? We all know how. He expressed it in his address at the University of Louvain, seven weeks before he died: Gloria Dei, VivensPauper.
Journeying toward resurrection empowered by the Spirit is an ongoing conversion that enables us to see, ever more clearly, “looking upwards,” the glorified, risen Christ, which enables us to find that glory here in our history—in the poor person, fully alive.
Resurrection is an eschatological event.
Romero never tired in his homilies of insisting that resurrection is present now, but never fully, never definitively. For instance:
God gives an eschatological meaning to the values of life. St. Paul comments today on the resurrection of the Lord, saying, “If we have risen with Christ, let us seek what is above” (Col 3:1). Paul is not talking about alienating ourselves from the things of earth; rather, he wants us to look at our earthly activities from a higher perspective. He wants us to work for the same earthly freedoms and rights as others, but we’re not going to achieve them by violence or armed struggle. We’ll achieve them only by means of Christ’s triumph.... But the church doesn’t just consider earthly liberation. Her cry is plus ultra—true liberation is “further on.”
And again:
I have always preached to you about eschatology, and I’ve told you, sisters and brothers, that eschatology is about the end times, the definitive perspective of history. But we don’t have to wait for history to end in order to have this eschatological perspective. It is like someone who is looking toward the goal when he is halfway there; he keeps that ultimate, eschatological goal in mind so that he can proceed with hope and confidence, knowing where the road leads. That is what the risen Christ has done: he has placed the eternal aspect of his life within the flow of history, in the midst of transitory things that come and go.
Resurrection, for Romero, is an already-not-yet reality. It is already here; we can “live as people already risen” (as Jon Sobrino, S.J., puts it) now, in the power of the Spirit, in union with the risen Christ as his mystical body, in continual conversion and “re-envisioning our reality.” Yet its “not-yet-ness” is a constitutive part of its “being here.” But that not-yet-ness makes all the difference in how we view, experience and act in our historical reality now.
Romero insists on this, because increasingly, insofar as he was accused of reducing faith to politics, he wants to distinguish the church from political organizations. This homily was preached at the same time he issued his third pastoral letter on the church and popular organizations. But I think it was also a deeply ingrained spiritual experience for him.
This experience was rooted in an important tradition in Christian spirituality, with representatives such as Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich and Thérèse of Lisieux: the notion of the “wound of love,” taken from the Song of Songs (2:5): “I am wounded by love.” A widespread theme, but one that was worked out with particular clarity by female mystics of the High and late Middle Ages.
For spiritual teachers taken by this passage, love can be painful—in two senses. First, as we experience more deeply the love of the beloved, we are aware of how inadequately we have responded to that love. This is the Christian virtue of “compunction,” which is far from a sense of guilt over transgressed laws, but rather a sense of how my actions have not corresponded to the immense gratitude I feel because of the love I have experienced.
Second, as we fall more in love with the beloved, we become aware of how much more deeply rooted and experienced that love could be—we feel a lack, a painful lack. Paradoxically, this sense of lack, this “wound,” is a sign that we truly are in love, even though that love “wounds us.” And the authenticity of that experience of love brings its own joy. This paradox was expressed by Julian of Norwich when she advised “longing is better than contemplation.” Far from seeing the apex of the spiritual life to be a “contemplative experience,” in which we possess, control and enjoy what we contemplate, she sees it as an experience of being swept along by a deep, even painful, longing in which we have, but, at the same time, continue to long for, the beloved. Indeed, we might say that the greater the degree to which we find the beloved in love the greater the longing we feel.
Romero helps us understand that the resurrection is this kind of a reality—a reality that we savor now, that transforms us now, enlivens us now, even as it pulls us, in painful longing but also hope, “plus ultra.” I think this explains the deep joy that you can see in so many of Romero’s portraits, a joy that increased even as he was painfully aware that the country was collapsing into civil war around him, a collapse that would be accelerated by the assassination he knew was coming.
Ultimate freedom
In his 1979 Easter homily, Romero preached that “as long as Christ had not risen, the minds of the disciples were missing a key. There was no way to explain the behavior, the doctrine, the miracles, and all the marvelous works of the Redeemer without the resurrection.” We can say the same of Romero. “The resurrection” was not just a doctrine that he understood and taught. It was not just a destiny that he believed would be his after he died. It was a reality that he lived; it was at the core of his spirituality.
Without taking that conviction into account, we cannot fully understand his “ongoing conversion,” which was not a sign of a faith inauthentically or incompletely lived, but of a faith, hope and love embraced with depth and intensity. We cannot fully understand his love for God and for his people, a love that “wounded him” with that “delightful wound” of which so many masters of the spiritual life have spoken down through the centuries.
Without it, we cannot understand the presence in his psyche and affectivity of sometimes paralyzing anxiety and self-doubt (for which he sought psychological help); deep sorrow, not to mention prophetic anger, at the suffering of his people; and pain over the calumnies relentlessly lobbed at him, conjoined with serenity and joy, leading him to say to a friend, near the end of his life, “I don’t want to die. At least not now. I’ve never had so much love for life.”
Finally, we will be missing a full explanation of the freedom that led him to lay down that life freely, that life for which he had so much love.
The day before he was murdered while saying Mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital, Romero preached a homily in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, at which he proclaimed: "No one can quench the life that Christ has resurrected. Neither death, nor all the banners of death and hatred raised against him and against his church can prevail. He is victorious!”
The facts of history prove that the life of Óscar Romero, one that Christ raised up, has not been quenched; but I suggest too that Romero made this claim as already true for him, before his assassination, because of the deep resurrection spirituality that animated his life, deeds and preaching.
