Remembering the Dead/4.15.15 by Margaret Nuzzolese

Martin Richard… Krystle Campbell… Lingzi Lu… Sean Collier…

In two days we will remember the “Boston Marathon bombing” – the victims, the dead, the survivors, the inciters… 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev… and your brother, Tamerlan. 

What a horrible thing you both dd. 

What monsters they are trying to paint you as.  
And true, what you did was horrible.  

But there is another way of remembering the dead.

It is the way of hope, of new life, of resurrection.  

Of rehabilitation, of vulnerability, of learning to walk again.  

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I was introduced to Mev Puleo by my friend James Meinert, when we were living in community together in Nicaragua, with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. 

I came to love and adore this woman, for how she sought to implement her vocation for the service of the world.  She was a photojournalist, who was intentional about photography for the world, versus photography of the world.  

I fell in love with the story of her love, passion, service and accompaniment, as told by her husband, Mark Chmiel.

Mark and Mev taught me about resurrection – how the saints rise in all different places and spaces, and we can see them and interact with them if we are paying attention.  

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This past summer, I had the gift of taking a course with Gustavo Gutierrez. 
Mev was there, with all the people in The Struggle is One. 
Mark was there, with all the people who have continued to tell (and live) the stories of the struggle.  

I asked Prof. Nickoloff at one point the class, “What do we do next?” “Where do we go from here?”  My notes from the course read as follows:

Any real, solid, deep spirituality, must be incarnate – must take on the flesh of the historical moment in which it arises.

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Some people die and we are, in Mev’s word’s, “converted a new.”
Other people are killed, and with each preventable death, we lose a bit of our potential for “new life.”

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Remembering The Dead

A Reason for Hope