MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Fall 2025

Sarah Bueter, El Salvador

Sarah Bueter helps community members install a “Care for Creation” sign, a reminder that protecting the earth is central to our faith and our future.

EL SALVADOR—The bombardment of rain arrives at Chalatenango. The mountain hides behind storm clouds, and the river Tamalusco froths chocolate brown, foaming and stupendous. The sky is pearl-gray, and the rain carves rose-purple furrows in the dirt road. The streets become narrower as water-logged foliage swells, and plants droop down under the weight of their own growth.

When the rain pounds on the tin roof, it hurts my ears. It becomes hard not to think of the Civil War here (1980-1993), years when villagers fled to the mountain to escape the massacres and weathered without comfort these patchy, cold downpours.

Sometimes I think, “Who am I to be rejoicing at this mountain, where so many innocents were killed?”

Who am I to hold joy in these times?

“Unprecedented times,” I am told by folks in the United States, who scramble, lament, resist, tire, and pray amid their reality.

“How can we possibly be joyful in a moment like this?”

This is a question that podcast On Being’s Krista Tippett posed to poet Ross Gay (and he answered magnificently, as only the poet may do).

Krista told Ross, “One thing that bothered me about this idea that joy couldn’t be possible is that joy is somehow a luxury or a privilege.”

To which Ross responded: “That’s just f—ing dumb.”

Their conversation traces the contours of joy, that it is not a luxury. In fact, joy has nothing to do with being easy or with ease. It is not easy.

Joy is a practice. It is a muscle. As a muscle, it requires exercise: it is strengthened in the practice of finding daily joys, not as an act of naivete, but as a clearsighted response of resistance in the face of despair.

Joy is precisely for these our times.

Wading through El Salvador’s lush landscape and overgrown roads in Chalatenango that are pathways of memory and presence.

One example of this is Pope Francis. He was no stranger to war, forced migration, and environmental destruction. Yet his response was joy. Humor, even! He told us that we must listen to the cry of the poor and to the cry of the earth. But we must not respond with cool pessimism, rather with joy, “joy ever new, a joy which is shared” (Evangelii Gaudium).

It takes a lot of work to practice joy. It is, after all, a practice. Something to be exercised, again and again. Slowly the muscle strengthens.

In El Salvador, I spend a lot of time listening to people share their struggles. It sucks to be poor in El Salvador: it’s precarious and vulnerable; it’s expensive and inefficient; it’s stressful; oftentimes, it’s boring. Even worse, from El Salvador to Gaza to ICE detention centers, the most vulnerable are made to be seen as non-human, or made the scapegoat to be eliminated.

“How can we possibly be joyful in a moment like this?”

Last month, at a commemoration of a massacre, victims’ families laughed, shared food, and visited among friends at the massacre site. At first, I felt a cool indignation. Don’t they know the atrocities that took place here? Where are the tears?

How is it that the same family members who laugh with the living will also weep telling stories of their dead? Without naivete, they exercise the muscle of joy, not to negate pain, but rather so death doesn’t have the last word.

Oh, death, where now is your sting?

As a young woman concerned deeply with others’ suffering, there is a fear, I think, that if I am not suffering, if I am not aware of suffering, then I will become complacent and somehow lose a sensitivity to the suffering of others. English Catholic priest and theologian James Alison expounds on this misleading, tempting trap:

“I tell myself that I can only be attentive to those on the margin if I myself am discontented and marginalised. Even, however, as I act in this way, I dimly sense that I am only acting out my own drama; there may be no real ‘other’ in my ken.”

It can be tempting to conflate solidarity with being equally miserable. It can be tempting to conflate solidarity with only the rage and righteous indignation, the sorrow and lament (truly necessary pieces in responding to injustice), and neglect the atrophied muscle of hope and joy.

When the rains pass, the clouds unfurl along the distant mountain ridge, the birds return to their habits, the road gurgles with runoff, and at last, at last, at last, an evening sunbeam lances the uppermost line of the mountain ridge.

Each of us gets to choose what we orient ourselves toward. For us, as Maryknollers, what we put ourselves at the service of … is love. Even as we know what frightens us, even as we know what we must fight and resist against, it is around love that we rally. This is our orientation. This love, sustained by the muscle of joy, is what creatively shapes the world we want to construct, heal, and nourish.

Please support my mission in El Salvador with a donation through the link below.

I also invite you to walk with me as a “COMPANION IN MISSION.” Companions in Mission are friends and generous donors who give financial gifts on a regular (usually monthly) basis. For more information, visit Become a Companion in Mission. Thank you so much for your generosity!