Spirit Speaking
Deborah W. Stollery
Healed to Help
“He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.”
A reflection on Mark 1:29-39 in light of keeping company with torture victim,
Sr. Diana Ortiz
Diana Ortiz is an Ursuline nun, an American citizen who, in 1987, went to Guatemala in answer to God’s call to minister to the children there. She went to teach them to read and write in Spanish, and for a year, she was blissfully happy. Around the end of that first year, she began receiving death threats. They continued throughout her second year teaching. Then, on November 2, 1989 she was abducted, raped, tortured and made to torture another.
11/2/89 is the day Diana Ortiz was afflicted with both a fever and a sickness. Her fever was not created by a virus or germ. Her fever was related to the sickness thrust upon her by a social, political and economic system that deemed the skilled and deliberate use of torture a favored tool of the state. Her sickness persists to this day, for sanctioned torture is still the case even in our own country. And she is still afflicted, with recurrent nightmares of being lowered into a pit with maimed and decapitated bodies, some still living. Her sickness persists in the haunting odor of her torturers, the sound of whistling, and the smell of alcohol. But her fever, like that of Simon’s mother-in-law, has been cured.
In her fever, with God dead to her, she thought, God was very much alive. Like Christ who cured Simon’s mother-in-law, Christ began to cure Sr. Diana. Christ, working in her family, in her order, among her friends and with professionals, began to cure her of the fever. Not the sickness, but the terrible fever that had reduced her to half-human. While Sr. Diana still wonders about her bruised and broken self, I know that Thursday evening in the company of several hundred others, I met a woman cured. She was fully human, and more divine than any I have ever met.
She began, slowly and deliberately, first to light a candle and then to tell us her story. The candle reminded her of torture victims everywhere, and of course, those very victims, mutilated and dead, with whom she had lain. The words were soft, clearly shrouded in the pain of vivid memory, piercing our indifference. I was in the company of a resurrected one; one whose wounds I could touch and by whom I could be healed.
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