Paul Thelakat

Sr. Ann is genuflecting before the almighty political power. It is an act of prayer. Here is a nun who lives in a convent but dared to pray. Prayer is not only to God but also to humans as well as we pray to the courts of Justice. A nun is supposed to be in prayer away from politics and social turmoil. Convent is supposed to be a place of serene silence of meditation and listening to the voice of God. A nun is not supposed to be a politician; all the more we are in a Lenten time meditating the passion of the Lord Jesus Christ. An elderly nun is not a threat to the police or the military.
Then why did Sr. Ann Nu Thawng of the Congregation of St. Francis Xavier in the diocese of Myitkyina go into the street of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State in the north of Mynamar, where military has taken over the power? Why did she dare to enter the street and kneel before the police, entreating them not the use violence against the youth who protest in peace? There are so many reasons not to enter the street when there is martial law in a country. These are more than hundred reasons we repeat all the time, reasons not to take a stand in the affairs of the country we live in, it is washing our holy hands of the pollutions of the problems that torment the ordinary man’s life. It is the way of the priest and the Levite on the road Jerusalem to Jericho. It is refusing to be concerned of what is happening outside the convent. It is simply refusing to think of the people with whom we live. She refused to be thoughtless like the Germans in Nazi times.
She was a devotee of Jesus crucified; she believed that any systematic violence is systematic crucifixion of man. The cry of the human in her country is the cry of crucified, “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?” A country becomes God-forsaken when it is ruled by violence, injustice and tyranny. God is ousted from the land and sent to exile. When God is absent, injustice rules; injustice rules when people become irresponsible to others, when rulers are dominating with their totalitarian ego. It is in the predicament or fatality of suffering and persecution she heard the cry of Christ from the cross. She knew that to be neutral is to betray her people. She is like Mary Magdalene who sought the body of Jesus in the tomb. She wanted to carry away his body. She gave him her feeble and frail body. She entered the street; she entered the history of the people. That is an incarnation in history. Her insertion into history changes history for her Lord. It was a call and a response. She lived out the Gospel; the life of Jesus ends with an open question concerning God. In the resurrection of eschatological faith, there is a return to this abandonment of Jesus by God. It is here that God poured out the divine, calling her to participate in ‘the illegal work ‘of redemption. It is precisely such a woman who sings with joy that the mercy of God overturns oppression in favour of the poor of the earth, allowing the matrix of her actual world to shape theological imagination is a particular way to make certain that the church remembers and honours her and theologizes about her significance. It serves the power of God of life. Galilee is the setting of Jesus’ historical life, the place of the poor and the little one. The poor of this world – the Galilee of today – are where we encounter the historical Jesus and where he is encountered as liberator. And this Galilee is also where the risen Christ who appears to his disciples will show himself as he really is, as the Jesus we have to follow and keep present in history: the historical Jesus, the man from Nazareth, the person who was merciful and faithful to his death on the cross, the perennial sacrament in this world of a liberator God. If one confesses the Resurrection as something real, then it is necessary to have faith in God’s possibilities for intervening in history. Rising up from the historical troubles, the nun did an act proper to God. Jesus sends the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, precisely in order to continue dwelling among humanity until the end of the ages.