Phoenix of Grace

In the spring of 1994 the mud in Rwanda ran red with the blood of genocide. The world, witness to massacre upon massacre in the past century, turned our collective head, collective hands hanging limply at our collective side. The United Nations withdrew troops from the very area most in danger of bloodshed. No nation on earth would break the spell by crying, “Genocide!” since to do so would compel action, both morally and legally. The US Secretary of State said, without the slightest hint of irony on her lips, “Ultimately, the future of Rwanda is in Rwandan hands.” Actually, in the hands of Rwandans were machetes, hoes, and knives. The Hutus of Rwanda took up these tools of harvest and used them on their Tutsi neighbors. Slowly and methodically, like men pulling double shifts in death factories, they hacked their way through human beings. They worked under tortuous sun and by firelight. They stockpiled their victims in schools and churches and hospitals. They carved a road to the future through flesh.

The Hutus were encouraged by a government which openly admired the methodology of the Nazis. Books about Hitler and the Holocaust became primers for officially sanctioned actions. They were spurred on by priests and nuns. They were strengthened by doctors and nurses. They were cheered by teachers and lawyers. They were pushed by parents, wives, and children.

But the intimate slaughter did not stop there. During the 100 days of terror, more than a quarter of a million women were raped with the kind of intentional passion kept only for burning love and grinding hate. Many, after they were used up, died. Many others fell victim to AIDS, intentionally exposed to the virus.

One of those women was Severa Mukakinani. Her story, recounted by Kimberlee Acquaro and Peter Landesman in the January/February 2003 Issue of Mother Jones Magazine, is a thumbnail sketch of the horror painted in the blood of the innocent. After watching the brutal deaths of her children, seven of them, she was raped, “I don’t know how long.” When her tormentors finished with her, likely to move on to fresh victims, she was cut up and dumped to die in the mud. But Severa didn’t die. She lived. And she who had seen seven births and seven deaths, found herself pregnant.

This might have been the last rock piled on her heart, the final blow of the machete meted out to her. This might have stolen, finally, her humanity. But Severa didn’t die. She lived. She is the phoenix of grace, rising from the mud, clinging to her humanity. She kept her baby, her child of pain, her child of violence, so national and so personal. And she saw her child not through the eyes of anguish, but through the eyes of hope. She, reborn from the mire of sin, gave her baby life and life abundant. She gave her daughter the name which is perhaps apt for all children, Hutu, Tutsi, German, and Costa Rican. She named her Akimana, “child of God”.

Today in Rwanda, women hold the highest places, places formerly closed to them. They are teachers, police officers, politicians, property owners. These women, risen from the ashes, are leading their country, and if we let them, the world, toward reconciliation. These women have learned more of mercy than the rest of us could dream of. They are raising the children of their oppressors, working hand in hand with the wives of their murderers, and leading their nation toward a different reality, where grievance does not follow grievance, and eyes are not demanded for eyes.

But still, I wonder. I wonder about that passage in the Bible where it says that, “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purposes.” I wonder if Severa would ever trade her child of God for her lost seven children, or them for her. I suspect that to ask her to make such an exchange would at last snuff out the phoenix within her. Who could make that call? Who could destroy her own soul?

I wonder if there might be some easier way for women to succeed in Rwanda. Surely there must. Did their path have to be cut through their skin and the bones of their men? Did the future need to be written in blood, rape, and mutilation? Could so great a forgiveness have come any other way?

In the end this thing drains meaning from words like tragedy. I am saddened at my own reduction of the pain into a cost/benefit analysis.

I’m glad that God’s economy is not like my own. There is no direct exchange: tit for tat, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. I’m glad we are not given those choices. And I’m glad God isn’t the author of everything, whose tears mingle with our own. I’m glad for a God who was with Severa, even in the mud, even in the rape compound, even in her powerlessness. I’m glad for a God whose blood ran in the river that day, who suffered the scorn of rape, whose hands, feet, and head were severed. I do not understand such a God, such a suffering God, such an economy. I am glad for a metaphysical economy of inequity. There is no direct exchange, only God’s life for mine. I’m glad for a God who is The Phoenix of Grace, rising from the mud and ashes to bring us along in faltering flight.