This past week, we awoke to news of yet another massacre - 45 people, mostly women and children, murdered in Acteal, Chiapas by paramilitary forces wielding automatic rifles and machetes. The people were refugees, among the six thousand who have been forced to flee their communities as a result of low-intensity war in Chiapas. They were attacked while praying for peace and an end to the brutality.

As feeling human beings, we walk with these questions:
- how to make such massacres real? - how to replace the staggering casualties with faces, names, persons.
- how to make their pain more heart than history?
- how to be changed enough to dull the edge of annihilation that waits to destroy us all?

The Judeo-Christian scriptures consistently command us to cry out, to plea for justice, to right wrongs that waste the world and its peoples. More - the scriptures warn us against empty reassurances, false promises, and half measures.

In these days after Christmas, as we remember that beside the infant in the manger are the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, members of the Atlantic Life Community gather to recall the massacres that dot human history before and since that of the children of Bethlehem. We present a piece of street theatre touching on five of the massacres, trying to take them to heart.

We who gather in these days after Christmas are seeking to understand and accept that a significant aspect of the political task in this world, is to weep and mourn. We believe that, healed by mourning, we can begin to repair the world, and water the parched earth and our parched souls with our tears. So much that made the world and ourselves beautiful is no more; so much that is essential to life, to spirit, and to love is threatened. We are fallen like the trees, our peace is broken, and so we must love where we cannot trust, trust where we cannot know, and await the coming grace - taking us where we would not go.