A True Believer -- Faith Was Jennifer Casolo's Saving Grace

The peace that settled on Jennifer Casolo in a Salvadoran prison stayed with her even as she was being interrogated, and may even have helped influence her captors, says the church worker who was held for 18 days after being accused of aiding leftist rebels.

In an interview in Seattle yesterday, Casolo recalled, with a mixture of horror and wonder, one interrogation in a 6- by 6-foot room with carpeting on the walls for soundproofing.

``About an hour into it, the screams from the next room became louder than ever before. The cries, the sound of them hitting became so loud . . . I couldn't take it anymore.

``I crossed my legs and closed my eyes, and tears began to go down my cheeks. And I said: `I thought you didn't do this to people.' ''

Casolo began repeating a vow taken by a young nun whose dedication to the poor had impressed her: ``Before a society that lives the ideals of power, possession and pleasure, I want to be a sign of what it truly means to love.''

At that, the young lieutenant in charge of the interrogation called a halt to the beating next door, she said. And after she told the others, who accused her of crying for her ``terrorist friends,'' that she would shed the same tears for them, the interrogation changed.

Soon, her captors were speaking about their lives, their dreams, their relationships, she recalled, sharing stories of their poor childhoods.

``For a moment in my life, I'd done what God asks us to do - which is to surrender ourselves totally to a greater love.''

In a news conference this morning, Casolo said her experience in the prison had changed her life. ``This experience has set me free,'' she told reporters. ``I finally realized my life belongs to God, not to me.''

Casolo, who will speak tomorrow night at 7:30 at Temple De Hirsch Sinai as part of an 11-city, six-week speaking

tour, was released from prison in El Salvador last month.

She was arrested after police found arms and ammunition at her residence. But the Connecticut native continues to deny any knowledge of the weapons or where they came from. The government claims the weapons were being hidden for rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which has been fighting the Salvadoran military in a 10-year-long civil war that has claimed more than 70,000 lives.

As an employee of Christian Education Seminars, a San Antonio-based church group, Casolo organized tours for Americans interested in finding out more about the conflict in El Salvador.

She was a bridge between the sides of the conflict, she said,trying to help others understand what had brought each side to its place.

For herself, Casolo's four years in El Salvador marked important steps in her own journey of faith, a journey which took her to the feeling of deep peace in prison. The feeling surprised her, she said yesterday.

``When I got to prison, the time when I should have been most empty, what happened was I was most full,'' she said.

``In high school, I used to walk in the woods and feel completely full. I always felt like I had more love than I knew what to do with. And that's how I felt in prison. I don't know if it was people's prayers, or my own emptiness, or a combination.''

Like Casolo, the lieutenant of her interrogation had grown up in a poor family, and she began to understand why he had made the choices he had in his life, she said.

But he was baffled by the young North American, she recalls. He couldn't understand why she wouldn't confess or implicate others to extricate herself from the painful situation.

``Why, why, why do you want to suffer?'' he asked her. ``When he said `suffer,' '' Casolo said, ``because of the word `suffer,' I saw Christ on the cross over his shoulder. I said to him: `Suffering is not the worst thing that you can do. Being cruel is a lot worse.' ''

At that moment, Casolo said, ``I understood the answer to his question, and I tried to explain it to him: that my life was not my own. It didn't really matter what happened to me.'' And in understanding that, she said, she realized she had the key to what was happening in El Salvador.

``That is why the Salvadoran people keep raising their voices, no matter how many of them are killed - because they know that they won't really die. And that they're giving themselves to the idea that their children have food in their stomachs, that one day there will be roofs over people's heads, medical care, the possibility of their children going to school.

``You can raise your voice to that, and it doesn't matter what happens to you individually, because you're surrendering yourself to a greater love,'' she said.

``It's they who should be featured in People magazine. . . . It's their words that should be on the front page,'' she told reporters today.

Casolo's own journey of faith began as a young child bargaining with a stern God to bring back a father who had left when she was 4 years old.

``I'll be perfect and you make my Dad come back,'' recalled Casolo, who graduated with honors from Brandeis University. Disillusioned when her proffered bargain didn't work, she became further convinced that churches were only out for themselves when, during her college years, she encountered the gilded Catholic churches in Spain that were surrounded by poverty.

But her disdain for churches began to turn around after a stint at Seattle's University Baptist Church, where, she said, she saw a church that really ``walked with the poor.''

Working with the Brethren Volunteers, an arm of a long-established, Illinois-based pacifist church, she helped Salvadoran refugees with daily needs - finding health care, getting their children into schools and solving their immigration troubles. She heard their stories, she said, and they moved and motivated her.

``I was the kind of kid who always saw that things were unfair,'' said Casolo, 28. ``When I was in fourth grade I wrote a petition so that girls could wear pants. When I was in sixth grade I put on a sandwich board and walked down the streets of Thomaston (Connecticut) asking that they build us a new high school.''

At age 20, measuring 4 feet 10, she socked a purse-snatcher on the streets of New York, out of anger that no one heeded the cries of the elderly woman he had robbed.

It was at University Baptist, in the lounge with the noisy wall heater and the stained gold carpet, that she prayed - another milestone in her journey. ``I opened my mouth and my heart,'' she said.

Her second leap of faith took place in El Salvador, where she had decided to work for a year.

``I heard the story of a young woman who had left her religious congregation - she had been Catholic - and retaken her vows'' to dedicate her life to the poor, rather than to Roman hierarchy.

She visited with the women who belonged to the order, the Sisters of the Small Community. ``They talked about their journey and their vows, and then they talked about this one young woman, who had had health skills. . . . They talked of her life, and that she had been killed in a massacre in 1981.

``And her picture was on the wall as we spoke, and her ideals, everything she had lived for and died for, were alive in the young women around me, the other women who had consecrated their lives to the poor.

``Maybe because she was a woman, maybe because she was closer to my age, but unlike hearing about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and unlike hearing about Oscar Romero (the archbishop in El Salvador assassinated in 1980), at that moment it became clear to me that that woman was alive - that a resurrection does occur. And so, for the first time since childhood, I believe in the resurrection.''

Finally, Casolo was transformed by her experience in prison, she said, where she finally

found what she was looking for.

``People who know me know

that the past couple of years of my life have been really difficult,'' Casolo said. ``Because I was challenging myself (to live more simply). . . .

``And I kept having this feeling that I knew what God required of me and I wasn't doing it. . . . I was always feeling lonely, always empty, always wanting someone to take care of me, wanting to be loved, wanting to be understood. Maybe wanting to be a Salvadoran, or wanting to be understood as a North American who loves El Salvador, but always feeling outside.''

That sense of community, finally, came to her in prison. It isn't easy, even for Casolo, to understand what happened to her.

By way of explanation, she recalled a story that a peasant woman told a friend.

``She said, `You know, women are stronger because they are able to admit when they are completely vulnerable, when they are completely empty. And only by being completely empty can you allow God to begin to fill you up.'

``I don't know about the difference between men and women,'' said Casolo, who went on to describe her arrest, ``but maybe the fact of the armed men coming in (to the house), not letting me go out back to see what was happening, me not knowing what would happen to Lupe and Jose (friends who were also arrested), having absolutely no control over my future, left me empty. And therefore allowed me to fill up.''

After Casolo spent 18 days in jail, President Alfredo Cristiani said there was not enough evidence to bring the case to trial. When she was told she could leave the Salvadoran prison, Jennifer Casolo cried.

She was sad to leave the community of women there. ``They had accepted me as part of them,'' she said.

And she was sad to leave El Salvador, she said, her voice shaking as she recalled her last sight of the country.

``I tried to take it all inside,'' said Casolo, tears welling in her eyes. ``And I said, `I'll be back. There'll be peace. I'll work until there is peace.' And then I got on the plane.''

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Casolo here

Jennifer Casolo will speak tomorrow night at 7:30 at Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 1511 E. Pike St. Admission is free.