I am in the middle of bare root tree planting season, and Sister Dorothy Stang often comes to mind. There is something about planting trees, about placing roots in the soil, about the quiet resilience of growth that echoes her life’s work. Today, on the anniversary of her passing, her spirit is especially vivid. If you don’t know who she is, keep reading. She is a heroine of mine.
Twenty years ago, on a humid February morning in the Brazilian Amazon, Sister Dorothy Stang put on her well-worn sandals and walked out into the jungle. She carried with her a dog-eared Bible and a lifelong commitment to the poor. By noon, she would be dead, assassinated by hired gunmen—her murder ordered by the very landowners whose greed she had spent decades resisting. But even in the moment before her death, as she read scripture to the men sent to silence her, she exemplified a radical serenity that would not be out of place in the annals of Stoic philosophy.
To live without fear of death is the aspiration of many, but to meet death with tranquillity, face to face, is something else entirely. For Sister Dorothy, the Amazon was not just a place of towering ceibas and tangled vines. It was the front line of an ancient struggle between the powerful and the dispossessed. Her life’s work was, in many ways, a practice of Stoic endurance: she accepted the hardship, the threats, the constant tension of standing against the interests of those who saw the forest and its people as nothing more than resources to exploit. And yet, she remained unshaken.
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, once wrote: “… resist the urge to dwell on the lives of others, unless driven by a shared purpose or necessity.” Sister Dorothy lived this dictum without hesitation. Her days were spent in service, building relationships with the poor, educating smallholder farmers, advocating for land rights, and challenging the destruction of the rainforest. She did not concern herself with the futility of fear or the comfort of self-preservation. Her concern was the present, the immediate work, the task at hand.
The violence that ended her life was neither surprising nor extraordinary in a region where land conflicts often spill blood. What was extraordinary was her unwavering resolve in the face of that violence. Stoicism teaches that external circumstances are beyond our control, and the only thing that truly belongs to us is our response. Sister Dorothy did not flinch when threatened, nor did she waver when the odds of survival shrank to nothing. In the end, she did what she had always done, spoke truth to power, even when power came with a gun.
Her death was meant to be a silencing. It was anything but. In the years since, her legacy has only grown, her name spoken in reverence among those who continue her work. The Amazon remains contested ground, its forests still falling, its people still fighting. But the memory of Sister Dorothy Stang stands as a reminder that courage is not loud or violent; sometimes, it simply stands its ground, unshaken, until the very end.
Consilium 