A More Violent Harvest

I came across an article on Facebook today saying that a meteor was going to hit Earth next week (next week!!) and we are all toast so get ready the end is near and here. I don't know if it was a joke or not, but all day I am thinking about that meteor and all the things I want to do in the week leading up to my imminent, now scheduled death, wondering where I am going to be when it hits, feeling kind of anxious, but also meditative, like St. Benedict praying while clutching a skull under lintels reading

KEEP DEATH ALWAYS BEFORE YOUR EYES

Wondering how to prepare for my death next week, I start reading the stories of those kamikaze followers of Christ--those who run into the certitude of annihilation without a second thought--to see if I could learn anything. After all, they are following in the footsteps of the one who said, "those who wish to save their lives will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it." (Mt 16:25). Fr. Damien--ministering to the walking corpses sequestered on the island of Molokai (Hawaii) in the late 1800's--was one of those followers.

The reality of existence on the island was stark:

Ambrose Hutchinson, a veteran of half a century in the colony, describes an incident in the settlement's early days. "A man, his face partly covered below the eyes, with a white rag or handkerchief tied behind his head, came out from the house that stood near the road. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with a bundle, which, at first, I mistook for soiled rags. He wheeled it across the yard to a small windowless shack.... The man then half turned over the wheelbarrow and shook it. The bundle (instead of rags it was a human being) rolled out on the floor with an agonizing groan. The fellow turned the wheelbarrow around and wheeled it away, leaving the sick man lying there helpless. After a while the dying man raised and pushed himself in the doorway; with his body and his legs stretched out, he lay there face down."

Fr. Damien welcomed death in the service of the Lord Jesus, because he knew it led to life.

While a student for the priesthood in France, Damien had symbolically faced and accepted death. At the public profession of his final vows, as was the religious custom of the times, his superiors covered him with a funeral pall. He had truly believed then that only by accepting death would he discover life. Now, thirteen years later, he was putting his dedication to the test. He sought to serve the most pitiful of all men, the lepers of Molokai. By so doing, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, "he shut to, with his own hands, the doors of his own sepulcher."

Damien ministered for sixteen years to the lepers before succumbing to death--a death that in all likelihood came from direct exposure to the people harboring the disease, an exposure he did not shy away from and in fact committed to, all-in:

He touched his lepers, he embraced them, he dined with them, he cleaned and bandaged their wounds and sores. He placed the host upon their battered mouths. He put his thumb on their forehead when he annointed them with the holy oil. All these actions involved touch. Touch is, of course, necessary if one is to communicate love and concern. The Hawaiians instinctively knew this. And that is why the Hawaiians shrank from the Yankee divines. Although these Yankee religious leaders expended much money on their mission endeavors, few Hawaiians joined their churches. The islanders sensed the contempt in which the puritan minds held them.

God had summoned Fr. Damien to labor in a different field--cultivate a more violent harvest.


My takeaways from living in the shadow of hurtling meteors and the legacies of kamikaze priests? 

• When God calls, don't hesitate to answer the call. No time to bury family. Both hands on the plow. (Lk 9:62)

• When Christ calls, he bids a man come and die (Bonhoeffer).

• Life is realized full only in death. (Mt 16:25)

• There is no escaping death. (Ps 89:48)

• Knowing the end is near is a grace and keeps complacency at bay. (Ecc 8:8)

• Reach out and touch faith (Depeche Mode)