"Father Damien of Molokai", (A collaborative artwork by Peggy Chun, Magdalena Hawajska, & the students of Holy Trinity School)
“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”
Today I want to share with you the story of Father Damien, a modern day example of Isaiah’s suffering servant. Damien literally bore the infirmities and carried the diseases of the Hawaiian people back in the 1800’s when leprosy, which we know today as Hansen’s Disease, swept through the islands and brought horrible, painful deaths to thousands of people.
In 1865, in an effort to control the disease in the islands, King Kamehameha V issued a decree, which ordered anyone who was infected with the disease to be segregated from the rest of the community and sent to the island of Molokai to a lepers’ colony that had been established there.
And so infected people, including infants and children, were rounded up, in spite of being hidden away by their families, and were put on board boats bound for the peninsula that jutted out on one side of the island, bound by the Pacific Ocean on three sides and a high cliff wall which served as a natural barrier between the peninsula and the rest of the island.
Imagine being taken away from your family, examined by strangers, diagnosed with the disease, and then being placed aboard a boat that would take you away to a place from which you would be forever separated from your family and where you would face a certain and horrible death.
If the boat arrived during a storm, making landing impossible, or if people resisted getting off the boat, then they were tossed overboard, left to swim to shore.
The authorities assumed that once on shore, the people would be able to survive by growing their own crops and by fishing. They were expected to build their own shelters.
When Damien, a Catholic priest who had asked to be sent to this colony to care for the people there, arrived on the peninsula in 1873, he found people who were covered in filth. They had no medical supplies to help them care for the gaping sores that ravaged their bodies.
People died quickly in the early days of the settlement because of the primitive conditions, and at death, they were wrapped in rags and thrown into a ravine where the wild pigs feasted on the decomposing corpses. Those who were alive “robbed one another, and abandoned the nearly dead.” Hope was non-existent.
Damien slept under a tree until he could build himself a tiny house and a storeroom where he kept the supplies sent to him to help with the care of the lepers.
When he first arrived, “he found living corpses lying abandoned in clumps of grass along the back trails. These victims had been dumped there by their fellow lepers or had crawled there to die alone.”
In spite of being at first cursed by the patients, Damien cared for them, cleaned their wounds, and began to go to work to improve conditions for the residents of the settlement.
Since there was no water available for the settlement, Damien became the water carrier, carrying the fresh water which was some distance away into the colony for his own needs and for the needs of the patients. Even after a pipe system was put in place, he continued to carry water for those people who had lost their legs. He also started an extensive building program, and “eventually, neat rows of houses appeared in the settlement. They were small and whitewashed, and they provided shelter for the patients and set a pattern of social order and civic pride.”
He taught the people who were well enough how to farm. Eventually, “the exiles stared raising flower gardens, riding on horseback, learned to sing in choirs and to play a vast assortment of musical instruments….the disease did not stop them from playing or singing…..patients even played as their fingers fell off.”
Damien “arranged luaus, festivals, singing contests and fishing celebrations in keeping with the Hawaiian observances of the seasons.”
Whenever a new boatload of patients arrived, Damien met them at the shore with coffee, hot food and blankets. He housed the new arrivals, who were devastated by grief and full of fear, in his own house or in those of his parishioners until dwellings could be found or built for them.
Because even infants were sent to the island, by 1883, Damien had forty-four children in his care. He started orphanages for these children, one for boys and one for girls.
Now when people died, they were no long thrown into the ravine or left by the side of the road to be devoured by wild animals, but Damien built coffins for them by hand. Some estimates of his handmade coffins go as high as sixteen hundred. He felt that each person “deserved a coffin, a deep grave, and a religious service that would commemorate the individual’s humanity and eternal destiny.” Not only did he build their coffins, but he dug their graves by hand.
In 1884, Damien himself was diagnosed with leprosy, and he died on April 15, 1889. On April 16th, eight patients carried his coffin to the cemetery spot beneath the tree where he had spent his first nights on Molokai, and they buried him there.
On October 11, 2009, Benedict XVI canonized Damien, and he became one of the saints of the Catholic Church.
My guess, though, is that Damien would not care about his sainthood. His only concern was to be a suffering servant for the sick people with whom he chose to serve, on behalf of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Today, the settlement of Kalawao is gone. The only building that remains there is the church, next to the cemetery which holds the remains of over 8,000 people who died there.
Eventually, the colony moved to the other side of the peninsula to Kalaupapa, the second colony, which was established because the conditions there were better for the lepers.
Today, fifteen patients still live there and visitors are limited to only 100 a day. Because of the location of the peninsula, the only way in is by foot, by muleback, or by plane.
I was blessed to visit this place while I was in Hawaii. Truly, this place is holy ground.
None of us will ever be declared saints with a capital S, like Damien.
However, we can all be like Brother Joseph Dutton, an American who served in the Union Army with distinction during the Civil War. After the war, through a series of personal disasters, he became an alcoholic . In 1883, he converted to Catholicism and gave up drinking forever.
After spending some time with the Trappists at Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky, Dutton set out to find out what God had called him to do with his life. And after reading an article about Fr. Damien’s work on Molokai, Brother Dutton knew that he belonged there as well. He went to the colony and helped Damien throughout the rest of Damien’s life. Br Dutton lived and worked in the colony until he became ill and was carried to Honolulu to the hospital, where he died in 1931. He requested burial on Molokai, and that request was honored by the Hawaiian government.
In the small bookstore on the island, I found a quote from Br. Dutton.
In this quote, Brother Dutton challenges all of us to seek out what God has for each one of us to do. This is the Sunday when we give thought to what we plan to give back to God, for God’s work in the world—not only financially, but also with our time and by putting our unique gifts to work for God’s glory.
So as you consider your estimate of giving for God’s work through this church, as you consider how you can more truthfully and fully be God’s servants in this world, and in this lifetime, listen to these words.
Brother Dutton said, “I wish to guard you against having too high an estimate of the work here. Work performed with a good intention, to accomplish the will of Almighty God, for his glory, is the same in one place as in another. Anywhere can be one’s Molokai.”
For Jesus, Molokai was Galilee, where he healed lepers, cast out demons, fed people, and ate with outcasts and sinners. On his way to Jerusalem to face crucifixion and death, he said this to his disciples—words that St Damien and Brother Dutton heard and obeyed in their service to the lepers on Molokai.
Jesus said, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
This chair and this wheelchair sit side by side in the church in Kalaupapa. This is the chair in which each of us are called to sit, and in the wheelchair sits that invisible person or people that God is calling us to serve. For me, this picture is a reminder that God is calling me to serve and to give my own life for God’s glory by serving others.
Who are you called to serve? How is God calling you to give, in the words of the poet Mary Oliver, “your one wild and precious life?” Where is your Molokai?
Amen.
Resource: Bunson, Margaret and Matthew. Apostle of the Exiled: St Damien of Molokai. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2009.