'Ruined for Life'

By: Rev. John McKenna, C.Ss.R.

I was about 6 years old. My uncle, John T. Ryan, known in Brazil as Padre Joaquin was home for one of his long three month vacations. His visits were events for our family. We would go to the piers on the West Side of Manhattan and see his ship arrive. A day or two later some steamer trunks would arrive at our house, and we would get great gifts from that far away country. The trunks would be filled with things that could be used on the missions when he went back.

One night, after supper Uncle John was going to show us some slides of Brazil. My mother hung a white sheet on the wall in our living room, and we watched beautiful slides of Brazil. Some I am sure were professional slides of Rio de Janeiro, and the newly constructed capital of Brasilia.

Others were of poor people in shacks, and big churches and small chapels. One picture caught my attention. Uncle John was about to go out on a Mato trip, to visit the far-flung villages of the enormous parish. He was sitting on a horse. He had his Redemptorist habit tucked into his pants, a jacket, boots and a pith helmet. As a kid I liked going to church. I really liked cowboy movies and shows on television. There was my uncle, a priest-cowboy. I knew I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be a Redemptorist missionary.

What is a missionary? A missionary is a disciple of the Lord Jesus who has clearly heard in the deepest part of his soul, the command of Jesus on the mountain of the Ascension:

 

Those first disciples, moved by the power of the Sprit poured out on Pentecost became powerful apostles, evangelizers of our world. A missionary is a disciple, a beloved disciple who sits at the table of the Lord, and a powerful energized person of Action.

Missionaries are like Peter and Paul — Peter the representative of the Church, and Paul the one who took the words of the Ascension to heart, bringing the Gospel, beyond the safe confines of Jewish Palestine.

Missionaries are like Martha and Mary — people of practical action, who are in the lives of people in a practical way and yet whose strength comes by sitting at the feet of the Lord.

Missionaries are like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who left her family and homeland in Albania to take care of the poorest of the poor, and St Thérèse, the Little Flower, the prayer patron saint of the missions.

To be a missionary is very different than being a tourist who goes for a visit to see a different part of the world and returns home with great souvenirs and pictures.

A missionary is not a colonist who goes to a foreign country to seek his fortune by exploiting the host country.

A missionary is not a soldier stationed on foreign soil

A missionary leaves his homeland and his family, the security of his language and culture, with great respect for those he is called to serve. The missionary goes to learn and love and share with a people he is called to make his own. “Your people shall be my people.”

One of my favorite books, and gratefully the movie was terrific, was James Michener’s book Hawaii. It was about Congregationalist missionaries who left New England to bring the gospel to the savages of the Hawaiian Islands. The main character played by Max Von Sydow was a religious fanatic. He was unbending in his rules. He was going, by the strength of his iron will to convert all these poor people to Christ, and not just Christ, but make them into good New England Puritans.

He believed, as all religious fanatics do, that he was right and everyone else were infidels going to hell His wife, played by Julie Andrews, is the only person who can break through to him occasionally. And only when she is dying does he begin to grasp that she, more than he, understood the Gospel. “We will bind them to Christ by the strong bands of our love.” A good missionary binds and is bound to Christ present in the people he serves by the strong bands of love.

Let’s admit it, the beginnings of our time as missionaries were rough. But we were younger and up for adventure. And we were surrounded by guys who had been in the seminary with us. It was like the seminary, but without the boring classes and the stupid rules. It was fun. …

We got to do things we never dreamed we would ever do — build churches and chapels and halls. …

I now have a superstition that whenever I begin to hear the song, Here I am Lord, is it I Lord, I have heard you calling in the night, I will go Lord if you lead me, I will hold Your people in my heart,” I should start cleaning out my things to be ready to pack. Is it possible to be too comfortable in a place? I think the answer for me was” Yes.”

I remember visiting some friends in Bridgeport, CT, on vacation. Santos was a permanent deacon, and his wife was involved in much of the work of the parish. I was there for a Mass when a nun was having a farewell party. The parish had five different ethnic groups, Mass in five languages: English, Spanish, Creole, Portuguese, and Laotian.”

In a very uncomfortable moment I saw that this was mission territory, dealing with people of different ethnic groups and cultures and trying to pastor them. It was a huge challenge, much more so than the great parish work I was doing. I tried to get that bad thought out of my head, but it would not go away.

Then there were the visits home. My dad died while I was still in Puerto Rico, my mother did not have good health. “How much longer do you think she is going to live?” Then I saw how much she and my family had sacrificed so that I could go to North East and the seminary and live 20 years in Puerto Rico. Did the commandment, “Honor you father and mother” mean anything to me?

Abraham was called to make a journey, “Leave your people and your father’s house.” But recently we had the reading at Mass about another more painful inner journey that Abraham had to make. “Abraham, take your son, Isaac, the one you love, and sacrifice him for me.” This journey to Mount Moriah was harder, more heart-breaking. For me, I believed that God was calling me to sacrifice “my Isaac, what I most loved for Him.” I will go Lord if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart.”

I heard this expression at the luncheon after Tom Gavigan’s funeral. Two of his nieces had volunteered to be Jesuit Volunteers after their graduation from the University of Scranton. They told me that among those who have gone on missions they had an expression: “You are ruined for life!!!”

The rat race, the American Dream, the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence, the corporate world, will seem so false and shallow after the missions. We are ruined for life! We will always see the poor, the needy, and the foreigner as our brothers and sisters, and treat them with the worth and dignity that they deserve. We will feel rabidly angry about the xenophobia of our nation in its treatment of the undocumented.

We will see homeless people, like Clem Krug in camps not far from his house, and bring them coats, and gloves and food, and a smile.

In Seaford, in the Diocese of Wilmington, people speak with great respect of the work of that, John Kelley did in the  migrant camps with an ironing board as an altar. One of the women in my parish received her First Communion in one of those camps. Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic “had ruined him for life”

I will go, Lord, if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart,” because I am a Redemptorist missionary.