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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Aspects of Christian Action

Aspects of Christian Action

I wish to describe something to you. I may not be successful. There is the old story – many of you may have heard it, but it is still worth retelling – about the four blind men who came in contact with an elephant.

The first man got hold of the elephant’s trunk. ‘I think we’ve struck some kind of palm tree,’ he said.

The second one was holding the elephant’s testicles. ‘Don’t be stupid, man,’ he said, ‘These are definitely coconuts.’

The third man grabbed hold of one of the elephant’s tusks. ‘You’re both of you quite mad!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a soldier on horseback, and I’ve got hold of the scabbard of his sword.’

The fourth man stumbled and fell under the elephant’s down-coming foot. ‘I’m done for!’ he yelled. ‘It’s a mountain and it’s falling on me! ’

The relevance of that story is not too obscure. Accuracy is never enough. Only God can see the whole shape of life. The elephant belongs to him. Nevertheless we were given tongues to communicate with. It should be a little easier in the family of Christians.

I intend to talk about Christian action. I think I will do it in a very personal way.

Our Christian belief is held in common. If we are Christians we believe pretty much the same things. It would be very strange if it were not so. But our Christian action – I could say our charitas – may move in entirely different channels, as if we were each in a different universe.

You may be caring for a walled-up husband.
You may be caring for a drug-using wife.
You may be caring for old people in a hospital.
You may be caring for those who have died.
You may be caring for difficult children.
You may be putting up with difficult parents.
You may be caring for unhappy friends.
You may be caring for – well, the list could go on . . .

For each of us there are, I think, special representatives of Himself whom God puts into our care. We always appear to fail in our care for them. That is perhaps the chief mark of a true vocation. In the agony of love and failure we are left wholly unprotected, wholly insecure. We are united with the incomprehensible cross.

I will tell you a scandalous story. A fable would be a better name for it. It is not historically true. I trust that the saint of whom I am speaking will recognise my intention.

When Father Damien contracted leprosy and died of that disease, there page 425 was a man in Australia – one who held some religious authority – and this man wrote that he was not surprised at Father Damien’s death, for it was well-known that he had slept with leper women. Robert Louis Stevenson got up in a rage, and wrote a reply to this accusation. He said that it was a hideous diabolic lie – and that even if it were true, the man who thought it and wrote it and published it deserved to be hanged from the highest gallows in the country.

I have no doubt that Father Damien’s relation to his leper flock was as pure as the driven snow. But I am speaking of Christian action – that vocation where love and failure are always united. So I will tell you now about an imaginary Father Damien – one who did break his vow of celibacy.

This Damien grew up as the son of a French peasant. He was broad-shouldered and slow-speaking. He cared for the animals on his father’s farm. He carried loads of manure. He meditated on the will of God revealed in nature. He was greatly aware of the holiness of God. He had a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, a special dislike for coarse speech, and a special horror for faults of impurity. He did not mind pain too much. He often said, ‘I have broad shoulders. I am like the ox. God made me so that I could carry heavy weights.’

The old priest in the village encouraged Damien. He noticed the young man’s devotion. He found that he was always willing to learn about the things of God. So he instructed him personally till he was ready to go to a seminary.

At the seminary Damien was not exactly happy. He had no doubt about his vocation. But the pre-occupations of town lads who were becoming priests did not coincide with his own. He was barely able to scrape through his examinations. Nevertheless his fellow-seminarians came to know that he had a good heart. He would look after the timid ones and the homesick ones. Some of them gave him the nickname of Mother Damien.

Damien was ordained. When he heard that missionaries were needed in the South Seas, he felt an obscure but strong desire to be one of them. When he heard of the abandoned Polynesian lepers, his heart began to burn inside him. He wished to share in their sufferings, and bring them the knowledge of Christ. ‘I have a strong back and a weak head,’ he said to the Bishop. ‘Perhaps the lepers will have some use for me.’

So Damien arrived at Molokai. There he found the lepers living in pain and squalor. They also had their wild explosive moments of joy – a fight, a drinking-bout, a song sung together, or sexual union – for the lepers were both male and female. The children of the lepers became lepers also.

The chief spiritual enemy of the lepers was despair. For a Polynesian, to be separated from his village community is a kind of death. Therefore the gradual decay and paralysis of their limbs was accompanied often by another paralysis of the mind and the soul.

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Damien cleared out a hut and said Mass there. Some lepers attended out of curiosity. But they did not wish to be instructed. The sight and stink of the lepers was a torment to Damien. He offered the pain to God and went from hut to hut cleaning their wounds. He learnt not to speak of religion too much. A few dying lepers accepted Baptism. But the living were less ready. He did not yet have a flock.

Damien sometimes prayed all night. He suffered from dysentery. He thought at times that God had mocked him by sending him among the lepers – then he would fight the thought back and pray for courage. He suffered in particular from loneliness. The harsh cries of pain or pleasure that he heard each night from the other huts would seem to him like the cries of demons. Then he would pray for detachment and charity. But he always feared the night.

One evening a leper came to him and told him that a woman had just arrived from the other island, the island where the clean people lived. ‘She’s very sick, Father,’ said the leper. ‘I don’t think she will live very long.’

‘Is the disease very bad then?’ Damien asked him. Leprosy usually took a long time to kill people.

‘Not the disease,’ said the leper. ‘She has that. But she also has –’ and he used a word that Damien had heard a few times before, the Polynesian name for a spirit of darkness, a total inertia and paralysis of the life of the soul – ‘the great pain’ or ‘the great sorrow’ would be the nearest translation for it.

‘Would that kill her?’ said Damien.

‘I think it will kill her,’ said the leper.

Damien went to the hut that was pointed out to him. Inside the hut, as he grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw a shape lying on a mat. The woman lay on her side with her face turned away from the door.

A great fear rose up in the soul of Damien. He wanted to turn from the hut and run. He felt that he was in the presence of some radical torment – a state perhaps of diabolic possession – which he had not before encountered. But he remembered he was a priest, and remained, grasping his crucifix. ‘Evil spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ, depart from her,’ he said in Latin. Then he put his hand on the forehead of the woman. She did not move. But with the contact Damien’s fear began to leave him.

‘This island is a sad place to come to,’ he said. ‘But if you think for a little while you will know that all life is sad. Men and women live and die. The sickness that you have will cause you suffering. But the body can suffer and the soul be happy. I have good news for you’ – and then he used the woman’s name – ‘there is a God who made you and me. God made the sky and the earth and the water of the ocean. God loves everything God-made. If you obey and accept the pain of the sickness, God will come into your heart and make you happy in spite of the sickness. And when you die, God will take you to a place where you will be happy for ever. No more sickness. No more page 427 grief. This life of pain will seem to you then like the pain of childbirth. It will be followed by joy. Believe in the true God and you will be saved and have joy for ever.’

The woman took one or two deep breaths but remained silent. Damien kept his hand on her forehead. He felt that there was an obstacle, a wall that he had to break through. He prayed silently and then began speaking again. ‘There is something else,’ he said: ‘Out of great love for us this God became a person. God was born of a human mother, lived among us and then died. God died in great pain’ – And Damien described the manner of the crucifixion – ‘then came to life again and went back to Heaven, human and God in one person.

‘But whatever we suffer God has already suffered along with us. On the Cross God carried the weight of your leprosy. Let God carry it. Join yourself to God in love. In time God will restore your body and join it to your soul. God will give you a glorious and beautiful body to match the beauty of your soul. Believe in God’ – again Damien used the woman’s name, and this time he held the crucifix in front of her – ‘Believe in God and God will never disappoint you.’

The woman sat up and knocked the crucifix to the floor of the hut. Her hair was dark and long. Her face was not yet affected by the disease. It was full of life and power that struggled with pain. What was visible of her body had no ulcers, though her feet and hands already had the leper’s twist. ‘What can you give me?’ she said. ‘You can give me nothing. If your God is over everything, why then have I been given leprosy? Why should I love this God who does not let me love? You talk about the soul. I think you have forgotten something. I think you have forgotten I am a woman.

‘I was the best dancer on the island. How well do you think I can dance with these?’ – she showed Damien her twisted feet. ‘I was going to marry the man I loved. But when he saw I had become a leper, he would not come near me. He would not touch me. He ran away from me when I came near. Now he is going to marry another woman. And I have to die among the lepers. I am not a woman any longer. No man will ever tell me I am beautiful. No man will ever hold me in his arms unless he is a leper himself. Therefore I wish to die!’ She threw herself on the mat and began a long violent sobbing that did not cease. Minute by minute it continued.

Damien rose to his feet. His fear of the woman had come back to him. But along with it there was an intense feeling of pain, as if his heart was being squeezed by somebody’s hand. The barrier between him and the woman had undoubtedly vanished. Her pain and his pain were the same thing. Wishing to withdraw from the pain, he thought longingly of the peace of his own hut – but there was also an opposite impulse – an intense wish to embrace her suffering, to bless, to calm her. He bent down and kissed one of the twisted feet, thinking – ‘It is the Lord’s foot I am kissing.’

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The woman ceased her sobbing. Almost immediately she stood up and threw her arms round Damien’s neck.

His fear had now gone completely. He could feel the warmth and life in the woman’s body. Her leprosy no longer offended him. He said – ‘My sister! My sister!’ – and stroked her hair. Except perhaps as a baby, he had never before in his life stroked the hair of a woman.

When she drew him down on the mat beside her, he did not resist. It seemed at that moment good and right and natural. He thought – ‘But I am a priest.’ And then he thought – ‘I will bless her in whatever way she wishes.’ And this thought remained with him as long as he was beside her.

An hour later, when he went back to his hut, leaving the woman fast asleep, the cloud in which his thoughts had been moving – a cloud of peculiar cheerfulness, as if some burly ancestor inside his soul were saying – ‘Well, what else can a man do?’ – this cloud began to lift, and his agony began.

He had permission from the Bishop to use a discipline on himself, a small whip of plaited wire and leather. He swung it over each shoulder till the blood ran. Then he lay down flat in front of the large crucifix on the wall of his hut, and stayed in this position – praying all night. Several large spiders walked over him. Normally he hated the island spiders, but this time he took no notice of them.

The agony did not leave when the day arrived. He said Mass as usual, thinking – ‘I am Judas. I have betrayed the one whom I hold in my hands.’

He continued to look after the other lepers, but he did not enter the woman’s hut again. He noticed, however, that she was walking about the island. She had begun to go into the huts of the other lepers and wash their wounds and look after them. No leper made any mention to him of his encounter with the woman; and by degrees he realised that she was keeping the matter to herself.

She began to attend his Mass. She would kneel close to the door of the hut and watch him with a grave quiet expression. He became used to her presence. It was at times almost comforting.

Two months later another priest visited the island and he made his Confession to him. The other priest said – ‘It is an unusual situation. These things can happen in the tropics. I have fallen twice myself.’ He gave him absolution and Damien said Mass with an easier mind.

Damien’s prayer to Christ now was – ‘I am a bad shepherd. But the lepers need my shoulders to carry their troubles. Do what you like with my soul, but give me the power to look after them.’

One day the woman asked him to instruct her. Over the next three months he did this, and she was his first convert apart from the earlier deathbed ones. Others began to come to Mass with her, and they too were instructed and baptised.

At length the day came when Damien began his customary sermon by page 429 saying – ‘We lepers . . .’. By that time the Mass hut had been enlarged and it was full of lepers. So, like a stake hardened by fire and hammered into the ground, Damien became himself a leper, and therefore the walking image of Christ crucified.

The fictitious Damien of this lengthy parable is, in my opinion, just as much a Christian activist as the real Father Damien whose statue some church in America refused to exhibit because the sculptor had shown on it the scars of leprosy. Naturally I would not ask the fictitious Damien to intercede for me, since he never existed; but I do ask the real Damien to do this. He should be the patron saint of social work.

If you do not understand my parable, there is little point in my explaining it. I suggest, though, that it points towards the mystery of charitas. My Damien had to care for his lepers.

I acknowledge that Our Lord is sinless. Why then have I made the Damien of the parable a sinner? I have no wish to overthrow the moral theology of the Church. I do not deny the objective sinfulness of a genital response to a woman who is not one’s wife, whatever her needs may be. I am not an admirer of any theory of situational ethics.

My point is perhaps that it would be unwise of us to suppose that we had to achieve the sinlessness of Christ before we could begin loving our fellow man. We are capable of sinning and being sorry and then sinning and being sorry again. That is the point we start from. In my own case, I have never been able to go beyond it.

In this audience it would be stressing the obvious to say we know that God became human. We also know that many of our contemporaries find it hard to maintain a belief in God, or else do not see that God’s existence is relevant to their personal or public lives. And we often attribute to this incapacity all kinds of disorder and unhappiness in the world at large. ‘If they believed in God,’ we say, ‘then their lives would be different.’

Personally, I rather doubt it; or (put it this way) I doubt if we have hold of the right end of the stick.

Belief in itself does not always humanise us. It may even do the opposite. It may make us think that we are secure, safe from human evil, a tribe miraculously set apart, a people whose treasure is already laid up in heaven – ‘The people of God’, His people. Let us examine our fallacy.

We were concerned to get to heaven because we feared Hell. We thought we were reasonably holy if we spent an hour each Sunday in a particular house together, and stopped our children from masturbating and brought them up to love money and the things that money can buy – and also avoided blaspheming when calamities come on us that we could not avoid.

We remembered the saying of Christ – ‘The street-girls and the drunks are going into the Kingdom of Heaven before you’ – and we felt it did not apply to us because we were already part of the Kingdom of Heaven, having page 430 been baptised. We thought He was a hard man anyway. But we didn’t say it because we thought He might punish us for blasphemy.

1972? (678)