Small Things With Great Love

This past week, on May 10th, was the feast day of St. Damien of Molokai.  Born Joseph de Veuster in Belgium in 1840, he entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary at age 19 and took the name Damien.  In May 1864, St. Damien was ordained a priest in Honolulu and assigned to the island of Hawaii.

St. Damien of Molokai

In 1873, St. Damien went to the Hawaiian government's community for patients with leprosy on the island on Molokai.  Originally, he was part of a team of four chaplains who were assigned there for 3 months out of the year.  Eventually, St. Damien asked to be assigned to the community permanently.  His request was granted.

St. Damien brought dignity and respect to a community that was originally just a place for people with leprosy to "live" until death.  He involved the patients in building houses, an orphanage, and a church.  He made the hospital larger and laid pipes for water.  He treated the physical needs of the patients, taking on the responsibility of cleaning and dressing their wounds.  He disregarded common medical practice at the time, eating with the patients, inviting the patients into his home, and touching them.  St. Damien gave the patients their dignity back by refusing to treat them as outcasts.  They were his brothers and sisters.

As a priest, St. Damien first and foremost tended to the spiritual needs of the community.  He scheduled prayer, meditation, Mass, the Divine Office, spiritual reading, and the Rosary into each day.  He also instituted perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  Through all of St. Damien's spiritual labor, the number of catechumens increased by hundreds.

In 1884, St. Damien contracted leprosy himself.  Over the next 5 years, he continued to serve the members of the community even as the disease ravaged his body.  On April 18, 1889, on the Monday of Holy Week, St. Damien died at the age of 49 after serving the colony for 16 years.  St. Damien was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 11, 2009.
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The first time I heard about St. Damien, I was deeply moved by his story and he quickly became one of my favorite saints.  He exemplifies in so many ways how to be a beacon of Christ's light here on earth...how to live our lives as God as asked us to: nothing short of Christ-like.

St. Damien gave his life for this community...he gave his life to bring them Christ.  Moving to Molokai permanently was essentially a death sentence.  St. Damien knew leprosy was contagious and knew that by dressing their wounds, eating among them, and living in such close proximity, it was almost guaranteed that he would contract leprosy and eventually die from it.  But he knew this is what they needed.  These people were the marginalized and unloved.  They had no one to care for them, no one who would see them as anything other than diseased.  Somewhere along the line, the fact that these people were children of God was forgotten.  St. Damien gave his life so that they might rediscover God's love for them.  Isn't this just what Christ did for us?  Isn't this what we should do for Christ?

The beautiful thing about this call is that we do not need to travel far to answer it.  The unloved and marginalized are, unfortunately, all around us.  The more we allow Christ to be a part of our lives, the more we see through His eyes, and the more we see those who are in need of an encounter with His grace.  We pray for the courage to reach out...to give of ourselves, some of our time, energy, and talents, to bring to love of Christ to every heart we encounter.

Yet knowing this, it still so often feels impossible.  When I look at the entire life of a saint, many times I become overwhelmed - "St. Damien subjected himself to a contagious, deadly illness to bring Christ to others.  If that's what it takes to get into Heaven, how am I ever going to get there?!"

But then I remember one of my favorite quotes of all time; a short and simple sentence by Blessed Mother Theresa: "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."  It wasn't one big act of love that made Father Damien a saint...St. Damien lived his life in that community doing small acts of great love.  These small acts of great love, once combined, add up to the entirety of St. Damien's life - a life filled with the greatest love, the love of Christ!  And if we commit our lives to extending the love of Christ to everyone we encounter, then haven't we too filled our entire lives with little acts of great love?  Small acts of great love throughout our lives = a life of great love.  God would never set us up for failure, so it is not impossible...we too can love like saints.

With the help of St. Damien's intercession, may we receive the grace to love beyond what we sometimes see as impossible:
Damien, brother on the journey,
happy and generous missionary,
who loved the Gospel more than your own life,
who for the love of Jesus left your family, your
homeland, your security, and your dreams,
Teach us to give our lives
with a joy like yours,
to be in solidarity with the outcasts of our world,
to celebrate and contemplate the Eucharist
as the source of our own commitment.
Help us to love to the very end
and, in the strength of the Spirit, to persevere in compassion
for the poor and forgotten
so that we might be good disciples of Jesus and Mary.
Amen.

In His Love,
Lindsey

Thank you to American Catholic and the Diocese of Honolulu for St. Damien's biography!