Testifying Together with the Holy Spirit, Sixth Monday of Easter, May 10, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Memorial of Saint Damien of Molokai
May 10, 2021
Acts 16:11-15, Ps 149, Jn 15:26-16:4

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus continues to teach us, in the continuation of his Last Supper Discourse in John 15, the means by which we will remain in him as branches on the vine and remain in his and the Father’s love by keeping his commandment to love others as he has loved us, to the point of laying down our life for them. On Saturday he told us that we would be persecuted and hated by all. In today’s Gospel, he says that we will be expelled from houses of worship and that people will kill us thinking that they’re doing a divine service. These will all be means to enhance our trust in him. He says that he has told us all of this — on the eve of his Crucifixion, but which the Church looks back on now in the light of the Resurrection — so that “when their hour comes you may remember that I told you” and “not fall away” out of fear. In the midst of those challenging words, he does give us an extraordinary remedy: God the Holy Spirit. “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,” Jesus tells us, “he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.” We will not be orphans. We will be assisted by God himself to give a joint testimony of fidelity to Christ and enter into his faithful witness to the Father. This joint testimony, no matter the circumstances, is the heart of the Christian life.
• In the first reading, we see that witness taking place for the first time in Europe, as Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke went to Philippi to proclaim where the Jews would assemble on the Sabbath when there was no Synagogue, by the river. Even though obviously none of those evangelists had been with Jesus physically “from the beginning” of his public ministry, they had been with him in a far more meaningful way, with him, the Word, from before the foundation of the world. He had them in mind from before the foundation of the world to receive Him within and to bring Him to the ends of the earth. And one of the Holy Spirit’s tasks was to remind them of everything Jesus had taught. Jesus, similarly, has had each of us in mind from that same beginning and the same Holy Spirit has been sent to us.
• There’s a beautiful and theologically very rich expression that St. Luke uses to describe Lydia who had come to the river that day from Thyatira. St. Luke tells us that she was a dealer in purple cloth, which meant she was very wealthy, because purple was pretty much restricted to the imperial family since purple dye was so costly to obtain, needing to be harvested one drop at a time from a toxic Aegean shellfish. Therefore, in Christianity, she would have had a lot to “lose” insofar as Christians were so generous in sacrificing what they had for the needs of the brothers and sisters. St. Luke tells us that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.” Not her ears, but her heart. It means she was interiorizing into the center of her personality what Paul was saying, that she was loving, willing and embracing what she was coming to know. The same Holy Spirit who was testifying with and through Paul and his companions was opening up her heart at the same time so that she would be able to receive the seed of the word on good soil and bear much fruit. Lydia heard with great attentiveness of heart, literally her heart was “leaning” toward the word ready to move. That’s the way we should be listening to this morning’s readings as well. That’s the way we should be listening to the Lord in prayer. That’s the way we should be listening to Pope Francis and our Bishops exercising the Magisterium, following in the footsteps of St. Paul (and St. Peter).
• There’s a beautiful way this scene ends that shows the greatness of her attentiveness. She who was so hospitable to the Word of God immediately grasped the way Christians are always supposed to be hospitable to those who announce the Word, and how those who announce the Word also must have attentive hearts. So after she and her whole household were baptized — immediately, we presume, there at the river, much like the faith of the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip the Deacon had baptized earlier in the Acts of the Apostles — she said to St. Paul and his companions, “If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my home.” Lydia’s home became the first Church in Europe, where she welcomed not only Paul, Timothy, Silas and Luke, but Christ who sent them, and the Father who had sent Christ. And St. Paul received this invitation as readily as Lydia had received the Word. The Word wasn’t just something that Lydia had listened to and accepted as an intellectual truth claim; it was something that changed her life, changed her home, changed everything. And she began to give witness to Christian hospitality together with the Holy Spirit immediately.
• These readings give us an interesting prism with which to appreciate the great saint we celebrate today: Joseph de Veuster, whom we remember as Saint Damien of Molokai. He was someone who heard and welcomed the word of God, such that he saw that living and spreading the Word would be his vocation. He was someone who lived by the Holy Spirit and sought to give joint witness. He was one who experienced great suffering, even persecution, on behalf of his missionary work among the lepers in Kaluapapa. Born in Belgium to a religious family, when he was 24, his brother August, whom he had followed into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, was too ill to go as a missionary to Hawaii, and Damien took his place. The Holy Spirit was doubtless at work. He was ordained a priest there and worked for nine years mostly on the island of Hawaii. He showed early signs of his pastoral zeal in a letter he to his parents, imploring them, “Do not forget this poor priest running night and day over the volcanoes night and day in search of strayed sheep. Pray night and day for me, I beg you.” In 1873, Bishop Louis Maigret briefed the Sacred Hearts Fathers on the need for priestly ministrations in Kalaupapa on the Island of Molokai, which King Kamehameha V had set up seven years earlier to quarantine lepers. Of the 816 with Hansen’s Disease in the enclave, 200 were Catholic, and he had received letters from several of them begging him to send a priest so that they might suffer and die with the consolation of the sacraments. The bishop knew what he was proposing: a slow martyrdom, as chaplain to a walking graveyard. Fully conscious of the consequences, Fr. Damien stepped forward to take the assignment. When he arrived on May 10, Bishop Maigret prophetically introduced him to the colony of lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you, to live and die with you.”
• The 33-year old priest got right down to work — every type of work. He built churches, homes and beds. He created farms and schools and worked to enforce basic laws. He fought to have medicine sent and to get his people whatever medical care was possible. At first, it was hard for him to approach the lepers because he had a natural revulsion to the fetid odor given off by their leprous sores. To overcome this olfactory repugnance, he began to smoke a pipe so that the smell of tobacco would make it possible for him to approach the lepers with dignity as he began to dress their ulcers. While what he could do for their deteriorating bodies was limited, he knew that he could help prepare their souls to meet the Lord, to help them live with an eternal purpose. The first thing he did was to give increased attention to the funeral rites. He knew that if the lepers saw how much care he showed them at their death, they might begin to sense the value of their lives. He brought them the sacraments at their bedsides and tidied their rooms and beds to await the imminent visit of the Lord Jesus. He formed choirs, taught them how to sing beautiful hymns at Requiem Masses, and taught others to play accompanying musical instruments. He cleaned the cemetery and adorned it with flowers. He even made coffins. At the same time, he instituted perpetual adoration, so that the lepers would know that the Lord Jesus was with them always and so that they would have the opportunity to pour out their hearts to Him in their need. Father Damien knew, too, that this was what sustained him. “I find my consolation,” he wrote in a letter, “in the one and only companion who will never leave me, that is, our Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist.… Without the Blessed Sacrament a position like mine would be unbearable. But having Our Lord at my side, I continue always to be happy and content.” It is unsurprising that his witness began to win over the members of his community. Six months after his arrival, he had 400 people preparing for baptism. A cheerful spirit began to radiate in the community in place of the former dejection.
• His greatest cross, he said, was not having another priest to whom to go to confession. Despite the accolades he was gaining from the stories about him across the globe, he humbly knew how much he needed the Lord’s forgiveness, how often he shrunk from living and proclaiming the Gospel, how often he failed to live for God’s glory, to live by his word, to live in communion. He would often have to row out to ships in the harbor, ask if there were a chaplain on board and then, since he was prevented from coming on board, without shame shout up his sins to the confessor. It was a great witness to sailors, priests and lepers alike, and something that helped them recalibrate the direction of their life and whether they were courageous enough to embrace the mercy God was extending if only we would receive it in humility.
• In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had contracted leprosy. He wrote, “My eyebrows are beginning to fall out. Soon I will be disfigured entirely. Having no doubts about the true nature of my disease, I am calm, resigned, and very happy in the midst of my people.” To those who asked him how he was holding up, he said, “Our Lord will give me the graces I need to carry my cross and follow him, even to our special Calvary at Kalawao.” He died during on Tuesday of Holy Week in 1889. Just as the Lord Jesus loved us enough that he came into our world, took on our human flesh, and redeemed it, so Fr. Damien entered into the lepers’ world, courageously took on their dreaded disease, and united it and them to the Lord. In the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God the Father to grant us, through St. Damien’s intercession, that we may be like him “faithful witnesses of the heart of your Son Jesus” through being “servants of the most needy and rejected.” Together with the Holy Spirit, he was a faithful witness of the heart of Jesus, because with faith, he heard Jesus’ words about loving his neighbor and acted on them to the point of laying down his life. He became for them and for us an icon of Christ’s tender, merciful love for every person, revealing the beauty of his soul that no illness, however repulsive, can disfigure. He will forever be the face of the Good Samaritan because by God’s grace he had willed to do everything that he could to love others as he had been loved by him first. He gave God great glory here on earth and now God has glorified him forever.
• Today at Mass, as we prepare to enter into the Paschal Mystery in Mass, we recall that Jesus said all of the words in today’s Gospel to us during the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed. Little did the apostles know that within hours these words would be getting fulfilled. At that moment, they didn’t really remember what he had told them because they had not been listening with adequately open and receptive hearts. But they’re all interceding for us — together with Saint Damien — so that we will learn from their mistakes and fully embrace what Jesus is saying. As he gives us his body and blood, the full manifestation of his love, the sign of his triumph even over the crucifixion and death, he summons us boldly to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to give the same witness. God so loved the world, St. John tells us, that he gave his only Son. And Jesus so loves the world that he gives us the Holy Spirit so that we might be able to go out into the world, in communion with him and his sacrificial love, and give our bodies, our souls, our homes, our lives to the work of salvation. If today you hear the Lord’s voice, harden not your hearts, but receive God’s help to open your hearts to it with full attention! Today we say to the Lord, “If you consider us believers, come and stay within us!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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