Wednesday In Holy Week

I overheard someone at work refer to one of their mutual acquaintances as having “a missionary’s heart.” The phrase got me to thinking about missions and my experience with missionaries.

In my experience in the Protestant world, few things are more heavily lip-serviced and more lightly performed in real life than “missions.” Pretty much every church has a bulletin board or display with photos and profiles of “their” missionaries. There are regular fund-raisers, coinciding usually with the missionary and his/her family making a personal appearance before the congregation to give a report on how things are going in their particular mission field.

I also saw a fair number of “mission trips,” in which local church members would raise funds to travel to some foreign country and visit missionaries in the field. These trips were ostensibly to encourage and “help” the missionaries, to give them a sense of the flesh & blood people back home who supported them. I learned later that many missionaries see these visits as something of a bother, since they have to set aside their real work to play tour guide and come up with busywork with which the visiting church folk can be tasked. Precious little actual work gets done during these visits, and after the church folk depart, the missionaries have to put out no small effort to sometimes undo what some of the well-meaning visitors might have said or done.

While most members of today’s churches express great admiration for missions work, only the tiniest fragment of them ever give serious thought to becoming a missionary, much less take the plunge and become one. This is understandable, given the very real hazards faced by those engaged in such work. It’s nothing like the Apostles faced, but in truth there is the potential for martyrdom all across this tempestuous globe.

The name I heard associated with missionaries more than any other during my life in the Protestant church was Elisabeth Elliot. Elliot’s husband, Jim, was speared to death by Huaorani Indians in South America in 1956. Elisabeth continued working with the natives for a few more years, then returned to the US, never to labor as a missionary again.

Let me preface my next remarks with a clear statement that I intend no disrespect whatsoever to Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, nor do I intend to degrade or diminish in any way the work they did among the tribal peoples nor their motives or intentions. I am simply thinking on the page, trying to express the mixed feelings I have long experienced when discussing missionary work.

When people would talk about the Elliots in my presence, they would get emotional and talk about the sacrifice Jim made, and the heroic efforts Elisabeth made after his death. There’s no doubt in my mind that Jim’s horrible death was a martyr’s death, and I honor him for taking on such a mantle. Elisabeth I’m not so sure about. The extent of her work among the Huaorani is rather hard to pin down, but I give her the benefit of the doubt and hope that she accomplished important things for the sake of the gospel.

My misgivings arise when I look at what Elisabeth did after she returned to the USA. As I pointed out before, she never again served as a missionary. She worked in various Christian organizations, and served on the publication process for the New International Version (NIV) bible. But she kept a busy schedule speaking to Christian groups about missions work and her experiences.

Historically and philosophically, the idea of taking on the role of a missionary implies lifelong service, even if not in the same geographical location continually. Mrs. Eliot served a very brief term on the mission field, but seemed to have traded on this for the remainder of her life. Perhaps I sound sour in pointing this out, but I do so because I am deeply moved by the life of another missionary, one whose experience and level of devotion was markedly different from Mrs. Elliot’s. I am referring to Father Damien, now Saint Damien of Molokai, the priest who devoted his life to the lepers on the Hawaiian island that served for all practical purposes as a penal colony for natives stricken with Hansen’s Disease.

Elisabeth Elliot was not what started me thinking today of Saint Damien. Rather, it was listening to people chatter about the Covid situation, listening to the astonishing paranoia about the universal and fatal malignancy of this dread disease, which has surely shown itself to be magnitudes worse than the Black Plague, AIDS, tuberculosis, and rickets, all rolled into one toxic package and released on mankind. Or at least this is what I infer from listening to the cringing questions whispered by the people around me, people who wear masks in their cars, who sanitize their hands (and sometimes their faces and even their nostrils, and no, I’m not exaggerating for effect) several times per hour.

But behold the humble Belgian priest who volunteered to go to Molokai for the remainder of his life. The years in which Saint Damien lived were years in which leprosy was believed to be highly, almost immediately contagious, incurable, and fatal. And yet he went. Upon arriving at the island, Saint Damien reportedly referred to himself while speaking to the natives 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.” Clearly, he knew what was in store for him. And he embraced it. He embraced it for a lifetime.

I won’t summarize this saint’s accomplishments here. You can easily find biographies or biographical sketches of the man, and there is a pretty good movie about his life that I would recommend.

What I will point to again is what spurred this blog post: the overwhelming fragility and un-virile (and yes, virility is a virtue) mindset of most people in this age of Covid hysteria. We wonder why there are no apparently aspirant saints today. We wonder why there are no heroes of the faith today. We wonder why churches close their doors so quickly when a non-elected government official barks an order at them. I believe the cause can be traced to generations of people who have squandered their spiritual heritage for a mess of pottage and are now experiencing malnutrition of the soul.

Today, people shriek and melt into hysterics if they see someone without a mask walking down the street in the open air fifty yards away. Christians of days past volunteered to live hidden lives among the most wretched, knowing that their days would end in a lonely death, content with the interior dialogue between them and God. When I examine myself, I see cowardice and inconsistency and hypocrisy…I see things much worse than overreacting to a virus, and this tempers my incredulity and anger towards the flaccid Christianity I see today.

The reason I think on the saints of old so often is because they do keep me in check. They do contribute to some tiny measure of reality in my mindset, and they also encourage me. My constant awareness of the “great cloud of witnesses” is a profound source of comfort to me, and I daily ask several of the saints to pray for me, just as I ask close friends who are still living to intercede for me.

I am spurred to pray for those who are fear-driven in this age. They need our prayers, my prayers as much as I need the prayers of my saints.

~ S.K. Orr