I think a universal human fear is that we will die alone. To die, even in the absolute best possible situation, is to set off on a very big journey, and everyone deserves kind people around to see them off. I cannot imagine a more lonely place to die than Molokai prior to Damien’s arrival. Molokai needed a priest.
Damien wasn’t always godly; he wasn’t even always Damien. He was born Jozef (Jef) de Veuster in Tremelo, Belgium, in 1840. He was a nice kid. His family was religious, and his mother enjoyed telling the stories of the lives of saints, but family piety didn’t stop mischievous Damien from hitching joyrides on the back of horse-drawn wagons16 or skating around on thin ice during the winter, much to his family’s concern.17 He was kind to animals and the less fortunate; he once stole a ham from his mother’s kitchen and gave it to a beggar, which, again, didn’t really thrill his family.18 He helped his neighbor nurse her sick cow back to health.19 I want to imagine his family was okay with that and maybe received some free milk.
In 1858, when he was age nineteen, he sought to begin his religious training. At his admission interview he said he hoped to work as a missionary in North America among the Native Americans. That is a cool answer. I think it is good to remember that cowboys were fashionably hip at the time, and I’m glad Damien picked the underdog in the traditional cowboy-Indian fight. However, I suspect he was not supposed to say “I’d like to travel and experience new cultures” as his reason for wanting to be a priest (that is only a good response on your college-year-abroad application). He was initially rejected by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, in Louvain, where his older brother Auguste (Father Pamphile) was studying to become a priest. Jef was considered unsuitable because of his “rudeness in manner and appearance and ignorance of Latin and any other language.”20
You know how people periodically bring up the fact that Einstein failed mathematics, to reassure parents that even though their child is receiving Ds and Fs in every math class, he or she still has the potential to figure out the theory of relativity? Three points:
1. That story about Einstein is probably a lie; he was generally a superb student.
2. As someone whose mother heard that story a lot, I can assure you that the only math an average human needs is how to calculate a 20 percent tip on a check, and you’re allowed to use your iPhone calculator; no one will laugh at you for doing so.
3. I still hope Father Damien’s story will be similarly comforting to anyone who wants to be a missionary but is turned down by the religious school of his choosing.
After some begging and pleading on his brother’s part, Jef was eventually admitted to the congregation as a choir brother. Choir brothers could possibly, maybe, become priests. However, it was more likely that they would simply remain at the monastery helping with daily tasks and studying the Bible in their spare time, which sounds great! Really quiet and low-key and peaceful and nonthreatening. I bet there was a lot of gardening involved and also some cooking, reading, and singing—just an ideal retirement, honestly. I guess not everyone felt that way. The positions were considered a place in the religious order for—sorry, choir brothers—nice guys who didn’t seem quite smart or charismatic enough to be out among the people preaching the word of God.21 Jef entered the order and adopted the name Brother Damien, after the third-century physician Damian, who refused to accept payment for his services.22
Surprisingly to the order if not to you, modern reader, Damien exceeded everyone’s expectations. His brother taught him Latin, and I have a personal theory that Damien was one of those sleepless elites who only needed four hours of rest a night. He would pray before the altar beginning at two or three in the morning and didn’t go back to bed afterward. Within a year, he had the skill of a fifth-year Latin student and could translate on sight. The only fault the monks seemed to find with him was that he laughed too much. In spite of Damien being so cool and hilarious, it was decided by the seminary superior that he should begin training for the priesthood after all.23
By 1863 Damien wasn’t yet a priest, but his brother had recently been made one. Pamphile’s first assignment was to work as a missionary in Hawaii. However, shortly before Pamphile was to depart, he became sick with typhus. He recovered but was too ill to go on a long sea voyage. Brother Damien asked to take his place, saying that he could finish up his studies en route. When his request was granted, he supposedly burst into his brother’s room shouting, “Yes! Yes! I am to go instead of you! I am to go instead of you!”24
So many biographers respond to this event by claiming, “Oh, how happy this must have made Pamphile.” I don’t know what those biographers’ childhoods were like, but this is exactly like running into your sibling’s room with a Disneyland ticket and screaming, “Guess where I’m going!” when your sibling is sick in bed with chicken pox. Damien was such a jackass here. I still like him a lot, and if you’ve ever been similarly insufferable, it’s nice to know that this behavior won’t rule you out for sainthood.
Things worked out fine for Pamphile, by the way. He served as instructor to novices—or new arrivals—to the congregation. It was a high-ranking position that, Damien wrote in a letter, meant he was “raised in dignity,” although Damien had hoped his brother might join him as a missionary.
Damien was assigned to a ministry in Kohala, where, he claimed, “visiting the sick is one of my chief duties each day.”25 Preaching in Hawaii meant that he soon heard stories about the “Kalaupapa prison,”26 as the Kalaupapa peninsula on the Island of Molokai, which housed the leper colony, was sometimes called. The lepers there had been writing to the church begging for a priest for some time. The bishop Maigret assembled a group to discuss the problem, though he held out little hope that anyone would volunteer for the dangerous and unappealing assignment. However, Damien and three other priests thought that they could serve on the island in rotation, each spending around three months there each year. Even once Damien departed, in 1873, the bishop was still concerned, famously writing that Damien could stay “as long as [his] devotion dictates.”27 He likely meant to give Damien an easy out; instead, Damien seemed to take it as the permission he needed to remain at Molokai for the next sixteen years.
Before Damien’s departure, the bishop explained the protocol of dealing with the lepers. According to Stewart: “There was to be no physical contact with a leper … his priests would never eat food prepared by a leper, nor would a priest ever sleep in a leper’s house.”28 The bishop was especially clear that Damien must “never touch or allow [him]self to be touched by a leper.”29 Moreover, if any of the afflicted offered him a smoking pipe, he must refuse it, and he should not sit with them for any communal meals or even use a saddle that a leper had previously used.30 He was more or less there to read them their last rites, and that was it.
Damien disobeyed the bishop’s instructions the minute he landed on the peninsula. He was greeted by a religious leper who offered him fruit, which he gratefully accepted. And presumably ate.31
Shortly thereafter he began visiting each of the lepers’ homes. At one he found a young girl whose wounds were so untended that worms covered the side of her body.32 Damien started changing the lepers’ bandages by hand.33 I suspect as soon as Damien saw that girl, he knew that he couldn’t make life bearable for the people of Molokai if he wasn’t willing to risk dying. He might have known that as soon as he set foot on the island, really. I would like to think that you and I would come to the same conclusion, but I am 100 percent certain I would not do the same. My devotion to my fellow man does not extend to treating wounds crawling with worms. Maybe yours does! If you are a missionary reading this book, I think you are getting a fast-pass to heaven, and I am really sorry about all the swear words I have used.
Damien wrote a lot about his affection and respect for the lepers. However, he did also write, “Sometimes, confessing the sick, whose sores are full of worms like cadavers in the grave, I have to hold my nose.”34 Damien strikes me as so superhuman in his goodnes
s that it’s relieving to stumble across an incident that reminds us that he was still a regular person sensitive to smell and worms. Supposedly, whenever he was lonely or frightened on the island, he would spur himself on by repeating to himself, “Come on, Jef, my boy, this is your life’s work!”
Church services began shortly after Damien’s arrival at the Chapel of St. Philomena. When Damien arrived the chapel was squalid, and he spent hours cleaning it out.35 The pandanus tree next to the church served as the chapel’s first rectory; a rock was his dinner table.36 As he made contact with more lepers, Damien obtained their help in improving the church, encouraging them to build alongside him. Soon it became a center not just of religion but for all manner of activities. The community was organized into a congregation. The area around the church served as a gravesite, where Damien conducted funerals, a welcome and compassionate improvement on how the lepers’ bodies had often been abandoned without ceremony before.37 A church choir was formed, despite the fact that, owing to the weakened vocal cords of many sufferers, the songs didn’t always come out as intended. The church organist had lost his left hand but attached a piece of wood to the stump in order to play all the organ’s notes. Occasionally two people would play the organ, as between them they had enough fingers to hit every key.38
These stories might seem dark to us, but to lepers who had felt forsaken for so long, belonging to a community again must have been wonderful. It’s completely fair to say that the lepers’ band would never have been featured on the Late Show, but that wasn’t really the point. The lepers knew that their lives would never go back to “normal.” What the lepers surely wanted was to be able to participate in some way in the activities they had enjoyed before contracting their disease and, in doing so, to perhaps have a few minutes when they felt like their old, normal selves again. Maybe that’s what everyone suffering from a disease wants. So when Damien noted at a foot race that one man failed to “toe the mark” because he had no toes, it was a cause for laughter, not despair. The fact that the flutes Damien distributed often had to be played with an inadequate number of fingers didn’t mean that people didn’t enjoy playing them.39
When he wasn’t making bad jokes at foot races, Damien labored to eradicate some of the practical terrors that had afflicted the island. Tackling the problem of inadequate water, he worked with the healthiest lepers to create a dam that collected the rainwater streaming down the side of a cliff. That water was used for drinking and medical purposes, but also to irrigate crops like taro, sweet potatoes, and sugarcane, which Damien and the more able-bodied lepers planted.40
There were risks. An issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association explained: “The manual labor of the roughest kind which he did for the lepers, to make them more comfortable, could not fail to produce frequently cuts, punctures and abrasions, by which the danger of inoculation was greatly increased.”41 But Damien didn’t seem much concerned. He was thrilled that by 1886, 90 percent of the residents of the peninsula had begun farming.42 He built dormitories and kitchens for the orphans of the island, and by 1883 he was caring for forty-four children. He loved them, especially the ones who, like him, were poorly behaved. One leper, Joseph Manu, who had grown up in Damien’s orphanage, recalled in the 1930s: “I was myself a naughty boy, and often Damien acted as if he would pull my ear or give me a kick, but immediately afterward he gave me candy. He behaved likewise with the other kids, but they were not as naughty as I was. That is why Damien loved me more, and he kept me alive for a long time.”43
Even though Joseph clearly established himself as the family favorite despite steep competition from forty-three other children, Damien taught all the orphans to farm and cook and encouraged them to fall in love and marry when (or if) they grew to adulthood.44
Look at this nineteenth-century Mr. Rogers.
He also did his best to break up what he regarded as vice on the island. The lepers had figured out that in addition to selling some of those sweet potatoes they were farming, they could also turn them into liquor. That sounds extremely enterprising and like the kind of brew you could sell for a fortune in Brooklyn right now. Damien, however, was not enthusiastic about this initiative. He often went to the area where drinkers would congregate—known as the “crazy pen”—armed with his walking stick. He used that stick to gesture, to whack people, and to break bottles of liquor. People fled as soon as they saw him coming.45
Righteous historians applaud these actions as a great idea, showing his commitment to virtue. But really that seems like a terrible way of curing people of their alcoholism. I think rehab consists of group counseling sessions and sharing feelings and not just “being attacked by a man carrying a large stick.” But it was well intentioned. I’m sure if Damien were alive today, he would read the Big Book and choose a more appropriate method to counter alcoholism.
Although he was, clearly, not the kind of guy they could share a beer with, Damien did sit and have his nightly evening meal with the lepers. The group would sing songs, tell stories, drink tea, and Damien would share his pipe with them. Mealtime became known as “the time of peace between night and day.”46
The sharing-his-pipe part might jump out at you here.
Leprosy isn’t easily contracted, but Damien lived among the lepers so fully that he must have come to expect his fate many years before he actually developed the disease. I generally think that anyone who throws themselves in the path of a disease and doesn’t take basic precautions is stupid and reckless. But … there was a little girl covered in worms because no one would change her bandages. What would you do?
The most common story about how Damien discovered he had leprosy is that one day in 1884 he was making a cup of tea for himself, or perhaps for someone else, at that time of peace between night and day. He spilled it, and the liquid ran down his foot. Anyone who has ever spilled scalding hot water on themselves will tell you that’s a good time to leap, swear, and threaten legal proceedings against water manufacturers, but Damien felt nothing at all. Puzzled, he spilled more water upon his foot. Still nothing. The next day, he began his sermon not by saying, as he usually did, “My fellow believers” but by saying, as he would until the end of his life, “My fellow lepers.” Contracting leprosy must have been terrifying, especially considering that Damien had always been so robust and active. But I hope he could have also looked around every day and seen the good that his life’s work had wrought.
In 1888 when the English artist Edward Clifford visited the island, he wrote: “I had gone to Molokai expecting to find it scarcely less dreadful than hell itself, and the cheerful people, the lovely landscapes, and comparatively painless life were all surprises. These poor people seemed singularly happy.” When Clifford asked the lepers how they could be so happy, they replied that they were doing fine, thanks, and “We like our pastor. He builds our houses himself, he gives us tea, biscuits, sugar and clothes. He takes good care of us and doesn’t let us want for anything.”47 This was only a year before Damien died.
Damien remained active until the end, trying to build houses and care for his friends, and carving dolls for the children. He wrote to the bishop, who had asked him to come to Honolulu: “I cannot come for leprosy has attacked me. There are signs of it on my left cheek and ear, and my eyebrows are beginning to fall. I shall soon be quite disfigured. I have no doubt whatever about the nature of my illness, but I am calm and resigned and very happy in the midst of my people. I daily repeat from my heart, ‘Thy will be done.’”48 The bishop eventually persuaded him to be treated at the hospital in Honolulu. He was met by nuns, who were horrified to see that his face was now truly distorted and misshapen. Within two weeks, he was on a ship back to Molokai. On that voyage, the captain approached and asked if he could have a glass of wine with Damien. (He clearly hadn’t heard about the walking stick.) Damien explained that would be unwise, because he was a leper, and common wisdom dictated you shouldn’t drink with lepers. The ship captain replied that he understood, and
he still wanted to, because he thought Damien was the bravest man he’d ever met.49
Damien died in 1889, shortly after his forty-ninth birthday. Just before his death he told the priest at his bedside, “If I have any credit with God, I shall intercede for all who are in the leproserie.” The priest then asked if he could have Damien’s mantle, hoping that with it, “[he] might inherit [Damien’s] great heart.” Damien laughed, rolled his eyes, and told him he couldn’t because “it’s full of leprosy.”50
A pedestal erected on Molokai to the memory of Damien reads “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”51 Damien deserves to be a saint, whether you think sainthood is proof of God’s love for us or just a way to honor those who loved their fellow man.
No sooner had he, widely praised, died than some iconoclasts—or, as they are called today, mean jealous haters—appeared to disparage him. People are always going to have different opinions on public figures, even if they are the most perfect public figures in the history of the world. The Presbyterian minister C. M. Hyde wanted people to know that Damien was a dirty slob who maybe had sex. He wrote a letter to the Sydney Presbyterian on October 26, 1889, about Damien, stating:
The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.52
Most of that seems unfounded, and even if he was headstrong and careless, I’m on Damien’s side. But I especially like the saints who are given to human vices, as are most of us. Of course that didn’t stop people like Hyde—who, cool fact, was so paranoid about developing leprosy himself that he freaked out after using a Chinese laundry53—from disparaging him. The author Robert Louis Stevenson penned a lengthy defense of Damien’s good deeds, to which Hyde responded by claiming that like other supporters of Damien, Stevenson was just a “bohemian crank, a negligible person, whose opinion is of no value to anyone.”54 Stevenson concluded the matter by stating, “Well, such is life.”
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