Sunday, June 24, 2018
Before my summer intern trip to Kalaupapa, whenever I mentioned to someone here in Hawaii that I was to have the opportunity to visit the Settlement there, I was met with a similar, striking response: I was told that Kalaupapa is a very spiritual place, and that my visit would be transformative. For a while, I felt confused by this sentiment. Of course, the island and the peninsula are beautiful, and the stories of what happened there – the cruelty, the pain, and the isolation – are haunting.
But wouldn’t a better descriptor for the place be something like, heavy? Dark? Intense? Is it the fact of the suffering, I thought, that makes this place so spiritual for so many people? You don’t hear folks describe other historical sites this way. What about or in Kalaupapa, I wondered, inspires such a strong sense of the sacred?
Our first full day on the Settlement, our leader broke us into sets of two, each group responsible for a different task caring for the building and grounds of the Protestant Church. My partner, Virginia, and I were taken to the back of the church and shown a large cabinet, which we were asked to clean and organize. The cabinet was chock-full of liturgical items – candles of all sorts, old service bulletins, communion chalices, little glass and plastic communion cups and communion sets, brass candle-holders, silver plates, and incense receptacles.
Given the dust and disarray of the cabinet, it seemed that most of the items had been left untouched for months, even years. Because of the dwindling patient population on the island, the Church doesn’t have high attendance anymore – maybe a few people every Sunday – so no longer requires the hundred or so small communion cups, or the many candles. But it was a strange thing, to find and restore items that had at one point been so important to the life of a community. It was a strange thing to grasp in my hands these cups and chalices and silver plates that had held the spiritual food that fed the patients and their care-givers, that had sustained the long suffering.
I don’t know if it’s just my Anglican background and my high theology of the Eucharist, but touching all of these items, I felt in them a trace of the real and incarnate presence of God – the fingerprints of Christ, the breath of the Spirit. I could sense that the Lord had truly communed with the people of Kalaupapa through the now-tarnished silver chalices and the chipped glass cups. God had been in this church, and fed its people.
I felt a similar sense as Kahu Richard, our sponsor, toured us around the rest of the island and showed us the other churches that had acted as places of worship, sacred communion, and gathering for the patients. I was beginning to understand what people meant when they said Kalaupapa is very spiritual. It seems to me a place where God’s presence has existed so explosively that there are remnants of the Spirit’s movements around every turn.
There is a theology that emerged from Latin America in the mid-twentieth century that contends that, throughout the scriptures, God is particularly concerned with and active among the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. This idea, which came to be known as Liberation Theology, insists that a Christian life necessitates working for justice and fighting systems of oppression, such as racism, poverty, and colonialism.
Liberation Theology was on my mind a lot during my time in Kalaupapa, and I believe it can help me make sense of how immediate the presence of God feels on the island. I think God is especially present in the Settlement because of the ways in which its inhabitants were oppressed, and the extent to which the patients searched for hope in the face of unfathomable pain.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s not about the communion, or the churches, or the saints who served on that peninsula. God was there even before they built the steeples and the priests and pastors arrived. She was there, and she was with the patients. As they were given their diagnosis, separated from their families, and loaded unto boats to set sail to a colony of isolation, Christ stood among them and comforted them. He watched and wept as they were horrendously hoisted up from the ships and over the rocking shore. The Spirit of God permeated every inch of that island because the Spirit of God seeks and dwells most among those who have no other hope.
Our Gospel reading this morning was the story of Jesus calming the storm. Though we didn’t hear it today, Mark goes on after Jesus makes the wind cease, with a line many of us have heard countless times. O ye of little faith! Christ famously cries after the disciples awaken him in terror, their boat tipping and rocking in the stormy sea. O ye of little faith! he cries, as if to say – how can you be afraid? I am already here. I have always been here.
Jesus is to found wherever there is storm, and wind, and terror. Our call as Christians is to look and recognize him there, to climb aboard the rocking ship and help to calm the storm. Like Father Damien, and Mother Marianne, and all those who gave their lives on Kalaupapa to care for the ill and remind them of the hope we find in God, as followers of Christ we are called to minister and serve the least of these – the marginalized and oppressed, the victims of contagious illness, the victims of bigotry, the victims of powerful institutions that care only for their own self-interest. To be more specific, we are called to serve immigrants and refugees, people of color, gay and trans people, the abused, the mentally-ill, the terminally-ill, the poor, the hungry, the disabled. Those in prison, those in pain. God is already with them. Let us join her there.
Amen.
To Marvelous Light 