On the Need for Lepers
Introduction
Old Testament & lepers.
In
a sense the Old Testament made lepers. The priests were to examine people and
declare them "unclean and untouchable" if they found leprosy
(Leviticus, 13). In public, lepers had to ring a bell warning the public of
their presence, as they cried out, Unclean! Unclean!" The damage to their
self-image must have been great: to the leprosy that disfigured their bodies
was now added a leprosy that disfigured their human spirits. In that sense the
Old Testament made lepers. The New Testament, however, does not make lepers;
it heals them. The New Testament is new because it touches the
untouchable and heals them. It’s New
because it touches and heals those whom others won't touch and heal.
Not only does the New Testament touch the
untouchables and heal lepers, it actually singles them out for healing. In
Matthew we read: "Heal the sick and cure the lepers"
(10:8). It even makes the cure of
lepers a very special sign that the Messiah has arrived. When John in prison
sends a delegation to Jesus asking, "Are you he who is to come or shall we
expect another," Jesus sends back a message that should clear up all doubt
for John: "Go and tell him what you have witnessed: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear,
and lepers are cured..." (Mt 11:5).
(Francis of Assisi)
We
Catholics have a strong tradition of singling out lepers and touching
them. Our tradition delights especially
in telling the story of St. Francis of Assisi.
It never adequately recounts the life of that great saint unless it
tells the story of "The Leper and the Kiss" -- a story as simple as the saint himself but
as real as the leper before him. One day Francis Bernadone, a young healthy and
wealthy man, rides elegantly out of
Assisi on his stallion, when suddenly
there looms up before him an immense roadblock to his courage. It is not the banners and the spears of the
hostile neighboring city of Perugia that he faces and fears. It's
a hideous leper! He is nauseated and wants to flee. Instead he breaks his mount and his fear,
gets off his high horse, and approaching the leper, bends down to embrace
and kiss him.
The
event was a powerful moment of revelation for Francis, and it marked the moment
of his conversion. In his Last Will and Testament he writes: "While I was
in sin it was a very bitter thing for me to see lepers. But the Lord himself led me among them and I
showed compassion for them. And when I
left them, that which seemed bitter to me was changed into all sweetness of
soul and body. After that I lingered a little and then left the world"
(Test. 1-3; AB 154).
That embrace and kiss from Francis healed the man of the leprosy eating his soul: his terrible self-image. In his spirit he cried out, "I'm embraceable! I'm kissable!" And who knows, maybe at that moment he was cured also of the leprosy consuming his flesh. If not, at least the worst had been healed
(Fr. Damian and Mother Teresa)
Our tradition also delights in telling the story of Father Damien de Veuster of Molokai who worked among the lepers in the Hawaian Islands. At Mass one day he opened the homily by saying, "We lepers": he had touched the untouchable and had contracted the disease! And in recent years, there is the remarkable story of Mother Teresa who picked up dying people off the streets of Calcutta -- people whom others won't touch. She took them to her House of Love, she kissed them as they died, and she sent them off to eternity cured of the terrible self-image inflicted upon them by a society that wouldn't touch them. She sent them off believing that they were human beings. -- Our Catholic tradition has nurtured us in the school of compassion for lepers. And I am proud of that tradition.
By
stretching out its hand and touching the untouchable the New Testament thereby
declares there are no untouchables; there are no lepers. That's the
Gospel, the Good News, which will
always be bad news for some -- bad news for all those of us who, for one
reason or other, need lepers --
need people whom we can declare as untouchables.
Who
in the world needs lepers? The biblical
Jew of old needed Samaritans and Gentiles as lepers whom they could
exclude from every facet of social life. Nazi Germany needed Jews as lepers whom they
could purify in the fires of the crematoria. Serbs, Croats and Moslems --
all need each other as lepers whom they can ethnically cleanse away. The
extreme religious right needs lepers too, whether they be gays to bash "in
the name of religion,” or whether they be simply all the “non-born-agains” in
thejworld, who will surely be purified
in the fires of hell for not believing in Jesus.
There
is no simple psychological explanation of our need for lepers. It is
complicated. Fear certainly enters the picture. People who think that
they are the “chosen ones” always suffer
from a bad case of xenophobia:
that’s a fear of "outsiders," "strangers," "the
non-member,” “the un-chosen ones.” For
the biblical Jews of old, not only were the lepers lepers, but all outsiders,
all non-Jews, were also lepers. // Beside xenophobia, there is also homophobia,
which is the fear in some heterosexual that causes them to make lepers of
homosexuals.
(transit
presto)
I
suspect, though, that the need for lepers rises especially out of a poor
self-image. The dynamic is this: We don't feel very good about ourselves,
so we proceed to build ourselves up by tearing somebody else down, by making lepers out of them. It works, but not very well. Once we feel good about
ourselves, we will also feel good about lepers. And once that happens, there
simply won't be many lepers around
anymore.
You
know, the secret is out about the school massacre in Littleton, Colorado. At first the picture was painted very
simplistically: on the one side you had Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two victimizers in that unspeakable disaster.
And on the other side you had all the
victims, i.e. the entire student-body together with all their families. Time
magazine featured the two boys on their front page and labeled them “The
Monsters Next Door.” They could as well have been labeled “The Lepers Next
Door.” Yes, they were lepers. Yes, the
secret is out: someone made them lepers. Who in the world made them
lepers? Their peers did!
Remember the suburbanite father at whose wedding I officiated twenty-five years ago? Every single Christmas Eve he comes to visit me with his two adolescent children. They’re at that age now when we can speak as adult among ourselves. Remember what the daughter said on this last visit? “You have no idea how mean and ugly we (she and her peers) can be toward each other. If someone isn’t so good-looking or isn’t a jock or doesn’t dress the right way or is simply different or isn’t in your economic bracket, let me tell you,” she said, “they really get it from us.” Get what? The inhumanity of their peers. The daughter admitted that she, for a while, was one of them And the son, first year college, added: “And the boys are much more inhuman than the girls.”
Yes,
the secret about Littleton, Colorado is out: the two lepers next door were
made lepers by their peers in school,
and there were more than just two monsters in Columbine High School. And
that gives us pause: we just might be
raising a whole generation of monsters! Strong language? Perhaps.
But if such strong language could have alerted the suburbanite parents
of the two boys, then more power to it.
Yes,
the secret is out: we are undergoing a cultural crisis, which Leonard Boff
(Order of the compassionate St. Francis) describes as, “The terrifying lack of
compassion and care that has settled in upon us all.” Compassion doesn’t make lepers; it cures them. As the compassion of St. Francis of Assisi
bent down and kissed the leper, and made him feel that he was kissable. As the
compassion of Father Damien of Molokai touched lepers, and him one of them. As
the compassion of Mother Teresa picked
them up off the streets where they were dying,
and sent them off to heaven cured as human beings.
The
TV evangelistic moralizers are correct: AIDS, the new leprosy, is from God. It
is sent from God to test true religion. To test whether we are truly of the New
Testament which does not make lepers but heals them. The new leprosy is
sent from God to point a finger not at
others but at ourselves with our immoral need to make lepers. The new leprosy is from God to call forth the
best that's in the human race: the Father Damien's, and the Mother Teresa's, the Brother Francis's.
They all call forth from us the best of
our Catholic tradition.