Why go back?
21.01.2009
Staying with them, dying and being buried with them is a proven powerful witness. It denies we are there for some motive of our own.
Anyone reading the life of Christ in the gospels does so out of their own life experience. Jesus Christ consciously and deliberately identified himself with 'ritually unclean' people who were ostracised and therefore, on the edge of their culture.
This identification with them became the story of his success; it also led to his seeming failure on the Cross.
He reached out to people who were denied 'personhood' and gave them a sense of importance that allowed them to accept themselves as persons.
People knew, know today, that as 'nobodies' in society they are going nowhere. My experience as a missionary has been almost exclusively with such people. I see a value in being with them. Shared presence teaches us that we need one another. Exclude people – then what meaning does priesthood have?
Our people in Peru see missionaries as persons, just as the 'ritually unclean' saw Jesus. Being prepared to spend our lives with and for them is a beginning; most of their own experience of life is of being betrayed. To help annul this suspicion, our identification has to be confirmed in death and burial shared with them – for some of us at least.
Staying with them, dying and being buried with them is a proven powerful witness. It denies we are there for some motive of our own.
It affirms we see them as persons, as equals. The kingdom of God is about being equal in dignity.
Fr Leo Donnelly lives in retirement in Peru after spending the last 50 years there.
