Sunday, 10/13/13
The readings today are about leprosy. In 1873 a Norwegian
doctor, Gerhard Hansen, isolated the micro bacteria causing the disease, and
cures were developed. For thousands of years before that, it was the world’s
scariest ailment; and preachers have employed it as a metaphor for all types of
sinful habits. Anyone seemingly saddled for life with a drug or alcohol
addition is a leper in his or her own way.
But for today let’s stay with the physical disorder. The
falling incidence of leprosy brought the U. S. government to close down the
leprosarium at Molokai in 1940,
and at Carville, Louisiana
in 1994.
However, it was still so common in Korea when I was there in
the 1950’s and 60’s that I had many sad dealings with lepers. In the spring of
1954 I was so delighted at being able to take part in a cathedral wedding, that
it struck me as horrible the following year when the disease took young Gregory
away from his Louisa.
We had a group of regular lepers in the small town where I
spent ten years. They used the threat of hugging people to induce them to hand
over money.
They had a burlap tent on a temporary island in our river.
And one day in walking across the bridge I noticed the oddest of our regulars
as he readied himself for wading out to that home of theirs. The man had very long legs, but a very short
trunk, and I found myself idly watching
him slip those shanks out of their make-shift trouser legs, Then, he startled
me by looking up, and shaking his fit at me for invading his privacy.
Our lepers got blamed for it when a mangled body of an eleven-year-old
boy was found in a shallow grave. Someone spread the story that had the lepers
killing the kid to use his spleen for a cure. That had men battering the lepers
with clubs. Then, a truck driver came forward, saying he had run over the boy
in the dark, burying the body. I thought highly of him for confessing to take
the blame away from our lepers.
There are burnt-out-cases who have been cured of the
disease, but are left with the disfigurement that keep them from mixing with
people. There used to be several
thousands of those people in shacks on the wide red mud flats by the Yellow
Sea. A bishop going out to say Mass for them, brought me along for hearing
confessions. Through four hours of it what repeatedly struck me was that the
problems of Korean people are no
different those of Americans, and the burnt-out-cases are no different from any
others of God’s souls.
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