Choosing Kalaupapa

In May 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Father Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered when Bishop Louis Maigret asked which of the Sacred Hearts fathers would serve the government's leprosy settlement — a place so feared that supply ships often dumped provisions offshore rather than dock. Damien found over eight hundred people living without adequate shelter, medical care, or hope, many abandoned by their own families.

He did not come to visit. He came to stay.

For sixteen years, Damien built homes, bandaged open wounds, organized schools, expanded St. Philomena Church, and dug countless graves with his own hands. Then in 1884, when he spilled boiling water on his foot and felt no pain, the truth was confirmed: he had contracted leprosy himself. He would die of the disease on April 15, 1889, at the age of forty-nine.

Philippians 2:5-8 describes Christ who, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage," but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, humbling Himself even to death. Damien's life mirrors that downward path. He had every reason to remain safe in Honolulu. Instead, he chose descent — into suffering, into stigma, and finally into the very disease that consumed those he loved.

Incarnational love is never love from a safe distance. It asks believers to enter fully into another's condition, even at great cost. The question is not whether we admire such love from the pew, but whether we will step forward when the call comes.