The Shepherd of Molokai

In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a boat onto the shores of Kalaupapa, a remote peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. The colony there housed roughly eight hundred men, women, and children suffering from Hansen's disease — leprosy. The Hawaiian government had banished them, and most of the world had forgotten them entirely.

Father Damien had not forgotten. He had volunteered for the assignment when no one else would go. He built houses with his own hands, bandaged weeping sores, constructed coffins, and dug graves. He shared pipes with the sick and ate from their communal pot. He learned their names. He called them by those names. When officials urged him to return to safety, he refused. "I would not leave my people," he said.

Eleven years later, Damien began a Sunday homily with two quiet words that changed everything: "We lepers." The disease had found him too. He served four more years before it took his life.

Father Damien understood something about the heart of God that comfortable religion often misses. In Luke 15, Jesus describes a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine safe sheep to search for the one that wandered into danger. The shepherd does not send a delegate. He goes himself, into the rough and thorny places, and he does not stop until the lost one is found and carried home on his own shoulders. That is the relentless, reckless love of the Almighty — and Damien had tasted it deeply enough to pass it on.