Reading Francis

Look for the lepers.

I mean, I get the value of Fred Rogers’ quote, “Look for the helpers,” as a way to soothe children in times of stress by encouraging them to focus on those who are doing good in times of tragedy.

But if you want to find where God is, look to the lepers.

From the time of, say, Moses until the mid-twentieth century, we treated people with Hansen’s Disease, or leprosy, pretty much the same way. We considered them cursed, vile, evil and degenerate, and we sought to protect ourselves and our loved ones by excluding them from society. For most of human history, having leprosy meant losing all contact with friends and family, facing sanctioned physical abuse, and accepting the responsibility to warn away anyone who would come near you. The disease itself led to pretty horrible death, but the abandonment and condemnation that preceded the bodily death was worse. If there were worse things than being a leper, I don’t know what they were.

In the Old Testament, there are a lot of rules about how to exclude and eliminate lepers from the community, as well as rituals for accepting those who recover from leprosy. But most of the references people know in the Bible about lepers comes from the Gospel accounts of Jesus healing them. In some cases, he heals them by telling them to go wash themselves; in others, he actually touches them to heal them. At any rate, he broke all kinds of rules by helping rather than shunning lepers, and for many people, his proximity to lepers would have led to suspicion that he was one of them.

This isn’t just a Bible-times thing. A key part of St. Francis of Assisi’s story was his metamorphosis from someone who, as part of polite society, despised lepers, to someone who embraced a leper he encountered, to someone who committed himself to living with and caring for those with leprosy.

This isn’t just a Medieval thing. When we went to Hawaii many years ago, the locals were hyped up, because a Hawaiian was about to be named a saint by the Catholic Church. St. Damien of Molokai was a 19th Century Belgian missionary who was sent to Hawaii and took on a ministry to the leper colony of Molokai, moving to the place where the shunned were sent and turning it into a community, until he succumbed to the disease himself. 

The throughline here is not the disease; it’s that God and the godly go where people are shunned and excluded and live with the people that everyone else would rather not see.

This is still a thing today. For the most part, it isn’t Hansen’s Disease that leads to people being shunned and excluded. But a lot of us treat other people struggling with other challenges the same way – by kicking them out, by hunting them down, by proclaiming they aren’t worthy of basic dignity.

We should probably remember that, if we don’t embrace the lepers, if we don’t put in the center those who everyone else excludes, we aren’t following the example of Damien. Or Francis. Or Jesus. 

If you want to find God in the world, look for the lepers, and go stand with them.