By Fr. Hayden Augustine, M.O.P., Contributor
Brother Rolando administers care to an inmate at the Lord's Place, in downtown Kingston. - Contributed
MISSIONARIES OF the Poor is a Catholic religious community of men who profess the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and take an additional fourth vow of free service to the least of our brothers and sisters.
It was in July 1981 that Fr. Richard Ho Lung, then a Jesuit priest teaching at St. George's College, was inspired by the Lord to begin a new religious order that would be dedicated to the works of mercy among the poor and abandoned people of Kingston.
For many years Fr. Richard had been praying and reflecting on the plight of the poor, the state of religious life in the Catholic Church and his own role in the drama of salvation for the people of Jamaica. The 1970s were perhaps the most turbulent decade in the history of modern Jamaica, and this was also the period of great change in the Catholic Church as she sought to update and renew herself and her mission in the world.
Fr. Richard felt a profound need to identify the areas of darkness that plagued Jamaica at that time, and that God was summoning him to do something about that darkness as his and the Church's response to the 'signs of the times'.
As a Jesuit he had been immersed in academia, but he felt it was not touching the reality of the suffering masses of Jamaicans oppressed by divisive and violent politics, laissez-faire capitalism, and a social fabric rent asunder spiritually and morally by all the current aberrations of post-modern Western culture.
And so, God sent him a tiny band of first disciples to begin the Missionaries of the Poor as a serious and substantial attempt to address these concerns and to assist the Church in her difficult task of renewal and adaptation.
With the blessings of the late Archbishop Samuel Carter of Kingston, Fr. Richard began Missionaries of the Poor as a "pious union", the official ecclesiastical title for a religious community in its incipient stage. Over the past 22 years, Missionaries of the Poor has evolved into a full-fledged religious institute of over 150 Brothers and priests, with another 90 in formation in its mission houses in India, The Philippines, Haiti and Uganda. Missionaries of the Poor is the first male religious order to be founded in the English-speaking Caribbean.
MONASTIC, COMMUNITARIAN LIFE
The Brothers live a monastic communitarian life in their three houses in Kingston and four overseas missions. The typical day begins in silence at 5:30 a.m. with just 15 minutes for personal ablutions before streaming into their chapels for morning prayer, Mass and meditation till 7: 15 a.m. Breakfast finds the Brothers still in silence until the "superior", or head of the community utters 'Deo Gratias', Latin for 'thanks be to God', at which the Brothers respond a like phrase also in Latin. Then begin daily corrections offered randomly by anyone who wishes to, and the day's assignments are discussed, problems identified and decisions taken before all head off to their various duties at 8:00 a.m.
There are many numbers of tasks the Missionaries of the Poor are committed to: from administration to teaching; from building and maintenance to gardening; from household chores such as cooking and cleaning to shopping and running errands. But primary and essential among these, and the one that engages the greatest number of Brothers, is the care of over 500 sick, abandoned and destitute men, women and children at their five centres for the homeless in the east-central part of down town Kingston.
Faith Centre, Jacob's Well, Good Shepherd, The Lord's Place, Bethlehem Home, are on the lips of bunches of Brothers as they pile into vans and trucks with their knap-sacks to spend the day caring for these forgotten ones of society: the mentally and physically handicapped, persons with AIDS, the abandoned, the aged. There is not one sullen face, not one harsh or plaintive word as these young energetic men cheerfully commit their entire beings voluntarily and without pay to a life of selfless, sacrificial service to the least of humanity.
SELF-DENIAL AND SERVICE
Religious life has always been a call to a life of self-denial and service. From the earliest centuries of the monastic communities that speckled the European continent, shaping and forming, civilising the waves of amorphous primitive Nordic tribes that converged and peopled the continent, and gave them what became known as Christendom or Christian culture; to the dramatic charisma of the Franciscans, the Dominicans and the Jesuits who traversed the globe with missionary fervour converting entire continents of peoples to the Christian Gospel, the Missionaries of the Poor dare seek to re-captivate the essential elements of this grand and noble tradition of Roman Catholicism.
The missionary aspect of their lives is inherent in its members as the overwhelming majority of Brothers come outside Jamaica: India, The Philippines, Kenya, Uganda, the United States; and closer to home, Belize, St. Lucia, Haiti, Dominica and Trinidad. And the catholicity is clearly evident in the fact that all the world's races are represented among the Brothers. But what really captivates is the fact that the Brothers take permanent vows to dedicate their lives fully to a life of evangelical poverty, chastity, obedience and free service, and to imbibe and embody the spirit and charisma of Jesus Christ through their founder, Fr. Richard Ho Lung. This is no mere Peace Corps volunteerism, or altruistic socialism or NGO humanitarianism. This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ writ large in the bodies, hearts and souls of men who could just as easily have opted for a life of self-seeking careerism, material pursuit, and instant personal gratification in its myriad of post-modern forms of our globalised world.
JESUS IN THEIR FACES
One cannot help but see Jesus Christ in the faces, hands and feet, in the long flowing white robes, of these men as they incarnate the life and ministry of Jesus in our Third Millennium world.
There is a passage of scripture from Matthew's gospel chapter 25, verses 31 to 46 that characterises the lives and spirit of the Missionaries of the Poor, and that the Brothers frequently site as the impetus for their actions. One cannot help but be in total agreement with them: that when all is said and done, no matter what brand of Christianity one espouses, finally it is how much you have loved that will win the day. And not the sensual, or even romantic love that has become so trite and banal in our contemporary hedonistic world, but the love that suffers, the love that sacrifices, the love that seeks no material or physical reward, except that of knowing that God is pleased and His Kingdom inches once more toward fulfilment. For as Christians, we believe that that is the only way man will be happy, that mankind will have achieved its purpose and that the world will truly attain that radiant and luminous life that God has destined for it from all eternity: Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
