Twenty-eight years ago, I met a
quiet 11 year old girl named Juana. I was on my first missionary trip to rural
Mexico, and Juana was to serve as our guide through the farm lands that we had
been assigned to visit. She was the 3rd of 9 children of the family who lived
at the foot of the hill of the small church we were staying in for those 18 sweltering
July nights as we preached the gospel to the good people of a village called
Monte Adentro. Every night we offered a catechesis in the church and every
night some would travel as far as 2 or 3 miles by foot, sometimes bare foot, to
come and hear the nightly catechesis. When the lessons and liturgy were over, they would
return to their homes in the dark of the night hoping that the clouds would
dissipate so that the stars would illuminate their way home and they wouldn’t
have to waste the battery of their old flashlights. In the morning, Juana would
take us out to their farms where we would visit these good people living in the
poorest of conditions. She rarely spoke. We would just follow her and when we
arrived at a farm she would tell us who lived there...and that’s it. When we
returned at midday to the church, Juana would go back home and resume her
chores: drawing water from the nearby well, sweeping her house, looking after
her many rambunctious little brothers, and helping her pregnant mother with her
newborn sister because her 16 year old sister had eloped the night that we had
arrived. Juana never spoke of it. She never spoke much of anything except
living the gospel with her actions at such a young age.
Juana has to be 39 years old now,
and I still remember how she taught me how to be a missionary without uttering
a word. Preach the gospel always, St. Francis said, if necessary use words.
Juana didn’t need them. She guided us through muddy pastures, under barbed
wired fences, across a very dangerous highway, and took us to visit some sick
and dying people that no 11 year old should be exposed to. But she carried
herself with the quiet dignity that I could only compare to the Virgin Mary who
rarely spoke as well. Juana had no aspirations to leave her village even though we all wanted to adopt her and bring her to the States. She just
went about her days doing good works. I spent three summers with her family. As
she got older she acquired a bit more spunk, and even joined the other missionaries
in ribbing me which was a pastime during those high school summers which are
probably the happiest summers of my life.
Juana, her family, and the people
of that village taught me the meaning of the words of today’s gospel: “whoever
wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first
among you will be the slave of all.”
Being a missionary and taking the gospel to the poor played such an
important part in my discernment to be a priest. These holy people were certainly not the
greatest nor the first in the eyes of the world, but their faith was so
tangible, so unwavering, and so alive.
They weren’t very expressive and didn’t show much emotion, but they
truly saw any missionary that walked into their village as an emissary from God
himself. There’s a word for that:
angels. And my fellow missionaries and I
were far from being angels. I remember
every summer there was a venting session about 10 days into the trip because by
that time we were getting on each other’s nerves, but it didn’t detract from
our goal of sharing the Good News. We
always said that we would go on missions for selfish reasons because we always
received more from these holy, simple people than anything we could possibly
give them.
Being a missionary is indeed an
essential part of being a Christian. On
this World Mission Sunday, we pray for missionaries throughout the world that
sacrifice so much for the sake of the gospel, some even putting their lives at
risk to bring Christ to the darkest corners of the earth putting even their own lives in peril. We may not be called to go off to
foreign countries, but we are definitely called to be a missionaries wherever
we go. We should always carry the
presence of Christ with us and do so quietly, but powerfully like that little
girl Juana who I encountered all those years ago. Our witness is what allows us to change the
world: by being the least among our brothers and sisters. We definitely did not change
Monte Adentro in so much as Monte Adentro changed us. We experienced a slice of heaven every time
we visited, and we’ve been trying to bring that slice back home with us ever
since.
