Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

INCONVINIENT PROPHETS

 Letter No. 34, November 1988

Dear Friends,

    It happens sometimes, reading a book, that you find written something you always thought or you always felt. Then you rejoice. It happened to me recently reading a collection of letters and articles written by Luigi Rocchi, a man who had passed all his life in bed because of a progressive paralysis.

He wrote: “The sick person is an inconvenient prophet who invites us to discover our inner self, who compels us to see our limits.” (Luigi Rocchi, “…tuo Luigi”, Edizioni Messaggero, Padova).

    Since many years, living with leprosy patients I am witnessing the truth of this statement. Nobody more than leprosy patients live and make evident the truthfulness of this statement. Nobody bears the consequences of this inconvenient prophetic role more than leprosy patients. In fact, if we ask why the leprosy patients had always been rejected, segregated and discriminated, also among sick people, the answer is: because their mutilations remind us immediately of our limits and our destiny to decay. They are the living image of death. Every one of us, instinctively and unconsciously, runs away from death and so we run away from leprosy patients, or we send them away. This is the psychological defence mechanism at the origin of the secular segregation and ostracism of leprosy patients.

    But, I would say, this is the mission given to them by God: to remind us that we are limited, vulnerable, and finite, that our body is bound to decay. No doubt, it is not an easy mission. It is like the mission of some of the Old Testament prophets who had to foretell unpleasant events to the people of Israel and particularly to their political and religious leaders, kings and priests. Remember, for example, what happened to the prophet Amos (7,12:15) when he went to tell the king, Jeroboam, that he had to die by sword and Israel had to go in exile.

    “That’s enough, prophet, go away,” told him Amaziah, the high priest,” go back to Judah and do your preaching there…Don’t prophesy here at Betel any more. This is the king place of worship, the national temple.” The answer of Amos is typical of those who have to prophesy without a clear title and without the honour of a prophet: “I was not a prophet and I am not a prophet’s son. But the Lord took me from my work as a shepherd and ordered me to come to prophesy to this people.”

    Unfortunately leprosy patients do not have a clear consciousness of this mission nor an order to speak, They do not know they are messengers. They are like those prophets of old who had been asked by God to do some symbolic action. Hosea (1) is asked to marry a prostitute, Isaiah (20) to go around naked, Jeremiah (27) to put a yoke on his neck. Like them leprosy patients are compelled to remind us that our body are decaying, that we are limited and precarious. They are uneasy and inconvenient prophets and so they are rejected, segregated and ostracised.

    The sick person is like a warning board stuck in the middle of the merry-go-round of our life, is a warning that human beings are vulnerable and precarious, that the body is bound to decay.

    If the leprosy patient is a message, Swarga Dwar wants to be a place to give voice to this message. Not just to spoil the feast of lie, but to remind us that death, inevitable as it is, is simply the gate of heaven, the beginning of true life. As Luigi Rocchi says in his book: “The sick makes us acknowledge what we really are: little precarious beings who can overcome their nothingness only by love, acknowledging that we are all brothers and sisters who need and can give help and love.”