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Spirituality of the Order of Malta
Servant Leadership – Called to be Mystics, Prophets, Witnesses – Meeting Jesus in the Other
By Paul E. Carrier, S.J., Ph.D., ChM
For the past 18 years, I have experienced first-hand the dynamic spirituality of the Order of Malta. It all began with a request from Boston College President Fr. Donald Monan, S.J. to offer a day of recollection for the Dames. When I left Boston College for Fairfield University in 1988, I was happy to receive a new invitation from Ann Peabody, and there followed a number of days of recollection. Over the years, I have traveled with the Malta auxiliary to Ecuador and Haiti and participated in the Lourdes pilgrimage. With Hope Carter, I have traveled with the Lourdes youth pilgrimage with meaningful visits to Loyola and Monstserrat. I am very grateful to have received valuable support from members of the Order, especially, Mary and Bob McCooey, and Dr. Dick Milone during a family crisis.
It is through Hope Carter and Tom and Betty Flynn that I have come to know the significant work of CRUDEM in Milot, Haiti, and I now travel regularly to Cap Haitien, Haiti to support the work of a Fairfield University graduate Doug Perlitz and his Pierre Toussaint project for street children. Doug is now in is tenth year living and working in Cap Haitien. I celebrated the 25th wedding anniversary of Jeanie and Tom Tisdale in April in Cap Haitien, with the children of Project Pierre Toussaint and the Tisdale's sons Kyle and Gavin.
Many students at Fairfield University volunteer at Malta House in Norwalk, Connecticut. As part of our Homelessness course, Tim Cummings, a Fairfield graduate of the class of 2003, has just arrived in Haiti to live and work with Doug as a new Malta sponsored missionary, and last January, I was with the Knights and Dames in Obedience on retreat here at the Jesuit Residence.
Because of these and many other relationships and experiences, I have been enriched and challenged.
Many of my closest friends and companions in ministry are members of the Order, and for that I am very grateful.
I hope that these reflections will be a meditation among friends, a prayerful reminder of who we are and who God calls us to be: servant leaders, mystics, prophets, witnesses, meeting Jesus in the other, the sick and the poor. There is a story told that is very relevant in light of the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina about a person praying, heart broken from the pain and injustice in the world; "Dear God," he cried out, "Look at all the suffering, anguish and distress in the world. Why don't you do something? How can you allow this?" God responded, "I did do something, I made you."
In God's divine Providence, God made you; God created the Order of Malta to be his special instrument of healing and compassion. As a religious community in the Catholic Church, you have centuries of experience to reflect upon, looking to the lives of the saints of the Order, beginning with Blessed Gerard.
In his book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Thomas Woods recounts the reaction of a German priest after a visit to the Order's hospital in Jerusalem in 1080. "The house feeds so many individuals outside and inside and it gives so huge an amount of alms to poor people, either those who come to the door or those who remain outside that certainly the total expenses can in no way be counted." That same magnanimity continues today all over the world.
The Order of Malta is the elder sibling of all religious orders and communities in service to the poor and the sick, in company with St. Vincent de Paul and so many others, including St. Ignatius Loyola. We read that in the Roman winter of famine of 1538, St. Ignatius and his companions went out and gathered the beggars and the starving people and brought them together. For the sick and poor of Rome he founded the Society of Orphans, and for prostitutes, the House of St. Martha.
You have much to be grateful for from your history, much to dream about for the future. Now is our time, now is our challenge—it begins with each one of us as servant leaders. Jesus is our model of what a servant leader is like.
Each day Jesus retreated from the demands of serving others to be prayerfully alone with God. Then he was better able to come back and minister to those most in need of his care:
• He turned no one away, and he didn't try to do it all by himself. He reached out and lifted up the downcast, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the poor, people of ill repute.
• He valued the contribution of those who labored only for an hour as well as those who toiled through the heat of the day.
• He proclaimed that it was the heretic Samaritan who showed true compassion to one in need.
• He honored the prodigal son and made him equal to the elder brother who never ventured from home or duty.
• He ordered the outcasts from the highway and the byways to come to the banquet.
• He placed as great a value on a single lost sheep as on the entire flock.
• He expanded the concept of humanity to include our enemies; his followers were to love their enemies.
And Jesus reaches out to each of us, in our struggles, darkness and fear, each of us without exception; even in the midst of our deepest pity, Jesus is there to lift us up so that we can do the same for each other. How can you tell a servant leader is at work? Ask. Do the people around the person grow?
As Servant leaders, people of the Beatitudes, we express the qualities of empathy and unqualified acceptance. We live our servant leadership as we grow as mystics, prophets and witnesses. All of us are called to an intimate, personal relationship with God,
That is what a mystic is, a person in touch with God. Our experience of God depends a lot on our images, and concepts. Is God for us a taskmaster, ready and eager to punish and correct? Or is God the tender mercy that nothing be lost. Our lives as mystics invite us to reconsider who we think God is, to come to know God as the one who cares, who loves us beyond our wildest dreams. What else could Hildegard of Bingen mean when she wrote, "God hugs you, you are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God." Or Julian of Norwich, "the fullness of joy is to behold God in everything." Or Meister Eckhart, "Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion."
New images of God empower us by helping us see that God has a new grammar and math that is inclusive, welcoming of all sinners and outcasts into the Kingdom.
To be a prophet is to care what God cares about; healing and mending creation. The prophet sees with God's eyes and feels with God's heart. As prophets we know that we must and can do things differently. We can say no to all that goes against God's dream for the world. We can say yes to all that nurtures and protects and defends human life. As prophets we come to realize that no injustice is trite; that we cannot allow our lifestyles to numb us to the reality of the pain and suffering around us, or isolate us from the people who need us most. We are called to hear the cry of the poor and to respond.
To be a witness is to testify with our lives to someone we have experienced, the Risen Lord. St. John tells us in his first letter, "Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our own eyes, that we have watched, and touched with our own hands, the Word who is life."
The apostles, as friends of Jesus, were the first witnesses. They walked with Jesus; talked with him; fished with him; prayed with him. We too are his witness. Every age is immediate to God. No time is holier or closer to God. The world needs our profession to what we have seen, proclaiming what we have heard, testifying to what has touched us. If we were arrested today for being Catholic would there be enough evidence to convict us?
As members of the Order of Malta, you have a privileged moment in which to experience Jesus' presence in your service to the sick and the poor, the other, and the stranger.
Fr. Pedro Arrupe, former head of the Jesuits, a key influence in my life as a Jesuit, reminded us in his writings that the poor, the suffering and the disadvantaged stand at the very center of our concern. He challenged us to realize that the poor person is the one without a voice, the last in line, ignored and forgotten. He challenged us, whether we were involved in university work, or any other ministry, that in order to understand the condition of the poor, it is necessary to experience it first-hand. Without it, abstract theory and grand resolves are of little use.
Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, another key influence in my journey as a Jesuit and a priest, with whom I was able to live and work for a summer before I was ordained, teaches that we must serve and befriend those who appear to us as strange, different, the unwanted and lonely. He reminds us that we all have handicaps, some are more physical than others.
Charles Peguy the French philosopher wrote, "When we come to the end of our pilgrimage and reach heaven, God will ask, Where are the others?" We never go to God alone!
As servant leaders, mystics, prophets and witnesses, we reach out to the other, as Jesus did through our ministry of presence and hospitality:
Presence—the simple experience of being with and for the other person, to stand with and walk with. Helen Keller once wrote of her experience of personal presence, "The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me, I have met people so empty of joy that when I clasped their frosty hands it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others, there are, whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart."
Which are we, northeast storm or sunbeams? Perhaps we are a northeast storm because of DDD, delight deficiency disorder. The symptoms are feelings of anger, irritability, aggression and impatience. The antidote, to enjoy life, to laugh, to become more comfortable with how little control we really have. We don't want our epitaph to read, "Got everything done, died anyway!" Remember some people brighten a room by leaving it.There must be something that kicks in each day that keeps us from dying from amazement and something that keeps us from dying of a broken heart.
Hospitality—is a daily process of transformation. It is to live more and more as a channel of grace and love, to focus love in every gesture and movement of my life, or as Thoreau says, "to affect the quality of the day, to make miracles happen through the enthusiasm of my living and loving, to say, I am going to live today on purpose." Life as hospitality is a celebration of all I am and all I have is a gift, undeserved and unearned. Hospitality has more to do with the resources of a generous and grateful heart than the availability of food and space. There is always abundance when we share, and even just a cup of cold water.
Our ministry of hospitality is lived with the passion to gather in, to include, to make people feel that they belong and are important. Life as hospitality is expressed fully in the life of Jesus, who welcomed the outcast, who identified with the sick and the stranger. Jesus practiced total inclusion, a radical table fellowship that knew no exceptions. The God of Jesus, revealed in his all-embracing love, knows no boundaries and no borders. We all have moments when we have shared or experienced hospitality, moments to recall and to appreciate.
In June, while visiting Doug and the kids in Cap Haitien, I witnessed the hospitality of Jesus, as I saw Doug reach out and make miracles happen, against incredible odds. It was a miracle involving a boy named Tidou, who one day was taken to the city hospital because he was bleeding internally from unknown causes. He was near death. During the five days I was there, Doug made frequent visits to the hospital, checking with doctors and nurses at every shift change, making sure tests were done, results looked at. Doug was God's pit bull. Without hesitation Doug gathered eight volunteers, kids and staff to give blood for TiDou. In fact, he was so successful in gathering the donors that The Red Cross offered to hire him. They had never had so many people donate blood at one time.
Before I left, TiDou was up and about; he had turned the corner of his crisis. Without Doug's steady presence and persistence, I have no doubt that TiDou would have died. But that isn't all, Doug's hospitality has incredible peripheral vision. He doesn't miss anyone. While giving his all to TiDou, Doug noticed another young boy three beds over, emaciated from hunger, with bed sores, neglected and alone. He had been there for two weeks. No money, no treatment. Doug brought me over to him, and took me aside and said, "I've talked to the nurses and I am going to pay for his tests and medicine." There was that look in his eyes that said I am going to beat this lousy system. Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Every time we meet a person different from ourselves, not from our world, from our network of relationships, our hearts are stretched, our world transformed. Our spiritual growth, our conversion to a life of unconditional love and service depends on and is nurtured by moments of deep personal communion, experiences that happen at a shelter, in a prison, a hospital, a nursing home, or a school. These encounters make us rethink our priorities and redefine our commitments. We stretch our circles of care and compassion. We do perceive from where we stand.
The challenge we face each day is for us to go out of our way, to take chances, to expand our boundaries, to include the other, the victim and to let God touch us through them. They become sacraments of God's presence. They are the distressing disguise of Jesus.
As Christians we know it is not enough that we do no harm to others. Jesus asks us to help alleviate each other's suffering and pain, to bear each other's burdens. There is no greater gift we can give someone other than the assurance that we are fellow sufferers, and fellow companions, making room in our lives for the other, in good times and in bad, knowing that we are not alone.
How have we changed and been transformed because of our friends in Bridgeport and Norwalk, in Haiti and Lourdes? See the effect of hearing about Doug's kids had on seven year old Jacob Russell. This is the letter he wrote to family and friends before his first communion.
Dear Family and Friends,
Instead of gifts for me, please make a donation to Haiti and to Doug. Doug's boys don't have enough money.
Thank you,
Love, Jacob
He gave all $700 of his first communion money! With that kind of money Jacob could have bought a lot of DVD's and even a few ipods. In closing I would like to offer a couple of practical recommendations. As we meet the "other" in the many ministries of the Order, let's give each person we meet the triple AAA treatment; attention, affirmation and appreciation. Let our presence be one of respectful listening and a compassionate response. And sometimes that response is simply a compassionate silence. In addition, we should persevere in our lives as servant leaders, and not succumb to compassion fatigue, let us remember the checklist offered by Fr. Dean Brackley, S.J., who teaches at the Jesuit University in El Salvador and does pastoral ministry among the poor: the need for community, for support and challenge
✓ regular contact with poor and suffering people
✓ daily prayer and contemplation
✓ regular community worship
✓ spiritual accompaniment
✓ a simple life style
✓ regular rest and recreation
✓ need for study
✓ sense of humor
We are all in this for the long haul, and the vocation and ministry we share is forcefully expressed in a prayer by David Butler, a prayer which we used on a prayer card celebrating the new Project Pierre Toussaint community members, but which applies to all the works of the Order of Malta,
I will change your names.
You will no longer be called wounded, outcast, lonely or afraid.
I will change your names.
Your new name will be confidence, joyfulness, overcoming one, faithfulness, friend of God, one who seeks my face.
This talk was given by Father Paul E. Carrier, S.J., Ph.D., ChM.
Father Carrier is a Magistral Chaplain of the Order of Malta and the head of Campus Ministry at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut
