Service for the U.U. Church of
Winchendon, Massachusetts
(based on, The Colony, by John Tayman)
April 29, 2007
The Rev. Jennie Ann Barrington
The Morning Reading (from, The Colony, by John Tayman; see the preface):
"For 103 years, beginning in 1866 [which was the year our church was founded and built], the Hawaiian and then American governments forcibly removed more than eight thousand people to a remote and inaccessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and into one of the largest leprosy colonies in the world. The governments did so in the earnest belief that leprosy was rampantly contagious, that isolation was the only effective means of controlling the disease, and that every person it banished actually suffered from leprosy and was thus a hopeless case. On all three counts, they were wrong. With the establishment of the colony on Molokai, officials initiated what would prove to be the longest and deadliest instance of medical segregation in American history, and perhaps the most misguided. In 1865 . . . the Hawaiian king signed [a law which criminalized the disease. The law remained in effect until mid-1969, when it was finally repealed.] Under the law, persons suspected of having the disease were chased down, arrested, subjected to a cursory exam, and exiled . . . In the early days of the colony, the government provided virtually no medical care, a bare subsistence of food, and only crude shelter. The patients were judged to be civilly dead, their spouses granted summary divorces, and their wills executed as if they were already in the grave . . . Leprosy is not a fatal disease. Neither is it highly infectious. It is a chronic illness caused by a bacterium, and communicable only to persons with a genetic susceptibility, less than 5 percent of the population. Transmission takes place… through airborne particles expelled by someone with leprosy in an active state. Among untreated patients, only a minority have the disease in its active state; the majority are not contagious. For cases that are active, a multi-drug therapy has been developed that quickly renders their leprosy noncommunicable, after which they pose no risk of infection and are, in essence, cured. Every city in America has such cases; in the New York metropolitan area, for instance, more than a thousand people have or have had the disease. There are currently eleven federally funded outpatient clinics in the United States treating approximately seven thousand patients, although health officials believe many sufferers go untreated because of the powerful stigma attached to the disease. Though modern medicine has stripped the illness of its horrors, on a social level leprosy remains among the most feared of all diseases, since untreated leprosy can result in deformity, its precise mode of transmission was until recently unknown, and a cure remained undiscovered for thousands of years. The greatest factor in the stigmatization, however, was the historical intertwining of leprosy with religious notions of divine punishment, which gave rise to the corrosive idea that victims of the disease were sinful, shameful, and unclean. The preferred method of dealing with such people was obvious: banishment."
The morning sermon:
It's been an emotionally-taxing two weeks for us since I was last in the pulpit-- We haven't had the chance to talk about the massacre at Virginia Tech, nor Don Imus' hurtful comments about the women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team-- Overhanging everything else is the fact that we are now in our sixth year of being at war. And we should talk about these events that are painful to hear about-- painful to the spirit. And all the while, I've been reading about leprosy-- the truth about leprosy-- which is, in fact, the truth about our kin.
The word, "leper" is in the Bible 23 times-- If you add in the words, "leprosy," and "leprous," you get 67 times. Most of those sentences also include the word, "unclean." But the word, "bless" is in the Bible at least twice that many times-- If you add in "blessed," "blessedness," "blesseth," and "blessing(s)," there's more than a full page in my concordance of the words in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. So as I stand here this morning, having heard all month people's expressions of sadness and their questions as to what we are to do in the midst of spiritual pain, my feeling is that, as religious people, we must, not curse, but bless our fellow human beings-- That, rather than designating other people as inherently sinful, in need of banishment, that reconciliation and healing are what the world needs now-- beginning with the words and deeds we choose to use in any random, unremarkable interaction.
Initially, I did not want to look at the topic of leprosy any more than you do-- believe me-- I simply happened on this new book by John Tayman, called, The Colony, a few weeks ago, while I was on a ministers' retreat in Connecticut. I picked it up, bristled at the topic, put it down again, felt compelled to pick it up again and read the back, set it down and walked around the aisle, went back to it and opened it up this time-- You know how that goes-- The topics we, morally, ought most to be looking at are the topics we most avoid looking at. But as it happened, I, coincidentally, had a small sore I felt concerned and confused about, yet too ashamed of to talk about with my colleagues on the retreat. The sore went away in less than a week. But that day in the bookstore, I didn't know that it would. All of us, at one time or another, develop sores or blemishes, most of which simply heal by themselves with time. But, as this morning's reading tells us, it was the practice for over 100 years for people suspected of having leprosy to be banished to Molokai to a life of exile and to be left for dead. For all such people, the chance to achieve their full human potential and participate fully in society was taken away from them. Moreover, that practice of exiling people simply because they were blemished was based on religious reasons. I don't enjoy highlighting ways Biblical scripture is wrong-- There is so much in Biblical scripture that is affirming, comforting, community-enhancing, and empowering-- But when a minister learns of a way that our religious history was, historically, so terribly wrong and hurtful, that minister is compelled to speak the truth and let history stand corrected. We could assume that no one in this room has leprosy-- But we don't know that for certain, do we? Nor do we know that no one in this room has a loved-one who has leprosy. And the moral imperative that the truth about leprosy shows us is that we must not stigmatize a category of people as less than fully human-- even when no one in that category is in the room-- in fact, especially when no one in that category is in the room.
–because what if that person being spoken of degradingly was you or me? As we said together in this morning's responsive reading, we are "each a single cell in a body of four million cells. The body is humankind." This week when over 59,000 people answered Newsweek's poll question, "Do you believe NBC and CBS were right to have fired radio personality Don Imus?" only 23% said, "yes;" 74% said, "no." It bothered me to read those poll results. Don Imus –publicly, and to millions of listeners-- called the women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team "whores." He used slang to do so, but that's what he said and meant. Even worse, he believed it was funny to do so. After making the slanderous insult, he didn't realize he'd said anything wrong. But his insult was so uncalled for this time that it caused many of us to look at his pattern of slanderous insults and find a long consistent line of racism, misogyny, and bigotry. "Enough is enough already," virtually all his public supporters said. Newsweek columnist Ellis Cose wrote of the vile incident that [04/23/07, p. 35], "In too many cases, it seems, Imus sees blacks that he does not know personally as something other than complete human beings-as things that can be dissed and dismissed without his having to know anything more about them than the color of their skin." That's exactly what has been done to anyone stigmatized with the label, "leper--"
--being treated as something less than completely human; as a thing that can be dissed and dismissed without having to know anything more about them than blemishes on their skin. Though the exiles on Molokai were left to die, they survived to form a loving spiritual community that comforted one another's sorrows and celebrated each other's joys. After visiting Molokai in 1907, Jack London described it as, "a happy colony, divided into two villages and numerous country and seaside homes, of nearly a thousand souls. They have six churches, a YMCA building, several assembly halls, a band stand, a race track, baseball grounds and shooting ranges, an athletic club, numerous glee clubs, and two brass bands." [p. 203] In his preface, John Tayman writes, "Their struggle to maintain faith, form a loving community, and help one another stay alive is one of the most extraordinary acts of enduring heroism in American history."
The practice of banishing people suspected of having leprosy is based on the book of Leviticus, which sets forth religious laws, crimes, and punishments. Chapter 13 of Leviticus says, in part: "When a man is afflicted with leprosy, he shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall make an examination… The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry, 'Unclean, unclean.' He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp." Moses conveyed this practice to the Israelites saying it was divinely ordained. John Tayman writes [p. 95-98]: "With that message of unsympathetic ostracism, Moses is considered by medical historians to have laid the foundation of lepraphobia. More than 3,000 years later… the Bible remained the most useful authority on how to combat leprosy. This approach contained a significant flaw, however: the lepers in the Bible did not have leprosy… their symptoms were more likely an indication of boils, scabies, psoriasis, or some other defacing disease… In fact, a biblical leper might not actually be sick, but merely a sinner in the opinion of the priest… scholars have determined that priests likely viewed any skin disorder as a sign that someone had offended God, and had been punished with a sinful mark. In the context of the Bible, this blurring of boundaries between medical and ethical diagnoses had one critical consequence: almost all skin conditions became stigmatized… Then, in the eleventh century, an Italian monk began to translate existing medical texts into a consolidated Latin text, which eventually became the standard literature for physicians in the West. When the Christian monk encountered the clinically correct description for the disease judham, he consulted his Bible, pondered a moment, and affixed the word lepra to the description [the word lepra had come to mean ritually impure] . With a few strokes of ink 2,000 years of biblical stigma was permanently transferred onto the disease." In short, to treat someone as though they are a "leper" is to treat them as though they are inherently sinful, and as though that inherent sinfulness is contagious. I share this story of the hurtful misuse of religion with you this morning because it's true. When our words and deeds are based on errors, we can cause our kin to feel less than fully human. When we know the truth, we can act respectfully and mercifully toward our kin.
Who, in our society today, is treated as though they are less than fully human? We each can imagine a list in our heads-- I would imagine many foster children feel they are on that list. And I think of people I've known whose speech is imprecise and so strangers frequently think they are inebriated-- But they aren't; they have multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy, or they have had a stroke. As many of you know, my main connection to this subject matter is the work I've done, for over ten years now, with people who were locked in institutions --originally called institutions for the "feeble-minded"—because of a diagnosis of intellectual impairment. Those diagnoses were often wrong-- perhaps the child communicated differently-- was deaf, even-- but was not of below average intelligence—and was blessed with such wonderful gifts and graces and talents-- "So they shouldn't ever have been there," people say to me when I tell them what I've seen. "No, they shouldn't have-- But no one deserved to be there," I respond. And I think of the fact that, during my years in Maine, people of French Canadian descent hid their ethnic background, and hid the fact that they could speak French fluently-- because historically in Maine, people of French Canadian descent were made fun of as though they were unintelligent, irresponsible, and even as though they were less clean. Prejudicial stereotypes like that have no basis in truth; they are simply prejudicial stereotypes that hurt people to the core of their being. Every person wants to be able to feel like a whole, full person deserving of dignity and respect. When the sanitation workers in our country went on strike in March of 1968, they wore placards that said, in large block letters, not civil rights or workers' rights, but, "I Am A Man."
Leprosy is now called Hansen's disease, named after the Norwegian bacteriologist who first identified the germ that causes leprosy. A cure was finally found in the 1940s by a doctor named Guy Faget, working in a colony of people with leprosy in Louisiana called Carville. In the following years, most of the people exiled in Hawaii became healed and were allowed to leave-- some of them for the first time in decades. [see pp. 260-61] A new superintendent was appointed, former governor Lawrence Judd, an unusually kind man. Of the people who chose to stay, Judd wrote, "They preferred to live out their remaining years in the pleasant peninsula where life was semi-secure, and where nobody stared." Judd made radical changes to the colony so patients could live in dignity. It had been the practice that residents were prohibited from mailing money to relatives, for fear of tainted bills; outgoing mail was disinfected; outgoing luggage was fumigated with formaldehyde; and physical contact between patients and staff was forbidden. Lawrence Judd literally tore down the barriers and fences between staff and patient areas, including in the chapel. "This place isn't like a jail anymore!" one patient exclaimed to a reporter. And another said, "You cannot imagine how much a simple thing like a fence and railing coming down meant to me. That gave us a feeling that we . . . almost belonged to the human race again." One of the exiles whose leprosy was cured [though he remained blind] and left the Hawaiian colony was a man named Makia Malo. He met a woman named Ann Grant, who had visited the colony some years earlier as a tourist. She helped him schedule public speaking and storytelling engagements in which he educated people about his disease, including for schoolchildren. They began dating, fell in love, and married. [See pp. 302-4] "One day at one of Makia's performances a woman approached Ann. 'I didn't know your husband was a leper,' she said. Ann stared at the woman and replied, 'He's not. He's a person, a man. And my husband.' Later Ann would write, 'Please know that using the word leper in any way, for any reason, is inflicting pain and humiliation of a most singular kind on those who have had the disease and on their loved ones.' She often quoted a speech by a person who had had leprosy [as saying]: 'The hell of this disease is that for the rest of your life and regardless of lab reports showing your body is cured, it is the public who will never let you heal . . . Over and over that word reduces us to a disease we had as children and [reduces us] into a generic term for everything repugnant, disgusting, and unworthy of membership in the human race. And all we did, our big crime, is that years ago we caught a germ."
When we look at a modern translation of the Bible today, and see the word, "kin," the ancient translation of that word was, "flesh." The earliest Jewish and Christian peoples were learning by heart the religious laws dictating that "lepers" be banished. Even as they were learning that, their prophets and seers were proclaiming that we are all of one flesh-- The Old Testament prophet Isaiah literally sang, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? …to share your bread with the hungry… and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" We would now say, "not to turn away from our own kin." "Then [Isaiah sang] shall your healing spring up speedily… that which is divine shall guide you continually… and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail." I think of a modern-day seer who sings for us the same hope for a healed humanity: "And when the brokenhearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer-- Let it be-- For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see-- There will be an answer-- Let it be-- Speaking words of wisdom-- Let it be-- And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me-- Shines until tomorrow-- Let it be-- There will be an answer-- Let it be--