I’ve spent most of the last three weeks on vacation, eight days of which I was in Hawaii. My family stayed on Maui, just north of Lahaina where life centers around and caters to the needs of tourists, but one day I slipped out of vacation mode, and took a day of study leave. I caught an early-morning ferry to the Island of Molokai, where I rented a rusty Schwinn and rode across the Island, from south to north, to where I could walk out onto the edge of a thousand-foot sea cliff and look down on the Kalaupapa peninsula where, in the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawaii established a colony within which to quarantine those stricken with Hanson’s disease, a condition more commonly known as leprosy.
The leper colony on Molokai is important historically because while the original settlement was established in 1865 without much in the way of proper medical care or administrative organization, in 1873, a young Flemish Roman Catholic priest named Damien arrived on the peninsula to work among the patients. Damien organized the colony, built suitable houses and a church, and acted as a nurse for those suffering from the disease. His ministry on the Kalaupapa peninsula cost Damien his life. The priest contracted Leprosy and died at the age of 49.
After Damien’s death, a Presbyterian missionary by the name of Charles McEwan Hyde, who was stationed in Honolulu, wrote a letter to a friend in which he criticized Damien, suggesting that the priest caught the disease through carelessness, unhygienic practices, and sexual impropriety with the patients under his care. In response, another Presbyterian, Robert Louis Stevenson, then living in Hawaii, penned a defense of Damien that is masterful in its rhetoric, terrifying in its ferocity, beautiful in its use of language and profound in its spiritual insight. I went to Molokai because I wanted to read Stevenson’s defense of Damien while sitting in the church Damien built on the Kapaupapa peninsula.
I didn’t make it. As much as life on Maui tends to cater to the whims of visitors to the Island, on Molokai, things are quite a bit less tourist-oriented. My original plan was to rent a motor scooter and ride to a trailhead where I could hike down into the colony, but the last motor scooter rental place on Molokai went out of business five years ago. Then I decided to rent a car, but I couldn’t find an available rental car on the island, and besides, I discovered that in order to go down to the Kapaupapa peninsula a visitor must ride a mule, and the mule train that day left an hour before my ferry arrived from Maui. So I had to rent a bike and settle for reading Stevenson’s essay while perched up on the cliff, which was just fine.
I rode up the Mauna Loa highway west out of Kaunakakai, Molokai’s largest town (which isn’t saying much), and then turned right and headed north past the mountain village of Kualapuu, where I stopped to drink a cup of coffee on the coffee shop’s lanai (what, in California we call a veranda), while a group of men played guitars and ukuleles, switching back and forth between traditional Hawaiian songs and the delta blues. I got back on my bike and continued uphill, past a place where cars are so rare that grass grows in the road’s pavement, to the lookout point where I sat and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s defense of the man the world eventually would know as Saint Damien of Molokai.
I believe every Presbyterian should read Stevenson’s defense of St. Damien, because in the essay, Stevenson presents and contrasts two ways to be a Presbyterian. One is insular, self-satisfied, and prudish while the other is open-minded, worldly, and humble. Stevenson’s pen makes the latter form of Presbyterianism seem appealing, and he does so with both righteousness and grace.
As I made my way down from the overlook to return my bike and catch the ferry home, I stopped to buy presents for my family at what appeared to be Molokai’s only touristy gift shop, where besides pooka shells and coral earrings they also sold used books. In a discount bin in front of the store I found a 2006 edition of the PCUSA Book of Order. Turns out it’s hard to escape Presbyterianism. This, in my estimation, is a good reason to try to be the right kind of Presbyterian, and because I want to be the right kind of Presbyterian I am grateful for guides like Robert, who, though a Catholic, still had a lot to teach Presbyterians, which is why I went to Molokai in the first place.
Ben
P.S. If you are interested in reading Stevenson’s essay on Father Damien, it can be found here.
