By Thomas Merton

Extract from a letter to Jim Forest from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, dated February 21, 1966; the full text is published in The Hidden Ground of Love, edited by William Shannon; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1985.

Jim Forest is now Editor of In Communion, the journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

By Sr. Georgina Delgado op

Blessed Damien De Veuster, SS.CC.

Born               : January 3, 1840
Died                : April 15, 1889
Feast Day       : May 10

Molokai, known as the leper colony island of Hawaii, is located west of Maui, the island where I am presently stationed.

Since I first came here to Hawaii in 1982, I have been keeping this secret desire in my heart to see Father Damien’s grave and the place were he demonstrated the greatest act of love. My opportunity came when hundreds of people from other islands, the mainland and even Europe gathered in Molokai to celebrate the interment of Blessed Damien’s relics. But first let me tell you about Blessed Damien.

Damien De Veuster, a young Belgian priest, had served nine years as a missioner in the Hawaiian Islands when he felt called to request a perilous assignment. He asked his superiors that he be allowed to serve on the island of Molokai, the notorious leper colony.

Next year is the 20th anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. One of the great ‘saints’ of the century. Dorothy lived voluntarily in the slums of New York and from there her light has shone out throughout the world.

Dorothy Day of New York (1897-1980)

Dorothy Day helped found the Catholic Worker movement. She spent the last 48 years of her life as a Christian anarchist on the margins of society. In a church organized like a pyramid, her Catholic worker houses were small, informal and decentralized. She traveled alternative paths where other members of the church often found it difficult to go. “The only way to live in any true security”, she would point out, “is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose. “

By Sr. Ma. Fe Sobrevega, MMS

Sr. Fe is from New Lucena, Iloilo. She is the youngest of six children. She graduated from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City with a Bachelor of Science degree in Pharmacy in 1956. After taking the board exam, she joined the Medical Mission sisters in Philadelphia, U.S.A. She was one of the first Filipinos to join this congregation.