“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20).
The other day I came across an interesting story about Saint Peter Claver. In the 17th century, Saint Peter Claver, who was a Spanish Jesuit priest decided to travel to the Indies and save “millions of perishing souls”. When he arrived in Colombia, the country received over ten thousand salves annually. During a time when the general consensus was that slavery was a good thing for the economy, Saint Peter Claver fought to abolish the slave trade. He set himself the task of serving the slaves, because Saint Peter Claver saw slaves as the people of the Beatitudes, the “rejected, abused, hungry...” As the slavers would arrive into the harbour, Saint Peter Claver would rush to the ships, board them and begin caring for the sick. During his ministry Saint Peter Claver baptised over 300,000 people…
And I have been thinking of that today. Because when we think of a slaving ship in modern times e fail to consider what it would have been like for a person to enter the ship.
Those ships smelled very bad. Human slaves were chained up below deck without access to bathrooms or showers. They were often terribly sea sick and were forced to throw up where they stood in their chains for months on end. They were treated worse than animals as the ground beneath them was not even cleaned. The dead – and there were many dead each voyage – were tossed over the side of the ship as though they were rubbish to be disposed of. And the smell below decks would have been so terribly overpowering that we could not imagine it in modern terms. It was effectively an open sewer with hundreds of unwashed human bodies standing up inside it for months at a time.
And Saint Peter Claver saw that and smelled that and heard the words of God, when “Jesus lifted up His eyes on His disciples, and said: ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” (Luke 6:20-26).
And I have been thinking about that in the context of my own little life with its own insignificant little problems. And I have been reflecting on the actions of a Saint like Saint Peter Claver. You see, he understood that the poor and the hungry and the reviled were covered in slime and smelling terrible.
And I wonder, if I would be able to hear the word of God if I ever became distracted by the smell… I just wonder…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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