The Cynic Express(ed) 2.16: A Religious Missionary Visits

     I was going to write a nice, cynical piece about the papal visit to St. Louis, with all the pomp, circumstance, and memorabilia that the visit entails. For those of you outside of the shouting distance of the St. Louis officialdom, the visit entails talking heads, papal motorcades, parades, and tour shirts available at the local grocery store. Conveniently right next to the St. Louis Rams caps. I was going to wax eloquent about all the hassle that the Pope's visit provides, with the shutdown of the downtown and the American President, a member of a sect whose ancestors called John Paul II's predecessors whores of Babylon, popping by to try to recoup some sanctity. Then, of course, I realized that my disbelief in the impending celebrity-gawking really didn't matter much in the greater scheme of things and that it's easy to wear one's religion on one's sleeve and hop on a bus at one-thirty in the morning to see Mass conducted by a tiny figure at the fifty yard line of a domed stadium. It's quite another to do something about it.

     Graham Stewart Staines acted on his faith. A member of a suburban Baptist church in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, he heard a calling and went to help treat lepers in India. He did it for 34 years. Until a mob of Hindu nationalists, obviously not beneficiaries of his beneficence and probably not as good at dealing with the infirm, decided that they did not care for the fact that missionaries like to convert people. Saturday night, while Staines and two of his children slept in a Jeep outside a Protestant church in India, several young men doused the Jeep in gasoline and set it aflame. Staines and his two boys Philip, 10, and Timothy, 6, died.

     I won't go off at length about his attackers. A bunch of Shiva wanna-bes, behaving in the manner appropriate to mobs and gangs everywhere.

     Graham Staines lived life according to what he believed. Instead of carping eloquent about the problems within the world and what citizens of Western nations should do to bring up the average human experience, he made a difference to someone else. Someone he did not know, and someone not like him. Last I heard, that's what Christianity and charity does.

     It's not that the world needs another martyr. History and the Catholic calendar are too full of them already. Unfortunately, though, martyrdom gets the rest of us thinking about what convictions mean. It's something that the Pope tries but cannot capture; the harsh television lights wash out the substance of his encyclicals and exhortations.

     When the rest of St. Louis trades stories about the day the Pope came, I'll be living my life as near my convictions as I can. When the St. Louis papers relegate the story of Graham Stewart Staines to B7 so that they can get pictures of the Pope and the motorcade above and below the fold, I remember the sight of Staines and his blond-mopped boys. They looked like my brother and me at that age, Philip and Timothy. Captured by the camera and tangled on the Web at their church's Web site (http://www.ecn.net.au/~kenlane/missions.htm), they smiled at the possibilities their futures offered, where they would find happiness in doing good or doing well or just doing.

     So bear that in mind when the media presents the great pageantry of the Church's court and when Mayor Harmon of St. Louis, Vice President Gore, and President Clinton come to touch the hem of Pope John Paul II's robe. Think of Staines as the buck-makers deal papal posters and paraphernalia like sanctified baseball cards. Remember that in hellish places around the world, men and women of many faiths have stuck their arms elbow-deep in the suffering and try to make it better.