So What's So Terrible About Being a Leper?

This is the question put to a friend who called the other night. He said he felt like a leper in certain circumstances. He had returned to a former area in which he had public recognition in an ecclesial way, and he liked it that people called him by his title--since he is now in a different area, rather in a kind of exile.

But leprosy is a disease not caused by wrong-doing, wrong choices, sin. There is a difference in that aspect; yet it is how people do perceive the type of afflictions that others have, which makes his issue painful for him, obviously.

I reminded him that Jesus loves the lepers; He heals them.

We also brought up that he liked being in an area where people knew him from his past and called him by his "title." We discussed how this can be, even in the Church--and why it is so hard to simply be lepers, to be rather undesirable to a certain mode or strata. Is it a need for approval? A subconscious desire for recognition?

I mentioned my brief web search and the results. Shared the one man from Canada who tossed his career for now and was going out into the relative wilderness to live, to get close to God, to be a hermit. This man not once mentioned trying to gain a title or be approved or public. We do not know the outcome; he is now hidden from the eyes of men and silently preaching Christ by his life. We may never know anything more of this private Catholic hermit; or he may emerge later on, and write a book, or become public, or become a priest, or not. For now, he seems to have desired nothing and has chosen to be nothing, at least not to the world.

So, I asked again, "What's so bad about being a leper?"--considering that all through Scripture and in the lives of saints, we find souls who struggle with afflictions and sin, and are loved and healed. We read the first shall be last, and to be meek, and to not seek after acclaim but to pound our chests and cry out: Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I am a sinner!

He said he'd think about it. He liked the idea that we have choices, and the choice involves being of one world or the other or strattling both. It is true that some are called to the world of the Church, but he is not in the way he still seems to desire, to have the title and the notice, to be approved. He admits he goes back and forth with this, which is human. I did that for years. It might hit again, the thought that I need some kind of approval, but I kinda doubt it. The sheer repugnance of even having my name and defamed character cleared in the newspaper sent me into shock, and now the letter is going to be pulled. As long as others do not act in a criminal manner based upon their ill thoughts of me, I don't mind what they choose to think.

St. Bruno did not hang around for public recognition or approval. When the Benedictine monastery wasn't hidden enough, and not quite the charism he sensed for himself within and from God, he and his six companions traipsed further into the Alps. He melted into the snow.