Glenmary Missioners, like the Fourth Wise Man,
meet Christ in the poor and neglected

While Christmas is a season of great joy, it’s also one of the busiest times of the year with lists to check and deadlines to meet. I confess that there have been many years that I’ve started the New Year with a sigh of relief instead of a prayer of thanksgiving for the celebration of Jesus’s birth and the mystery of God-with-us.

So this year I am taking a different approach. Following Father Dan Dorsey’s suggestion in the Winter 2004 Glenmary Challenge, I read the story of The Other Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke (Ballantine Books). It helped me focus on the real meaning of Christmas and provided me with a powerful image for explaining how our missioners approach their ministry.

As you read this letter and my retelling of this story, I invite you,to consider a gift to Glenmary this year. I hope that, like me, you will see each of our missioners as a “fourth wise man” and your gift like the “jewels” he intends for the Christ Child—but gives away to help those in need.

Van Dyke’s story centers on Artaban, a Persian physician who, upon sighting the bright star in the East, sells all he has to buy three precious jewels to give to the long-promised king now born to the Jews.

Hastening to join three fellow Magi for the journey to Judea, he pauses to help a dying man—and he is left behind. (Already I am thinking about our Father John Brown’s notorious reputation for being late because whenever he encounters someone along the way who needs immediate assistance—a ride to the doctor, a voucher for emergency food, whatever—he stops to help.)

So Artaban sets out alone. But on this journey to Bethlehem, he stops time and time again to tend to the sick who desperately need his skills. He also gives away his jewels—one after another—in order to help others. (Here I can’t help but think of our Brother Vincent Wilmes who just died in August at 89. His near zero bank balance told the story of how, month after month of his 64 years in Glenmary, he spent all of his meager personal allowance reaching out to the poorest of the poor.)

After traveling for 33 years, Artaban finally arrives in Judea just in time to hear that “The King of the Jews” is about to be crucified. As he laments his failure to personally meet this Christ, Our Lord tells Artaban in a vision that he has already met the promised King in each of the naked, the sick, and the forgotten that he had helped along the way.

I challenge you this Christmas to follow the example of this “other wise man” and to give away your “jewels” to help Glenmary help the poor and forgotten that populate our home mission areas. Your gift will assure that missioners like Father John Brown can continue to minister to the least of our brothers and sisters.

During the 12 years that Father John worked in Idabel, Okla., the people living on the fringes of the community knew they had an ally at the Glenmary mission. People in need of food, shelter, clothing, people in jail—or about to be taken to jail—knew Father John would drop everything to help them. It won’t be long before the people in Swainsboro, Ga., his latest mission assignment, will know equally well that no previously arranged meeting—even one with three other wise men heading for Bethlehem—will come before their needs.

As many of our missions were being called upon to provide spiritual and material assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina, this story of Artaban took on a very special meaning. Our missioners, like Artaban, were challenged to put aside other very important priorities—maybe a fund drive for a first church building, maybe providing training for local catechists—to meet our incarnate God in these evacuees from New Orleans and other areas along our Gulf Coast. They all wished they had Artaban’s jewels to sell to help them in this effort!

Your Christmas gift to Glenmary helps send at least a few “jewels” their way. And it demonstrates how seriously you take Our Lord’s message to Artaban: that the Christ Child is found not just in the meticulously planned celebrations of the Christmas season but in all the unexpected demands on our time and talents as we struggle to check our lists and meet our deadlines.

I hope that you and your loved ones will have a most blessed Christmas. Please know that you are in my prayers and those of all Glenmary priests, brothers and coworkers.

Your brother in mission,

Father Dominic Duggins
DIrector of Development

P.S. I invite you to e-mail me send me the names of those you want remembered in our Glenmary Christmas Novena.

To make a Christmas gift to Glenmary