The concept of home is a curious one. Is home a place or is it a feeling? Is it both? For many of us the word home may bring to mind a welcoming image of comfort and warmth. Perhaps a vision of the place we were born and grew up, our parents’ house or even our hometown. It is often accompanied by a sense of belonging, a sense of safety, of friends and of comfort. Many times when we are away we have a longing for home, and it is quite natural to yearn for our heavenly home. The lyrical chorus of country music sensation Carrie Underwood’s song Temporary Home speaks to this yearning,
Columban Fr. Charles Duster with the Fiji team.
For a word with such concrete meaning, home can seem an awfully abstract concept at times. Consider our missionaries. We often think of and admire their commitment to “leave home” and travel abroad to places where the culture is distinct, where a different language is spoken and belief systems and routines are unique and many times strange to us. Something happens during the journey that is very Christ-like…the meaning of home changes, it becomes deeper, and it is no longer confined to the memories of youth, but rather it takes on a new and stronger shape and form. The following is an account of one missionary’s return “home,” and what it meant for his family to see him again as told through the eyes of someone who now has a new understanding and grateful appreciation for what home is.
Fr. Charlie Duster had been back to Fiji several times since being reassigned to the United States from his missionary assignment a decade ago, mostly to be present at an ordination or an official function. This trip was a little different. This trip was more of a “working pilgrimage,” if you will. A pilgrimage that would include visiting the people and the parishes where he spent 23 years of his life as a missionary priest, but also one that included active pastoral and missionary work throughout the country of Fiji. It would be a whirlwind trip of energy and activity for two weeks.
We started in Ba which is a town of roughly 15,000 people on the northwestern side of the the largest Fijian island of Viti Levu. Fr. Charlie introduced me to the town saying, “I’m not sure how many towns in the world have only two letters in the name, but Ba is one of them!” Fr. Charlie’s first official action was to celebrate Mass at Ba’s Christ the King Parish on the very day of our arrival! It’s a wonderful and bright church with an enormous window of the Risen Christ on the east and open windows overlooking the parish school yard with the ever present Fijian mountain scape to the west. Although Fr. Charlie was never officially assigned at this parish, many people here knew him and anticipated his visit eagerly. Our few days in Ba were filled with the laughter of friends reconnecting and the celebration of the Eucharist. The harmonies of the Fijian people during Mass can only be described as angelic, and the wafting of their voices across the school yard and bouncing from the mountains could be heard early each morning as they practiced their hymns for Mass. Accompanying the lovely melodies one Sunday morning were drums. Fr. Charlie informed me that it was the Fijian lali, an ancient form of communication between villages using a log drum. Sunday morning we were treated to the Angelus as beat on the lali. It was purely divine.
After our stay in Ba, we took a painfully bumpy bus ride on the King’s Highway to Suva, one of only two highways in the country with the other highway being named the Queen’s Highway. The ride took nearly five hours. While we waited for our bus at the stand in Ba, the children who attend the parish school waited with us to catch their ride home. In Fiji, some children take the bus to school and others who live more remotely walk barefoot for hours along rainforest trails each day to get to and from school. They were talking about a dangerous game that Fr. Charlie and I had heard spoken of in the parish called “Charlie Charlie.” Evidently it is a game similar to an Ouija board that professes to invoke a spirit called “Charlie Charlie” to answer questions and move a pencil around unaided by human hand. The school masters and the ministry of education in Fiji seem to be doing a fine job of stamping out the harmful childhood game that has been imported to Fiji. When Fr. Charlie heard the children speaking of the game, he struck up a conversation with a few of the nine-year-olds. One little girl in particular wondered where we were going; she knew Fr. Charlie was a priest, but didn’t know his name. You could hear the anxiousness in her voice as she spoke of this game, “Charlie Charlie.” Fr. Charlie looked down at the girl and said “I’m Charlie…I’m Father Charlie.” Suddenly the anxiousness of the “Charlie Charlie” conversation left the little girl, and with a quick and bright smile she laughed and climbed aboard her bus.
Our time in Suva, the capitol of Fiji, seemed brief. Fr. Charlie was able to visit the lay missionary formation program where he served as coordinator for some years as well as the Columban seminarian formation house. In both cases, Fr. Charlie was treated as an honored guest, and the seminarians and lay missionary candidates were filled with questions for him. Community and family are the focal point of Fijian society. The questions that both the seminarians and the young women lay missionary candidates asked all seemed to all revolve around the angst of leaving family, community and home. Fr. Charlie adeptly guided the young candidates through their worries using his own journey of mission and parables about finding a home wherever you may be. We left the seminarians and lay missionary candidates in a much less worrisome state after good discussion and more singing!
While we were in Suva, we visited the cathedral. Fr. Charlie had been vicar general here to the first Fijian Archbishop, Archbishop Petero Mataca. We were able to visit his tomb at the cathedral and pay our respects. We took a moment to pray inside the cathedral, as we often do; only this time was different.
I sat apart from Fr. Charlie and reflected on what he must be thinking and what he was praying about. So much of his life was spent here. He and other Columbans have been such a part of the growth of the faith in Fiji, perhaps he was praying about that. Perhaps he prayed for his old friend the Archbishop, perhaps he prayed for friends back home.
Home, there was the word again. Where was Fr. Charlie, if not home? While we were at the cathedral, the current Archbiship, Archbishop Peter Loy Chong spotted Fr. Charlie and in spite of being an incredibly busy man, he asked us to have tea with him and some of the priests with whom he was meeting. Following the tea, he asked Fr. Charlie if he could drop by the Columban Central House to visit with us before we left. We were blessed to have a delightful visit and dinner with the Archbishop that lasted nearly two and a half hours!
We continued our journey to the smaller more northern island of Vanua Levu to the town of Labasa and Holy Family parish where Columban Fathers John Ryan and Paul Tierney are located. Fr. Charlie had been the acting parish priest here in this sugarcane town in very trying times. During a flood in 2003, all of the parish’s school books were destroyed. With over a foot of mud in the church sanctuary, the people worked hard to scoop the deposited mud from their church home so that Mass could be held on Sunday. They were successful, and Mass was held on time!
The people of Labasa and the surrounding area are used to tough work. The sugarcane here is cut all by hand and loaded on trucks to go to the sugarcane processing plant on the east side of town. Trucks loaded to the brim with cane sit unmoving in long lines for hours waiting for their opportunity to move forward toward the plant. Working in the cane fields is labor intensive and backbreaking work. There is no mechanization used, and in 2017 Fiji will have to compete, unsubsidized by the European Union, alongside mechanized nations on the world market. It remains to be seen what changes this will bring to the hardworking families of Labasa.
The school at Holy Family held a student body wide event to welcome Fr. Charlie home. The students’ parents and grandparents had heard of his arrival back in town and wanted him to speak to their children of how the parish and the school all began. The students listened attentively as Fr. Charlie spoke of the devastation of the flood and also the hard work of their parents and grandparents to build such a wonderful school for them along with assistance from people around the world who cared enough to sacrifice so that their school could be built. He told them of the missionaries and how they had left home to make their home here. It was a moving presentation.
We were also able to visit the remote village of Solevu while on the island. Fr. Charlie had been here as parish priest for six years. It took us nearly four hours by four wheel drive to arrive at the remote parish. Fr. Charlie celebrated Mass to an overflowing church in this beautiful setting. His voice rang out strong and his Fijian true to form in the crowded church as he baptized a baby during the Mass, a fitting remembrance for any missionary priest’s return home!
Following the Mass, Fr. Charlie was able to reconnect with the “old team” that had worked so hard here in the bush to create this lovely parish. They had invested time, energy and most certainly sweat to carve out a place for teachers to be housed and to build a school overlooking the church and one of the most scenic, but also remote places in the world.
Fr. Charlie seemed to be very much at home here. In fact, it was here that he had been presented with the tabua, (whale tooth) and the most coveted of all gifts presented in Fijian culture. It was here that he had selected the place where he wanted to be buried, overlooking the sea were he to end his days in Fiji. As we stood looking at the sea he said, “There couldn’t be a more peaceful and beautiful place in the world to be laid to rest.”
There is no question that Fr. Charlie would have never left this place, his home, had it not been for a change in his health that required medical attention unavailable in Fiji,he was home. Home is where all of us belong, where we are welcomed, where we are with those we love and those who love us. Ultimately our home is with Christ. As St.Paul told the Corinthians, so he told us:
“So we are always courageous, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yet we are courageous, and we would rather leave the body and go home to the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 5:8)