Lives of Service

Lives of Service is the People of God (the church, in its broad sense) observed in prayer, action, and sometimes heroic circumstances. A limited study of nine contemporary Maryknoll missioners, lay and religious, on four continents, Lives conveys the immediacy of God’s presence as manifest in the missioners’ everyday lives.

Sr. Beverly Arao, MM, Panama.
Roll mouse over image to view Johanna Kailing, MMAF, Serengeti, Tanzania.

An eleven-by-eleven-inch photographic journal, Lives combines brief commentary with 120 vivid images by National Geographic photographer Jim Daniels. Daniels spent four years on the project; his talent and respect for his subjects are apparent throughout. Readers of Maryknoll magazine will recognize his photography and relish the folio-size treatment offered by Lives.

Fr. Vince Cole, MM, Asmat people, Irian Jaya, New Guinea

The Maryknoll mission society has a proud, courageous history. True to its American roots, for ninety years it has melded both daring and diversity to bring the gospel to the earth’s poorest peoples. Daniels provides a short description of Maryknoll’s three branches—which include priests and brothers, sisters, lay people and associate priests—and then takes off for the far field with camera in hand. He visits Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, war-stricken Sudan, Tanzania, New Guinea, and Panama. At each site, he chronicles the Maryknollers’ lives in at least two distinct venues. (Unfortunately, the book provides no maps.) Often, the contrast represented is between urban setting and mission outpost, reached only after arduous, often dangerous travel. While the indigenous people presented are our contemporaries, they live in different centuries.

Bangladesh Woman

Maryknoll not only anticipated much of the new missiology promulgated at Vatican II, but has long promoted enculturating the gospel where it meets people. Just how rich and kaleidoscopic this turns out to be is vividly captured by Daniels’ camera: the blood-red robes of Masai tribesmen dance against Tanzania’s green hills; a Hindu Bengali dye maker’s magenta-stained hands welcome a visitor; the glistening beads and skin of Toposa girls shine in warring Sudan; the silhouette of Admat fishermen reflects off glinting waters in New Guinea. These images are gorgeous yet far from romanticized. Father Bob McCahill of Goshen, Indiana, says a solitary early morning Mass, then carries a dying Muslim into a teeming Bengali hospital; Sister Juana Encalada nurses a woman dying of aids in Phnom Penh; Brother John Beeching visits displaced Cambodian war refugees in Thailand; and Doctor Susan Nagele conducts an outdoor clinic amid war and mayhem in Sudan.

Panamanian woman
Roll mouse over image to view Br. John Beeching, MM, Thailand

The photographs’ inherent beauty and painful subject matter provoke a sense of dissonance. Yet their brilliance and nobility convey a liberating vitality. Here Christianity is not mere edifice or past history, but open, young, and exploratory, a confirmation of God’s interest. In a word, here Christianity is worshipful.

Patrick Jordan is Commonweal’s managing editor.

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