Readings:
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 8:1-3
Reflection:
I have recently returned from a short trip to Vietnam. Over the years, I have made contact with so many good people and organisations. Orphanages for disabled kiddies, blind schools, deaf schools. So many people doing great work with those who have drawn an unfortunate ticket in the raffle of life.
As always, I managed a visit to the Mai Tam centre. This is my favourite place in the whole world. It has been running for about twenty years. I first learnt about them when I had just started going to Vietnam. They were taking in babies born HIV+. Much HIV transmission in Vietnam has historically been associated with intravenous drug use.
Mostly mum is out of it, dad has probably left, so the newborn infant gets abandoned at Pagodas and Temples. Also, twenty years ago, people started leaving them with Fr John Toai MI and other Camillian priests, who conduct ministry to the poor. He is, of course, supported by an amazing group of workers and volunteers
The youngest member of the community is a three-month-old boy. His name is “Hair”, because he has a mop of it. His mother, who is about 16 or 17, was sexually abused by a family member, and ended up pregnant. They threw her out rather than removing the abuser, and eventually she found her way to Mai Tam. They looked after her in the pregnancy, and now she has a job in the kitchen. The love between that mother and child was beautiful, after all that hell.
Their model is empowerment: if they can locate the mothers, they medicate them, find them jobs, give them training and so on.
Of around 270 children they have on their books, about 80 have not been able to find their parents. And so they live in at Mai Tam.
And that’s what I love about that place. It is beauty and love and hope born out of abandonment. The kids are so kind and sweet. One young girl who is in university, but looks about 12, she just kept hugging me, it is just such a place of love. It is action built on faith and love.
It is a place of transformation.
What I love about today’s Gospel is the transformation that occurs when Jesus enters our lives. These women shared in the fellowship of those who had suffered. Jesus had profoundly touched and healed them; they were no longer merely disciples but witnesses. Having encountered mercy and healing, they bore witness together, with gratitude, to what Jesus can do when we walk as one.
All of us are called to be what the late Alice Miller described as “enlightened witnesses”: people who, through kindness, tenderness, and a focused intention of love, help return
others to themselves.”
In places like Mai Tam, I see exactly that. I see faith expressed in action, love overcoming abandonment, and lives transformed by mercy.
It is a reminder that the Gospel is not simply something we hear; it is something we live.
Peter Gardiner is a Passionist Priest.