– Brought to you by Father Gameiro (aires.gameiro@isjd.pt)
Saint John of God (1495-1550), Portuguese, was forty-two when he went to hear the famous John of Avila’s sermon in Granada on the 20th of January 1538. Hearing it, he was called by God, and went through a strong spiritual transformation. He had been searching for a real and deep unified self and was blessed with a strong modification, called a Christian conversion. His personal life and behavior went through cognitive and emotional transforming experiences and he found a more satisfactory meaning of life (cf. Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy). He became upset, emotionally moved and unbalanced, crying that he was a great sinner and clamouring for God’s mercy.
For some weeks, people considered him a fool and he was taken into the royal hospital. This experience restructured the whole perception of his past life and unified his self in a more coherent one. After this personal transformation, his empathic relationship and hospitality praxis became universal, without frontiers, and extended to all kinds of people, either unadjusted or unbalanced, stigmatized and marginalised, rich and poor people, even to prostitutes and criminals.
After the strong illumination that he experienced, he felt himself to be so great a sinner as any other unworthy man or woman that he met on his way. He felt identified with the so-called naughty people and sinners. As he had the experience of being nobody, he could identify with any person excluded from the mainstream and also with unbalanced people. At the same time, he could easily be empathic and merciful to them. Somehow he felt identified and as a brother of whoever was marginalised and excluded. John had a sense of humour and such a strong maturity that he was able to take himself with humorous irony and mockery.
After a pilgrimage to the Guadalupe sanctuary (in Spain), he started to collect firewood in the mountain to make a living and to help the poor on the streets. In Place Bivarrambla the irreverent boys mocked him, asking if he had another folly now.
Laughing, John entered the game in a surprising way. He told them joking:
“Brothers, this is like the game of birimbao, three galleys and a ship, the more you see the less you will learn”. This game is a Portuguese show-hide game played by the boys in John’s birthplace, Montemor-o-novo, until today. At one time, the Saint was accused to the archbishop (they said that he was supporting unworthy and false needy people in his hospital). Or so they thought. Some of them, they said, were abusers, women of bad example, thieves and lazy people. They were really dangerous and were damaging the hospital’s image, eating unworthily the poor’s bread and throwing away his benefactors. He had to quickly clean his hospital of such people, the archbishop concluded.
John listened respectfully. After a while he said:
“ My Father and Good Bishop, in my hospital all are good people, nobody is unworthy and so as God makes his sunshine come on everybody so there is no reason to throw away the helpless and the afflicted from
their own home. I am the only bad person there, unworthy of eating the poor’s bread ” (CASTRO, Cap. XX). (To be continued)
Fr. Aires Gameiro, OH, (Brother of Saint John of God)
Note: Father Gameiro has been celebrating Mass at the chapel while Father Bernadino is on holiday. He has degrees in both theology and psychology and has written many books including one about alcoholism in Madeira and the Açores.
He has been the director of the Casa de Saúde São João de Deus of Madeira, which provides care in the area of mental health and the rehabilitation of those suffering from dependency on drugs and alcohol.
