Two Columban priests write about ‘angels on the journey’, encountered at night in a jungle in Pakistan by a group on their way to a wedding, and in daylight on a train journey in Japan by a visiting Columban.

Angels in a Jungle in Pakistan

By Fr Paul McMahon

The author is a Columban priest from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and tells the story of ‘Angels’ from northern Pakistan, Muslims students, helped a wedding party of Catholics on a night-time journey through a jungle. The article is taken from the December 2012 Newsletter of the Pakistan Mission Unit of the Columbans.

Mr William Raza has been the assistant to the House-in-Charge at the Columban House in Lahore for the last 25 years. Recently he and his extended family formed a wedding party to travel from Lahore with his nephew who was to get married in Karachi. The journey of 1400 kilometers was to bring unexpected adventures and lessons on how God provides angels along the way to look after us. Even in the least expected places!

William, along with the wedding party consisting of 20 family members, men, women and Children, accompanying the groom had hired a small bus to make the journey. Normally it would take 21 hours from Lahore to Karachi but William’s journey was to take much longer.

A Japanese Gentleman

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By Fr Leo Baker

Phone calls for me from Japan are rare, so I was surprised recently to receive a call from Mrs Murakami, the wife of a man who was my catechist from 1951 to 1954. She told me that he had died, aged 88. That phone call marked the end of a 55-year friendship with a man of remarkable personality and one of the finest gentlemen I came to know during my 35 years in Japan.

In 1951, after 18 months in Japan, I was living in Kamogawa, a coastal fishing port, where fishermen, farmers and shopkeepers made up most of the population. I had been appointed there after just a year of language study, only 27-years-old, to try to establish a new mission where none was there before.

It seemed like an almost impossible task. I could only hope, trust and pray that God would make something happen. Soon God did just that, in a remarkable way. Mr Murakami Sensei appeared out of the blue at my door one day. He had come from Yamaguchi, hundreds of kilometers away, to look for his mother. She had called me a few days earlier and I knew the farmhouse where she was staying. It seemed she had a falling out with her family and left home, traveling aimlessly by train until Divine Providence let her finish up at the end of the line in Kamogawa.

Tags:

• Japan
• September-October 2008

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