October 10 2017 – homily for Tuesday of 27th week in Ordinary Time – St Daniel Comboni – Luke 11:5-13

     As we hear about Martha and Mary in the Gospel today, as we think about how we are to achieve balance in our lives, to be both hard workers and spiritual seekers, I thought about the saint we celebrate today, with whom I have a very intimate connection.  I went to Ecuador as a lay missionary with a Catholic religious order called the Comboni Missionaries. They are named after Daniel Comboni, the saint we celebrate today.  St Daniel Comboni  captured my imagination when I was out in the jungles as a missionary in the religious order that he founded.  He was born into a poor family of farmers in Italy in 1831.  He is the only one of 8 children of his parents who made it past adulthood.  He was ordained a priest in 1854, the same year the Immaculate Conception was declared as dogma in our Church. He always dreamed of being a missionary to Africa. He went on his first trip to Africa to the Sudan, when he and his companions journeyed for 4 months on camel from Egypt just to get to their mission site. Many of his companions died along the way, but Daniel survived, being affected by the poverty and hardship that the people there had to endure. He eventually became the first bishop of the Sudan in Africa.  He died at the young age of 50 from all of the hardships he went through as a missionary, but his love for God lives on in all priests, brothers, and nuns of the Comboni missionaries who work all over the world. I remember some of the Comboni priests telling me how in 1964 all of the Comboni missionaries were expelled from the south of Sudan when an anti-Christian government took power in the country.  Thousands of missionaries returned to Rome, many of whom had been in the Sudan most of their adult lives serving the Lord.  Daniel Comboni and so many of the Comboni Missionaries willingly gave up their lives for their love of their faith and in service to the calling they received from God.  In that same missionary spirit, all of us have a calling we receive from God as disciples of Christ.  And we are all called to be missionaries wherever we are in life.