Puttering around on the “social media” site, I stumbled on a page called “Greater Love,” designed as a memorial to Richard.
A native of the Philippines, he was studying in a Jesuit seminary when his superiors sent him to Cambodia where he worked at a technical school with students who had been maimed by land mines.
This was difficult work, but Richard Fernando loved the Cambodian people, and he asked to stay in the country after he was ordained.
There is a lot of frustration in the lives of people in poor places like Cambodia. Some of them handle it better than others.
One day, a student who wasn’t handling his frustration well came to the school with a hand grenade and threatened to detonate it.
Richard talked to the student, trying to calm him down, but the lad pulled the pin from the grenade and Richard Fernando, 26 years old, was killed.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
It was Dr. King’s way of expressing what we hear from Jesus—the idea that leading a fulfilling life means somehow taking up the cross.
That was played out in the life and death of Richard Fernando.
In fact, at his funeral, the homilist said that by dying as he did Richard imitated Jesus, who also died out of love for others.
Most people, confronted by a deranged teenager with a hand grenade, would run away from him, not approach him.
And if that were all there was to say about Richard, we would still admire him.
But that isn’t all.
Richard didn’t die heroically only on the day he encountered that hand grenade.
He died a little when he turned his back on the other attractions of the world and entered the seminary.
He died a little when he left his homeland to travel to poor Cambodia.
He died a little when he worked with students who were missing eyes and limbs.
Richard did what Gregory Norbert described in one of his songs—“dying clear the many deaths of going beyond self.”
This is what Jesus calls us to—not only to the unlikely chance that we might be killed as he and Dr. King were because they stood for principles that disturbed the establishment.
He calls us to die the many deaths of going beyond self.
What could that mean? Making recordings for the blind? Soliciting donations for a charity? Visiting a nursing home? Coaching youth soccer? Teaching in the religious education program?
All of these things are in a way inconvenient. They all take time and energy and commitment—they take away bits of our lives. And for those reasons they constitute exactly the mentality that Jesus described.
To live for the self is not to live as a Christian. To live for the other, and especially for the stranger who cannot repay us, is to take up the cross.
This is the heart of Christian teaching, not something that would be nice to do if we weren’t so busy with everything else.
Richard Fernando would have fulfilled this teaching even if that grenade had not gone off, because he was already living by the gospel words:
“Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it’’ (Matthew 16: 25).
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.
