A Reflection on Fr. Aedan McGrath’s Story

Fr. Aedan McGrath’s story for me is a story of the struggles and hardships and the peculiar feeling of happiness amidst the sufferings in a missionary life. The experiences he shared on the article are the realities of the vocation he embraced. Reading the story, my imagination took me to each of the events he embarked in his mission to China.

I felt glad imagining Father Aedan’s experience living with the Buddhist families. Learning the language and accepting the culture not known to him must be hard but could also be quite funny in some ways. I think it takes a lot of patience and dedication to have the nerve to wander around communities and travel on foot. What he did was a manifestation of his love for God and his passion for his mission.

My spirit was lifted up when I read about how he protected thousands of women from rape slay. It was great that he was used as an instrument by God to spare the lives of those women. I see this as God’s reward for everything he had gone through. He must have felt that his efforts are all worthy.

What really shook me in his mission journey was when he was held captive and was isolated for years. I gazed upon myself if I can stand being in prison, worst on a foreign country. I wonder if I have Fr. Aedan’s courage to submit myself to that kind of test. The prison life he did go through was the most difficult part of his life as a missionary. Being alone and left with no choice but being unable to do what he loves to do in the mission was an excruciating pain. I was curious with what made him sane with all those years in solitude. I felt curious about the doctrine of Saint Louis Marie Grignon de Monfort. I did a few reading and found out that his advocacy on the Legion of Mary was all he needed. The Monfort’s spirituality is about “charity expressed in a special way for being slave for the love of Jesus following his examples and the maternal aid of Mary”. It is about “pure faith and its fundamental and often painful obscurity”.

I think of how immense his love for God, it was his great faith in God, in Jesus and in Mother Mary that gave him strength to come out of that test. It makes me realize of the importance of my faith to God and using it as a source of strength in whatever moments in my life where I feel helpless.