Fred E. Woods wasn't looking for transformation when he and his wife, JoAnna, spent their 24th wedding anniversary riding mules down the 2,000-foot cliffs of Molokai.
The Brigham Young University professor was in Hawaii in December 2003 researching the Mormon settlement of Laie. The former Hansen's disease colony on Molokai was just a side trip.
But what Woods found on the Kalaupapa Peninsula below the cliffs did, indeed, transform him.
For more than a century, men, women and children were torn from their families, quarantined on the isolated patch, and suffered the disfiguring, fatal disease (also known as leprosy). And yet, with help from outsiders, they created a community that transcended religious and ethnic differences.
Moved by the way the Kalaupapa community came together in a fellowship of suffering, Woods says he now is a more empathetic listener, more grateful and able to love more deeply and unconditionally.
"The Kalaupapa experience has reminded me that great personal growth can come out of difficult circumstances."
Woods found the story of a settlement born in misery but redeemed by interfaith friendship. And he learned it wasn't just about Father Damien, the Catholic priest whose ministry in the colony became an international emblem of selflessness and who was canonized a saint this month by Pope Benedict XVI.
Others -- including Damien's friend Mormon elder Jonathan Napela, who voluntarily lived and died in the colony -- also were martyrs.
"It's a story that needs to be told," says Woods, who holds the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding at BYU.
And, since 2005, Woods has been doing just that.
The professor of church history has written a flurry of articles and given dozens of lectures at universities and campus Catholic Newman Centers to LDS, to Protestant and to interfaith groups.
Now he is preparing to show the documentary "The Soul of Kalaupapa" at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The interfaith gathering will be in early December.
Woods is the co-producer with Utah filmmaker Ethan Vincent, who also is the documentary's director.
The trailer for the film begins with sweeping shots of the 5-square-mile Kalaupapa Peninsula jutting from the cliffs on the northern shore of Molokai, like a "flat leaf," the English translation of its Hawaiian name.
Woods uses the terrain as a metaphor for what happened there.
"There is this leveling effect," he says. "The disease eradicates the barriers of ethnicity and religiosity."
Life and death in exile
Few places in the world better illustrate the human capacity for endurance or for charity than the remote peninsula, according to the Web site for Kalaupapa National Historical Park, which was created in 1980.
An epidemic of Hansen's disease swept the Kingdom of Hawaii in the mid-1800s, especially afflicting natives who lacked immunity. (The disease is named after Norwegian Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, who discovered the bacteria in 1873.)
Not only was there no treatment or cure at the time, those suffering bore the stigma of sinfulness that was falsely associated with the disease from ancient times.
The Legislative Assembly and King Kamehameha decided to isolate the afflicted and, in 1866, began sending them to the peninsula cut off from the rest of Molokai by sheer cliffs and surrounded on the east, north and west by ocean.
The idea: Nearby valleys would provide fresh water, and the patients would grow fruit, taro and sweet potatoes.
It didn't work out that way.
Those funneled into exile were too ill or dispirited to farm, and government supplies were scant. Suffering intensified as more patients arrived. Some exiles deadened their senses with alcohol and prostitution.
The Protestants were the first to send ministers to help, organizing the congregation of Siloama, which means Church of the Healing Spring, at Kalawao in 1866.
They were followed in 1873 by Father Damien, a Catholic priest born Joseph de Veuster from Belgium, and by Napela, one of the earliest Hawaiian converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a leader among Mormons there.
By that time, there were more than 700 patients at Kalawao and Kalaupapa, about three miles apart on the isolated peninsula.
While Damien voluntarily left a parish on the big island of Hawaii to serve and advocate for the exiles of Molokai, Napela went there because his wife, Kitty, contracted the disease and was ordered into quarantine.
In a letter to the Board of Health seeking permission to accompany Kitty as her kokua , or helper, Napela wrote: "On Aug. 3, 1843, I took my wife as my legally married wife and on that same day I vowed before God to care for my wife in health and sickness, and until death do us part. ... During the brief time remaining, I want to be with my wife."
The devotion evident in that letter moves Woods. "That shows you the heart of the man," he says. "Discipleship is local, whether you're Mormon, Catholic or Protestant."
Best friends
Napela became the ecclesiastical leader of the Latter-day Saints exiled to the peninsula.
While it's unclear how many of the 8,000 patients sent to Molokai over the next century were LDS, Woods surmises from graves in the four cemeteries that Mormons were the third largest group behind Catholics and Protestants. A minority were Japanese Buddhists.
Woods has not yet been able to document much about their relationship, but he says one contemporary of Damien and Napela wrote that the two were "the best of friends" despite their age and religious differences. Napela was 27 years older than Damien.
Napela contracted Hansen's disease and died in 1879, two weeks before his wife, Kitty, succumbed. Damien would live another 10 years, dying of the dreaded disease in 1889.
In the decades after their deaths, interfaith cooperation remained a hallmark of Kalawao and Kalaupapa, which eventually replaced the former as the main settlement.
That stood in sharp contrast, Woods notes, to the rest of Hawaii, where Protestants, Catholics and Mormons competed for souls.
In a speech at BYU last year, Woods cited authors from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote about the leveling influence of the suffering on Molokai.
As a former patient told Woods, "We were nurtured ... not just by a Protestant or a Mormon or even Catholic nuns. Everyone worked together."
Members of the community historically helped one another build houses of worship. They joined one another's choirs. They gathered together on holidays.
When the work hours were tallied after the 1965 construction of a new LDS chapel on the peninsula, Woods says, it turned out that nonmembers had donated more time than had Latter-day Saints.
The Hawaiian government's forced exile of Hansen's patients ended in 1969, after medical treatment became available. Most patients returned to the islands where they were born, but not all of them. Today, about 20 patients remain.
The hero priest
The BYU professor says he had to learn to "talk story and forget the formal professor stuff" as he became friends with those at Kalaupapa, whom he interviewed for his articles and film.
After the first year of visiting the former colony, he stopped wearing a tie and started wearing Aloha shirts.
At one point, he and Vincent took out their instruments -- Woods an acoustic guitar and Vincent a harmonica -- and played a ditty about the "Mormon boys from across the sea." Their Hawaiian friends joined in on drums and guitars.
Woods has attended services in the Catholic and Protestant churches on Molokai as well as the LDS ones and has watched friends be buried in old wooden caskets.
Searching through archives kept by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Damien's order, and the Sisters of St. Francis, whose nuns followed him to the colony, Woods found nuggets that support the notion that the place was unusually ecumenical.
"It's one thing for a Catholic to give their testimony of Damien, but I was interested in the Protestants and Latter-day Saints who said that he was tremendous," Woods says. "It's been a transforming experience. I didn't think five years ago that one of my heroes would be a Catholic priest."
Woods says he has felt the hand of Providence through his work these past five years. "This story fell into my lap and it was clear what I ought to be doing."
His hope now is that the documentary will continue the bridge building that is the point of his endowed chair and most of his lectures worldwide.
"If there ever was a time to generate light instead of heat, it is now."
