8. The Romance of Missions
Chapter 8
The Romance of Missions
Such a Hallelujah welcome was waiting for me here,” wrote Amy of her arrival in Matsuye on May 1, 1893. “Praise Him who went before to search out a Resting-place. May it be a place of victory too, for His own glory’s sake.”
Amy, always assuming that her correspondents, and later the readers of her books, were as saturated as she was with the language and imagery of Scripture, rarely bothered to cite references. Here she was thinking of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord that preceded by three days the people of Israel as they journeyed, to “search out a Resting-place.” Whenever the Ark began to move, Moses prayed for victory over their enemies. Amy moved day by day in the spiritual company of those Israelites, guided as surely as they were, by the Lord, and sheltered by the Ark of His presence, which came to rest in Matsuye.
This was an old feudal town with a pagoda-shaped castle on a hill. The town lay between two inland lakes, one of which opened into the sea. Amy sketched a corner of the castle on one of her letters, but sketches could not catch the beauty of it all—“blue and green, brown and purple, opal lights, and changeful shadows, sunset glories on the waters.” The houses were built so that one could look straight through to the garden at the back, where there were dwarf pines, rock work, tiny pools and bridges and lanterns. It seemed to Amy that everything in the houses was made of paper—walls, windows, trays, dustpans, baskets, brooms, strings, handkerchiefs. The walls had a convenient way of sliding back into themselves when not needed. If anyone wished to see out, he had only to touch the paper with his tongue and the translucent became transparent. “An eyehole being thus expeditiously manufactured, what need of glass?”
The Reverend Barclay Buxton was a young man then, one whose name, for Amy and many others, always wore “a little crown of light.” She refers to a “shadow that was with him always,” but does not explain. It was something that might have darkened his whole life and witness, but because it did not she learned that it is possible for those who love the Lord to choose to rejoice. He was a man of great charm and gifts of leadership. They were people of means and had brought with them many English manners and conveniences, including a governess for their three small sons. They lived in a large house and employed servants as the English of their station in life always did, whether in England or abroad. Here Amy was to spend the first months of her stay in Japan in a lovely room which, to her great delight, commanded a view of the mountains.
Buxton was not the stereotypical British colonial, nor the missionary depicted by Hollywood, who spurned the society of “the natives.” There was “not a suspicion of the foreignizing element” in the church in Matsuye, which was a converted Shinto temple—“rather a thorn in the flesh to the Devil, I should fancy,” wrote Amy. The Christians held a welcome meeting for her on the first Saturday evening after her arrival. She went to church, probably for the first time in her life, without hat or shoes. What this meant for a Victorian girl from her cultured home, with her great personal reserve, no twentieth century American or European can imagine. She sat, as everyone did, on the floor, Buxton beside her, interpreting in a running undertone the speech of greeting.
In a letter which began, “This is to be a home-letter in the strictest sense of the word, and isn’t to be trotted round,” Amy answered some of the questions folks at home were asking. Why “trot round” the answers to such trivial questions? What did she wear? In the summertime, cotton dresses, as few layers as possible, for the temperature often stayed in the nineties. In winter, “my blue serge dress and cap (that last dear little bit of home). For coats, my myrtle one with the cape—so warm and light—and for knock-about my good old pilot.” When it was bitterly cold she almost lived in her “big tweed.”
It did not take Amy long to see that European dress was a distraction. Why add an altogether avoidable distraction to the many unavoidable ones of being foreign? If Hudson Taylor could wear the queue and gown of a Chinese, why couldn’t she wear a kimono? She departed from standard missionary practice and asked her colleagues’ indulgence if she wore Japanese dress at least on Sundays. A sensible idea, they realized, and soon all adopted the practice. She had a dark-blue kimono with pale-green finishings, cool and graceful, with the words “God is Love” embroidered on it. “One soon forgets its presence in proving its power to draw one to the people. . . . I am keeping to my own shoes and stockings, however—the native ones being beyond me as yet.” The text furnished an opportunity to explain to the curious her reason for being in Japan. Her hair was a matter of astonishment to the people—“No oil at all!” said one old lady who bowed most devoutly, sidled gently over, gazed at the foreign hair, and patted it. “Is it always fuzzy like that?”
One day she was telling the Good News to an old lady by interpretation. Just when she seemed ready to turn to Christ in faith, she noticed Amy’s hands. It was very cold that day, and Amy was wearing fur gloves. “I cannot remember whether we were able to recall her to what mattered so much more than gloves, but this I do remember, I went home, took off my English clothes, put on my Japanese kimono, and never again, I trust, risked so much for the sake of so very little.”
What did she eat? the folks at home wanted to know. When in the Buxtons’ home she ate more or less what she had always eaten, including a proper English afternoon tea. This was the “hour of hours” to her, for “be it known, though fairly Jappy in other times and places we are thoroughly English then, and revel in the most un-do-without-able of English luxuries.” These included condensed milk, potted meat, bread, and “real” tea, which was three times stronger than Japanese tea. When traveling, however, it was a different story. “Native fish paste, pale mud color and nasty; semiboiled animal, nature unknown; eggs young and old; perfectly raw fish, brown seaweed, black beans in a liquid like senna tea; chicken (usually a fowl of much experience) in sugary juice; leathery scraps floating about in some terribly fishy liquid; sliced bamboo, lily roots, odoriferous radish, sea-weed, sea-ears, sea-slugs, plus pickle, plus rice.
Before she left England, Amy had imposed on herself the discipline of drinking tea without cream and eating toast without butter, in preparation for hardships to be endured. It did not work. It was dull and boring, and it made everyone else nervous, so she gave it up. The Lord knew where her heart was—where He led she’d follow, what He fed she’d swallow. She found when the time came that she didn’t really mind anything nearly as much as she had feared she might. The promised grace was always supplied. The great thing was to learn to be thankful, for “in Japan we don’t know what hardships are.” She was thinking of the rigors of missionary life in inland China or Africa. Admittedly, however, there were occasions during her missionary journeys when, because of seasickness or sheer exhaustion, she could not bring herself to swallow the black liquids or the sea-slugs. Then she would, as unobtrusively as possible (which sometimes meant under the quilts) pull out of her bag bread and tea of the familiar variety.
Amy tackled the study of the language at once. It was a great gulf fixed between her and the people with “dark eyes, dark windows of darker souls,” and she felt the helplessness of the alien. She was surprised and delighted to find that it was possible to start giving out the Gospel by means of an interpreter. A Christian Japanese girl, Misaki San, became her “mouth,” her travel companion, her teacher.
“The honorifics are peculiar,” Amy wrote. “For our ‘go slowly’ they have quite a touching appeal, ‘augustly leisurely going, deign to be;’ if you are hungry, you explain with polite frankness that your ‘honorable inside is empty,’ and if you want to say somebody has died, you say he has ‘honorably deigned to cease to become.’” Upon arrival at one of the small country hotels she was greeted with the announcement that a chicken had “deigned to cease to become,” and that a bath was “on the boil.”
When she had been in Japan for one month she felt it was high time she took a missionary journey. She wrote long, long letters at every stage, filling twenty or more of the thinnest pages imaginable with her round, clear handwriting and delicate drawings (storks, centipedes, people, fish, swordplay, incense burners, pagodas). There was an audience, of course. People hung over her shoulder, studying the writing. “Oh!” said an old lady when Amy explained that she was describing to her family the silkworm business in that village, “Our honorable worms and we ourselves are going to England in a letter!”
Portion of a letter from Japan written on rice paper.
On the first leg of this first journey she and Misaki San traveled by kuruma, the Japanese rickshaw. “Sometimes after a plunge of unusual severity, my kuruma-man would turn with a cheerful ‘Oh!’ and a glance to make sure I was still safely inside.” The roads were nothing but ruts, the ride so jolting that it could not be borne for many hours at a time, so the two women would get down and walk. They traveled in melting heat in crowded trains; in sampans and other boats of various descriptions where they and everyone else were seasick, and in a kango, a sort of sedan chair. The batterings and bufferings of such travel, the discomforts of the tiny hotels, the horrors of the menus could not but have been severe lessons in discipleship for the girl who had lived in the peaceful seaside village, the pleasant house in College Gardens, and the beautiful estate of Broughton Grange. But the girl was a disciple. That had been a clear and final decision, and all subsequent lessons she saw not as “culture shock”—the term had not then been invented so she did not have to bother about that sort of thing—but as the expected terms of her chosen discipleship, the first condition of which is, according to the Master’s words, “He must give up all right to himself.”1
Amy described in smallest detail everything she encountered, “comical topsy-turvy ideas and odd customs,” seldom losing her spiritual perspective or, what is equally important for a stranger in a strange land, her humor. She was a realist, but never a pessimist or a sentimentalist. “Last night as we splashed into pools and knocked up against posts (wind and rain made carrying paper lanterns impossible) I laughed and thought of the Romance of Missions. Throw a love-halo round us, as shining as ever you like, but don’t, if you wish to be true, adorn us with one more romantic.”
The “private” lives of the people were, in the foreigner’s eyes, rather shockingly public. People sat in their open front windows, discoursing, smoking, nursing babies. Then there was the custom of The Tub. The wooden family bathtub was often set in front of the house. “The blaze below, the steam above, with a parboiled head in the midst thereof, reminded one rather painfully of the early Christian martyrs, but nobody seemed to mind.” Amy minded, “But I refrain—!” was all she said about that.
Amy’s notions of privacy had no meaning at all for the Japanese. At night in the little hotels, when she lay down on the floor on quilts, she was surrounded by solemn eyes. One man gazed, she “regretted to say, at my nightdress, which I could only thankfully remember would look like full dress to him. Oh dear, it was dreadful, but too funny to mind very much.” On a later journey, when she was traveling third class (there was no other option) with the Buxtons and other members of the Japan Evangelistic Band, the captain, a European, insisted on Mrs. Buxton’s taking his own cabin and the others making the salon their bedroom. This meant that Amy and two single women shared the salon with Mr. Buxton and a bachelor named Consterdine. Amy told herself that this was really no more inappropriate than overnight railway travel, the resemblance being nearly strong enough to invite an attack of “H.S.”—homesickness. But suddenly the captain reappeared with a carpenter, three youths whose duty seemed to consist in running around, a curtain, a flag, a hammer, and some nails. A partition was rigged up, and Amy fell asleep under the full blaze of the Rising Sun on the Japanese flag. When she woke and saw the great red ball, she realized how far she was from home. “Don’t be a baby, Amy,” she said to herself, “Sing a chorus and look ahead”:
The Lord of the Harvest will soon appear
His smile, His voice we shall see and hear.
The taken-for-granted delays in Japan were hard on Europeans. Amy and the Buxtons had packed for a long voyage but the ship sailed six days later than scheduled. Why should it matter? What difference did three or four or six days make, after all? One could simply look upon the 144 hours as “a welcome little hemming-up time,” but one of the band (Amy does not say which one) regarded them as so much “hanging on.” Surely they were going to be late for everything they were making the journey for if they went on in this happy-go-lucky style. Mr. Buxton, never ruffled, pointed out the obvious: “God knows all about the boats.” The lesson, applicable to anything that troubled her, stuck with Amy, along with another of his sayings, “Good for the flesh!” (spoken when someone objected to their singing as they walked along the road).
Perhaps no part of the cost of being a foreign missionary is greater than the loneliness. The alien experiences a sense of utter isolation, and is tempted to cling with greater tenacity to others of his own language and culture. Amy had a co-worker in the mission named Florence, whom she referred to in her letters as “Twin.” At a missions conference they found that in the posted dinner lists, Twin and a friend named Mina had been seated side by side.
Well, I was very glad that dear Mina should have Twin, and I don’t think I grudged her to her one little bit, and yet at the bottom of my heart there was just a touch of disappointment, for I had almost fancied I had somebody of my very own again, and there was a little ache somewhere. I could not rejoice in it. . . . I longed, yes longed, to be glad, to be filled with such a wealth of unselfish love that I should be far gladder to see those two together than I should have been to have had Twin to myself. And while I was asking for it, it came. For the very first time I felt a rush of real joy in it, His joy, a thing one cannot pump up or imitate or force in any way. . . . Half-unconsciously, perhaps, I had been saying, “Thou and Twin are enough for me”—one so soon clings to the gift instead of only to the Giver. . . :
Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure-store.
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee.
FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL
After writing this, Amy felt inclined to tear it out of the letter. It was too personal, too humiliating, but she decided the Lord wanted her to let it stand, to tell its tale of weakness and of God’s strength. She was finding at firsthand that missionaries are not set apart from the rest of the human race, not purer, nobler, higher. “Wings are an illusive fallacy,” she wrote. “Some may possess them, but they are not very visible, and as for me, there isn’t the least sign of a feather. Don’t imagine that by crossing the sea and landing on a foreign shore and learning a foreign lingo you ‘burst the bonds of outer sin and hatch yourself a cherubim.’”
Forty years later Amy described for one of her “children” a transaction that had taken place when she was alone in a cave in Arima. Having gone there to spend a day in solitude she faced with God feelings of fear about the future. Loneliness hovered like a spectre on the horizon. Things were all right at the moment, but could she endure years of being alone? The devil painted pictures of loneliness which were vivid to her many years later, and she turned to the Lord in desperation. “What can I do, Lord? How can I go on to the end?” His answer: “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate.”2
Her mother ventured to ask in a letter whether Amy “loved anybody very much.” Her answer was evasive. Had she met someone who made the possibility of marriage seem attractive, in spite of her early decision to remain single? Mr. Consterdine’s name had occurred once or twice in her letters—apparently a single missionary, kind, protective, thoughtful in small ways. A young woman of Amy’s beauty, gifts, and exuberance of spirit could not possibly have escaped the notice of any European bachelor who might have been around. If Mr. Consterdine or anybody else had proposed to her, she covered it with complete silence. She was a Victorian, with a Victorian’s scrupulous modesty, and she had given over all matters of the heart to Him to whom alone hers was open.
1. Matthew 16:24 (Phillips).
2. Psalms 34:22.