9. The Unrepealed Commission
Chapter 9
The Unrepealed Commission
Breakfast at the Buxtons’ was at seven-thirty, followed by the reading of Daily Light. Then came Japanese and English prayers, and from nine till half past twelve language lessons. The midday meal was dinner. Everyone else in the house had time after dinner for rest and play. Not Amy. Rest and play? Perhaps for some it was necessary, but certainly not for her. Such an expenditure of time for a new missionary! She used the hour to teach English to a little boy who was eager to teach her Japanese—“a comical interchange of information!” Tea was next, then visiting, when Amy and Misaki San went to the village of Yokohama to try to find hearers for the Gospel. They usually had another tea there, then an hour’s Bible reading with a young man.
The schedule was unrealistic. Amy’s associates told her it couldn’t be done, so she tackled it with a smile. She couldn’t do it. After a few months she was forced to quit the English lessons and have a bit of quiet after dinner—not to rest, of course, and not to play, but to write letters. She told the folks at home that her poor head was tired and stupid, she had not studied for some weeks, and the enjoyment she had had at first in her lessons had taken wings. “Quiet,” however, was a relative term. She could get away by herself to write, but “downstairs squeaks a concertina (to be borne for the sake of the cause), outside screams a baby (I wish I had some soothing syrup), from one quarter wails a street cryer, to whom nobody seems inclined to attend, from another hammers a cooper. But the worst of the worst is the nerve-distracting shriek of a terrible tin horn performed upon by a youth who has yet to learn compassion.”
Nights were often broken by noise—a gang of boys, for example, thundering with all their might and main on the front door. “Now we have a highly respectable cook-san, who is the happy possessor of a kind heart and a thick head, foreign clothes (always too tight and minus a button or two). He is strangely obtuse as to puddings, but in matters of this sort he shines. The thundering ceased and he held a parley. It ended in tumultuous defeat on the part of the insurgents, and a victory, flat but satisfactory, on his: they retired from the field, he subsided into his quilts, and we went to dreamland.”
After nearly a year in Matsuye, Amy wrote in the letter she called her “Scrapperie,” read by many people at home, “I shall never, never, never learn Japanese. You may put it on my tombstone: expired in despair. I am in the middle of my lessons, and have stopped short to tell you so. I answer all Misaki San’s expostulations by assuring her that it is much more important for me to warn you to send out no more missionaries to a land with such a language, than to go on longer trying to learn it.” The length of the words alone (tokiakashiteoagemoshimashoka for example) was daunting.
Here is the last straw which has broken the final back of my resolution . . . I wanted to say, “I like fine weather better than wet”—not a complicated expression, one would imagine. It is the twist of construction that staggers me: “Rain of coming down bad honorable weather than even good honorable weather of days of side good is.”
You may learn pages of this, poll-parrot-fashion, but how to form other sentences in such a world? . . . Poor Misaki San is taking it quite seriously and I am scribbling under a perfect hailstorm of “Ah, Weesong [her pronunciation of Amy’s middle name, Wilson] San, dozo stop and learn more. Please say not so! Ah, Weesong San!
But all was not by any means lost. On the anniversary of her arrival in Matsuye she wrote that she had actually been the speaker at a little meeting, meant to be for children only, but men and women, “who would not otherwise waken up enough to trouble to come were attracted by the singing and crowded into the room. The children, “little wild rabbits a few weeks ago, as tame as pet ones now, clustered close about me.” When the room was jammed past toleration they moved into the courtyard and Amy spoke simply, helped by some men who translated into child language, “crumbling the bread, as it were.”
“We had just finished when an old woman who had been listening with great delight to her small grandchild’s performances in the sing-song line, came up to me and pulled my sleeve, saying, ‘All alone you have come, and well we have understood.’ Wasn’t it good of Him? I was half afraid they hadn’t quite. I thought of the last first of May and thanked God and took courage.”
Her letters describe dozens of meetings, always beginning with singing, always with distractions multiplied—the smokers smoked and tapped their tiny metal pipes loudly on the charcoal braziers, mothers nursed babies, undressed older children and rubbed them down, gongs sounded for prayer in nearby temples, terrible-looking idols gazed down from shelves in the houses where the meetings were held. Sometimes, in the middle of a hymn, “a splash in the near distance tells us that somebody is in the middle of something else—but I refrain. Oh, the strangeness of it!”
It was one thing to speak in a public meeting, but the thought of approaching a family as they sat in front of their own house filled her with fear. “Go and tell them about Me,” she heard her Master say. She had gone a few yards beyond them and it seemed silly to turn, the usual buts rose—I don’t know enough, may make mistakes and do more harm than good. Still that solemn Voice I am learning so slowly to recognize, spoke on—’Go and tell them about Me.’ It must be His, so I went. . . . In the simplest colloquial I repeated ‘God so loved the world,’ told them the very little I could, and left them sadly enough. It was so little My words are so few and so broken as yet, but pray that somehow He may use it to bring glory to His dear name.”
As in Belfast and Manchester, Amy sought out the factory girls. She cut an even stranger figure in their part of town than she had in the city slums at home. She was showered with stones and followed by jeering boys, but never mind. When she invited girls to a meeting nearly eighty came, making Amy cry as she remembered her girls at the two Welcomes and how they had sung “God be with you till we meet again.”
Her great longing was to have a “single eye” for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had given her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt others to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate. Why waste precious time, painful effort, on lesser things? Someone suggested that more girls would be drawn to the meetings if she offered lessons in sewing or embroidery and administered only a mild dose of the Gospel. But these girls worked from five in the morning till half past six in the evening. They had one day off in ten. They hadn’t time for foolishness. Furthermore, so far as Amy could see, there was no scriptural warrant for “consecrated fancywork and chatter,” for “fleshly things rather than spiritual.” “I would rather have two who came in earnest than a hundred who came to play,” she said. “We have no time to toy with souls like this. It is not by ceremonial teamaking and flower arranging, not by wool chrysanthemum-making and foreign sewing-learning, but ‘by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’”1
The young men of Japan we re beginning to learn English, which she regarded as the “open Sesame of the world’s great treasure caves and poison caves too.” She must do something about that, give them an antidote for the Western books full of falsehood and skepticism that were making their way into Japanese. Somehow she fitted afternoon Bible classes for them into her schedule, beginning with the book of Daniel.
Meetings in tiny dark rooms, meetings in courtyards, meetings on the street, meetings for women, for children, for men, for young men, factory girls, farm worker s; meetings in the afternoons, meetings in the evening, often beginning at ten o’clock when the people came in from the fields, and lasting till midnight—no wonder Amy was exhausted. Once while waiting for a late-night meeting to begin she lay down behind some kind Christian women on a dirty mat on the floor, chilled by draughts, assailed by odors, and fell asleep. She woke to hear her name announced as the next speaker, “and before anybody had time to wonder anything, I was wide awake in my place, text found and all. A curious preparation for speaking, you will think, but I think He gave it to me, so it was all right.”
Amy felt that her ability to sleep in such conditions ought to prove to her fellow missionaries that she was robust enough to “live native.” Why on earth did they make such a fuss about her wanting to do this? Their attempts to teach her the wisdom learned through longer experience than hers made little impression, and she continued to try to persuade them to allow her to discard all Western ways. “If there were less of what seems like ease in our lives they would tell more for Christ and souls. . . . We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don’t wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.” She did promise her concerned friends that she would not go against the combined wisdom of them all and rush into a life of extreme austerity, but she was deeply troubled by their objections. “Satan is so much more in earnest than we are—he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”
She felt keenly her own helplessness, awkwardness, and ignorance, and begged her friends at home to pray. All other powers but prayer seemed infinitesimal and useless by comparison. As she thought of the giants of faith like Elijah or Hudson Taylor, she knew that she was nothing but a baby, “shamefully, yes, shamefully small. ‘That which I know not teach Thou me. Lord, teach us to pray.’” She deplored the tendency she found in herself to do more talking and writing about praying than actual praying. She lacked practice, she wrote, so it was small wonder she was an infant in prayer speech. Would her friends at home help? Would they, when they wakened in the night or were busy at work and her name flashed into mind, would they recognize it as God’s telegram to remind them to pray? Would they telegraph back? “Don’t let a moment slip. More may hang upon your instant yielding than you know or shall know till the great Then comes.”
Amy’s attempts to give her readers the verisimilitude of an actual experience by painting verbal pictures were never more ardent than when she tried to arouse spiritual concern for those who had never heard of Christ. She described a chilly little hotel where she sat trying to dry her clothes over a hibachi while she wrote. Behind her was the “honorable place,” a slab of wood on which were arranged golden persimmons, a spray of blossom, burning candles, and a bowl of incense, offerings to a relative whose anniversary of “deigning to cease to become” they were celebrating. Above the offerings hung a picture of a Buddhist dignitary. In the next room was a shrine with ancestral tablets and a many-armed idol of the goddess of mercy. Lamps swung before it, prayers were chanted. It cut deep into her heart to think of the emptiness of it all, the sadness, the cry of the silence of death.
You who can resist the half-articulate pleading of many and many a heart today, can you resist this? From millions of voiceless souls, it is rising now—does it not touch you at all? The missionary magazines try to echo the silent sob. You read them? Yes; and you skim them for good stories, nice pictures, bits of excitement—the more the better. Then they drop into the wastepaper basket, or swell some dusty pile in the corner. For perhaps “there isn’t much in them.” Very likely not; “there isn’t much in the silence any more than in darkness, at least not very much reducible to print; but to God there is something in it for all that. Oh! you—you, I mean, who are weary of hearing the reiteration of the great unrepealed commission, you who think you care, but: who certainly don’t, past costing point, is there nothing will touch you?
1. Zechariah 4:6.