12. Not Much of a Halo in Ceylon
Chapter 12
Not Much of a Halo in Ceylon
At dawn of the day the ship was to dock in Colombo a small, tired woman stood on deck, tortured with fear, weak, “utterly unfit for the great dim unknown, coming now so close to me.” A moth, Amy said, could have crushed her then. She picked up her Daily Light and read, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”1 A flood of sunshine fell across the mists and she decided she would trust and not be afraid. Welcomed and invited to stay at a mission cottage in Colombo she was immediately made one of the circle, but felt helpless, trustless, wondered why she had come, and longed for solitude and quiet.
The D.O.M. had word of her whereabouts. What on earth could his darling girl be up to now? Off to Ceylon! Was she about to pull up all stakes in Japan and join another mission? He cabled her at once, advising her against joining any mission in Ceylon. Then he wrote, expressing his serious concern about the move she had made without so much as informing the Keswick Mission Committee in advance. She was devastated. She had left it all in God’s hands, believing He would make things as clear to her constituency as He had made them to her. “But it has not been so, and I see my wrongness and cannot be sorry enough.”
She found that “a tiny band of girl-witnesses unto Him” (three single missionaries whose leaders had both died of fever) had been praying for a new leader to be sent to the village of Heneratgoda. To them it was perfectly obvious that Amy was the answer. To her it was not. She, their leader? The thought filled her with new fears, but as they met and prayed together she believed that while she was not meant to lead them she could be “the string to the beads.”
Making it clear that she must not be regarded as a member of the Village Mission of Heneratgoda she moved into their thatch-roofed hut. Its floor was composed of what Amy’s Victorian sensibilities allowed her to describe only as “mud and horror. ” During every minute of every hour they were under the meticulous scrutiny of many eyes (“these good folk seem fond of character-study”), a thing unsettling, of course, but “an easy way of entertaining one’s friends—live and let look!” She found beauty in the surroundings, always particularly observant of birds.
Yesterday I had five delightful minutes watching a honeysucker. There, in the bright sunshine like a bit of blue flame among white flowers, the tiny chirping thing flitted to and fro. Now poising itself on a spray of shining blossom, diving its curved beak deep into each fragrant flower, never marring a petal, now fluttering in and out of the bush on which they grow, its clear electric tinting showing well against the green, and now for a moment motionless, half hidden in the whiteness, a little living jewel in a snowdrift of sweet flowers.
With her usual determination and earnestness—never mind that she was supposed to be convalescing—she plunged at once into meetings. “Bright lamp shining in the midst of bright flowers, bright dark eyes shining upon us, bright praise songs rising from lips closed till now, soft moonlight shining upon all.” Here she was in a new field of service, a new language to learn, the old, old story to tell. Children were most open to hear that story, and she began to gather them, “dear little brownies with necklaces and bangles, such a contrast to the quaint tots of Japan, the queer little imps of China.” When one three-year-old refused to join the singing, she forfeited the privilege of sitting on Amy’s lap. A thumb went into her mouth, she sulked, was put on a chair in the corner, and told she was a sinful child. Three times in an hour the child fell off the chair. When she was told she could not go home till she was good, “a smile of much delight lit up the sweet contentment of her face and she remarked triumphantly that she did not want to go home. The opposite tack was tried at once and within five minutes the fight was won and with more mischief than penitence, I’m afraid, the monkey declared herself ‘good.’”
Heathenism in all its forms Amy found appalling. She described a celebration which took place just across the lane from their little house:
Through the moonless dark we can see the flare of torches, the glimmer of lamps, the flicker of tapers. The woman there was ill, they had a devil-dance over her, now she was recovered and they were paying the vow to the demon who had withdrawn as requested. One man is playing a sort of long-shaped tomtom, hung round his neck, two more are dancing up and down and round and round on a marked circle, sacred to the presiding spirit. Two or three boys are arranged in corners to yell at given periods. On the ground lies the woman. Behind the performers three altars stand, decked with creamy water lilies, lit with tapers floating in split coconuts, and on each there is rice in little piles, a few coins, and sprays of the exquisite areca flower. All around there are people, men and women and boys. They will go on all night. In the early morning the dance will vary, they will sing something different too. At present it is a continuous drum thump, bangle-jingle, weird cry, and monotonous chant. They are propitiating the demon and at the same time trying to frighten him away. . . . “Doctrines of demons” are no myth here. . . . I turned to my Bible: “Be strong and courageous, be not afraid or dismayed, for the King of Assyria nor for all the multitude that is with him, FOR there be more with us than with him: with him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles. And the people rested themselves upon the word of Hezekiah, King of Judah.”2 And so, I think, may we.
When this woman from the windswept seacoast of Ireland found herself “away in the heart of heathendom with my sister-girls in this dark, dark jungle” she was telling the straight truth as she saw it. She turned with an instinctive deadly nausea from any coloring of the facts, any slightest bending of the truth in order to create a more interesting picture. She was far ahead of her time as a missionary reporter. The constituency was accustomed to a certain triumphalism in missionary stories. Not that there were none like Amy who told it straight, but there were many who popularized mission work by dramatizing the successes and skipping lightly over what was far more commonplace than success. “There isn’t much of a halo in real life,” she wrote, “we save it all up for the missionary meetings.”
The original letters (reprints of which Amy had expressly forbidden) show evidence of another’s attempt, if not to color the facts, at least to sweeten them a bit. Someone had crossed out parts not thought suitable for reprint, such as mention of fleas, lice, or “slimy, crawly things,” filthy slime through which she had to wade, and, in a reference to the inability of the Singhalese to focus their minds, the editor has deleted Amy’s aside, “if minds they have.”
The hard work of visiting—“Do you throw a halo around it?” she wrote:
You go to a hut and find nobody in, you go to the next and find nobody wants you, you go to the next and find an old woman who says yes, you may talk if you like, and she listens in an aimless sort of way and perhaps one or two more drift in, and you go on, a prayer behind each sentence if you are speaking through interpretation (but I hope I won’t have to do that always), an undercurrent flowing all the time, if you are sitting silently listening to somebody else speaking. Perhaps they are thoughtful enough to object—“We ourselves are Buddhists, why should we change? Do you kill animals? We don’t want a religion like that.”
If you ask them don’t they eat eggs and fish, they say oh yes, but they wouldn’t poach an egg (i.e. break the shell!), boiling it is different. They wouldn’t kill a fish, they take it out of the water and it dies of its own accord. . . . It is so disappointing sometimes, just when you think you have got a little bit of the glorious Truth wedged in, when the heart seems touched perhaps by the wonderful story of Calvary, some little triviality comes up, and some question about pigs or eggs sends you back to the very beginning. But there are the bright bits, too, times when a flash of Heaven’s own sunshine lights up the darkness of the darkest mud hut, and one such moment is worth a lifetime’s plod.
Although Amy was told that it was a risky business in Ceylon for single women to visit Buddhist priests, she did it. Taking questions from a crowd also was dangerous. She did that too. A priest turned up in an open-air meeting one day and put these questions: You Christians believe God leads people who are in earnest to the Truth, do you? Yes. Do you deny that Gautama Buddha was in real earnest? No. How was it, then, that he did not find it? Amy’s answer, recorded in a letter: “To our Father and his Father we may leave the gentle Buddha. To the Indian Prince Siddhartha (the teacher of whom Buddha was the deified incarnation), as to the Persian King Cyrus, He may have said, ‘I have even called thee, I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.’—but what of those,” she added to home friends, “who today are seeking and, so far as we are concerned, seeking as vainly as he? There are some such. In inland China Mr. Hudson Taylor found one. All old missionaries can tell of a few rare souls found blindly groping, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him. Oh that our skirts may be free from the stain of our brother’s blood!”
Because of a doctor’s verdict that it would never do for Amy to return to Japan—she had “brain exhaustion”—she had finally settled down, she wrote in November 1894, to study the Singhalese language. Her luggage was to be sent in a year or so from Japan, and the D.O.M. was shipping a box of clothing to Ceylon for her. She had reached a measure of peace. The Lord’s field for her work would be Ceylon. “All is settled,” she wrote on November 14.
On November 27 she learned that the D.O.M. had had a stroke. Within an hour she set out for Colombo, borrowed warm clothing from a missionary, and sailed for London the next day.
The journey was a nightmare from start to finish. She was so ill she could remember little except pain, fever, fear, heat, then, in Naples, icy wind. The Lord sent along His angels, one of them in Rome to rout her from sleep on one train and get her on the right train for Paris, another a Frenchman who piloted her across Paris to the train for Calais. A rough Channel crossing. Her mother meeting her in London on December 15. December 16—her twenty-seventh birthday. It is doubtful that there was any festivity. Then long days of blank. Finally the faces of beloved Keswick friends, a doctor’s face. Through it all the urgent thought, “I must be well. I must get to Broughton Grange.” She got there in time for Christmas.
1. Nehemiah 8:10.
2. 2 Chronicles 32:7, 8.