11. Losses and Gains
Chapter 11
Losses and Gains
Roger Judson turned six months old in March 1816. It was about this time that his parents noticed something strange. During the day Roger was fine. He would lie on his mat in Adoniram’s study following his father’s every move, or he would crawl around the garden. He enjoyed all the attention he got on outings with his parents around Rangoon. At night, however, he was a different child. His face felt feverish, and he cried and fussed for hours. Adoniram and Ann worried over what the problem could be. Neither of them knew enough about babies to decide whether it was normal teething behavior or if their son had something more serious wrong with him. Only time would tell, and it did.
Exactly two weeks after Adoniram and Ann first noticed Roger’s high temperature at night, the baby had a coughing fit. Nothing his frantic parents did for him seemed to help. Within an hour, Roger was dead.
The grief over Roger’s death sent Adoniram and Ann into deep depression. Ann wanted to know if all their children were going to be taken from them. Adoniram had no answer for her as he dug a small grave for his son under the mango tree in the mission house garden. News spread quickly of Roger’s death, and later that day, over two hundred friends and acquaintances arrived in time for the funeral of the “little white child.”
For the next three days, neither Adoniram nor Ann had the heart to go out in public. Instead, they locked themselves away in the mission house, surrounded by the few physical reminders of their dead son; a crib, the tiny clothes he wore, and his mat on the floor.
On the fourth day, Ann looked out the window and let out a surprised gasp. “Adoniram,” she called, “the vicereine is on her elephant, and she is stopped outside the gate.”
Adoniram hurried to the window. His mouth fell open as he counted the number of officers and attendants the vicereine had with her. There were over two hundred of them. “What can this mean?” he asked anxiously, slipping on his jacket.
“I’m not sure,” replied Ann. “I have not been to visit her lately. I hope she’s not offended.”
The Judsons stood transfixed as the vicereine, dressed in a blue and gold silk robe, was lifted down from the elephant and set on the ground.
“Come on,” said Adoniram, grabbing Ann’s hand. “We had better welcome her.”
When they opened the gate, the vicereine stepped into the courtyard.
“My dear sister,” she began, holding out her hands to Ann. “I have only just heard of your son’s death. Why did you not send for me so I could come to the funeral?”
Adoniram watched his wife turn white and supposed she, too, was thinking of the penalty a person could pay for offending a member of the viceroy’s family.
Ann quickly regained her composure. “I am sorry,” she replied. “I was so shocked by Roger’s death that I did not think of it.”
“Ah, well, I am here now,” replied the vicereine, patting Ann on the hand. “It is not good to shut yourself away like this. Tomorrow I will send an elephant for you both, and you shall be my guests for an outing.”
Neither Adoniram nor Ann felt like going on an outing, but deep down they both knew they had to find a way to put their baby son’s death behind them and go on.
Sure enough, the following morning a huge elephant arrived outside the mission house, complete with a howdah, a little booth perched on the animal’s back in which Adoniram and Ann were to sit. A rope ladder was dropped, and the two of them were helped up onto the elephant’s back. The driver, who sat just behind the elephant’s ears, skillfully guided the animal down the road to the corner, where the vicereine was waiting on her own elephant. Looking very regal in her gold-covered howdah, the vicereine smiled and waved to Adoniram and Ann.
Soon the procession of elephants and people had walked through town and out into the jungle around Rangoon. Despite their recent loss, Adoniram and Ann were fascinated by the whole adventure. Their elephant walked side-by-side with the vicereine’s. In front of them were thirty men with guns and spears, each man clad in a red tunic and wearing a long, floppy hat that reached to his shoulders. Behind them were four more elephants carrying the viceroy’s son and important government officials. And behind them was a throng of nearly three hundred servants carrying everything from huge fans to a supply of the vicereine’s favorite cigars.
From his position on the elephant’s back, Adoniram was able to get a sense of the animal’s strength. As they ventured deeper into the jungle, the path became narrower. At one point, the driver tapped the elephant with a stick, and the huge animal stopped and wound its trunk around the tree in front of it. The howdah swayed as the great beast braced its back legs and pulled the tree out of the ground by its roots. The elephant tossed the tree to one side and lumbered on down the path.
Finally, the procession reached an open spot under a huge banyan tree, where the vicereine signaled the procession to stop. “This will be a fine place for our meal,” she said, smiling at Ann.
Ann nodded and waited to be helped down the fifteen feet from the elephant’s back to the ground, where they all ate an enjoyable lunch. The vicereine did everything she could to take Adoniram’s and Ann’s minds off their dead son.
The vicereine’s efforts seemed to pay off, and soon both of the Judsons began to focus again on their missionary work. Ann, who was very lonely without Roger, decided to throw herself into starting a school to teach girls how to read. Most of the boys in Burma learned to read, but not the girls, and Ann wanted to do something about it. Soon there were twenty, then thirty girls lined up at the mission house each morning waiting for Ann to begin reading lessons. After class, when the mothers came to collect their daughters, Ann would tell Bible stories. Many of the women would stay for twenty minutes or longer to listen to the strange tales the white woman told them fluently in their own language.
In October, the Houghs and their printing press finally arrived in Rangoon, along with a supply of paper and Burmese type faces, generously made up for them by the head printer in Serampore. The first thing to be done after their arrival was to build a small hut for the printing press. Then it was time for George Hough to learn as much as possible about the Burmese language so that he could set the type.
While helping to set up the printing press, Adoniram kept busy translating the book of Matthew into Burmese. He also held nightly meetings with local Burmese men. Ann was busy, too. Her school for girls was flourishing, and she also had set about assisting Adoniram with the task of writing some simple Christian literature to help the Burmese people understand about God. This task was much more difficult than it may have sounded to their Baptist supporters back in New England.
Most Burmese people were Buddhist and did not believe in an eternal God. They had no concept of such a being. For them, human life was an endless wheel of reincarnation, of being born and reborn from one life to the next. This cycle was marked by endless suffering caused by a person’s passions and selfish desire for things that could not satisfy the spirit. The only hope of salvation for these Buddhists was to follow the Noble Eightfold Path laid out by the Buddha more than two and a half thousand years before. A person who disciplined himself and followed this path could eventually reach Nirvana—the state of no longer being alive—and so be freed from the cycle of being born and reborn. It was a bleak outlook, completely at odds with the hope and promise of salvation from sin and a new life here and now and in heaven to come, held out by Christianity, which Adoniram and Ann were trying to share with the Burmese people.
It took a while, but finally Adoniram and Ann produced a seven-page tract that they felt explained the gospel in a way that Burmese people could understand. They concluded the tract by noting the date it was completed, according to both the English and the Burmese calendars: “In the year of Christ, 1816; in the Burman year 1178; in the 967th day of the lord of the Saddan elephant, and the master of the Sakyah weapon; and in the 33rd year of his reign; in the division Pashoo; on Tuesday, the 12th day of the wane of the moon Wahgoung, after the double beat, this writing, entitled The Way to Heaven, was finished. May the reader obtain light. Amen.”
The type was set for the tract, and in early 1817, a thousand copies were printed by George Hough. At first no one seemed very interested in reading the tract, but slowly word got around that the foreigners had a “holy book,” and men began to stop by the mission house and request a copy of it. Sometimes they would stay and ask questions, but most often they just took the tract and quickly left. It was surprising, then, to Adoniram when one day in March 1817 he answered the door to find a man who wished to come inside and talk.
“My name is Maung Yah,” the man said. “I have come to visit you.”
“Please sit down,” replied Adoniram, taking note of the man’s expensive clothing. “Where are you from?”
“North of here,” replied the man rather vaguely. “I have come to Rangoon to worship at the Shwe Dagon pagoda.”
Adoniram nodded. In Burma, March was Tabaung, the last month of the Burmese year and the month in which huge Buddhist festivals were held. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Burma flocked to Rangoon to worship at the pagoda where eight hairs of the great Buddha were said to be enshrined.
Maung Yah leaned towards Adoniram, his voice low and steady, his dark eyes gleaming. “How long will it take me to learn the religion of Jesus?” he asked.
Adoniram stared for a moment. In his four years in Rangoon he had never been asked this question. Could it be that this man wanted to become a Christian? “Well,” he began, stumbling over his words, “it’s impossible to answer that question. It depends on how serious a person is in his inquiry. If a man or a woman sincerely wishes to become a Christian, God will give them light. If a person does not sincerely wish to become a Christian, they will never truly understand the Christian message.”
“It is more complicated than I had imagined,” replied Maung Yah.
“God is there to help anyone who asks,” said Adoniram gently. “Tell me, how did you come to hear of Jesus?”
Maung Yah’s face brightened. “He is the Son of God,” he said. “And God is a being without beginning or end, who is not subject to old age or death, but always is.”
A chill went up and down Adoniram’s spine. Those were the exact words of the tract he and Ann had written. Sitting cross-legged in front of him was proof that the printed word could make a difference with the Burmese people. Maung Yah was the first Burmese person Adoniram had ever heard speak directly of an eternal being.
“Wait here,” said Adoniram, hurrying over to his desk to retrieve a copy of a new tract Ann had just finished writing. “I see you are familiar with my writing,” he said.
Maung Yah nodded as he took the tract. “Yes,” he said. “These words speak of the right way. This is the true God.”
Thinking that the man was ready to become a Christian, Adoniram began to tell him more about Christianity, but Maung Yah did not want to talk anymore.
“I need more of the writings,” he told Adoniram several times. “What can you give me to read and meditate on?”
Adoniram felt deflated. He had not yet finished translating the book of Matthew. He explained to Maung Yah that if he came back at this time next year he would have a big book for him with the entire life of the Son of God recorded in it. But Maung Yah was not to be satisfied. “You must have something,” he said.
In the end, Adoniram handed him the proof sheets George Hough had printed of the first five chapters of Matthew. Although they had many mistakes in them, Maung Yah seemed happy to have the pages.
“I will read them every day,” he promised Adoniram. “I will guard them as a great treasure.”
For weeks Adoniram waited for news from Maung Yah. Surely he must have become a Christian by now, he told himself. Still no news came. In frustration, Adoniram talked to his language teacher about the difficulty the mission was having in making a single convert.
The teacher’s answer was simple and to the point. “We are from Burma, the Golden Country,” he said. “Everyone who is from Burma is a Buddhist, and just a few are Hindu like myself. That is the way it is. Your religion might be good for foreigners, but not for us; we are from Burma. Look around. Do you see even a single native Christian in all of Burma? No. Even if your religion was truer than ours, our people would rather dwell in hell with their families than in heaven alone.”
Adoniram sighed deeply at the response. But it was true. During the past year, hundreds of people had taken a tract or come to listen to him or Ann talk, but not one of them had become a convert. There had to be a key to unlock their hearts, but Adoniram had no idea what it might be. Somehow he had to find a way to convince Burmese people that they could become Christians and still be Burmese.