11
Chapter Eleven
Dr, Anderson arrived at exactly the hour she had specified, impeccably groomed in a dark cotton dress of simple cut, her ash-blonde hair drawn back carefully in a bun. She wore Ecuadorian earrings of hand-wrought silver with a bracelet to match. I noticed that her car was well polished.
“Well,” she said, negotiating smoothly a remarkably rough road, “what sort of day have you had?”
“Oh, it’s been very interesting, really. But so hot! I’d forgotten how hot it can get here on the coast”
“Terrific, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose I feel it more because the sierra is so cold. Is that where you live, too? Where is your work, Dr. Anderson?”
“Please call me Lynn, if you like. I live in Cuenca, in the southern part of the sierra.”
“Oh, yes. You have a hospital there, haven’t you?”
“Just a clinic. I have four nurses and two national doctors who work with me, but we don’t have inpatients.”
“What mission are you with?” No one had told me Lynn’s connections, and as yet I could not tag her in my mind.
Lynn laughed, tilting back her head. Then she looked at me quickly, her eyes becoming serious again.
“Suppose I didn’t tell you? It doesn’t really matter much anyway, since my connection with the mission is becoming less and less tangible. Besides, I think it’s much more interesting to know people than causes and movements, don’t you? As soon as you put somebody in a pigeonhole, you want either to endorse him or cross him off. Did you enjoy the meetings this morning?”
“Why, yes. I enjoyed Mr. Perkins’ message.”
Lynn said nothing. She waited for me to go on.
“And then, it’s certainly encouraging to know that there’s so much missionary effort going on. I mean, you see such a need all around and it seems so hopeless to do anything about it, and then when you hear all these reports you’re convinced it’s not hopeless after all.”
“And suppose, after a few years’ work, you found that it was?” Lynn watched the traffic and did not give me a chance to learn from her face what she meant.
“Oh, but it couldn’t be hopeless,” I protested. “You don’t mean that that’s what you’ve found?”
“I was asking a question. What would happen to your idea of God, for instance, if you found that your work was useless?”
“To my idea of God? Why, nothing, I hope.”
We had reached the Rogerses’ house and Lynn parked the car with easy skill. She must be a very good doctor, I thought, the picture of confidence and efficiency. I saw that she had a certain dignity in her walk as we went toward the front door.
The house was orderly and cool, with the smell of roast beef coming from the kitchen, the table attractively set at the far end of the living room, fresh flowers in several places. Miss Blake was there, dressed in a very bright crepe dress with pink flowers which cried out for some feint response from her gray face and hair. Frances introduced us to another couple named Ernie and Maxine. Ernie was the one from Nebraska who imported bulls and roosters. Myrtle was there, too, sitting on the edge of a chair beside Maxine.
“Strawberries!” said Maxine. “Where?”
“At the market. And beautiful red ones, too—not those gray squishy ones they usually have. I think Point Four has helped develop them.”
“How much were they?”
“Only four sucres a box. I didn’t think that was too bad, considering what you’d pay in the States.”
Ernie lounged in a corner of the sofa, reading a magazine. I could see the tide of the story: “Are Christian Teen-Agers Stuffy?”
“Daddy!” came from the children’s bedroom.
“What is it, Linda?” called Woodrow.
“Can I have some ice cream?”
“No, Linda, you go to sleep. You should have been asleep long ago.”
“Barry had ice cream.”
Woodrow said nothing.
“Barry had ice cream, Daddy. Why can’t I have ice cream?”
“Didn’t Rosario give you ice cream for your supper?”
“Just some. Not a lot”
“Well, wasn’t that enough?”
“Barry got a lot. Can’t I have some now?”
“No, Linda, you go to sleep. Daddy means it”
“Why?”
“You’ll wake Marilyn. Go to sleep, I said, Linda.”
“I want ice cream.”
“Linda.”
“What, Daddy?”
“You know what. Go to sleep.”
“Daddy didn’t pray with me.”
“Mommie prayed with you a long time ago. Now you be quiet”
“I want Daddy to pray.”
Woodrow went into the bedroom. There was a low murmur, then a higher-pitched murmur, and he emerged, closing the door softly. He flopped down on the other end of the sofa and picked up a magazine, leafing through it idly as he turned to Miss Blake.
“Not a bad crowd down for the conference, is it?”
“Daddy! Will I get ice cream tomorrow?”
“Linda, you be quiet this minute.”
“OK, Daddy.” There was a pregnant pause. “But Barry won’t get any, will he?”
“Linda won’t get any if she doesn’t go to sleep.”
“I’m going to sleep, Daddy. Daddy, I’m going to sleep now.”
Woodrow smiled at Ernie with one side of his mouth. Ernie shook his head.
“These kids,” said Woodrow.
There was evidence of them in the room, though everything was neat. In one corner stood a low square table with a seat built into an opening in the middle of it. There were toys spread on top of this, and under the coffee table lay a small cement mixer. The floor of the room was of polished brown and white tile and the walls were plastered and painted off-white. Frances’ good taste showed in the choice of slip covers and draperies and in the artistic arrangement of flowers on the mantel. She came into the room, wearing a small bright apron, carrying a tray of glasses. Woodrow rose and took the tray and passed it to the guests. Ernie, I noticed, did not get up. He found the magazine story absorbing, and looked up only long enough to take the glass of tomato juice offered him and to say thank you. There was no place for Frances to sit down. Ernie did not notice this and Woodrow had gone to the kitchen for napkins. I had begun to get a chair before Ernie came to and took it from me.
As we sipped the juice Miss Blake described her ride to the meeting that morning in a colectivo, a cross between a bus and a station wagon.
“They aren’t supposed to stop for you unless they have a seat, but it was rush hour and when I got on there wasn’t a seat left so I protested and the driver pointed to the little seat on his left—you know the one, don’t you, Margaret—that little boxlike affair, hardly big enough for a child, on the left of the driver’s seat. So of course I told him I couldn’t sit on that, so a man behind him slid around onto the box and I finally got his seat. But the buses are even worse, and it’s worth the difference in price, don’t you think so, Frances?”
“Oh, definitely. What’s four cents?”
“Well, I used to think it was plenty, but after I got my purse stolen on a bus and lost fifty-five sucres I decided even a missionary had a right to ride the colectivo.”
Rosario, Frances’ maid, was putting the food on the table.
“Ya, señora,” she said, and Frances invited us to sit down.
“Frances, this roast is perfect!” exclaimed Maxine, when the food had been passed around.
“Oh, I don’t take any credit. Rosario does everything, really. I can even leave the meal planning to her if I want to. Of course, she’d like to feed us nothing but rice and fideo.” Missionaries, I noticed, had an irritating way of throwing in Spanish words as though they were English. “So I have to sorta help her balance the meals for us. She cooks her own rice and stuff, of course, regardless of what we’re having. Without rice it’s just not a meal in her book.”
“Oh, I know,” Myrtle put in. “My Filomena is the same way. I never saw such mounds of starch as she can put away. How do they do it, and not get any fatter than they do?”
“They eat in bulk what we eat in variety, you must remember,” said Miss Blake.
“Well, with the diet I’m on now there’s precious little variety,” said Maxine, and from there the conversation went on and on about diets. Then it was the heat, the dishonesty of tradesmen and mechanics, poor gasoline which ruined cars, red tape involved in getting things into the country, the conference and the people who attended it, with their poor Spanish, poor health and poor support from home.
“And the way these nationals think we’re all made of money!” exclaimed Myrtle.
“You can hardly blame them,” said Miss Blake, “when you compare our way of life with theirs. We belong to the upper class, by their standards, and we can’t get around it.”
“Maybe we should learn to identify more,” said Woodrow. ‘Jesus was a poor man.”
“Yes, but then how do you reach the upper classes?” said Myrtle. “Besides, if we identified with the lower classes, we’d be spending all our time doing the things they do, and we’d never get any missionary work done. How could we take our clothes to the river and wash them by hand? Or cook on a wood stove in a bamboo shack, spending all day making all those complicated soups and things?”
“Well, I guess it’s been done. Missionaries have had to do worse than that”
“But this is the twentieth century. We’ve got to adjust to more modern missionary methods.”
I was lost. The arguments disregarded, it seemed to me, the principle of renunciation and sacrifice to follow Christ. What were we here for? And yet I could not answer the questions raised in my mind. Someone noticed my silence, and a few polite inquiries were made about my work in Indi Urcu. I described my house and the village and the great need around me, and they all thought it sounded like a great opportunity and were relieved to know that another missionary had come to work expressly with the Quichuas. Miss Blake talked about her work with the little church in Riobamba, a series of small successes which punctuated her continual giving out of tracts and going from door to door.
“But it’s so hard to get people at home to see the need. They think of jungle missionaries as the only ones on the front lines. It’s so hard to convince them that we who labor for the Lord in the cities are just as much on the front lines, just as much in need of prayer and support. If only I could get a young couple or a couple of young men to come up there and work with me. My, the opportunities!”
The use of the term “front lines” puzzled me. It was not clear just which were the front ones, now that I was in Ecuador. Once I had thought of all missionaries as on the front lines, but now distinctions were being drawn and I wondered how my work would be classified. Lynn saw the puzzlement in my face, I was sure, though her expression did not perceptibly change.
I did not dream of challenging the truth of Miss Blake’s statement. It must be quite legitimate to refer to certain aspects of God’s work as strategic, but on what basis did one single them out? I could not argue the thing through, but I knew that it made me uneasy to hear her speak as she did. Perhaps I had an imperfect recognition of the loftiness of my calling, a lack of vision which forbade me to assign to the work its full status in the economy of God. I was an inexperienced, immature worker and it ill befitted me to criticize the terminology used by a veteran of years of service.
Frances passed me a basket of rolls.
“Oh, I couldn’t, thank you, Frances. They are delicious, though. Miss Blake, will you have one?”
Miss Blake took one and went on.
“It’s a real joy to contact some of those young housewives there in Rio. They’re bored and lonely and it’s amazing how receptive they are, for the most part, to the Gospel. They hardly ever refuse the Scripture portions I offer them, and who knows how many are blessed by them? Of course it’s another thing for them to come out to the services—their husbands or the priests might find out, and they’re afraid, but I do give them the plan of salvation, and then, even if I’m never allowed inside the door again, I know they’ve had the chance to accept Christ. Of course, some of them are hard all right. Only God could ever break through to them—they slam the door right in my face.”
There were small pauses after some of these utterances, as though Miss Blake expected assent from the audience, but I had the odd sensation that we were listening to a recording and consequently need not respond. Finally Woodrow spoke up.
“Well, I’ve always heard Riobamba is a hard place. Wonder why it is those mountain cities are so hard to crack?”
“I think it’s just what I was saying—people don’t pray for them, they’re just not as interested in that kind of work as they are in more dramatic or romantic work. Then, too, young couples come out, and we try to interest them in working in the cities, but they’re always attracted to the Indians and there they go.”
“I wonder,” Lynn spoke for the first time, “if it is possible that God might have some excellent reasons, quite outside our imaginings, for not doing what we think He ought to do?”
“What do you mean?” asked Miss Blake.
Lynn paused, her water glass halfway to her lips. “We are accustomed to blame the deficiency of missionary work on our own lack of prayer or failure to surrender, or on our inefficient methods or the coldness of the church at home, or even on the hardness of the native heart—the notorious failure of Christian missions among Mohammedans is often accounted for in this way. . . .”
“Would you deny those things?” Miss Blake asked, her eyebrows drawing together.
“I question whether they explain everything.”
“Oh well, of course they don’t explain everything. But, after all, we have the clear command of God, we know what His will is concerning the evangelization of the world, so if it doesn’t get done you wouldn’t blame Him, would you?”
Lynn took a sip of water. I held my breath. She would surely say no. What other answer could there be if we were not to let the whole structure of our faith collapse? Why were we here if God was not going to keep his part of the bargain? Lynn said nothing, but looked from Miss Blake to me, and then to Frances and Woodrow.
“Oh no,” said Frances. “We can’t explain the way God works, we know that. Lots of things happen that we can’t explain. Look at the beheading of John the Baptist. But then in the end God shows us that it was all for the best, and who knows how much greater glory He got because He allowed John to be killed?”
“That’s true, Frances,” said Woodrow. “But we’re talking about the evangelization of the world and the reasons for its apparent failure so far. I see no other explanation than the indifference of the Church. Christ gave the command, Go ye, and if we don’t obey, we’re responsible. That’s all there is to it. The burden of proof lies with us to show why we didn’t go.”
“Exactly,” said Miss Blake. Her eyes darted from one to the other, missing nothing, as though the moral responsibility for the entire group rested with her. ‘Why, you’d take the whole motivation out of missions if you put it on any other basis. We know God could have done it some other way, but He chose us to be His ambassadors, and woe unto us if we preach not the Gospel.” She looked at me almost accusingly, as though I had taken a position on the other side. Not for the world would I have contradicted her or the others. What they said was to me ineluctable. God keep us, I prayed, from human rationalization which cracks the very foundation of our faith.
“Did God,” asked Lynn quietly, “ever destroy anything which He Himself had built?”
“No,” said Miss Blake without hesitation, “at least not until men had been so disobedient that He had to. But what are you trying to say? Don’t you believe, Dr. Anderson, that we’re here to win souls? Don’t you believe that? What is the missionary task, after all?”
“I am no longer as sure as I once was.” Lynn smiled, a gentle admission of vulnerability.
“Well, we’re here to serve the Lord. I don’t know what you’re here for.” Miss Blake attacked the piece of meat on her plate. Frances offered us more mashed potatoes and peas and tried to direct the conversation to a discussion of the hopelessness of the Ecuadorian customs system. Woodrow had spent two entire days trying to retrieve a pair of new glasses which he had had sent down from the States. We all commiserated with him, and other examples were cited which proved the system worse and worse, but conversation was strained for the rest of the meal. A few clear pronouncements on one side and a few honest questions on the other had, in a matter of minutes, shown me that life was not going to be as simple, ever again, as I had thought. It was as though, during a stage performance, someone had peered around from the wings, and though the actors did their best to ignore him and then to make him gracefully retire, the play was ruined. The lines petered out in banality.
There was a little time before the session and I wanted to get away alone. The others went to the church, but I decided to walk. I must determine whether anything I had heard at dinner made it necessary for me to revise what I had planned to say in my report that evening.
I went out to the Malecon and walked by the river, too absorbed this time to notice the things that had bothered me on my first visit to Guayaquil—in fact, my general impression this time was that the city was very modem indeed, a progressive and bustling metropolis.
I was supposed to tell of my work. What was my work? Reaching the mountain Indians, of course. What was my object? Souls. How was I to seek this object? Why, by witnessing, giving out the Gospel. And this, of course, could not be done until I learned the language. That was the obvious first step, and that was what I’d begun to do. There were no texts, no language schools to attend. I must do it on my own. The mission would want to know my specific prayer requests: first of all, my own spiritual needs—a genuine concern for the souls of the Indians, a wholehearted abandon to the task, a willingness to go to any lengths in order to bring others to the Savior. Then I needed prayer for special help in the language, wisdom in knowing how to make contacts with individuals, guidance to those who were prepared by the Spirit of God. That would do it, I thought. That would easily fill my seven or eight minutes; it would be an honest presentation of the work and a good summary of my needs in connection with it.
But the dinner-table conversation kept plaguing me. Lynn’s calm questions had shaken me, but Miss Blake’s instant answers, which were precisely the answers that had popped into my own head to give to Lynn, shook me even more. It was disquieting to discover now, as I walked by the river and went over the talk in my mind, that what Lynn had said had also been in my thoughts at times and I had not dared to give utterance to it. I had answered myself, at such moments, as Miss Blake had answered Lynn, and had succeeded in silencing the conflicts. They were not so easily silenced now. Then I thought of Woodrow and Frances, kind and generous and anxious to make us all happy, Woodrow, in his position as field director of the mission, obliged to take a certain position while at the same time diplomatically acknowledging the right of another to examine it. I was a member of the same mission. I was committed to the same set of propositions. Just how was I going to blend into this picture? I would have to be careful.
The evening session was as I had expected. There were more reports, detailed this time, sprinkled with “our people,” “our work” and “our territory,” but the possessive included me this time, since I was a member, so it was my work, my people, my mission. When it was my turn, I said what I had planned to say and sat down, having given no one reason to wonder whether I was qualified to carry the banner, whether I was wholly convinced of the validity of my position or of the mission’s. I had said my lines as expected, and I was in.
I lived through the rest of those three days, wishing that they might somehow be shortened, for I wanted to return to my field and begin trying out in earnest the things which were being talked about at such length. The Work was the supreme subject and object of everyone present, it seemed to me, and human relationships went by the board. Except for Lynn, no one seemed to be an individual. They were cogs in wheels, fitting smoothly into their notches, emitting the right kind of squeak—and this, I thought, was as it should be if the task of each was the same. What room was there for questionings, or the exercise of individuality? In answer to an inquiry I had learned to which mission Lynn belonged, and I heard that she had been on the verge of resigning or being asked to resign—my informant was not certain which—but her unimpeachable record as a physician and a missionary kept her superiors from dealing too harshly.
Between the hymn singing and the praying and the reporting and the devotionals there was time for “fellowship,” which usually meant food eaten in the company of other missionaries and the sharing of a few jokes and personal anecdotes. I longed to have more conversation with Lynn—or, for that matter, with anyone who would take time seriously to discuss issues—but there was no opportunity. So I settled for faithful attendance at all meetings, where I tried to learn all I could.