13. To the West
Chapter 13
To the West
Sundar stood on the deck of the steamer City of Cairo, watching as Bombay and the west coast of India receded from view. It was January 16, 1920, and he was on his way to England. The voyage took over three weeks, and Sundar spent much of the time in his cabin praying about the speaking tour ahead of him. He was not sure what form it would take. All he knew was that meetings had been arranged for him in England.
The City of Cairo berthed at Liverpool on February 10, and members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were commonly called, met Sundar at the dock. Sundar felt immediately at home with these people, as they often worshiped in silence as he did. Even though it was late winter in England, Sundar refused to wear shoes or an overcoat until someone pointed out that his muddy feet inconvenienced his hosts, who had to provide water to wash his feet before he could enter their homes. His hosts also pointed out that arriving at a person’s home in a wet robe was not considered good manners in England. So, to be a better guest, Sundar bought himself a pair of sandals and a gray overcoat.
Try as hard as he might to remember, Sundar often forgot to wear his overcoat. On one particularly foggy morning he was standing on a busy corner waiting to cross the street when out of the fog a woman’s hand appeared, clasping a letter. The woman started poking at Sundar, who immediately realized that she had mistaken the orange glow of his robe for a red mailbox. Sundar took the letter from the woman and said, “Ma’am, I would be very pleased to post that for you.” He could hardly stop himself from laughing at the thought of how surprised the woman must have been to encounter a talking mailbox.
The Quakers took Sundar south to Birmingham, where he spoke at the Friends’ Missionary Training College. He was still frustrated by his limited vocabulary when he had to speak, but he pushed himself to improve his English.
From Birmingham, Sundar traveled to the university town of Oxford, where he was invited to stay with an Anglican brotherhood called the Cowley Brothers. Sundar had met some of the men of the brotherhood in India and been impressed by their simple way of living. While in Oxford he was invited to carry out a series of lectures at Balliol and Mansfield Colleges. Still wearing his saffron robe and carrying only a blanket and a Bible, he made quite an impression on some of England’s most elite and educated young men. By Sundar’s third lecture in Oxford, hundreds of young men had to be turned away because there was not enough space in the hall to accommodate everyone.
In a newspaper interview during this time, a reporter asked Sundar, “So why did you come to England?”
Sundar replied, “Many Indians say that Christianity is not the real religion of England and that it is not practiced here but is merely an Empire plan to change the religions of conquered nations. So I came to see for myself.”
“And what have you seen of this?” the reporter asked.
“I have found that you are a very busy people and that you have so much to do there does not seem much time to think about religion. There is a great deal of materialism. But when I get into your homes and know you, then I find that you do really care about religion.”
Following the meetings in Oxford, Sundar traveled on to London, where he met privately with the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop seemed very impressed with Sundar and offered to sponsor a series of meetings in London. The first of these gatherings consisted of seven hundred clergy of the Church of England who came to hear Sundar speak at the Church House in Westminster.
Then, on March 23, 1920, a large group of missionaries and mission secretaries, representing many missionary organizations in England and Ireland, came together to hear Sundar. He urged those who gathered to learn about the cultures they were going into and to find ways to use as much of the local cultures as possible when presenting and modeling the gospel.
While in London, Sundar was asked to speak at Westminster Chapel. Although this was a prestigious pulpit to be invited to speak from, he told the same simple stories he told when speaking to the people who gathered to hear him in India.
“Once,” he began, “I was sitting on a Himalayan hillside, and I looked down on a tree. In the tree was a nest, and on the nest a mother bird was hatching her brood. I knew that a wonderful world was awaiting those chicks, a world of fresh air, green leaves, and sunshine. Soon they would be big enough to leave the nest and fly wherever they chose, but as they pecked their way out of their eggs, they did not know this. The only life they had known was confined to their eggs, surrounded in liquid and dependent upon their mother for warmth. We Christians are like that—the Gospel of Saint Mark tells us that we are not far from the Kingdom of God, just as the chicks in their eggs were not far from the outside world. We do not know what we shall be, nor the things that God has prepared for us. Now, while we are still in the body, our great need is to receive heat from the Holy Spirit.”
On Good Friday five thousand people came to hear Sundar speak at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. When Sundar rose to speak, the entire congregation stood and greeted him with a traditional Indian greeting. A reporter from the London Daily Chronicle was present at the meeting, and the following day an article appeared in that newspaper. Like all reporters, this reporter grappled with what it was that made Sundar so special. In his article the reporter concluded: “How is it that the sadhu has so manifestly captured the religious world within the short space of six weeks?… The secret of this man’s power lies in his utter self-abandonment to a high ideal.… It is surely a token of good that we of the West, who are so obsessed with the materialistic spirit of the age, have come in close contact with one who stands for the supremacy of the spiritual.”
From England, Sundar traveled on to Scotland and Ireland. At one of his meetings in Scotland, a Swiss pastor was present. When the meeting was over, the Reverend Kiener came to Sundar with tears in his eyes and said, “When I saw you there, standing before me, and heard you speak of your spiritual life, while on the other hand I was surrounded by theological scholars in gowns and hoods, all at once the question came to my mind: What are we aiming at, after all, in studying theology? Why do we learn and study all the hundreds of lesser things, when we do not allow the most important one of all to have its proper place in our lives? What are we doing with all our apparatus of scholarship, and what have we achieved by it all? Men like you can move nations, but what about us?”
Sundar did not answer. He knew that the Reverend Kiener would have to answer for himself the questions he had posed, just as every Christian had to answer them individually.
The following month Sundar spoke in a great missionary conference at London’s Albert Hall. Ten thousand people squeezed into the building to hear him speak, while many others were turned away for lack of room. This led to Sundar’s receiving over three hundred more invitations to speak in the United Kingdom, but he declined all of them. Sundar felt that his time in England was over and that God had called him to continue on in his journey to the United States.
On May 30, 1920, nearly five months after setting out from India, Sundar arrived in New York harbor. A group called the Pond Lyceum Bureau had offered to arrange a lecture tour of America for him. But soon after disembarking in New York, Sundar learned that the Pond Lyceum Bureau was a business, not a Christian ministry, and that the group intended to make a great deal of money from promoting him. No matter which way he looked at the situation, Sundar could not accept that his religious beliefs were going to be peddled in such a manner. He cancelled the arrangement, leaving him with no itinerary in the United States. He then prayed and asked God to show him what to do next.
Two days later Sundar met a Christian lecturer from Hartford Theological Seminary named Frank Buchman. Professor Buchman was so impressed with Sundar that he offered to arrange a modest tour of the country for him and be his traveling companion along the way.
Sundar spoke at churches in Hartford, Connecticut; Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Sundar was also invited to speak at a conference for Christian students. The conference was being held at Silver Bay on Lake George in New York State, and Sundar made his way there. During the conference he spoke at an outdoor meeting on the shore of the lake. In the early evening, as the sun was beginning to set, Sundar stood with his back to the water and said to the eight hundred assembled students, “America is near the Kingdom, but not of it. Think of it this way. A large tiger was chasing a hunter. But the hunter was not afraid. He knew he was approaching a shelter, and he had in his possession the key to the door of that shelter. But when he reached the door, to his dismay he discovered that the key was no longer in his possession. All that separated the hunter from safety was the thickness of that door. Yet he knew he was doomed. Many Americans are like that hunter. They know where their salvation lies, but they do not make use of it.”
Following the student conference at Silver Bay, Sundar traveled on to Chicago and then made his way through Iowa and Kansas before heading to San Francisco.
When Sundar arrived in San Francisco, a reporter asked him what he wanted to achieve while in the United States. Sundar replied, “I do not seek to Christianize America. I come only as a witness of what Christ has done for me. America is already a Christian nation. But although America has many sincere Christians, the majority of the people here have no religion. Here, where it is easy to have religion, where religion is offered on every side, and no one is persecuted for being a Christian, life should be happy and peaceful because of Christianity. But it is not. Instead, there is a hustle and bustle after money and comfort and pleasure, and that all clouds out thoughts of religion. Because it is so easy to have faith in this country, Americans do not appreciate what a comfort there is in religion. At one time the ostrich could fly, but because it did not ever use its wings, it lost its ability to do so. Just so, the people here who do not appreciate the religious faith of their fathers shall lose it.”
Sundar set sail from San Francisco on July 20, 1920, and began the long journey home to India. Because no steamers were going directly to India from San Francisco, Sundar was obliged to go to Australia first. On August 7 seven hundred clergy and Christian workers gathered to hear Sundar speak at Saint Andrews Cathedral in Sydney, Australia.
On September 3, Sundar’s thirty-first birthday, he was in Adelaide preaching. From there he made his way by train across the Australian continent to Perth in western Australia. In Perth no buildings were large enough to hold all those who wanted to hear Sundar speak, so he held his meetings outdoors in a park. Finally, at the end of September, Sundar boarded a steamer at the port city of Fremantle, bound for Bombay, India.
After a twenty-day voyage across the Indian Ocean, Sundar arrived once again back in his homeland. Hundreds of Indian Christians clamored to hear stories of his trip and his impressions of the West. This is what he told them:
Many Englishmen of the present-day do not believe in the miracles of our Lord Jesus Christ, and when they asked me questions concerning the miracles, I answered them and added that I saw a miracle wrought amongst them because, in spite of the English people being so materialistic, there were still many spiritual people among them.… There is a good deal of Christianity in America, but that is not enough. Just as a thirsty man cannot quench his thirst even if he is drowned in sea water, because the water is salty, in the same way a spiritually thirsty man cannot quench his thirst in America because it is saturated with materialism. Our Lord’s words, “Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” are true as regards the East, but for America our Lord would say, “Come unto me all ye that are heavy gold-laden and I will give you rest.”
Still, God has His own witness in the West and all over the world. Sometimes I have heard young Indians say that they do not want missionaries from such places, but that is a mistake. Missionaries from the West who come to India keep the churches at home alive, and if the West did not send its missionaries, very soon their churches would become dead like the Dead Sea. Therefore we should welcome the missionaries for the sake of keeping Christianity alive in the West.
Now that he was back in India, Sundar’s mind was once again focused on getting back to Tibet.