15. The Perfect Life
Chapter 15
The Perfect Life
Sundar was tired and unwell by the time he arrived in Liverpool, England. But with great effort he kept his promise to speak at the Keswick Convention. However, as soon as he had fulfilled the obligation, he gladly boarded a steamer and headed back to India. The long voyage did him some good, but he was still tired as he made his way back to Sabathu in northern India.
Back home in India, thirty-three-year-old Sundar made a slow recovery, and during the last months of 1922 he undertook a tour of many large cities in India, including Delhi, Benares, and Lahore. While in Lahore he visited his old school, Saint John’s Divinity College, and spent a day with one of the missionaries in the city who still remembered him.
How long ago it now all seemed to Sundar when he had fled his home and set out to follow Jesus Christ, not knowing where the journey might take him or even how long his family would continue to spare his life.
While on this trip he visited his father in Rampur. Sundar found him in good spirits, rejoicing in his Christian faith, but his body was now frail and old. In April 1923, six months after he had visited, Sundar received word that his father had died. According to Sher Singh’s will, his estate was to be divided between Sundar and his one remaining brother. The estate consisted of a number of acres of land and a large sum of money. Sundar sighed when he learned the details of the will. He had told his father many times that he did not need financial help, yet he knew that his father had wanted him to buy a house to use as a rest stop between his preaching tours.
As he thought about this notion, the idea of having a house to come home to began to appeal to Sundar. He imagined sharing the place with people in need, keeping one room for himself where he could sleep, pray, and write books. And so he decided to accept the money from his father’s estate, but he turned the land over to his brother so that the parcel would not be broken up.
It did not take long for Sundar to find just the house he was looking for. It was an old mission house situated in the middle of the poorest area of Sabathu. Sundar knew it was not the type of grand house his father would have wanted him to spend the inheritance on, but he did not care. He felt comfortable in the place and soon invited his friend Dr. Peoples from the leper hospital and his family to move in with him. Dr. Peoples, his wife, and their four children were delighted with the new housing arrangement, which suited Sundar perfectly. Sundar now had a room to come back to whenever he wanted but did not have to worry about who was taking care of the place while he was gone.
Sundar was still tired from his trip to England, so after completing the purchase of the house in Sabathu, he spent the next year writing two books, Reality and Religion and Search After Reality. These two books were soon translated into over forty languages, and as they were distributed worldwide, requests poured in for Sundar to speak at venues all over the globe. Some of the invitations likened Sundar to Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas. An American writer urged Sundar to come back to the United States for another visit, saying, “You can’t make the excuse that India is your own country. Are you forgetting that now you belong to the whole world?” But Sundar refused all of the invitations. He felt that he had already been a witness in the West and that his heart did not belong to the whole world but to the people of the dark country of Tibet.
Sundar tried to go on preaching tours around northern India as much as he could, but his health continued to deteriorate. In 1925 he developed an ulcer in his left eye, and despite the best medical attention, he lost his sight in that eye. However, this did not seem to unduly worry Sundar, who wrote to a friend in Germany:
As I returned last month from a preaching tour in the villages, my eye became inflamed and caused me great pain.… I am not sorry about this suffering because it is a great privilege to be allowed to suffer in this way, it is a means of blessing for me as it keeps me humble and gives me an opportunity for prayer and intercession. I do not want to be at all sad if I should lose my sight, for God has opened my spiritual eyes which can never become dim. I thank God for this gift and this blessing. I thank you for your prayers and I likewise continue to pray for you.
After losing the sight in his left eye, Sundar found the glare of the sun dazzled him, and he took to wearing dark glasses whenever he was outdoors.
In April 1927 Sundar was determined to return to Tibet. He set out from Rishikesh with a group of Tibetan traders who were returning home via the Niti Pass. They had traveled only forty miles together when Sundar became violently ill. He was suffering from internal hemorrhaging, and the traders carried him in a semiconscious state back to the nearest train station and put him on a train to Sabathu. When Sundar finally reached Sabathu, he was more dead than alive, but the doctors at the leper hospital nursed him back to health.
Once he was feeling better, Sundar returned to writing, producing two more books and answering the hundreds of letters that flowed in from around the world.
The following year Sundar planned to enter Tibet again, but he waited too long for his Tibetan trader companions to arrive, and by the time they showed up, it was too late in the season to attempt the journey and return safely.
Ten months later, in April 1929, Sundar was determined to make it to Tibet for the summer. He was especially eager to encourage a little band of Christians who lived east of Lake Mansarovar, as well as other Tibetans who were inaccessible to the few Moravian missionaries who worked close to the border.
When he received a letter from a Tibetan man explaining that a group of traders were gathering at Kalka on the banks of the Ganges River in preparation for their trek back into Tibet, Sundar decided to set out to meet them as soon as he could. He had spent much of the winter preparing for such a journey. He had even decided what should be done with the royalties from his books if he did not return from Tibet.
Sundar did not often speak to large crowds now. He relied instead on his pen to do his preaching and on personal meetings with people seeking truth. But on April 12, 1929, Sundar agreed to speak at the town of Okara. The service was well attended by Christians and a number of Hindus. After the meeting a young Christian sadhu who had patterned himself after Sundar asked for some advice. Sundar told him, “Read your Bible daily with prayer, do not flee from the Cross, and do not become proud when some good people give you any honor. Remember, the colt had the honor of walking on the garments which were spread by men in the way while Christ was entering Jerusalem and people were saying ‘Hosanna, blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.’ The colt had this honor because Christ was seated on it.”
On April 18 Sundar sat down at the desk in his room and penned a letter to a New Zealand missionary he knew and trusted well. The words tumbled out onto the paper. “I am leaving today for Tibet, fully aware of the dangers and difficulties of the journey, but I must do my best to do my duty. But then I set no value on my own life as compared with the joy of finishing my course and fulfilling the commission I received from the Lord Jesus to attest to the gospel of the grace of God (Acts 20:24).”
Sundar stopped for a moment and gazed out the window at the majestic mountains beyond Sabathu. Then he wrote on. “I wanted to come to see you before leaving for Tibet, but I have received a letter from a trader to meet him at once on our way to Tibet. The route will be the same as that about which I told you last year. I hope to be back with one or two Tibetan Christians by the end of June. If anything happens I will send down Thapa to meet you, and if you do not hear anything from me, or about me, then please come to Sabathu in July in order to see to all my things in my house here.”
When he had finished writing the letter, Sundar sealed it and picked up his staff and dark glasses. As he had done so many times before, he set off for Tibet without shoes or sandals, clad only in his saffron robe, with a cotton blanket draped over his shoulder.
Sundar’s first stop was the leper hospital, where he asked Mr. Watson, the hospital superintendent, to mail the letter he had just written and to take care of any urgent correspondence that came for him while he was away. Then Sundar said good-bye to Mr. Watson and started toward the railway station. Sunnu Lal, one of the Indian preachers at the hospital, waved to Sundar and then joined him as he walked down the hill toward the station. The two men walked quietly together for a mile or so, and then Sunnu Lal turned back toward the hospital. Sundar walked on alone, grateful that he was finally on the way to preach to his beloved Tibetan people once again. This time he was determined to make it all the way there.
On November 18, 1929, the headline in the Morning Post newspaper read:
MYSTIC LOST IN TIBET
Christian Preacher Who Visited London
FEARED VENGEANCE BY LAMAS?
From Our Own Correspondent, CALCUTTA.
Misgivings are felt among his followers in India regarding the safety of Sadhu Sundar Singh, the Christian mystic and preacher. Not a word has been heard of him since entering Tibet in April on one of his teaching tours.
The Reverend Riddle, the New Zealand missionary Sundar wrote to before setting out for Tibet, along with his friend Dr. Taylor, set off on a twenty-eight-day trip into the Himalayas to see whether they could trace Sundar’s footsteps. They hoped to find some news of him, but there was none.
When they returned to Sabathu, they discovered that everyone had some theory as to what had happened to Sundar. Some speculated that he had contracted cholera and his dead body had been thrown into the Ganges River. Others thought that he had probably slipped off the rocky trail and fallen into a ravine, where he perished. Still others guessed that he had made it to Tibet and been martyred there or was set upon by bandits. But no one knew for sure what had happened to Sundar, and since his body was never found, no one ever would know exactly how he had died.
Finally, in 1933, the Indian government declared Sundar Singh officially dead, and his will was executed. According to the will, Sundar left the house and the money from the royalties of his books to be used for training and supporting preachers who worked in Tibet and the Indian states bordering the region. In addition, some of the money was to be used for scholarships for motivated boys from poor Christian families so that they could attend college, and for scholarships for preachers to get further theological training.
As news of Sundar’s disappearance and death spread, Christians all over the world mourned his passing. They comforted one another with words from his books and reminded themselves of the things Sadhu Sundar Singh had told them. Sundar had often said, “It is better to burn quickly and melt many souls than to burn slowly and not melt any.”
On his last trip to England, as he addressed the Keswick Convention, Sundar had declared, “I feel no fear at the thought of one day dying in Tibet. When that day comes, I shall welcome it with joy. Each year I go back to Tibet, and perhaps next year you will hear that I have lost my life there. Do not then think, ‘He is dead.’ But say, ‘He has entered heaven and eternal life and he is with Christ in the perfect life.’”
After forty years on earth Sundar Singh had indeed entered into the perfect life that he had dreamed of so often as he traversed the Himalayan Mountains.