Epilogue II
Epilogue II
JANUARY 1996
This time it's not a leaf-thatched hut on the Tiwanu River but a small house with big glass windows and real walls high above the Atlantic Ocean on Massachusetts'rockbound coast.
I sit at my desk looking out at a nearly pure white sea reflecting a white sky, with no horizon to divide them. A winter sun makes a pale, shimmering pathway on the calm water where two little boats idle as the lobstermen pull their pots. It is a long way from the jungle.
Although the pathway of my life has taken many unimagined turns since I wrote this (my first) book, I have not been allowed to forget the story. I would not have wanted to forget it, but there have been times when I have wondered if others might. Perhaps they have tired of it. Should I continue the retelling as I am so often asked to do? I spoke of my misgivings to Miss Corrie ten Boom who, as an old lady, indefatigably traveled the world to tell her own story over and over again, of her family's providing refuge to Jews in Holland during World War II, of their being betrayed and imprisoned in a concentration camp, and of the deaths of her sister and aged father as a result. "Sometimes," she told me, "I have said, `Lord, I must have something fresh. I cannot go on telling the old story.' But the Lord said to me, `This is the story I gave you. You tell that one.' " So Corrie encouraged me to go on telling mine.
Readers will want to know what has happened to the people in this book. It is easy enough to answer the questions about the widows. Two of them are still in Ecuador. Marj Saint is now Mrs. Abe Van Der Puy, wife of the former president of HCJB World Radio in Quito. They have six children between them and an impressive crowd of grandchildren. Barbara Youderian ran a missionary guest house for the Gospel Missionary Union before returning to live in Orlando, Florida. She has two married children, Beth and Jerry. Marilou McCully is retired as a hospital accounting supervisor and lives in Bonney Lake, Washington. All of her sons are married-Steve, who is a schoolteacher, and Matt, a sportswriter. Mike, the middle one, travels around the country working with racehorses. Olive Fleming married Walter Liefeld, who is now retired as head of the New Testament Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. They have three children: David, Beverly, and Holly. Rachel Saint died of cancer in November 1994 and was buried in the Waorani settlement where she had lived for a number of years. My third husband (the second died of cancer) is Lars Gren, who, when he is not "managing" me and our travel and book sales, works for a private foundation. My daughter, Valerie, is the mother of several children. Her husband, Walter D. Shepard, Jr., is a pastor.
It is difficult not to grasp after thrills. The publicity surrounding the deaths of the five men focused what has sometimes seemed to be undue attention on that small jungle group, deflecting (some said) much interest from other vital kinds of missionary work. There can be little doubt that the drama of the story awakened many to the existence of "harvest fields" they had not thought of. At least hundreds were jolted by the sacrifice of five young men for whom obedience to their Lord was quite literally a matter of life and death. In a civilization where, in order to be sure of their manhood (or, alas, even their "personhood"), men must box, lift weights, play football, jog, rappel, or hang-glide, it was startling to realize that there was such a thing as spiritual commitment as robust, as total, and perhaps more demanding than the most fanatical commitment to physical fitness. It was a shock to learn that anybody cared that much about anything, especially if it was invisible.
On January 8, 1996, my husband, Lars Gren, and I, along with my daughter, Valerie, her husband, Walt, and eldest son, Walter, were with the Waorani. Steve Saint, pilot and son of pilot Nate, and his wife, Ginny, kindly entertained us in their jungle home on the Curaray River. We sat in hammocks as the Waorani crowded in to see us, to laugh and shout about how much I ("Gikari") and Valerie ("Mangan") had aged. They did their best to pronounce "Lars," "Walt," and "Walter," welcoming them with great glee, powerful handshakes, and deepest interest. Together we reminisced about the years 1958-1960 that Valerie and I had lived there. Minkayi and Kimo, two of those who had speared the five, talked and talked, telling me of events over the decades since I had seen them. They are Christians now. The New Testament has been translated into their language.
The name Auca is a Quichua word meaning "naked" or "savage." It is no longer used. Waorani is what the people call themselves. Their story, at the time of the death of the men, later when I lived with the Indians themselves, and during all the years since as I have recounted it and reflected on it in the light of my own subsequent experience, has pointed to one thing: God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.
This is the context in which the story must be understood-as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.
There is always the urge to oversimplify, to weigh in at once with interpretations that cannot possibly cover all the data or stand up to close inspection. We know, for example, that time and again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed. So we are tempted to assume a simple equation here. Five men died. This will mean x-number of Waorani Christians.
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Cause and effect are in God's hands. Is it not the part of faith simply to let them rest there? God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. It is the same spirit that taunted, "If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross." There is unbelief, there is even rebellion, in the attitude that says, "God has no right to do this to five men unless. . ."
Those men had long since given themselves without reservation to do the will of God. So far as they knew, they were to be plain ordinary missionaries-Roj to the Atshuaras; Jim, Ed, and Pete to the Quichuas; Nate to serve all the jungle stations with his airplane. But small things happen (Nate found some inhabited Waorani houses). Small decisions are made (he told Jim and Ed), which lead to bigger ones (they began to pray with new vigor for an entrance into the territory), and ultimately a man's individual choices become momentous. Plain, ordinary missionaries with wives and children whom they loved found themselves faced with a life and death decision. They were not looking for anything bigger to do, let alone for fame. The need of the Waoranis simply became the categorical imperative.
For us widows the question as to why the men who had trusted God to be both shield and defender should be allowed to be speared to death was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered in 1956, nor yet silenced in 1996. God did not answer Job's questions either. Job was living in a mystery-the mystery of the sovereign purpose of God-and the questions that rose out of the depths of that mystery were answered only by a deeper mystery, that of God Himself. The Lord answered Job out of the tempest:
Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness? Brace yourself and stand up like a man; I will ask questions and you shall answer. Where were you when 1laid the earth's foundations? Tell me, if you know and understand. Who settled its dimensions? i
(Job 38:I-4, NEB)
On and on the unanswerable questions went, overwhelming the man on the ash heap with proofs of divine control, origin, generation, legislation, authority, and wisdom. Job's only reply was that he had none. "What reply can I give Thee, I who carry no weight? I put my finger to my lips" (40:4).
Again God told him to brace himself, stand up like a man, and answer. "Dare you deny that I am just or put me in the wrong that you may be right?" (40:8).
Job stood the test. He recognized who God is. He "melted." But he then became the intercessor for his friends, and God restored to him more than he had ever had to begin with.
I believe with all my heart that God's Story has a happy ending. Julian of Norwich wrote, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."
But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise. What God means by happiness and goodness is a far higher thing than we can conceive. John Oman said that "a true belief in Providence cannot be held either as an instinctive trust that God is kind or as an inference from life that He is benevolent, but only as the last and highest victory of a faith which has won a vision of a true and abiding good, which is not of the world, even while things in the world become a new creation to forward it" (Grace and Personality, p. 126ff.).
The massacre was a hard fact, widely reported at the time, surprisingly well remembered by many even today. It was interpreted according to the measure of one's faith or faithlessness-full of meaning or empty. A triumph or a tragedy. An example of brave obedience or a case of fathomless foolishness. The beginning of a great work, a demonstration of the power of God, a sorrowful first act that would lead to a beautifully predictable third act in which all puzzles would be solved, God would vindicate Himself, Waoranis would be converted, and we could all "feel good" about our faith. Bulletins about progress were hailed with joy and a certain amount of "Ah! You see!" But the danger lies in seizing upon the immediate and hoped-for, as though God's justice is thereby verified, and glossing over as neatly as possible certain other consequences, some of them inevitable, others simply the result of a botched job. In short, in the Waorani story as in other stories, we are consoled as long as we do not examine too closely the unpalatable data. By this evasion we are willing still to call the work "ours," to arrogate to ourselves whatever there is of success, and to deny all failure.
A healthier faith seeks a reference point outside all human experience, the Polestar which marks the course of all human events, not forgetting that impenetrable mystery of the interplay of God's will and man's (e.g., "He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief"; "Jesus was handed over to the power of men"; "Thou halt set me free to range at will').
I think back to the five men themselves, remembering Pete's agony of indecision as to whether he should join the others in the venture; Ed's eagerness to go even though Marilou was eight months pregnant, his strong assurance that all would be well; Roj's depression and deep sense of failure as a missionary; Nate's extreme caution and determination; Jim's nearly reckless exuberance.
I think of the tensions that developed after the men died among those who had to try to "pick up the pieces" of the work they had left behind. There was misunderstanding between some of the mission boards as to what part each was to play in continuing efforts to reach the Waoranis.
I think of how, when Rachel and I finally arrived in the Waoranis' jungle clearing, we found that what she and Dayuma had been using as the Waorani language was not readily understood. Dayuma had forgotten a large part of it, and had unwittingly jumbled up Waorani, Quichua, a smattering of Spanish, and a little English intonation for good measure. Then gradually I saw, to my dismay, that Rachel's approach to linguistic work, her interpretation of what the Indians did and said, and the resulting reports she sent out were often radically different from my own.
I think of the Indians themselves-what bewilderment, what inconvenience, what disorientation, what uprooting, what actual disease (polio, for example) they suffered because we missionaries got to them at last! The skeptic points with glee to such woeful facts and we dodge them nimbly, fearing any assessment of the work that may cast suspicion at least on the level of our spirituality if not the validity of our faith.
But we are sinners. And we are buffoons. I am reminded of an occasion in Bible school when I nearly laughed aloud in the middle of a prayer. Following a long session in which one student after another had confessed his sins, real and imaginary, our principal, L. E. Maxwell, stood up and boomed out, "0 Lord, deliver us from our sad, sweet, stinking selves!"
It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend on. It is God and nothing less than God, for the work is God's and the call is God's and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes, the whole scene, the whole mess, the whole package-our bravery and our cowardice, our love and our selfishness, our strengths and our weaknesses. The God who could take a murderer like Moses and an adulterer like David and a traitor like Peter and make of them strong servants of His is a God who can also redeem savage Indians, using as the instruments of His peace a conglomeration of sinners who sometimes look like heroes and sometimes like villains, for "we are no better than pots of earthenware to contain this treasure [the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ], and this proves that such transcendent power does not come from us, but is God's alone" (2 Corinthians 4:7, NEB).
We are not always sure where the horizon is. We would not know which end is up were it not for the shimmering pathway of light falling on the white sea. The One who laid earth's foundations and settled its dimensions knows where the lines are drawn. He gives all the light we need for trust and for obedience.