How quaint missionaries seem today. Yet I recall them as integral to life in my father’s parsonage. That place of my childhood of worn out furniture and tall wooden bookcases that is a castle keep for hundreds of books no longer read, for art ignored, and great music now left unheard. Sad for me? No, a proud distinction.
My parents welcomed into it these characters, missionaries, who absolutely could no longer exist: Aunt Harriet, Russell King, E. Stanley Jones.
Together they make for a ruin where in another life I once lived. They seem utterly unique today, mainly abandoned by the crowd and increasingly unrecognizable, a neglect giving them added value.
Yet in their day these characters knew excitement, world events, and especially some of the people who had a profound impact on the 20thcentury.
I grew up in a home of Intelligent thought. A place ruled by my parents’ gentle persuasion for a benign religion that was tolerant of others. ‘Tolerance’ for them being always the greatest of civilized virtues. Yet also, I came to learn, leaving us defenseless, Rome waiting for another sacking. The good Christians around were certainly intolerant of us, sometimes cruelly so. Christianity taught me pain.
My parents adhered to a low key, high brow Protestantism that was eclectic and embracive. For them Christianity meant a mild, Christ centered, mysticism with a tonic of Humanist thought.
Missionaries of the same persuasion were respected as spreading enlightenment, more so than as agents of crude proselytizing.
Already by the time I was 11, somewhat more than midway through the ‘Great Republic’s’ second century, such a home as my parent’s parsonage had become quite unusual especially so on the Great Plains where we lived. Today it would be more than surreal. It would be unintelligible, its language lost like Latin.
Aunt Harriet had been a missionary to China, Russell King still was one to Africa and the great (to me) E. Stanley, as we called him, had spent his life in India. In their suitcases they brought into our home these three great alternatives to European orthodoxy and global hegemony.
I think my bellicose, rebellious spirit, that hallmark of me for good and for ill, was nurtured in part by the momentous revolutions in points of view that these three themselves had been altered by and were living witnesses to.
Yet, soon enough I’d come to indignantly rebel against them too. That was their importance as well. How can we fight for our freedom if there is nothing to fight against? They gave me quite real images to destroy in my adolescent, iconoclastic fury. They like my parents I would come to both love and abhor.
Looking behind me I see that their ultimate gift to me was a love for mankind, for its poor, sick, helpless, manipulated and ignorant folk. They tried to their utmost to turn teeming masses into miserable individuals. How ashamed I feel for failing to follow them in their glorious if futile quest.
1. HARRIET
A teacher for 30 years in China. I knew Aunt Harriet in the 1950s when she visited us in Kansas once a year. Then in her mid -70s to me she was only interesting in that in the 1920s she’d been abducted by a Chinese Warlord and held for ransom.
I can now imagine the old woman, poor and alone, planning her annual calendar like a Progress by the Virgin Queen to bankrupt her lords. She’d include beside our family similar stays with her many acquaintances.
She was not my aunt at all, no relation, her title was honorific. My parents knew her from their early happy years of marriage, back in the mid 1930s in Boston, where my father attended seminary, Boston University School of Theology.
Returning from China to Boston in the 1930s Harriet’s work was to help missionary families returning from the field adjust back into American life.
She stretched this vocation to include my parents who themselves were in great need of ‘adjusting’. Being young, inexperienced and most likely terrified of having arrived in their first real city. Neither would have known anywhere larger than Wichita, a small city then with a narrow mentality.
It was Harriet who opened them to previously unimaginable experiences from what they’d known in depression-era Alabama and Kansas. Harriet who toured them through Boston’s museums, taken them to the symphony and opera, introduced them to the panoply of its immigrant cuisines. Much of what was in our parsonage, in my child’s brain, came from her influence.
Aunt Harriet didn’t notice me. Even at 11 I understood she was off in her own private China. She talked of that repeatedly, in a sharp Boston accent, a chatter of bad breath. Mother explained the odor came from her cheap false teeth.
Kidnapped by a Chinese warlord! That fired me up inspired as I was by Charlie Chan movies and my older brothers’ fulsome explain of what ‘rape’ meant. It’s dubious that Aunt Harriet was ever ravished, surely a homely face and androgynous figure kept her safe. Most of all she likely remained pristine because ‘damaged goods’ were less valuable in barter.
She’d been captured somewhere in the sprawl of China’s northern half. The half of a vast country that was almost entirely parceled out among the Warlord factions that came to rule it in the void left by the end of Manchu rule.
At last ransomed she’d returned to some passing notoriety. Apparently she enjoyed that because I could see how she looked about her even with us in Cloud County Kansas (it is a real place), perhaps wistfully expecting to be recognized.
To my disappointment Harriet never talked of that, I only knew about it from my parents. Instead, her conversation centered on the horrors of Communist China. She gave harrowing accounts of the heroic (to her) struggles of the Nationalists—the champions of all things great and good. She’d get visibly distressed over what they’d been reduced to, the tiny National Republic of China (the designation I myself was firmly instructed to use) on Taiwan, in Taipei.
Harriet had been particularly close to the Soong sisters, legendary luminaries of China as it ‘awakened.’ They were three Christian women from a most wealthy and powerful Shanghai family. The three were educated in the US and were also Methodists so the connection to Harriet was direct. The Soong sisters are legendary for intelligence, assertiveness. It didn’t hurt that they were striking. They were Soong Ai-ling, Soong Ching-ling, Soong Mei-ling.
Soon Ailing became spouse to the richest man in China. She had a hand through him, as the country’s Finance Minister, in creating the national bank of China.
Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen the first president of China and known as the father of modern China. After his death this one went on to be a highly influential Communist Party supporter. From 1959 to 1972 she served as the joint Vice Present of Communist China. Ultimately, Ching-ling would be named Honorary Chairman of the nation.
When Ching-ling died in the 1980s aged 99, three days of national mourning were declared and Chinese flags were flown at half mast.
And then there was the youngest sister, Mei-ling, a true beauty and the particular friend of Harriet’s. She married the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. This made her, foremost, First Lady of mainland China and then later of Taiwan. She too wielded real power. As Madame Chiang Kai-shek she became a global celebrity.
Harriet’s connection to and friendship with these three astonishing Soong sisters gave her keys to their kingdoms—she simply knew everyone of importance in Chinese history from say 1915 to 1930.
Our dining room would crowd with these people as Aunt Harriet brought them in with her anecdotes. She’d survived monstrous battles, plagues and great natural disasters. Harriet had apparently thrived in that upheave, that fraught history.
Is it any wonder that my parents welcomed her to free load off them in return for such stirring, amazing, incomparable entertainment.
2. RUSSELL KING
Care for the most benighted. He fits in as bringing Albert Schweitzer into my home.
Unfortunately, as a child but only to myself, I called Russell King ‘the nose.’
As a boy it was difficult for me to look Russell King in the face. He’d been given such an extreme pug nose, cartilage incredibly short to his skull, that I fancied I could see up into his skull and watch his brain pulse with thought. Furthering this his nostrils were unfortunately round and large. For me his tiny nose was monstrous.
He visits home to the States were to raise money for Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambarene, in what was at the time French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon). Once he brought along two children from Africa, his own. A boy and a girl, very pale replicas of himself. To my dismay with the same nose too.
So, in his turn, Russell King brought us Africa in his suitcase. Before my acquaintance with Russell King my imagined Africa was a place like a movie set for the films of the Tarzan novels that I adored. A place of friendly looking jungle, comic natives and a wonderful welcoming chimp to cavort with. His house was even like my own tree house in our backyard perched in the sheltering arms of a large quaint tree.
During each of his visits our living room would be darkened one evening while we sat in folding chairs. The beam of light from the whirring projector lit our small audience in profile. King splashed his slides one by one, click after click, onto a bed sheet screen that my mother had strung up. He spoke a running commentary.
Startling Images swam over me so strange they made me cringe. Interminable slides of Africans, sometimes grinning, more often their faces taut in a zombie-like rictus terribly eloquent of a dumb suffering.
Entire heads appeared disappeared into the horror of ‘elephant man’ virus, feet and hands were shown eaten alive by leprosy, eyes pierced at me in near-to death throes of cholera and malaria.
Albert Schweitzer, rather than Tarzan, was the great star of these slide shows. Albert Schweitzer needed no credit, with his baroque mustache in a fury, his acne scarred cheeks, his head either a crown of white glory or else covered in a smarmy looking pith helmet.
Schweitzer was hailed as a genius. Moreover, a good one, if we can still believe that of any man. At the time he was known around the world, much less so now I think, goodness become a weakness or worse a deceit. He received the Nobel Peace prize in 1952. He was both a medical doctor and a doctor of philosophy. He was a great organist, maybe the greatest of his age.
His central, simple concept of ‘Reverence For Life’ was strangely alien to our world in Kansas. The Cold War encroached around us dotting our empty landscape in a multitude of missile silos.
Schweitzer’s Reverence For Life is even more antique now. A musty world of missionary relics. is care for the shunned– lepers and those afflicted with the dreaded sleeping sickness– at his virtually hand built hospital carved from the deepest dark jungle heart of what was then French Equatorial Africa. It seemed saintly then while now we have no saints.
Then he was a man to be seriously revered. Especially by my parents who goose stepped in his parade. During Russell King’s slide shows in our living room my mother would weep at the photos of the afflicted, at scenes with Schweitzer in his hospital and of the sick children in his care crowding round him for attention.
For me, I was in my music phase. My admiration of Schweitzer was also for his stature as a great virtuoso of the organ. It was a period of several years in my boyhood and teen years when I assiduously if abysmally played piano, violin and clarinet. I reverently listened to Schweitzer’s Columbia recordings of the Bach organ preludes, toccatas, passacaglias and fugues.
During Russell King’s slide shows in our living room my mother would weep at the photos of the afflicted, at scenes with Schweitzer in his hospital and of the sick children in his care crowding round him for attention.
My father did not weep at the slide photos of lepers. I not once saw a tear on him, not even when my mother died. Bur he did weep once. Mother told me so. That time on his seeing the stacks of naked dead in the Ohrdruf death camp.
My guess is that the terrible scenes there had drained him, leaving him lost to emotion for the rest of his life. My own father was a peripheral victim of the collective barbarism of a civilized people.
He took photographs of what he saw. Proof to those too blind to see. I have them now. What they show infects me too.
Clear to me now how he suffered from the evil he’d witnessed and could not fathom. I understand why he needed to have faith in missionaries.
My favorite Schweitzer story: a young woman approached him for an autograph, saying ‘Dr. Einstein, I’m such an admirer.’
Schweitzer is said to have signed for her “Albert Einstein by his admirer, Albert Schweitzer.”
3. E. STANLEY
It’s complicated. Ironically, my history with missionaries is mainly important to me because it in turn cleared the path for my ultimate liberation from faith. Exchanging Humanist Christianity for the even more ancient creed of Humanist Atheism.
E. Stanley Jones, or just E. Stanley to us, remains a rarity to me, a genuine Christian. He was certainly the most important missionary to come our way, the best known to our family. I have a fortified recollection of him as a refined gentleman, sensitive and intelligent, quintessentially kind.
He visited us often when we lived in Concordia, Kansas. That was because of his international Christian Ashram movement for which my father was the Kansas Director. That was an unpaid position in addition to his regular work on the Bishop’s cabinet.
The Ashram demanded a great deal of organizing, taking place for a week each summer. A week adhering to E. Stanley’s precepts for his Christian Ashram of intense prayer, seclusion and spiritual reflection. E. Stanley called it a “retreat for the soul.” I attended because my father dutifully subscribed his family.
E. Stanley wedded Christianity to the framework of the Hindu Ashram because he had spent a life time in India as a missionary and too because Mahatma Gandhi had been a close friend. On the afternoon of the Mahatma’s assassination Jones was in fact on his way through New Delhi for a meeting with Gandhi. One that to his great sorrow would never be kept.
Jones wrote 30 books, some best sellers in their day (Christ of the Indian Roadalone sold more than a million copies in 1924). But the most acclaimed was his biographyGandhi—Portrayal of a Friend. ‘Portrayal of a Friend’ is credited by Martin Luther King as the major inspiration for his own non-violent crusade.
Time Magazine described E. Stanley as “The world’s greatest missionary.” Perhaps he was. Jones, a confidant of such disparate characters as FDR and Nehru, a two time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award in 1963, was also a constant diplomat which explains his frequent visits to the White House.
Circles within circles drawn back to the circle of light over our dining room table. My parents were further closely linked to E. Stanley by Asbury College, where in Kentucky’s Blue Grass region my parents had gone to school during the Depression, where they met and fell in love. More than a generation before, E. Stanley had taught at Asbury before heading to India.
As an intelligent and sensitive child it is understandable that I fell for E. Stanley. Being close to him made me feel I was in turn close to the great Gandhi, my greatest hero.
On a speaking tour for peace in the U.S. when World War Two began, the British refused to allow E. Stanley back into India. That due to his sympathies for the India National Congress and Nehru. For years he was kept separated from his family.
Given my nature I was highly susceptible to the E. Stanley Jones Ashram experience, a global movement he created in 1930 in the Himalayas. So much so that on a hot and humid August night alone in a dorm room of Kansas Wesleyan College, the campus then hosting the Kansas Ashram, while truly awake, I vividly saw Jesus come through the window and land in my room.
It was so profoundly real. Few moments in my life are clearer. If I close my eyes I see it now. In alarm I jumped out of bed in my underwear, tears on my cheeks, and raced to another room where my parents were sleeping.
There I blubbered my tale of a Technicolor visitation. It seems to me that while my father was excited about my being blessed, my mother was nonchalant. “How nice, Jonie, now go back to sleep. You can stay with us.”
Next morning my parents stayed in character, mother calm, father agitated perhaps feeling that through his son he’d had a sorely needed verification of faith. Me? It’s fuzzy, although I am certain that a pervading peace had numbed my chronic fears and phobias.
Father took me at breakfast to see E. Stanley. He asked me to tell the experience to him. It was a bit like Jesus being presented at the Temple.
E. Stanley then took me with him, just us two, for a stroll across the campus of Kansas Wesleyan. What wisdom did I receive from E. Stanley? Sadly I recall nothing, except, and I must render it in a close paraphrase.
“Jonathan, when we are young we can have experiences that seem incredible. They are so great to us. Then sometimes when we are older the same experiences can seem not so important after all.”
What a wise old man. Stupid little boy, it took me years to understand what he’d said.