The Missionary

It breaks my heart to see so much darkness. Will Harding stared out from the balcony of his Mumbai flat in the state of Maharashtra, at the mass of people moving through the streets below. He was situated on a shopping street, in a fourth-floor flat. He could look right down into the mass of market stalls and the crowds of pedestrians. The flat was a leftover from the colonial era, with a big ceiling fan, the only way to keep cool in the humidity. He listened to the continual chatter of voices, the sound of car horns in the distance, and the coo of the pigeons that filled the polluted skies. Aromatic smells wafted up to him from the spices on the stalls below. India was a land of color, noise and life. Every moment was a complex interaction of different music, rituals and dance moves. Multiple languages and religions, and a never-ending torrent of words, whether written or spoken collided to produce an infinite variety of complex patterns. It was all very overwhelming and impossible to keep up with. He was listening to the voices of one and a half billion souls, generating stories without endings, with the historical weight of a civilization that had been here for millennia. All this emotion merged into a crushing wave of pressure that threatened to sweep him away.

Will wondered what he was thinking when he followed his call here. His life in California had been easy, with a trust fund to live off, a nice apartment by the coast, with regular trips to the beach for surfing. He remembered lying on the beach with the sound of the waves, the smell of the sand and the sun on his face as he lay on a towel after three hours surfing. A woman in a bikini approached him and asked him to come with her to church, and what man could have said no to her? He'd gone to the service and the pastor had made sense and now five years later, with a degree in theology, here he was. God told him to go save Indians but he pondered, What does that mean? India is too big, too diverse and I need a focus. After a year in this place, a year of trying to connect, he had had no success at all. He fell to his knees, on the bare wooden floorboards, in prayer.

But as he knelt there, the noises did not stop, and his head filled with images of Indian gods. The strange elephant visage of Ganesh, the monkey face of Hanuman, the divine eagle mount of Garuda taunted him. Then he saw cows roaming the street among the cars and people as if that was a normal thing. He saw ornate temples with strange carvings and Sanskrit runes that were thousands of years old. He saw piles and piles of Vedic scriptures, Upanishads, Dharma Shasti and Puranas without end. He saw the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, lying unread in the stack on his desk. He saw his half-finished notes from his Hindi course still only at a beginner's level. He reached deeper and saw the Hindu Trimurti gods of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. None of them seemed real to him. They felt like enormous language games, stretched like blasphemous masks across the face of God. They hid God from Him. He longed to reach deeper still but could not. He was blocked by the attempts of men to describe what, despite their zeal, they did not know. Had a wise man once known God here and was that knowledge lost by an endless process of Chinese whispers, down the centuries? Or had they never known God at all, instead allowing word games and demons to fill in the gaps?

His visions turned ugly as he remembered the angry chants of the brown-shirted Hindutva, directed by entitled Brahmins anxious to preserve their position of privilege and prepared to kill for that. This was nothing new. St. Thomas himself had been slaughtered 2000 years ago by one of these Brahmins from the priestly caste. He was pierced with a lance in a place near Madras, or Chennai as it was now called. Even Gandhi, a man many thought more Christlike than your average Western Christian, was assassinated in the streets by Nathuram Godse, a friend of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who was the founder of the Hindutva movement. Both had been Brahmins. Godse had shot Gandhi three times in the chest. He claimed that Gandhi had betrayed Hindus by arguing for non-violence when Muslims were violent daily.

Human Rights organizations all around the world have reported for decades the growing intolerance in this nominally secular republic. The election of the BJP, with its Hindu nationalist agenda, had deepened the problem. In practice, local BJP officials and Hindutva gangs determined the policy toward Christians and intolerance and persecution was growing daily. The world out there was not listening to the cries of Christians, trapped in their Indian darkness. The promise of riches, of new and lucrative contracts with this fast-growing economy, drowned out all appeals to the world's conscience.

Where is God in all this overwhelming mass of imagery and noise, he thought to himself. I do not know enough, I am not enough, I am a broken and sinful man, a mere twig on a stormy ocean. Can a broken, finite, mortal and sinful man calm these waters? No, only God can do such a thing. Why am I here Lord? Why did you send me into the middle of this ocean?

It was then that he saw the brown leather-bound bible by his bed and remembered his favorite verse.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them

He remembered the wise man, in his home church in California, who had spoken to him once about prayer. He allowed the man's words to guide him now.

The prayerful man sits between two clouds. The cloud of forgetfulness below him and the cloud of unknowing above him.

It was easy enough to visualize dark clouds above him and below him.

Push the thoughts that distract into the cloud of forgetfulness.

The thoughts of the day, the thoughts that had threatened to overwhelm him before, could be pushed down into the black swirling cloud below. One by one he pushed his thoughts down. This took effort and he was sweating as he did this.

Never pretend that mere human intellect can pierce the cloud of unknowing. The key to penetrating that is to focus on God's love. Having jettisoned all the thoughts of this world, with the eyes of faith look up and see the face of a God who loves you, who sent His Son to save you, a God who knows you and the world around you better than you could ever understand. Let Him break through and let His light blast away both clouds. Then just sit in God's love and wait for Him to speak to you.

He reflected. Wise words indeed. God's love is the only refuge from such high waves, thunderbolts and lightning from stormy winds and treacherous currents. God's love is the key to piercing the dark clouds above me. I can never know enough to make a difference in this country, love is the key here.

He relaxed and pondered the verses in the bible that related to God's love, always returning to the cross on which Jesus died. In his mind’s eye, he stood there with the crowd, watching Christ bleed before him, weeping with the women who loved Jesus, marveling at Christ's cry from His position of suffering, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." The bright white light of God's love shone ever more intensely in his heart. Finally, the darkness was gone, and the kneeling man was resting in the most beautiful and peaceful of places.

Time and concern melted away into the moment and he wanted the moment to last forever. He felt God's heart and was reminded that God was here before India, before the worlds that weave their way through the heavens before the stars and all life. He felt God's heart for this land, a land He had created, nurtured, protected and loved for longer than life had walked here. He felt God's love for the lost people playing endless word games, acting out rituals in their religious zeal, running around in circles and yet always missing the only way they could find true peace and joy. His own heart ached with the love that God placed in him. Nothing was higher, deeper, or wider than this love that filled him now. He knelt as if for an eternity in this special place. Only then when he had no desire to leave did the voice say, "Open your door and say hello."

The moment passed and his eyes opened, but his experience still drowned out the world around him. He felt a warmth and peace in his heart that had not been there before. He stood up leaving behind his books and his half-finished language projects. He moved to the door of his flat and he opened it. A young woman was struggling up the stairs with a shopping bag in one hand and a child in the other. He'd seen her before, the landlord said she was a single mother abandoned by the man who had gotten her pregnant. She lived alone. He had heard her weeping many times before and worried that it was none of his business. He had been unwilling to risk his ministry, with any hint of inappropriate behavior, by associating with her. She was pretty in a way, but there was a feeling of neglect about her as if she did not have time to tend to the things that vain women value most. A ragged old doll was tied to her belt. There were stains on her clothes. He wondered if that doll was the only toy her child had. He ran to her and gestured to the shopping bag, taking it from her. She ascended one more flight of stairs with him behind her carrying her shopping. When she arrived at her apartment door he offered his hand to her for a handshake.

"Hello," he said, and the dark-faced, brown-eyed, raven-haired woman smiled a pearly white smile that lit up the stairwell.

She took his hand, shook it and replied in English, "Hello."



Notes ▼

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RESOURCES:
https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/latest-news/india-christians-persecution
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2022-0042/