I-YOUniverse

It’s freaky (at least some people will think so) to make friends with the dead. You could say that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few months, reading up on Charlie Andrews (1871-1940), friend of Gandhi, British missionary and consultant at large on problems of race and labor relations in India, Africa, the South Pacific, and South America.

He has so much to teach us.

Missionary with an Unusual Vision

His father belonged to a Christian cult characterized by speaking in tongues and keen anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ, but Charlie studied at Cambridge with some of the best biblical scholars of the age. Knowing the critical study of scripture, he chose to go into the Anglican ministry.

But even early on, phrases in the creed about the damnation of the lost troubled him deeply.

He went to India, where he taught at St. Stephen’s College. He had a deeply caring nature, and found himself welcome in corridors of British power as well as the hearts of Indian colleagues and the lowliest of Untouchables. He pressed the college to elect an Indian president, rather than an English one.

He became an early ally and lifelong friend of Mohandas Gandhi, spending time in his South African ashram. Charlie wrote several books introducing Gandhi to the West.

Facing the Problem of Racism

The issue of race prejudice troubled him deeply, whether in India, Africa or the United States. He found himself identifying strongly with the Indian people, eventually leaving his mission appointment, a decision he explained like this:

It was the inner moral beauty of India, which I was seeking to know at first hand. I could see it and almost grasp it. Sometimes I could instinctively recognize it in human faces I met. But at Delhi [seat of government and of St. Stephen's College, where Andrews taught] I could never fully comprehend it. There I was in constant revolt against the narrowness of government control of education: I was also in revolt against much that has rightly been called “foreign mission work.” For I had no wish to be “foreign” any longer; rather, I longed to be bound up with the life of India in every respect. If I were to find Christ truly in India as the Son of man, then I must live and move among the people of India as one of themselves, and not as an alien and a foreigner.

C.F. Andrews, What I Owe to Christ (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1932), p. 241.

Ministry of the Written Word

During the 1930s Charlie continued to be a negotiator, teacher and writer while living in England and in India at Santiniketan “Abode of Peace” the ashram of his friend the poet Rabindranath Tagore (who won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for his poem Gitanjali). Among many other books, articles and pamphletts, Charlie wrote an account of his faith What I Owe to Christ, an exposition of John 13-17 entitled Christ in the Silence, of the Lord’s Prayer Christ and Prayer, and of The Sermon on the Mount.

He came to believe, as Tagore said, that the West had sold its ideals (to give just one example) in the scramble for Africa in the mid to late 1800s, and in the continuing war-lust and greed of the Great War and its aftermath (the buildup to World War II). He struggled against giving allegiance to the tribal god of parts of the Old Testament and instead gave his life to the universal Christ, who taught, “Love your enemies.”

I wonder what Charlie would think about the world situation today. Surely he would rejoice with India, as it stretches and grows, but I think he would worry that it may adopt Western practices of hurry and greed and lose its soul. He would without a doubt condemn the war in Iraq.

He Being Dead yet Speaketh

Jesus said, “[God] is the God not of the dead, but the living.” Henri Nouwen in his book Our Greatest Gift writes that at death our spirit is released from the local limits of the physical body, and is free to commune with those who love us. I’ve found this profoundly true with family members. I find it also true of those I read, like Charlie Andrews, whose life of love for friends, whole nations, and the world, continues to speak today.

  Wrongly accused of cutting telegraph wires, a young Sikh was taken from his home by British soldiers and flogged publicly. His friends called on C. F. Andrews, Anglican clergyman and friend of India, afraid the man would do violence to himself or others. Meeting him, Andrews realized words would not suffice. Instead, Andrews knelt and touched his feet, asking for forgiveness.

The gesture, familiar in the East, broke through his humiliation and rage. Through the conversation that followed the man reported that he had forgiven the injustice and his face lit up with joy and peace. 

This is an example of what Bonhoeffer meant by Christianity “from below,” Christianity that doesn’t arrogate power and privilege for itself.

It’s from Christ in the Silence [(London: Hodder & Stoughton. 1933), pp. 94-96], C. F. Andrews’ exposition of the Farewell Discourses of the gospel of John, the interior life underlying his years of service to India, Britain, and the world.

Wonder what such an approach could mean in the world today.

I never take media storms at face value. Take, for instance, this controversy over Jeremiah Wright. 

His comments were inflammatory. His ministry has been remarkable, though. He is highly regarded by responsible leaders. What if you sweep aside the distortion of sound-byte reporting and statements made in the heat of accusation-innuendo and the glare of the 15-seconds-of-fame spotlight? What if he has something to say? What if, though you disagree with certain statements, you find truth in his overall message?

During my friend Jean-Emile Ngué’s visit we watched the film Gandhi. The independence of India through spiritual struggle is one of the great victories of the 20th century. I’m intrigued by the Anglican clergyman C.F. Andrews, who showed up in South Africa to support Gandhi. Few of the English supported racial equality.

How did this clergyman escape the racism of his age? How did he so effectively identify with the Indian people?

I believe in missions and in the contributions missionaries have made. Missionaries way too often proselytize, however, and make converts twice the children of  hell as themselves (Mt 23.15). I’ve come to believe we need to go meet Christ among the people we serve, for Christ is already there. Too often what we bring is our own narrow white North American consumer culture.

Especially today, although 9/11 has changed our welcome of international students, the best opportunity in missions we have is the international students here. Think of the impact we could have by adopting students in our churches. Many live on starvation rations. A home away from home, no strings attached, would constitute worthy service in itself as well as plant seeds of Christian compassion. If a thinly disguised program to evangelize, though, such an effort would be disingenuous and sure to fail. We need to leave the winning to God, and simply do the loving.

I recall visiting a lovely SBC church in Gary, Indiana. It had a commercial style kitchen, fellowship hall, sanctuary to seat 300. But only four people attended, and there were bullet holes in the windows. Why? I asked the local Baptist leader. He said, “The problem is, you have to be converted twice to get into our churches. First, you have to become a Southerner, then a Christian.”

The great issue we face (perhaps not the greatest, but close), is racism. So many churches demand converts to be white first. I cannot speak for black churches.

What’s required is for us as individuals, if churches will not, is to become part of the lives of people in our cities, which are not whites only, to care about the issues people care about, to offer unconditional love. I’m afraid what most of us love unconditionally is our comfortable lifestyle. We live in a balloon of white privilege.

I’m still poring over The Ordeal of Love: C.F. Andrews and India (NY: Oxford, 1979) by Hugh Tinker. I found a used copy on Amazon. I’ve also found the two volumes of his Christian witness What I Owe to Christ and Christ in the Silence, which I will be reading soon. I’ve also found a terrific site for liberation theology reading at Liberation Theology Resources Online.

My friend is gone, the house is still, I’ve slept around the clock almost twice. How Sandy, who resumed 10 hour days Wednesday, manages I don’t know. I hoped to write about his stay, but like an Orthodox Jew on Temple Mount not knowing precisely where the Holy of Holies is, I choose not to walk anywhere.

I think of these lines from Stephen King’s Rita Haworth and the Shawshank Redemption (an incredible piece):

We’re glad he’s gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

We spent the last couple nights at the movies: Gandhi and Pope John Paul II. I agree with Gandhi’s statement, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

Invisible Violence

I am convinced that one of my and the Western church’s chief sins is materialism. We’ve had several Enlightened Ones now, Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and others who have shown us that God empowers the poor to change the world.

There are 9-11 massacres happening every day among nameless millions who lack food, water, vitamins, shoes, childhood inoculations. But they are invisible, they are institutional. Nobody sets out to harm them. They just fall to the side because of globalization policies that give preferential terms to the wealthy.

We do not realize when we shop for the cheapest price we are perpetuating child labor; when we buy multinational brands we enable employers who pay less than a living wage for commodities like coffee, while drug lords pay handsomely for the drug-makings that poison our streets.

I feel so damned helpless.

Learning to See

I am fascinated by Charles Freer Andrews, the Anglican clergyman who spotted Gandhi early on and quickly allied with him. How did he see differently from other Christians? I’ll be commenting on his biography in awhile.

(I’m half through three or four books: The Life of Dialogue, Anglo-Saxon Spirituality, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, by Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, friend of Gandhi, an overview of one kind of Hinduism, a religion I’ve never understood.)

Sick of Religion

We had a get together of my wife’s relatives, some of the best people on the face of the planet. And as we usually do, our conversation turned to the Southern Baptist history of the last 30 years, much of which is written in our families’ sweat and blood. But my son left the room. After awhile I went to find him.

He said, “Dad, I’m sick of religion. I’m not interested in religion, it’s not my thing.” He no longer goes to church, although we raised him to. In that moment I got a glimpse of myself. This is what my sectarianism has done! God, have mercy!

Mid-Year Milestones

Tonight we’re celebrating my son’s birthday, bringing in meals from Outback. Sunday will be Mother’s Day, then wedding anniversary and our birthdays, all bunched up in the middle of the year.

But I’ll have to punch my way through this damned depression to do all that. Writing is the last thing I want to do. I’m out of pain meds until next week sometime, and pain hovers at 5 or 6 or more. Not only that, I’m depressed as hell.