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.