OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

This issue will reflect the fact that much of it was written in airports and on airlines around the world—Seattle, Seoul, Manila, Bangkok. I send the stuff to Ouida and she feeds it to the computer and makes it "camera ready." She has now been at my side for 44 years and most of those years we have had the responsibility of this paper which we both consider a labor of love, especially when we can do it together! As I grow older and find it more and more difficult to be absent from her, I have resolved that this is my last extended journey without her.

In Calcutta I visited the mission of Mother Teresa, which is only a stone's throw from a huge and busy Hindu temple. Seeing the proximity of the two, one can appreciate the story of how the high priest of the temple summoned the police to remove Mother Teresa's mission. Noting what she was doing for the dying on the streets, they told him that when he started doing what she was doing, they would remove her. When the Hindu priest himself came down with cholera, Mother Teresa included him in her works of mercy. I counted upward of 100 beds (cots side by side) in two wards where the dying are allowed to die with some dignity. While we were there one wretched soul was carried away on a stretcher, covered with a sheet by two seminarians wearing masks, who volunteer to help the Indian nurses. The poor soul died with a loving hand holding his rather than alone on a street with the indifferent masses passing him by. I told my missionary companion, Ralph Harter, who has been here 41 years, that what impressed my dear Ouida was that Mother Teresa tells her nurses that they are not only to do such work but to do it with joy. This is confirmed by the various reminders printed on the walls, one of which reads, "let every action of mine be something beautiful for God," and another, "All only for Jesus."

In Calcutta I stayed with a Christian Indian family, which included three grandchildren. One evening I was walking the neighborhood with my host, L. M. Kundu, who speaks Bengali and English. He pointed to preparations being made for a large altar on which sacrifices will be offered to the Hindu goddess Durga, a favorite of this area, during an upcoming pageant. The people will dance before the idol and offer garlands. Other parts of India will serve other idols, "lords many and gods many!" My host told me that his Hindu friends claim that they really do not worship these idols but the one true God who stands behind them. I asked him if he believed this was true. "No," he insisted, "they do not worship anything except themselves." This old Indian believer may well have named man's basic sin the world over—he worships himself rather than the God who created him.

In India I also, with some difficulty, visited the grave of William Carey, one of the early missionaries to India, who came from England in the 1790's. I remembered that our own Archibald McLean, first president of the American Foreign Christian Missionary Society, respectfully visited Carey's tomb when he came to India a century ago to encourage Disciple missionaries. Carey's grave, in an ill-kept cemetery, is in Serampore, some 15 miles from Calcutta, less than a mile from the college he founded.