Green Clouds and the Lamps of God’s Village

“~V7“OU stopped so long to look at that” said a boy -L to me one day. It was in a lane arched with palm. There was a well on one side, in an open space, fenced in by rough reed work. On the reeds in the sunshine sat a pair of kingfishers. The flash of blue on the brown in the sunshine by the old grey-walled well is a joy just to remember. But my stopping to look at it was something quite out of reach of the boy, who stood in the shadow side under the palms.

This is what most of our children are like when first they come to us; but very soon they begin to care for the lovely and curious strewn so lavishly over the plain of South Indian life. Often now an excited little creature comes flying in, impetuous, full of some new discovery. Once it was a beetle rolling a ball much bigger than himself to a hiding-place under a tree. The children wanted to help the beetle, and they made a smooth track for him; but he obstinately persisted in kicking it by the rough way of his choice. Once it was a weed, as we disrespectfully call our flower guests who come without being invited. “It has thirteen different colours, not counting the stalk.” Once it was a praying mantis, whose devotional manners charmed the whole community, and suggested any number of moral reflections. Often it is a new mimic insect, like a straw, or a leaf, or a bit of bark. Once it was green clouds.

“Green clouds! Oh, you little green girl!” I said not in the least believing. But the earnest, “Indeed, they are green,” and the tugging little hands prevailed. The clouds were really green; a sort of undefined seagreen, like the colour of a wave before it rolls over, just as the crest curls ready to break. They were lighted with lemon colour towards the under edge, and darkened into grey above, and they were floating in violet air. Then through that pure violet the sickle of the new moon curved, sharp against its transparency. Jupiter, at some seasons very large and brilliant here, shone above the moon; and the little filmy cloudlets swept across it, making halos as they passed.

The splendour and the silence of the movement held us still. I think we both felt we might miss something if we spoke. Slowly the lemon light faded; the cloud colours melted into a blue that was almost electric. Every moment the moon cut clearer, and the silver of the planet grew more radiant. And the little halos flying round it were like rainbows caught and twisted into rings.

At last the child spoke, her brown eyes fixed wistfully on the fading glory of the sky. “I thought He was coming back,” she said. Then I found she had fancied to herself that our Lord went home on a sunset cloud, pink and soft and beautiful, with gold from the inside shining through. “And whenever the clouds are just like that, I look to see if He is not there. And I have looked so often, and He hasn’t come yet.” But other little voices broke in upon us — “What is the sky made of? Is it a real roof? Look at the big star! Oh, it is running! Where is it running to? Why has it got a coloured crown?”

In the warm South land the spirit of the moonlight and the starlight need not be shut out unkindly. We sit outside with it, and sleep outside beside it. The toil and the littleness of the day pass out of memory in that large calm, as the heat that has passed is forgotten in the cool. The juniors generally go to bed early, but sometimes they break bounds and sit on the sand in the courtyard, in the starshine, very wide awake. Then, if you happen to be conveniently exhausted and unfit for conversation, the compassionate children will leave you in peace and forget your near existence. You have the chance then, if you care to take it, to drop for awhile into the world that is never far away, though we so seldom seem to find the little bypath into it.

“I want to string all the stars together on a thread and make a necklace.” This was Lola. “You can’t,” said the Firefly, scandalised. “They aren’t yours.” “Whose are they?” Lola sounded defiant. “They’re God’s. They’re the lamps of God’s village.” “Where is God’s village?” “Up there.” “What is it called?” “It’s Heaven, of course.” “And it’s up there?” Lola pointed up with one fat forefinger, and looked searchingly at the Firefly, who answered with confidence,

How DOES GOD’S VILLAGE STAY UP? 271

“Yes, up there; high up.” Then Lola, who at the date of this story was considerably younger than when she instructed Leela, as already narrated, gathered herself together and demanded, “How does it stay up?”

This was disconcerting. The Firefly, at that time also a recent arrival, realised her limitations. Only a few days previously she had been as puzzled as Lola over a similar problem. We were at the Harvest Festival. The people were bringing offerings of sacks of rice, huge baskets of solidified brown sugar, many fowls, and some goats. The Firefly was enjoying it thoroughly till a question smote her. “Who are all the things for?” Surprised, we told her they were for God. “But I thought He lived in Heaven. How are they going to get the things there?” So, feeling unequal to clear explanation as to how God’s village stayed up, the Firefly appealed to the Mouse, who honestly answered that she did not know, and was proceeding to expatiate upon the spiritual joys of the better world, when Lola interrupted anxiously, “What do the people in God’s village have to eat?”

The Mouse, unlike the Imp of old, is nine, and good. She cuddled Lola in her arms, and explained that she was rather young to understand all about Heaven. Even she, the elderly Mouse, did not understand everything. But one thing was perfectly clear: Heaven was a beautiful lovely place like a beautiful lovely garden. Lola wagged her head approvingly. “Are there plantains?” (bananas). The Mouse was not sure. There is a tree, and twelve different kinds of fruit grow on it — a gasp of joy from Lola. And every month the fruit ripens — another gasp from Lola. And the wall all round God’s village shines, and the gates are made of big glistening pearls, and the village streets are gold. “What are the plates made of?” was Lola’s next, interjected as soon as she could find room. “And is the rice always hot? And how many kinds of curry?”

Lola’s unchristian greed distressed the Mouse. “You shouldn’t be always thinking about your food-bag, Lola,” she said with some severity. “Will it be hot?” once more interposed the irreverent child. The other children were listening rather keenly. In the monsoon season they have hot rice twice a day. At other times only once. The other meals consist of cold rice with condiment. Hot rice always, with an appropriate variety of curry, would be bliss indeed. The Mouse hesitated. “I think if there is rice in Heaven it will be always hot. And I think if there is curry, there will be a great many kinds. But it isn’t in the Bible, and I don’t know. As for the plates,” she added in a more decided tone, “it is very silly to ask about them at all. Who can tell what they are made of?” Nobody ventured a guess. Their vocabulary’s top word, gold, having been already requisitioned to describe the mere streets, what word was left to describe the plates, which must be unspeakably superb.

But the Mouse was uncomfortable upon these lower levels, and she made a strenuous effort to drag the unwilling Lola up: “Listen, Lola! “she said, and gave that plump person a shake.” Jesus, our own Lord Jesus, will be there, and we shall see Him, and He will smile upon us, and that will make Heaven’s sunshine. And God will stroke our faces — so — to take away all the marks

of crying from our faces. And nobody will have fever, and we shall never have to go to bed. And there is a beautiful river.” — “How do we get there? Are there steps?” inquired Lola, much impressed by this jumble. “No; Jesus comes and carries us up. Or the angels come: that’s what happened to a poor sick man Jesus tells us about; and that’s what people call dying. Or else Jesus will come for everybody all at once, and we won’t die, we will all rise quickly, and fly and fly straight up to Him, up and up!” “Shall we have wings? What sort of wings?” Lola was quite stirred. The children have not been brought up upon pictures, and so have not interpolated the idea of wings into the Bible narrative. But then, the act of flying is intimately connected with wings. There was a moment’s entanglement of talk, out of which the voice of the very sane Mouse emerged: “How would wings be fastened on? I don’t think we shall have wings. It says nothing about them in the Bible.” “If the angels who came down to the world had had wings,” remarked another sagely, “people wouldn’t have mistaken them for common people. But they could fly all right.” “And Jesus hadn’t wings, but He flew up into the cloud,” said another and more decided voice. “So wings aren’t necessary.” But Lola seemed disappointed. She wanted wings; white ducks’ wings.

Later the conversation turned to the Parable of the Kich Man and Lazarus, which fascinates Eastern children, to whom the dramatic appeals. The picture of Lazarus sitting happily on Abraham’s lap, as the Tamil puts it, had captivated them, and they considered gravely upon whose lap they would choose to sit, “not counting our Lord Jesus, for of course we would all choose His.” One chose Elijah’s, because he was so brave. Another, Abraham’s. “You can’t; Lazarus has it,” was crushing. Another chose John’s, because he was a loving man. The Elf chose Ignatius, because he was a martyr. But the Firefly would have none of these. “I’m not going to not choose Jesus,” she said sturdily, “He’s the only One I know in Heaven.” “Everybody will want His,” somebody objected. The Firefly gave my hand a squeeze: “Won’t He keep just a little room for me?”

The frankly realistic way these children deal with the unseen may rather startle some, and their strong religious and Biblical bent may perplex others. There is nothing perplexing in it. India is naturally devout; the Bible is the children’s favourite story-book: these two facts explain much. We have not many good story-books in Tamil, and the few that we have often cross the frontier into the grown-up people’s kingdom. The Bible stories the children know best never do. Then, too, the book is new to most of them, and till they know it thoroughly other books can wait. So it comes to pass that at present everything shapes that way. Everything is coloured by some Scriptural reflection — even punishments, as I found only yesterday; for five naughty little sinners had eaten forbidden berries, and to ward off possible consequences had a dose of quinine all round; which quinine, to enforce the moral, had to be slowly munched. Quinine, dry, is not delicious. The five made faces. Then the ringleader remarked:” After Adam and Eve had eaten the for-WAS THE POWDER QUININE? 275

bidden fruit I wonder if God filled it with powder to keep anybody else from eating it, and I wonder if that powder was quinine?”

Among the larger events of her early life the Elf reckons a sharp attack of enteric. “My typhoid,” she calls it, with unchallenged sense of possession. The weary convalescence was brightened by a doll which opens and shuts its eyes. For some time after its arrival and delightful laborious unpacking, the Elf was speechless. By the time she recovered voice everyone was busy, so she addressed the treasure, which was propped up in bed beside her: “Ah, my doll, I am going to love you very much. Oh, I do love you, my dear doll” — sounds of kissing followed — “but I must not want to keep you for myself entirely. I must be willing to give you up. I must not listen to the feeling in my inside that you are my very own. But you really are my own” — more fervent kissing — “the Lady of the hills sent you to me to be rny very own,” the relief in the voice was unmistakable, “so it doesn’t matter what that feeling says.... But I must not be like Haman. He wanted all good things to come only to him, so he got a great disappointment.”

Here I lost the thread of the discourse which, I think, must have got into knots, and perhaps Hainan’s fate proved depressing, for the sermon closed abruptly with, “Now I must not be at all like that... But, ah, my doll, you are my doll!... But I will give you to my younger sisters when I die!”

One feels inclined to leave you with no more serious view of the children than their playground shows, but they are too dear to be left like that. They are not children in a picture just to be looked at, or children in a story sure to end happily. They are living children, with more than merely childish faults. Each who was, or whose parents were, connected with Temple service as the word is understood here, is possessed of an inheritance unexplored as yet, but close at hand. Sometimes it is as if the Power to whom the child had been dedicated, suddenly fastened upon her, drew her over the dividing fence into that inheritance, worked upon her will till she wills to be there, reasserted its claim in fact, very really. These children come from “dim uttermost depths which no Angel hath known,” nor any English woman, save those who go out with the Shepherd to seek the sheep that is most of all lost; and even they have not plumbed the abyss that opens under Satan’s throne. There is a difference between those who ever were in that abyss and those who never were; and the grace and the victory wrought by our God, and the light when it illuminates are all the more to the praise of His glory and all the more a joy. But we ask you not to forget the background, and the possibility it holds.

One of Christina Eossetti’s poems expresses so tenderly and so completely much that we desire for these little Temple children, that one cannot do better for them than copy it here. Just the few who are with us can pray the prayer for themselves, but the many not found yet need you to put yourself down quite low beside them, and pray the little prayer for them, as mothers do for babies too small to say the words:

“FiND, EMBRACE us” 277

“0 Lord, seek us, 0 Lord, find us

In Thy patient care;
Be Thy Love before, behind us,

Round us everywhere:
Lest the god of this world blind us,

Lest he speak us fair,
Lest he forge a chain to bind us,

Lest he bait a snare.
Turn not from us, call to mind us,

Find, embrace us, hear;
Be Thy Love before, behind us,

Round us everywhere.”

And to this will you add an earnest word, that each one saved may grow up to be a saviour of others, a blessing to India.

“If the Lord pull, you must not hold when He draweth.”

SAMUEL RUTHERFORD.

(The sick baby to its mother.)

“’ 0 Mother, mother! loose thy prayer,
Christ’s name hath made it strong,
It bindeth me, it holdeth me
With its most loving cruelty,
From floating my new soul along
The happy heavenly air.
It bindeth me, it holdeth me
In all this dark, upon this dull
Low earth, by only weepers trod,
It bindeth me, it holdeth me!
Mine Angel looketh sorrowful
Upon the face of God.

Oh you

Earth’s tender and impassioned few,
Take courage to entrust your love
To Him so named, Who guards above
Its ends, and shall fulfil!
Breaking the narrow prayers that may
Befit our narrow hearts, away
In His broad loving will.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
From “Isobel’s Child.”