Life Among the Syrians, as a Fellow-Worker Saw It
The first halt of the little party which had left Dohnavur, its then abiding place, in the late afternoon of January 16, 1902, for the western coast, was at the last southern outpost of the C.M.S. in India, Pannikulam, a Hindu and Muhammadan border town not far from the pass leading through the mountains into Travancore. There, within sight of the temple lights, within sound of the murmur of voices chanting to Siva, by a great tree, the sacred fig of India, supper was spread; and the little snake idols (worshipped by childless women) on the raised platform under the tree, remained as a last impression of dark idolatrous Tinnevelly, dark and idolatrous still, in spite of its noted centres of light. In strong contrast to its temples and roadside shrines appeared presently the little frequent whitewashed churches, hidden among the palms bordering the wide water-ways of the part of Travancore inhabited chiefly by the Syrian Christians.
The journey, dreamlike and pleasant to look back upon, was not altogether so delightful at the time. There was a dusty tumble over a road which, till the Travancore side was reached, was more rut than road; then a break for breakfast and a rest at Nagercoil, in South Travancore, where the Duthies, L.M.S. missionaries, long practised in matters of hospitality, received the party; then a hot drive on to Trevandrum through the afternoon and night. One of the bulls went lame and prolonged the journey, and Trevandrum seemed to recede through the morning hours into farther and farther distance. Once there, however, the kindness of the Chief Engineer and his wife made things easy for the next few days’ work. Then on by wallam (native barge-like boat) through the night to Quilon, and thence by very slow bullock carts to the first centre for Syrian work.
The first surprise — though the fact had been known before, it had not been realised — was to find the people not Syrian in type, but Indian. Here and there was a face which suggested the far land from which the founders of this wonderful Church had come; but intermarriage with the people of the country had led to the Indian type prevailing, a good type for the most part, sometimes distinguished by great refinement of feature and expression, and almost invariably by a gentleness of manner most pleasant to meet.
For the Syrians as a whole are a gracious people. It may be possible to live among them and not become attached to them, but it must be difficult; they have a way of their own of winning the heart.
It was the delight of the one who knew them well by this time, to expound to those who were new to the life, how things were viewed in this land of leisure and unbounded kindness. The meeting was fixed for eight in the morning, so that it might be over before the great heat of the day. The mission party was ready at eight, but there was no sign of the congregation. “It will be eight when they come,” he explained. They came at something nearer ten than eight. “Now it is eight o’clock!” Or, a move had to be made; all was to be ready upon arrival at the other end of a long night journey of pitch and toss in a bullock-cart. “Be prepared for their not beginning to get ready till you arrive; that’s the custom here!” would be the warning word, which made it fairly easy to wait with calmness of spirit in scorching sunshine at the other end, while with every sign of welcome upon their faces, Syrian men rushed round setting things to rights, and Syrian women raised clouds of dust in efforts to make everything nice; for in India, if a thing is the custom, that settles it. But always by the end of the stay at any special place, all that could minister to the comfort of the guests was forthcoming, even to a red tablecloth for the round table in the middle of a room minus those usually necessary things, doors and window-shutters. (It was a new house, and, like many things in Travancore, was waiting to be finished.) Or again: “Don’t be in a hurry. You can’t hurry a Tamil; but ten times more truly you can’t hurry a Syrian Christian. After all, we have come for them, and we have nothing to do but give ourselves to them,” a view of life which covers more than work among Syrian Christians, and if sincerely adopted leads to infinite peace of mind. From the first day to the last, there was one unbroken cord of kindness thrown round every member of the party; till each separate one of that little band found the heart going out to those most lovable people, whose ways seem to suit their beautiful land, with its placid lagoons, forests of palm, and easeful, indolent, languid air which does not encourage the strenuous, and smiles at foolish haste.
But the people were ready for any amount of effort, only in a frankly un-Western way. “You will stop at such and such a place,” said the Syrian friend in charge one evening, as a move was made to a new centre. “So and so has arranged to give you a meal upon your way.” So at midnight the sleepy missionaries turned out of their bandies, and were led to a Syrian house and asked to wait “a few minutes.” They waited, and two of them lay down on a bench and went to sleep. That supper was the work of the women of the house, who had toiled for hours over it. After it was finished, “Now the family will gather for prayers,” was the cheerful announcement. There was nothing for it but to acquiesce; and then, after some little delay caused by routing the children out of their beds in the small hours of the morning, that household met in the largest room the house contained, and prayers, which they would gladly have prolonged into a meeting lasting till dawn, at last closed the proceedings. Wonderful is the unchanging East. Let those who cannot learn to love it, stay away.
Once a curious man of no discoverable persuasion hung on the edge of the crowd at one of the great meetings, and fell upon little groups of convention goers as they dispersed for meals. He attacked a member of the mission party: “You people are all wrong. This Church should split up. ‘I am the Vine.’ These are our Lord’s own words; but you do not see that the more branches there are on a vine the more glory to the vine. In this matter Walker Iyer is wrong “(the idea being, the more a Church split up the better).” Thank God, we have something better to do than split branches into twigs,’*
258 WALKER OF TIXNEVELLY [CH. xx.
was Walker Iyer’s somewhat indignant comment when he heard of this new doctrine; and he fell back upon his favourite expression, “Pity to go about branding sheep when one might be catching fish.”
The meetings were always an amazement. Besides the general meetings, there were separate gatherings for leaders; and women’s meetings were arranged for other members of the party — curious women’s meetings they appeared at first, for the mass of a thousand to fifteen hundred women was invariably fringed by a wide border of men — five thousand was the count one day. But the men were so docile and so refreshingly quiet (in contrast to the women, who of course had their babies to see to, and therefore were more or less disturbed and disturbing), that they were never sent away. Then before the evening meetings began, the people would gather in hundreds, till perhaps ten thousand or more were packed solidly into the pandal, and all they wanted was to be taught choruses. These they learned in a way of their own: they listened while the new chorus was sung by a little group on the platform, and immediately took it up, recasting it as if by common consent into something like and yet unlike the original; the effect was quite delightful, an Indianised chorus thereafter not to be foreign at all, but their own possession.
To this audience thus prepared the speaker would come punctual to the second, for the evening meetings always began in time. Quietly he would work his way through the packed masses to the wide, low platform; and then there would be a gradual hush, passing down from the platform to the far-out edge of the crowd while he knelt down, and once more stretched out his hands to the Unseen, and as it seemed, received gifts for men. Then the address, broken by the interpretation sometimes twice or three times repeated by interpreters stationed at intervals through the great throng, and even so unspoiled — how describe it? Sometimes it was like hearing waters fall from high places, pure waters of refreshment; sometimes the eager sentences following hard the one upon the other were like leaping flames. The difficulties in travelling were many, and often very tiresome, and the tiring end fell on the one responsible for everything; but never once through those many journeys was there a sign of the early-lamented impatience, but rather that continual making the best of things which tends so much to lessen the petty frictions of travel. Whenever there was any thing interesting to be seen, there was always a quick call. “Look at that fisherman! Did you ever see a man shooting fish before?” This was on one of the backwaters, where, sitting on the bank, the fisher with bow and arrows shot the fish as they swam past. And again, “Look at those two! Did you ever see anything like that 1” and with intense interest he listened while a Syrian Christian of the Reformed Church, after trying in vain to get into spiritual touch with one of the orthodox, began by way of assurance of his own orthodoxy to repeat aloud the Nicene Creed, as he followed a yard or so behind the other along the bank of the river: “That’s a new way of approach to souls!” And when established in a Syrian house, where the domestic life, entirely audible to the interested guests upstairs, included at the time of their visit the arrival of a new baby, the call was: “Come and see a Syrian Christian baby’s tub!” and there in the verandah below, in a cream-coloured spathe cut from a palm in the compound, lay a fat baby, extremely indignant while its nurse swished cold water plentifully over it, finally rinsing out cradle and baby with one effective swing of the arm. “There, did you ever see anything like that before?” The morning scrubbing of the elephants in the river as seen from that same verandah was another call to come and look; so was the administration of pills to the great beasts when ill. Every thing contributed to the natural happiness of life, and helped through the tremendous strain of meetings and constant conversations between.
To one who watched, understanding the manner of man who had come among them better than did those engaging visitors, his peace in receiving one after the other without a shade of anything but welcome in his eyes, was something far more striking than the taking of huge meetings. After such meetings the whole being asks for quiet relaxation, but it was rarely granted; and perhaps Mrs. Walker’s faith was never more taxed than when she saw these constant demands made upon strength which had narrower limits than was generally known.
But it was impossible to save him any of this extra work. “As sheep without a shepherd,” he said pitifully one evening, as he watched some thousands of people stream homeward in the dark, each little group carrying a flaming torch. They were walking by the river, and the water, reflecting their white garments and yellow torches, made a mile of picture. But the inner side of things appealed most: “So many of them as sheep without a shepherd “; he could not do too much for them.
Often in some great meeting it was as if he were playing upon a living harp; a touch, and any effect he desired was instantly produced; but he feared this kind of responsiveness: “Lord, make it real,” was his one prayer. There was much prayer throughout the whole time; it was the very breath of life to him: “Oh to be able to pray!” he used to say, and then he would pray, and pray, till those who were with him could only wonder that the heavens did not visibly open, and pour the blessing down.
There was blessing, and there were joys no one ever attempted to count; but the work of this missioner all through his life was to walk by faith. Never to him was granted that which, to judge by descriptions in current religious literature, is often granted to some, an open and visible great ingathering of the precious fruits of the earth. But man after man with whom he came into contact can witness, better still can show a life that witnesses, to what no mortal can effect, or continue to enable if effected. Such were the signs of his apostleship. “Now go and live for others,” was often his last word to one and another who came, usually alone, to tell him what had happened in the soul’s secret place. “Keep close to God, and go and live for others.” It was his own life practice in two sentences. Spiritual selfishness was, like all insincerity, intolerable to him.
Upon one of the last days at Maramana the aged Metran came in his amazing robes of state, and sat on a chair in the middle of the packed platform, his betel nut apparatus (a very Eastern touch) conspicuous by his side. That day the crowd was so vast that the two interpreters, who had been sufficient up till then, had to be increased to three, who, dotted about the pandal, carried the words of the speaker to the edge of the throng of
15,000 people. It was a stirring sight, those many faces looking all one way, and the white face, so much too white with the strain of such ministry, gazing down upon the thousands in the intervals between his sentences and their three-fold repetition. “This sacred work demands not luke-warm, selfish, slack souls, but hearts more finely tempered than steel, wills purer and harder than the diamond.... Nothing but a burning sanctity will convert this unbelieving generation;” thus Pere Didon, noble, knightly missioner of France. And the fine words were wrought into deeds day by day through those weeks in Travancore.
Such a life, by whomsoever lived, has a secret experience behind it: the lines facing this chapter tell it in part. Give me power, give me fire! many a preacher has prayed the prayer. To such comes the searching word of the Lord, Art thou in earnest? Wilt thou pay the cost?
The good-bye to Travancore was sorrowful. They came down to the water’s edge, those loving people, led by Philipose Achan, and a band of Achans and deacons. And they sang as the boat pushed off from the stone steps at the foot of the Metran’s grounds: “Victory to Jesus!” Lower down the river a C.M.S. pastor waited with his family, laden with great bunches of fruit, whose taste was forgotten in the beauty of its colour; for the river scene, green palms, brown water, asked for just that vivid dash of red. Slowly the wallams moved off from the shore and down the Rana River. It was good-bye to Travancore.
The last mission was held at Kannankulam, in the northern State of Cochin. There were difficulties in that northern town; for the pandal had been built in the heart of the Orthodox Syrian population, and attempts were made to break up the meetings by throwing stones in among the crowd. But special help was provided; for Mrs. Nicholson and Miss McKibben, who had for some years been working among the Syrians and who were then living at Kannankulam, brought faith to bear upon the difficult position, and all passed off quietly: “So closes our campaign on the west coast,” is the journal’s last word; “Lord, forgive its failures!”
Hector Macpherson, drum-major, 93rd Highlanders, in 1855, to a chaplain who had asked him advice as to how to work among the troops : —
“Look round you. See the pickets of Liprandi’s army. See yon batteries on the right, and the men at the guns. Mark yon trains of ammunition. Hear the roar of that cannon. Look where you may, it is all earnest here. There is not a man but feels it is a death struggle. We are all in earnest, Sir; we are not playing at soldiers here. If you would do good, you must be in earnest too.”
JOHN MACPHERSON, Life of Duncan Matheson.