When Sundar came upon him, the hermit was praying aloud. Sundar waited patiently until he was finished. Then through the hole he asked, “May I speak with you?”
It was too dark inside to see the hermit, but the man did answer. “Yes, I welcome conversation with fellow seekers,” he said.
Sundar asked him, “What have you gained through your seclusion and meditation? The Buddhist religion teaches nothing about a God who hears our prayers. To whom do you pray, then?”
The hermit answered, “I pray to Buddha, but I do not hope to gain anything by praying and by living in seclusion. Quite the opposite, I seek release from all thought of gain. I seek nirvana, the elimination of all feeling and all desire—whether of peace or of pain.” He paused for a moment before going on. “But still I live in spiritual darkness. I do not know what the end will be, but I am sure that whatever I now lack will be attained in another life.”
“Surely,” Sundar countered, “your longings and feelings arise from the God who created you. They were surely created to be fulfilled, not crushed. The destruction of all desire cannot lead to release but only to suicide. Are not our desires inseparably intertwined with the continuation of life? Even the idea of eliminating desire is fruitless. The desire to eliminate all desire is itself a desire. How can we find release and peace by replacing one desire with another? Surely we shall find peace not by eliminating desire but by finding its fulfillment and satisfaction in the One who created it.”
The hermit replied, “We shall see what we shall see.”
Finally it was time to return back across the mountains to India. The return journey was just as dangerous as the trek into Tibet had been, but Sundar made it safely back to Simla. From there he set out on a winter preaching tour of the towns and villages across the Punjab plain. He went as far east as his home village of Rampur, where a wonderful surprise awaited him.
It had been fourteen years since Sundar had last seen his father. Throughout that time he had not ceased to pray that somehow Sher Singh would become a Christian. With trepidation Sundar made his way to the family compound in Rampur. He still vividly remembered the terrible reception he had received from his father and brothers on his last visit and hoped things would be different this time. With tears running down his face, Sher Singh warmly welcomed Sundar into the compound. Sundar could see that there was something different about his father. But it was not until the two men were seated in the shade of a veranda and sipping tea that Sher Singh finally told his son that he, too, had become a Christian about a year before. He explained how he had been keeping track of Sundar’s travels through reports in the newspapers.
Tears welled in Sundar’s eyes as he received this news. After so many years of praying, God had finally answered his prayers, and he was once again sitting with his father, both of them now Christians.
The following day Sundar’s father said to him, “Son, I know I have often told you that I disinherited you, but that was to try to get you to denounce your religion. The fact is that secretly I have always kept your inheritance for you. I want to give you a portion of it now so that you can travel freely around the world preaching the gospel to all nations.”
Chapter 13
To the West
Sundar stood on the deck of the steamer City of Cairo, watching as Bombay and the west coast of India receded from view. It was January 16, 1920, and he was on his way to England. The voyage took over three weeks, and Sundar spent much of the time in his cabin praying about the speaking tour ahead of him. He was not sure what form it would take. All he knew was that meetings had been arranged for him in England.
The City of Cairo berthed at Liverpool on February 10, and members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were commonly called, met Sundar at the dock. Sundar felt immediately at home with these people, as they often worshiped in silence as he did. Even though it was late winter in England, Sundar refused to wear shoes or an overcoat until someone pointed out that his muddy feet inconvenienced his hosts, who had to provide water to wash his feet before he could enter their homes. His hosts also pointed out that arriving at a person’s home in a wet robe was not considered good manners in England. So, to be a better guest, Sundar bought himself a pair of sandals and a gray overcoat.
Try as hard as he might to remember, Sundar often forgot to wear his overcoat. On one particularly foggy morning he was standing on a busy corner waiting to cross the street when out of the fog a woman’s hand appeared, clasping a letter. The woman started poking at Sundar, who immediately realized that she had mistaken the orange glow of his robe for a red mailbox. Sundar took the letter from the woman and said, “Ma’am, I would be very pleased to post that for you.” He could hardly stop himself from laughing at the thought of how surprised the woman must have been to encounter a talking mailbox.
The Quakers took Sundar south to Birmingham, where he spoke at the Friends’ Missionary Training College. He was still frustrated by his limited vocabulary when he had to speak, but he pushed himself to improve his English.
From Birmingham, Sundar traveled to the university town of Oxford, where he was invited to stay with an Anglican brotherhood called the Cowley Brothers. Sundar had met some of the men of the brotherhood in India and been impressed by their simple way of living. While in Oxford he was invited to carry out a series of lectures at Balliol and Mansfield Colleges. Still wearing his saffron robe and carrying only a blanket and a Bible, he made quite an impression on some of England’s most elite and educated young men. By Sundar’s third lecture in Oxford, hundreds of young men had to be turned away because there was not enough space in the hall to accommodate everyone.
In a newspaper interview during this time, a reporter asked Sundar, “So why did you come to England?”
Sundar replied, “Many Indians say that Christianity is not the real religion of England and that it is not practiced here but is merely an Empire plan to change the religions of conquered nations. So I came to see for myself.”
“And what have you seen of this?” the reporter asked.
“I have found that you are a very busy people and that you have so much to do there does not seem much time to think about religion. There is a great deal of materialism. But when I get into your homes and know you, then I find that you do really care about religion.”
Following the meetings in Oxford, Sundar traveled on to London, where he met privately with the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop seemed very impressed with Sundar and offered to sponsor a series of meetings in London. The first of these gatherings consisted of seven hundred clergy of the Church of England who came to hear Sundar speak at the Church House in Westminster.
Then, on March 23, 1920, a large group of missionaries and mission secretaries, representing many missionary organizations in England and Ireland, came together to hear Sundar. He urged those who gathered to learn about the cultures they were going into and to find ways to use as much of the local cultures as possible when presenting and modeling the gospel.
While in London, Sundar was asked to speak at Westminster Chapel. Although this was a prestigious pulpit to be invited to speak from, he told the same simple stories he told when speaking to the people who gathered to hear him in India.
“Once,” he began, “I was sitting on a Himalayan hillside, and I looked down on a tree. In the tree was a nest, and on the nest a mother bird was hatching her brood. I knew that a wonderful world was awaiting those chicks, a world of fresh air, green leaves, and sunshine. Soon they would be big enough to leave the nest and fly wherever they chose, but as they pecked their way out of their eggs, they did not know this. The only life they had known was confined to their eggs, surrounded in liquid and dependent upon their mother for warmth. We Christians are like that—the Gospel of Saint Mark tells us that we are not far from the Kingdom of God, just as the chicks in their eggs were not far from the outside world. We do not know what we shall be, nor the things that God has prepared for us. Now, while we are still in the body, our great need is to receive heat from the Holy Spirit.”
On Good Friday five thousand people came to hear Sundar speak at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. When Sundar rose to speak, the entire congregation stood and greeted him with a traditional Indian greeting. A reporter from the London Daily Chronicle was present at the meeting, and the following day an article appeared in that newspaper. Like all reporters, this reporter grappled with what it was that made Sundar so special. In his article the reporter concluded: “How is it that the sadhu has so manifestly captured the religious world within the short space of six weeks?… The secret of this man’s power lies in his utter self-abandonment to a high ideal.… It is surely a token of good that we of the West, who are so obsessed with the materialistic spirit of the age, have come in close contact with one who stands for the supremacy of the spiritual.”
From England, Sundar traveled on to Scotland and Ireland. At one of his meetings in Scotland, a Swiss pastor was present. When the meeting was over, the Reverend Kiener came to Sundar with tears in his eyes and said, “When I saw you there, standing before me, and heard you speak of your spiritual life, while on the other hand I was surrounded by theological scholars in gowns and hoods, all at once the question came to my mind: What are we aiming at, after all, in studying theology? Why do we learn and study all the hundreds of lesser things, when we do not allow the most important one of all to have its proper place in our lives? What are we doing with all our apparatus of scholarship, and what have we achieved by it all? Men like you can move nations, but what about us?”
Sundar did not answer. He knew that the Reverend Kiener would have to answer for himself the questions he had posed, just as every Christian had to answer them individually.
The following month Sundar spoke in a great missionary conference at London’s Albert Hall. Ten thousand people squeezed into the building to hear him speak, while many others were turned away for lack of room. This led to Sundar’s receiving over three hundred more invitations to speak in the United Kingdom, but he declined all of them. Sundar felt that his time in England was over and that God had called him to continue on in his journey to the United States.
On May 30, 1920, nearly five months after setting out from India, Sundar arrived in New York harbor. A group called the Pond Lyceum Bureau had offered to arrange a lecture tour of America for him. But soon after disembarking in New York, Sundar learned that the Pond Lyceum Bureau was a business, not a Christian ministry, and that the group intended to make a great deal of money from promoting him. No matter which way he looked at the situation, Sundar could not accept that his religious beliefs were going to be peddled in such a manner. He cancelled the arrangement, leaving him with no itinerary in the United States. He then prayed and asked God to show him what to do next.
Two days later Sundar met a Christian lecturer from Hartford Theological Seminary named Frank Buchman. Professor Buchman was so impressed with Sundar that he offered to arrange a modest tour of the country for him and be his traveling companion along the way.
Sundar spoke at churches in Hartford, Connecticut; Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Sundar was also invited to speak at a conference for Christian students. The conference was being held at Silver Bay on Lake George in New York State, and Sundar made his way there. During the conference he spoke at an outdoor meeting on the shore of the lake. In the early evening, as the sun was beginning to set, Sundar stood with his back to the water and said to the eight hundred assembled students, “America is near the Kingdom, but not of it. Think of it this way. A large tiger was chasing a hunter. But the hunter was not afraid. He knew he was approaching a shelter, and he had in his possession the key to the door of that shelter. But when he reached the door, to his dismay he discovered that the key was no longer in his possession. All that separated the hunter from safety was the thickness of that door. Yet he knew he was doomed. Many Americans are like that hunter. They know where their salvation lies, but they do not make use of it.”
