Adventures with Christ in Latin America

Front matter

PRINCETON, N. J.

PURCHASED BY THE HAMILL MISSIONARY FUND.

Miller, George Amos, 1868-

Chapter I Why Missions In Latin America?

A GROUP of missionary teachers in a South American country was discussing the question, “Just what are we trying to do here, anyway?” The answer was not so easy to find as might appear to those who have not realized the far-reaching complexity of the missionary’s program of service.

After a time one young man, principal of a boys’ school, put it this way: “We are here to do a lot of different things, in detail, but I think that they all come at last to this; we are here to represent Jesus Christ; and if we fail in that, all our other doing comes to nothing that justifies our coming.”

“TY wish that I could feel that I am doing that,” remarked a young woman. “It is hurry and teach and discipline and visit and correct papers and wonder what they are up to now, until I feel as unlike a missionary as possible. If I had known that I was coming down here to do all this, I would have thought several times before I packed my trunk. I would like to know how all this tearing about, sixteen hours a day, is going to present Christ to anybody.”

“Exactly that way. It all depends on how you do those very things. If for me to teach is for Christ to teach, for me to correct papers is for Christ to correct papers, for me to visit and discipline and deal in a hundred ways with sometimes difficult boys is the same thing approximately as for Christ to do it, then, speaking with all reverence, I am presenting him as effectively as though we were running revival meetings every day in the year.”

Silence fell on the gathering, a few even stopped their fancywork and the meeting closed with something to think about.

We have come to a new emphasis in our work in so-called foreign lands. There was a time when the missionary went out to save the heathen from hell. Sometimes he came back and held his watch for a breathless minute and then told us that while the sixty seconds had ticked themselves into eternity so many hundreds or thousands of immortal souls had gone down to the torments of an eternal perdition because they had never heard of the name of Jesus Christ. It was time to hurry.

_ Aside from some independent extremists, very _ few enter missionary service to-day with that motive. Rightly or wrongly, we do not teach that men go to hell who have never had a chance to go anywhere else.’ For one thing, there was a usually unconscious but nevertheless inevitable smack of superiority and condescension about the old approach. We were superior, of course. Did we not bring with us a better brand of nearly everything?

It is inevitable that most new missionaries should suffer more or less from the “United States complex.” Just plain patriotism would seem to require that the young American stand up for Uncle Sam and all his works, especially since he is so far ahead of everybody else. That the peoples to whom we go feel exactly the same way about their own countries and are apt to look with suspicion, not to say dislike, upon our ubiquitous flag-waving, may come as a surprise to the complacent new missionary, full of the old home-town spirit. Of course, poor people, they are only foreigners, but what veteran among us can forget the shock of his own first discovery of the astonishing fact that he himself was the foreigner, very much on the outside of the whole social situation, trying to get a glimpse of the inside, often through a very small linguistic knot hole?

To merge one’s nationality in universal humanity is a great achievement, to the attainment of which there is but one effective approach, and that through the spirit and teachings of Him in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian

105 8 PROD nor Scythian, European, Asiatic, African, nor Latin, but one world full of needy people. There is a risk implied in the removal of race barriers, and only in Christ is that risk worth taking.

It makes all the difference in the world how we approach our fellow men and what we carry with us in our minds and hearts. Some of us have been suspected of perpetrating a new version of the Great Commission—“Go ye into all the world and teach the English language.” We have gone to all the world, including Mexico and Central and South America, with our English language as a door-opener, and we have also taken with us Anglo-Saxon supremacy, empirical science, medicine, farming, trades, up-to-date clothing, foods, fashions, college spirit, and much else besides. In Latin America we. have pretty effectually insulated the newly arrived teacher from effective contacts with national life, by insisting that he report for duty in the class room at eight thirty on the morning after arrival. There was always something that could be taught in English.

We have succeeded in these Latin lands, sometimes beyond our own hopes. A warm-hearted people has received us and has readily recognized our friendly attitude, our neighborly interest in them and the service-motive that in some form dominates the heart of every missionary.

There is a certain universal appeal in the cup of cold y water, the friendly home visit, the classee ronching:. or any other service rendered in a spirit of frank neighborliness.

There is possible a mutual coming together of missionaries and the leaders of the peoples about them, provided there be found a common ground. The missionary and national teachers, working together day after day, come to understand each other, and back of this personal fellowship lie all the larger possibilities of race and language gsroups. Out of the personal adjustments grow the beginnings of national agreements. And basic to all larger fellowships lie the transformations of personality into terms of the one Common Denominator of humanity, even Christ Jesus.

‘Latin America has sometimes received scant attention in world-missionary councils, and the ideals of Pan-Americanism have never profoundly gripped the hearts of the people of the United States. Most of our international thinking has run around the world east and west. When we go abroad we usually cross the Atlantic. We are but dimly conscious of our all-American community, inhabited by a score of national families, besides a number of insular neighbors of the Caribbean suburb. The future of our own civilization and the hope of permanent peace for mankind are intimately bound up with the moral and spiritual progress of the Latin civilization that prevails from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan. / Some great religious experiments have been thoroughly made among these peoples. We know what ecclesiasticism, superstition, intolerance, and priestcraft have done and will do when they have control of the situation. It remains to be seen what Jesus Christ can do when he has a fair op-_ portunity in their lives. He has made a beginning abundant with promise of larger things to come.

Through all the missionary plans, programs, and activities of the last half century of seedsowing in Latin America runs one explanation of our successes and reason for our failures. In proportion as we have made ourselves one with the people about us and have revealed Christ to them, he has wrought his own impact upon the institutions of human life. Wherein we may have concealed him beneath our imperfections, rather than released him to do his own work in his own way, we have failed. No man singlehanded can present Christ to a civilization; it takes a living church to produce an effective missionary and give him the backing of spiritual life and material equipment that enable him to become a true ambassador of the King of kings.

Chapter II Latin Lands Of Promise

THE allurement of the externals of life in Latin America is apt to mislead the passing pilgrim or the newly arrived resident. Human life in these Spanish-speaking lands is varied, stimulating, picturesque, and interesting at any time and in every place. There is something about it that gets into one’s consciousness and calls him back after he goes away. It is all so different from the uniformly correct and prosperous life of the United States of America, with its rows of houses, its wide streets lined by laborious lawns, its impossible traffic conditions, the flaming wayside billboards, the universal public utilities and every-family-some-kind-of-a-car.

With all due respect to the abundance of goods in the United States, we claim that Latin _ America is different, decidedly so, from all these things, and whatever else we may think of it we cannot escape its compelling interest. There are contrast and variety, light and shadow, squalor and splendor side by side. Rags, robes, huts, palaces, deserts, flowers, beggars, officials, toilers, idlers, homeless girls, butterfly daughters of the rich, garbage piles, exquisite gardens, bare walls, fountains, crippled dogs, canaries, vultures, birds of paradise, flea-bitten donkeys, limousines, loaded llamas, auto-trucks, crumpled-up old men, smiling, chubby children—such are the details of the picture. Whatever else may be said, there is overflowing interest.

He who has become a-weary of the conventionalized routine of a settled social system may well betake himself south and merge his life with the unfolding pageant of humanity en route from the cradle to the grave, as exhibited on every highway trodden by human feet in any major city of Latin lands. Just such scenes must have spread about the feet of Him who, seeing the multitudes, was moved with compassion because they were as sheep having no shepherd.

From Mexico City an ancient highway leads westward across the mountains to the city of Toluca. Leave the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (otherwise the modern City of Mexico) any Saturday morning on this Toluca road and meet the procession coming in. From two days’ journey away they come on foot, and pretty lively foot at that. Old men and maidens, young men and children, all trudge along mile after mile, every back piled high with produce for the Sunday market in Mexico. What loads they balance! Bulging rolls of matting, crates of pottery, coops of chickens, vegetables, furniture, fruit; it is the produce of a province walking to market on the backs and legs of human beings. Yesterday morning they set out, to-morrow afternoon they will begin the return journey, loaded with gew-gaws and trinkets from the maelstrom at the center that has sucked up their little stock of goods and given them scant return. In shadowed doorways, in dark alleys, in the court of the cathedral they will spend the cold night on the stones, in the latter case hoping for a little extra merit or spiritual benefit, or just luck, as you please, from the aroma of the sanctuary. |

One wonders what would happen if Jesus came in bodily presence to Mexico and mingled with this throng of tired, hungry, ignorant, patient, smiling humanity. Would anyone pay any attention to him? Certainly, what happened in Jerusalem long ago would once more take place; the priests of the temple would again - pass by on the other side and plan how they might get rid of this disturber of a going business.

That Jesus Christ is even now present in Latin America may be known by the mouths of many witnesses who have seen him and known him and who even now show forth his works and his spirit. There are other evidences also, not the least of which is the perseverance with which the chief priests and scribes of to-day continue to plot the overthrow and persecution of his people. There must be some deep-down reason for this, and there is, the same reason that sent him to the cross once before.

One does not tarry long in any Latin land without forgetting the scenery and finding absorbing interest in the people. The cactus of the northern deserts has a strange attraction for weary minds, but even those appealing wastes or the monkish hermitages at El Desierto lose their charm when the pressing needs of living creatures crowd about. Convent gardens may be dreamy and musty with suggestive tradition, but hungry people begging at the doors have more eternal values than shaded corridors or fading paintings of medieval saints.

Panama streets and balconies and shops and orchids are interesting, but the most interesting item in Panama is the pansy-shaded conglomerate of assorted humanity from the ends of the earth. Fifty thousand population is it? Seemingly there are nearly that many kinds and colors of people and there must needs be at least one of a kind.

The roof of the southern continent has scenery in abundance, so much of it that it is piled up in grotesque heaps all about, but one lone Indian on a hilltop, with his ear-flap cap and shepherd od!

IN LATIN AMERICA vid staff, standing among his sheep and Hamas, has more eternal value than all the rocks and mountain peaks.

‘Treasures of art and architecture and carved temple facades that are veritable lacework frozen in stone—you find them everywhere, but whose hands wrought all this magic of curve and line and who patiently toiled over the glorious gilded altars of Cuzco and Tepotzatlan and Cordoba?

There are countless shrines where alleged miracles keep alive the superstitions of multitudes and fill the deep pockets of the priests at the annual festivals of wooden saints that look inanely down on living men and women. Often have I stood beside them and seemed to hear once more the voice of Christ saying, “Is not one of the least of these my brethren of more value than all these things?” And shall not the very beggars at the doors enter into the kingdom of heaven before all these grafters and traffickers in hungry hearts? ©

There is a bewildering beauty about the architecture of old Mexican churches. Towers of stone and domes of glazed and colored tile, beautiful turreted spires, storied pinnacles rising up and up, facades, altars, transepts, paintings, carved doors, vaulted arches, ancient courts are everywhere. What ever were they trying to do, those old builders who wrought for the glory of God, and with such command of human toil that they planted their churches by flowing streams, on towering hills and beside winding roads, not to speak of most of the street crossings? Possibly there has never been anything quite equal to it. But, one may stand amid the throngs on a saint’s day and witness the splendor and pomp and arrogance of it all, and it needs but a moment of closed eyes and inner vision to see the form of Him who was despised and rejected of men, seeking solitary to find his way into his temple, and moving about among the hungry people touching here and there a broken life or healing a bleeding heart. I think that he would not pay much attention to the jeweled robes and imposing pageantry before the high altar, and I am pretty sure that he would be put out if he tried to pass beyond the gilded railing.

There is the Cathedral at Curnavaca, most impelling of all the old shrines of the country side. Here is the real thing—enormous old walls, yards thick, rising stark upward with an immense buttress thrown out where once the original building began to lean. The courtyard is big enough for a town Plaza and the minarets along the side wall look like ghostly vultures, keeping watch by the waiting tomb for the last death-rattle of a dying faith. Inside there is no great display but everywhere on the walls are stains where the centuries have signed the register and sunk out of sight. Anyone who can spend a half hour here and not carry away an unforgettable and unnamable something out of the past, is spiritually defective. An old Indian—some way every Indian is potentially old —sat with his staff on the curb of the fountain and gazed stolidly at nothing at all. He appeared to be lost in thought, but more likely he was thinking also of nothing at all. What, indeed, had he to think about? His ancestors had built this old pile, under skillful tutelage of their betters, the priests. But somehow these priests never taught an Indian to build a schoolhouse nor a decent dwelling place for the toiler and his family. And after four hundred years of cathedrals and domes and art and gilt and gems and robes and incense and pomp and power and profit, the Indian is exactly where he was when the conquerors came and began the tenthousand-a-day baptizing of the unresisting inhabitants of a subjected land.)

Down in the banana countries there are some striking subjects for good landscape painters. Try the Almirante Bay of the Muskito coast of Panama, and you will forget all else for the time. The Thousand Islands and the Inland Sea and the Fukien coast and the shores of Maine have nothing to boast over the Chiriqui Lagoon. White, sandy beaches with high royal palms and everywhere in the background the crowding jungles reaching out for more. But among those lofty palms nestle the huts and grass shanties of the West Indians who furnish the hands and feet and backs without which the banana business would cease overnight. And one church full of starched-and-ironed, swaying, singing humanity or one schoolhouse of black boys and girls growing up to Christian citizenship and service, after all, has more value than the uncounted millions of the big banana companies. At least I sometimes think that if Christ came to Bocas del Toro and were to make an inventory and sign an appraisal, he would set up the case in some such fashion.

There are enormous rivers in the far southland. Not only the Amazon, which with all its multitudinous tributaries long ago got into society, but the almost unknown Parana and Uruguay. Twenty-five hundred miles from its mouth the Parana is still navigable, and its banks are lined with lands that may yet nourish civilizations as great as our own.

There are the measureless pampas of the far south, and the deserts stretching away toward Patagonia, and the glaciers and big sheep lands of the regions about the southern Straits, all of them potential cradles of civilizations yet unborn. How I would like to stand on the deck of a South American steamer and listen to Christ himself put his own appraisal upon the values that lie latent in those regions to which the world must yet turn for food supplies and population outlets and training grounds for human endeavor!

Reduced to its inner essence, life in Latin America is not a monument, a monastery, nor a tomb filled with relics of bygone splendor. Life is a cradle, the cradle of growing youth and abundant power. The representative of Jesus Christ is here not a “priest of glories past, but a prophet of greatness yet to come.” Here are to be enacted some of the major dramas and greater triumphs of the ages ahead of us. It will make a deal of difference to the humanity of a thousand years hence what ideals, education, politics, government, commerce and faith and hope and fellowship are to dominate these new forming and rapidly growing civilizations of the south. And if He could stand among us in visible presence and give us his counsel, I think that he would do as he did so many years ago, gather into his arms some of the brighteyed youngsters that swarm the streets and patios and remind us that here is our main task, to follow these little ones into the kingdom of heaven and keep them from slipping out and back into the superstition and exploitation that for four centuries have cast a blight of spiritual death over these fair lands.

Chapter III Christ, The Common Denominator

IT is easy to be misled by the common name of the two Western continents. We are all Americans, to be sure, but it would have tended to clearness of thinking if some other name could have been given to the land south of Panama.

Further confusion arises from the assumption on the part of the people of the United States of a monopoly of the term American. This is due, partly to the impossibility of making an adjective of our national name and partly to our limited experience in thinking north and south. When dealing with Europeans or Asiatics, we are Americans, but our use of the term annoys our southern neighbors of the Latin countries. If they are not also Americans, what are they?

As matters stand there are two great civilizations on American soil, of which the English-speaking peoples form one. There are twenty republics in the Western world of which the United States is one. There are two language groups of which we form a part of one. Of all the territory that bears the geographical name of America the United States inhabits less than one fourth.

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With all due recognition of the vast resources of the United States we have some marked limitations and deficiencies that are supplemented by the riches of Latin America. The largely unexplored resources of the Amazon valley, the enormous wealth of the Andean mines, the yet undeveloped food possibilities of the Central and South American tropics, the spreading pampas and plains of the south temperate regions all belong to Latin America. The only areas of fertile land yet uninhabited and in the temperate zone, which may serve for the nurture of future populations driven from the overcrowded lands of the north, are in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. Argentina alone has room for two hundred millions of people and South America could, if developed, feed the world.

We may well take satisfaction from the growing intimacy and friendliness of the peoples of the north and south. If there were no other consideration, the possibility of forming an American bloc of nations pledged to world peace would make it worth while to get together at whatever cost of personal interests. We have a northwest and southeast American highway with some twenty property holders along its eight thousand miles. Every consideration of self-interest and neighborhood prudence would suggest that we get together and organize some sort of community improvement association on an all-American scale. Certainly, we shall get nowhere by throwing stones at each other across the boundary lines nor making faces at the folks next door.

The linguistic barrier is difficult but not insurmountable. It is hard.to get to like people when we cannot understand what they are saying to us. The Latin, like ourselves, resents a foreign speech and dislikes an interpreter. The traveler in China suffers a less serious handicap and may even gain a certain prestige for the moment by the presence of his official interpreter. The Chinese themselves shift linguistic gears every few hundred miles and cannot understand each other. But in Latin America with its common speech (with the Portuguese variant) it is a different case, so different that the deaf-anddumb visitor who has to employ some one to do his talking for him is often greeted by polite but. unmistakable weariness.

How acute is this language question, the veterans well know. “Let the other fellow work the front of his head, I will use the top of mine,” is the foolish boast of the beginner who has his lesson yet to learn. But once the language barrier is broken down, there are no peoples more ready to respond and quick to give of their best to a speaker. Never was a more fruitful field for evangelism, in the best sense of the term, but it must be evangelism that can be understood.

Every veteran missionary can tell tales of effective approaches through this linguistic door. A superintendent new to his field was given a rousing reception. The program was of high order and included three addresses of welcome. The text of the first address, roughly paraphrased, was, “Thanks be to God, at last we have a superintendent whom we can understand.” Heretofore such visits had meant a tiresome interpretation, and who knew whether the interpreter was saying the same things as the inter: preted? Followed a second address on the theme, “Thank the Lord at last we have a man who can understand us.” Who wanted to tell his private troubles to a man through a third party? The closing address revolved about the subject, “Thank God at last we have a superintendent with whom we can deal in our own language.” Doubtless the interpreter did his best, but how was anyone to enter into the ideals and aspirations of a people when he could not even understand what they were saying to him? So occupied were they both with the linguistic features of the case that they could think of nothing else worth talking about. It is strange? Put yourself in their place.

In every language the most characteristic and revealing phrases are those that defy adequate interpretation. Our English speech is full of | short, sharp, driving words that go through’

and land with a snap. Such is English speech and such are those who speak it. How proud we are of our blunt directness!

It would be hard to find a more direct con: trast with all this than Spanish speech. Smooth, flowing, abounding in delicate shades of meaning, often round-about, always graceful, “it is a shame to say anything in ten words when it might be said in fifty,” and the reason therefor is that it may be said so much more elegantly in fifty than in ten. In English we ask how forcibly it may be said, in Spanish, how gracefully.

Take a single example. The Spanish word “simpatico” sounds as if it might be related to the English word “sympathetic,” and so it is, but very distantly. “Simpatico” means “sym-— pathetic’—but much more. A person who is simpatico is kindly, and gracious and likable and congenial and often good to look upon. If the visitor to Latin lands is stmpatico, he will have a wonderful time. Everybody will be his friend and sometimes go to absurd lengths to do him honor. But if he is “anti-patico,’ heaven help!—no one else will. Better travel somewhere else. Those intending to visit South o2 ADVENTURES WITH CHRIST

America will do well to take a course in “simpatico” before they leave home. Incidentally, it may be worth trying out in the United States once in a while.

All of which supplies abundant and direct evidence of the desirability of getting closer together the civilization of go-getter-ism with that of ““simpatico” ; the combination will be valuable for both.

One of the first things needful for the new mis- Sionary is to learn never to say “No.” This at first comes with something of a shock. Saying “No” is a sort of measure of moral manhood among us. We sing, “Have courage, my boy, to say no!” and we say it with an abruptness that at least leaves no doubt as to what we mean. How proud we are of our sawed-off negative! No is NO! 2

But it gradually dawns on the new-comer to the land of courtesy that, after all, there may be another way of doing it, and that this softer speech may be highly effective. I once tried to take a photograph in a forbidden zone in Japan in war time. A smiling and abjectly apologetic little official approached and most humbly bowed, scraped, shook his head and motioned me away. Had he been brusque about it, I would have got my picture, but he was so mild that for the life of me I could not get it done.

And when some national pastor comes with an impossible request, one learns at last to avoid the heartless negative and take a moment to say that in the visitor’s place one would doubtless be making the same request, that the project has many good points, that if it were possible it would be granted and that one really regrets that as matters now stand, it is impossible to grant the petition, but that it may be worth while to wait a little and see how the situation develops.

“Sixty seconds wasted?” Not at all. Sixty seconds spent in softening the blow and showing a little human sympathy with a brother man who does not get what he asks but does get something, after all, quite valuable to him, and to us all—a little touch of human feeling for a man with a request.

All of this has a direct bearing on the question of an all-American get-together. This has been tried various times and with none too much | success. Simon Bolivar, dreamer that he was, caught a vision of one great America banded together for common interests and called a congress of all nations at Panama in 1816. But the attendance was disappointing. Jealousies were in the background, and no great matter came of it.

Various Pan-American gatherings have been held here and there from time to time for the consideration of scientific, commercial, educational and political matters of interest to all America. The results have not been all that might have been expected. Language barriers, petty rivalries, jingo leadership, and demagogue partisanship have worked against the uniting of common cause among these western republics. But steadily through the nineteenth century the ideas of common interests and good will have survived every outburst of ill will and exaggerated depicting of the “terror of the north.” The Monroe Doctrine opened a long chapter in American diplomatic history, too complex to enter here, but it may be said that the unilateral feature of that principle has become an increasing irritation to the southern republics and a menace to the closest relations between them and us.