Things as They Are

“but we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by the manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” — 2 Corinthians 4:2 (ASV)

Later in 1901 the household settled at Dohnavur, a village on the plain at the foot of the Western Ghats mountains. It had been founded in the 1820s as a refuge for Christians driven out of their own villages. Amy loved it at once; the mountains reminded her of the Lake District.

Other children began to arrive after Preena, and Amy found she couldn’t travel the villages and care for small children at the same time. Some fellow missionaries thought she was wasting her gifts, giving up being a missionary to become a nursemaid. But she came to believe that caring for children for Christ’s sake was as spiritual as preaching. She let her own plan go.

Two visiting friends urged her to turn her letters into a book, and offered to do the editing. Things as They Are came out in April 1903.

“The book is a battle-book,” she wrote, “written from a battle-field where the fighting is not pretty play but stern reality.” Under the village stories, it argued what readers at home didn’t want to hear: that the work was slow and hard, that most people didn’t want the gospel, that those who did often lost everything, and that cheerful missionary reports were misleading. “Do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing great things, as an everyday matter of course,” she wrote.

It also named what most missionary books left out, including the dedication of girls to temples, though without lurid detail. She knew people would call the book too harrowing, and answered them in its pages: “We are told to modify things, not to write too vividly, never to harrow sensitive hearts. Friends, we cannot modify truth, we cannot write half vividly enough; and as for harrowing hearts, oh that we could do it!” She wasn’t trying to shock. She believed people wouldn’t pray properly unless they knew what they were praying about.

Eugene Stock, a respected leader of the Church Missionary Society, wrote the preface: “What she says is the truth, and nothing but the truth; but it is not the whole truth—that she could not tell. If she wrote it, it could not be printed. If it were printed, it could not be read.”

Some readers in England didn’t believe her. Others objected to the argument itself: by what right did missionaries draw children away from their parents? Amy took them seriously. “We frankly admit that these objections and proposals are naturally reasonable,” she wrote, “and that what they state is perfectly true.” She agreed it was best for a convert to live among her own people, and called the breaking of family ties “a very cruel thing.” But in caste society, she said, a convert often wasn’t allowed to live at home as a Christian. Later editions printed notes from missionaries elsewhere confirming the book, and one from the Indian scholar and reformer Pandita Ramabai: “I can honestly corroborate everything said in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus.”

But ask another question too: how would this book have read to a Hindu? Amy called one chapter “Deified Devilry.” She described images of the gods as hideous, and sometimes blamed the whole religion for the worst things she had seen or heard. Most Hindus had nothing to do with those abuses and would have condemned them, and Hindu reformers were fighting the same evils in the name of a purer Hinduism. A devout Hindu reader had every reason to object. Amy could also write with real warmth about the intelligence, courtesy and humour of the Hindus she met. Both things are true.

Paul refused to handle God’s word “deceitfully.” Amy refused to sell the mission with pleasant fictions. But telling the truth well means telling it fairly about others too.

One thing to do this week: next time you talk about your faith or your church, don’t polish it; be honest about the hard parts. And if you describe someone else’s religion, do it in a way a person who believes it would recognise as fair.