From left: with a group of young men at the Indian museum / Victoria Memorial / Serampore College – Mission Station / Mother Teresa’s Motherhouse
In July 2022, during my last stay in Saigon, Vietnam, as pastor of The Well International Church, I was under a visa situation that required me to leave the country every month. It didn’t matter what other country I went to, I just had to enter Vietnam from the outside before I could spend another month there.
After the first month I went to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a city I was somewhat familiar with. Cambodia was the go-to place for most visa runs.
But on the second outing I decided to try something different. I would go to India, to its largest eastern city, Calcutta (present name: Kolkata). There was a non-stop flight there from Saigon. I had never been to India. I would spend a few days there.
Another reason for going to Calcutta was to visit two famous Christian sites–one Catholic, one Protestant. The first was Mother Teresa’s world-famous Motherhouse, the center of her iconic work among the poorest of the poor. The second was the Serampore mission, arguably the most famous mission station in all of Protestant missions.
As I went to visit the Mother Teresa site, I wondered if I would see sick and dying people on the streets, as she had described. Her nuns would gather the sick and dying, bring them to the compound and try to help them any way they could. If nothing could be done for them, at least they could die with dignity in the presence of compassionate human beings. But, happily, I didn’t see anyone needing that kind of help. I noticed that the compound was in a Muslim area of town. Another surprise (or maybe it wasn’t a surprise) was seeing that Mother Teresa’s home/office was a sparsely furnished room with no air-conditioning, and above the kitchen–and we were told that she never complained about the heat! One cannot help but be impressed by her sacrificial service.
The Protestant site, the Serampore college/mission, was not in Calcutta, but 18 miles north across the Hooghly river. Serampore was a Danish colony where a great mission work went on under pioneering English missionary William Carey and others. I hired a car to take me out there. It took a while. I was surprised that once we escaped the heavy traffic of Calcutta we actually had to slow down–the road was two-lane and full of many three-wheeled carts. On the way back the driver took me over the river on the Howrah bridge–which is made of industrial steel. I wouldn’t call it beautiful at all, but the people are very proud of it. Its picture is on postcards.
The begging could be aggressive. I had been warned about this by a man at church who lived in India for years. He said that it is not advisable to give money, as it was very possible that the beggars worked for a syndicate. Once, while I was in a taxi we were stuck at a standstill in traffic, a man came up to my window and pounded on it wanting money. He persisted the whole time until the car started moving.
The city seemed desperate for business (Covid had really taken a toll on tourism, as it did everywhere). Three or four times I was ‘befriended’ by one or another Indian man speaking good English, trying to get me to go to a shop or sign up for tourist trips.
One of these men convinced me to go with him to the river to show me some things. We drank tea from a what were essentially disposable ceramic cups. He showed me the tiny, covered ‘love boats’ (that’s what he called them) where poor couples who lived in communal situations could go out on the water and have their marital relations.
My hotel, which had history dating back to the late 1700’s, had classy touches one might expect. It had an elegant sitting room, a restaurant with tablecloths on the tables and great food. The room had charming, old-style, heavy fixtures. But the ‘city’ was right outside the wall. My room was next to an alley where in the middle of the night someone decided to sort scrap metal (at least that’s what it sounded like) for what seemed like hours. Classy and gritty were right next to each other.
The Victoria Memorial, which is surprisingly spectacular, was a monument to the reign of Queen Victoria who presided over much of the Raj–the British rule of India. It’s curious that they still call it by her name, and still leave her statue standing, seeing as how India famously shook off British rule. But inside the building it was all a tribute to a man named Nataji Bose (I had never heard of him before). Bose was kind of the anti-Gandhi. He was either a terrorist or a freedom fighter, depending on your point of view. His methods for overturning British rule were based on violence. Gandhi’s face is on the currency, but Bose was the one featured in the Victoria Memorial. Maybe I was the only one who thought this seemed contradictory.
Young people wanted to have their picture taken with me, perhaps because it was unusual to see a white westerner.
In the taxi ride back to the airport, the driver pointed out the scenery. As we got closer to the airport, he pointed out ‘New Calcutta’ which he said was ‘very beautiful’. It didn’t seem beautiful to me, mainly a lot of concrete buildings.
Calcutta struck me as a chaotic city that was mostly poor. There did not seem to be opportunities for advancement that some cities have. But people seemed energetic, trying to get ahead.
I wondered later if maybe Calcutta was a picture of the state of the world for most of history. Where most people were poor and social lines could almost never be crossed. Opportunities for advancement were reserved for the privileged.
It was into this rough, unfair and sometimes tragic world that Christ came. In a sermon in his own hometown, Nazareth, he preached a sermon. In Luke 4:16-21 the Bible says, “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor’. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him,and he began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’.”
Jesus gave an escape hatch to people trapped in poverty and bad circumstances. He gave dignity to the poor. He came to people who rarely catch a break in this world and offered them the Good News, the way to heaven.
Of course, he came to offer salvation to everyone, rich and poor. But the rich tend to be blinded and made overconfident by wealth. It is harder for them to have ‘ears to hear’. It has been said that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. The people of Calcutta, and all poor places, have this area, the spiritual area, where they have full opportunities for admission. The economic and social walls made against them are powerless to keep them out.