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| Sunday, 13 July 2003 |
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Of a missionary and snobbery by FACTOTUM The highlight of the golden jubilee celebrations of the Ecumenical Institute of Study and Dialogue (EISD) was predictably to hark back to those early days when the idea of setting up a study centre germinated and to recall the role played by a dynamic missionary Rev. Basil Jackson as Founder Director whose son Graeme graced the occasion to launch the book 'Basil: Portrait of a Missionary' authored by him having delved into dusty records and moth-eaten diaries to present to the reader a touching account of the trials and tribulations the Jacksons went through consequent to Father Basil answering God's call to serve His ministry far removed from mother country in the second quarter of the twentieth century. What emerges from the 200 page account is not only the vision and mission of a man of God but the very human stresses and strains that the foursome that comprised the Jackson family went through due to long separations when the children were left to their own devices in their formative teenage years for which it appears they bore their parents almost a grudge. For a young couple married just two months the wrench when Basil sailed alone would have been terrible but borne with fortitude. Almost teasingly Basil writes to wife Sandy on his way to Ceylon by steamship "How are you finding your widowhood? I am finding it to some degree tolerable. I'm very happy, but I wish so often we could share all this time and beauty together. It's only half as beautiful as if you were here. I often sit on deck and just think of you." Writing of a fellow countryman but a member of the Anglican episcopacy, Basil describes the Eminence thus, "The bishop's a perfect dear. Tall, young, good looking, a keen sense of humour, and merry blue eyes. In plus fours and a pipe he'd look a typical young Cambridge don with a tinge of the Student Christian Movement in his veins - but all that needs imagination. All you see when you look at him is cassocks and hassocks and chains and rings and gentle gestures that are essentially ecclesiastical, it's so sad for so nice a man to be so perverted..."Would native parishioners have dared to picture the Bishop in that fashion? Perhaps not in those days of the Empire. Within a few months of arrival in Ceylon in 1926 the missionary displays remarkable vision and a quick grasp of the local situation when he writes thus privately to his wife Sandy the contents now made public in the book published by son Graeme. "I was telling you last week how the Sinhalese love to disport themselves in music and dance and procession. That is the one form of diversion in the ordinary villager's life, and he thoroughly enjoys it. But it always has a religious significance and is organised by the Buddhist priests in connection with some new moon or other. As such, it is naturally taboo for the Christian community, who instead of the romance of a Perahera have to amuse themselves by going to the local chapel and listening to a lecture on the Life and Times of John Wesley. In spite of the ardour of his Methodism, he doesn't find it a really adequate substitute for elephants and tom-toms at least not unless he has been 'Methodized' out of all recognition as a Sinhalese. That attempt to compress the more emotional and natural natures of other people into the forms and modes of expression of our more sophisticated Society has been one of the mistakes of most Mission Fields, I should imagine, in the past. It certainly has in Ceylon. The reaction has been coming slowly since the war, but very slowly in Ceylon, for there is a large and semi-Christian population who, in their anxiety to find their status among the white society of the island, affect a very hearty contempt for anything that is Sinhalese, and all along it is their opposition one has to fight in any attempt to build up an indigenous and Sinhalese form of Church life. In that fight the Colony, and especially Gibson has led the way." So his snide remarks were reserved for the local 'gentry' whose snobbery was the greatest impediment to Church Union for which Basil Jackson devoted the greater part of his life and died perhaps in grief of stomach cancer at the turn around when all his efforts failed. A sad indictment on the selfless life of a missionary and visionary. |
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