The Immanence of God in the Tropics Read online

  To the other missionaries he seemed incapable of throwing up. But, in fact, he had carried a bubble of nausea at the top of his stomach from Southampton to Gibraltar, all down the coast of Africa to the Cape. For a few hours in the pale green waters of Table Bay the sickness lifted, but at sea again, it returned. As a result Seavey had an air of expectancy about him; he had spent six weeks waiting patiently to be relieved of his distress. He ate little. Alone, in the safety of his cabin, he belched air.

  The seasickness shriveled his sociability. Seavey spent the afternoons playing his flute on the afterdeck. He slept often and dreamt of heaving stones. The muscles of his body had grown flaccid in the inactivity of shipboard life; he felt himself disappearing. Though he tried to listen to the other missionaries, his attention was constantly shrinking back to the swallow in his throat and the uneasiness that floated at the nape of his neck. He was not willing to dispute church organization with Procter and the others. Questions of ritual and liturgy seemed pointless to him. But theology began to matter. He talked with Charles, one of the African Christians who had come aboard the Lyra at the Cape, dutiful men, orphans and freed slaves, who were to serve as interpreters with the savages of the interior.

  “What color is God’s skin?” Charles asked him.

  Seavey thought a moment—satisfied with his responsibility—and said, “Well, of course, it is all colors: black, brown, yellow, and white. God has created the natural world—the sea, the earth, and the air—out of himself. He possesses all attributes, all colors.”

  “But,” Charles asked, “he is more like some things than others, isn’t it? He is not like everything. Aren’t we created in his image?”

  Seavey thought again. He considered the looking-glass hanging on his cabin wall. “Yes, Charles, we are an image of him, but an image is only a partial thing, a reflection of the whole. Look at this mirror. Do you see your image in it?”

  Charles nodded. The black man studied his hair, the line of his nose. He ran a finger across the full skin of his lips.

  “This is your image, but it is less than you. In this image I can hold your head between the tips of my fingers; it is smaller than you. And it is flat. It has only the two dimensions of length and breadth. It is your image, but it has no roundness, no shape. As you yourself are more than your image, so God is more than us. We have only one color to our skins. God has all colors.”

  Seavey’s talk seemed to satisfy Charles. The black man was full of curiosity about the civilization which he had adopted, but there was a threshold of strangeness, of sheer peculiarity, which he often approached, but once having sighted it, never crossed. It was not the technological power of the British that dazzled him so much as this magic barrier, the splendid irrationality of their thought. The African returned to his work.

  But Seavey was disturbed. He had always thought of God as an abstract thing, a force rather like sunlight, strength without substance. But if he possessed all attributes, then God—as he had himself just told Charles—must be full of shapes. It was only natural—the word seemed particularly appropriate to Seavey—that he could appear out of whirlwinds, in pillars of fire and smoke. He was like a human but more so, more like those images the Hindus made than like any Christian painting: God was a thing with many arms and feet, with a breath of fire and smoke, with odors. Incense and sweat curled the missionary’s nostrils. Seavey, rocking in his cabin in the humid night, became obsessed with the physical body of God.

  “But you are wrong, Andrew,” Procter told him. The sea was glassy now, calm, the water turquoise. Two birds broke the surface at a distance in twin dives, a wriggling of their tails, then reappeared with silver fish pinioned in their beaks. There was no sound from the sails. “God is the creator of the universe but he is not part of it. It is a thing separate from himself as a box made by a carpenter is not the same thing as the carpenter. To believe that God is physically equivalent to the natural world is a foreign idea.” Procter mopped his brow. “I think it is Chinese.”

  “Oh no. I don’t mean that he is equivalent. I just thought he might include the natural world, but still be something more.” The birds reappeared, fishless, and shook the water from their backs. “Your carpenter, for instance, is only separate from his creation—his box—if you look at things in a materialistic way. Spiritually, the box and the carpenter are one, aren’t they, if the box has been made with care and love? I mean, isn’t it our souls that organize the random matter of the universe—the light and dust and elements—and hold them in the shape of our bodies? And if our souls are organizing principles—subsidiary of course to the Divine Principle which has, in its turn, organized them—then why can’t the wood, paint, and nails of the box also be organized by our souls and be a part of us, as our bodies are a part of us?

  “You see,” continued Seavey with a note of pleading in his eyes that made Procter think, uncomfortably, of a golden retriever, “if spirit—God’s as well as our own—is separate and distinct from the body of the world, then we, and God as well, live nowhere. We are ghosts, cut off from being. We have no substance. There is, quite exactly, nothing to us.” Seavey ran a hand nervously through his thinning hair. “Doesn’t that thought frighten you?”

  Procter didn’t know what to think about Seavey. Crawford, Simpson, and Jones, the Mission’s other junior men, suggested there was perhaps too much free time on board ship and organized a more intensive program of study. In the mornings they read Dr. Livingstone’s notes on the Tswana language. It was not the tongue that their own savages would speak, but it was no doubt related. Besides, the discipline of grammar was comforting. It protected them against the feeling of the ocean as the floppy hats of ship’s canvas protected them against the sun and sky. The working sailors of the ship disdained such gear; instead they wore bandannas, soaking them in water on the hot days to cool their foreheads. As a consequence the faces of the ship’s crew darkened while the missionaries’ skin remained pale, unimprinted by the elements and the long voyage.

  There was nothing yet for them to do. After so much preparation—the addresses from retired missionaries, courses in simple medicine, prospectuses of abridged catechisms—the idleness shipboard was a brutality. Each of the five men, upon his decision to take to another continent, had made an imagined sacrifice; they were relinquishing the company of their equals and the guidance of their betters for a life among lower, less complete people. Crawford had left a fiancée behind in Britain and Procter, a wife and child—dear ones they were not likely to see for years.

  It was not the physical hardships they feared. Livingstone had assured them that the valley where he was sending them was, in fact, quite pleasant. It was more a fertile prairie than a jungle. There were woodlands that alternated with meadows and rich black bottomland by the streams. Farming it, the doctor told them, was so simple that even the Africans themselves had done it, tilling and harvesting in an organized, but barely conscious way, as bees made honey.

  But the texture of life would inevitably be poorer, the social fabric woven all of straight lines of dominion and teaching. After all was said and done, they were to live among strangers who dressed in loincloths or less, who wore metal rings as big as horseshoes in their ears and plugs of brass through their nostrils and whose musical instruments had but a single string. “A tolerance for boredom,” Livingstone had told them, “is the first requirement of a successful missionary. You must attend happily while they try to please you in a million poor ways. They will feed you sour milk and expect you to be delighted. They will give you a sick goat and expect praise. They will build you a house that leaks and a roof that is six inches too short for a white man’s height. Your mind will swim with thoughts you cannot express in their language and you will spend the rest of your life talking down. Such complexity of thought as you can muster will come only in dreams. You will repeat anecdotes to each other as men in prison might and the conversations of your fellows will grow stale. Since the intimate watchfulness of family will
be lacking to check you, you will be prone to delusions. You will grow to believe strange things.”

  It was starting, thought Procter, with Seavey and his overheated imagination. “I believe,” Procter told him in a deliberate effort to calm the man, “that your theological doubts can be traced to simple disturbances of your own mind at the thought of leaving behind those you cherish. Do you come from a pleasant town?”

  “Most pleasant.”

  “Well-peopled?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Is there a crowd of people and many comings and goings? Small active farms and an energetic civil life? What I mean is, you’ve not lived in a wilderness.”

  “By no means. There is nothing wild about Hertfordshire.”

  “Well there you are,” Procter warmed to his task. Thinking was such a simple thing when one came down to it. “You are leaving the city for wild country. At home your responsibilities were brought upon you without discussion. There was a mutual acceptance of what was expected. You knew it; the people in your care knew it. There was no need to think about it. But with your responsibilities so clearly defined, and sharply limited, there was little check upon your feelings. Your actions were so clearly hedged in that your feelings could safely wander, since they had no consequences. You could feel or imagine whatever you chose, since you were sure to behave properly.

  “But in Africa, there will be no such check. We will have only ourselves to keep an eye on each other. Your imagination will have consequences. If you think something improper”—Procter leaned his bulk over Seavey; the man had a strong odor of sweat about him and behind was the smell of the sea, so that it seemed to Seavey a large creature, a seal or walrus, was cautioning him—“it may lead to improper action. The Africans may be misled.

  “I don’t mean to say that thought isn’t dangerous even in England, but you are correctly aware that error will be infinitely more potent in Africa. You know that and are, no doubt, a little frightened. You believe a housecleaning of your thoughts is necessary.”

  At Seavey’s feet a mouse skittered from under a pile of canvas and sniffed the resistant breeze. The missionary withdrew his face a few inches from Procter’s and felt the wind cool his forehead. “That may all be so, Arnold. But just because you can account for my doubts, that doesn’t mean they’re not real. It’s not you that has to live with them.”

  On the seventeenth of January, off the East African coast, the island of Johanna appeared: a soft breast of land above the green translucent sea. The island was not at all African; rather, it was Arab. There were palm trees along the harbor and square, whitewashed buildings. The streets of the town were narrow and ran with foul water in the late afternoon storms. As on the ship, there were still no women to be seen. The thought disturbed Seavey. On the Lyra he had expected not to see females. But on land he expected women, as he expected the floor would no longer rock beneath him.

  Upon landing, the party of missionaries was greeted by Consul Adams, the lone Briton on the island, a man with silver-white whiskers and an eyepatch he wore now on one eye, now on the other. “For the sun,” he told Seavey. “Otherwise I’d spend all my time squinting.” Adams appeared delighted to have the chance to exercise his office. He arranged the rental of a small house, owned by the Prince Abdallah, and planned a dinner for the group.

  “Normally I do nothing but wait for a living. The native boats bring in the spices, which I weigh and grade and store until the company ship comes along.” He smiled a smile—firm, comforting and wistful—that convinced Seavey the man must once have been the captain of a vessel. “But they come along only once every three months—twice on the way out to India and twice on the way back. The monsoon, you know.”

  “Of course,” said Procter, who as Seavey had begun to notice, deeply disliked not knowing anything.

  “What do you eat?” Seavey asked the consul.

  “Eat? Why, everything. These fellows are the best gardeners in the world.” He leaned over close to Seavey, his whiskers catching the sun. “Have you ever eaten a fresh mango? Or ham from a pig that’s never had to shiver in his life?”

  Seavey was shocked. He pulled forward the wicker chair on which he sat. “But I thought the Mohammedans didn’t eat pork. “

  “Not your normal-run islander. But Prince Abdallah lets me keep pigs for my own use. When he’s with white men, he’ll eat some himself. And drink, too. You’ll see tonight. It’s all by way of experiment, of course. The Prince is something of a philosopher. You see, he’ll never be Sultan himself; that’s for his brother. It gives Abdallah a certain freedom. He doesn’t even like to use the title Prince. He says it shows too much pride.”

  Seavey settled into his room in Abdallah’s house. It was a villa of whitewashed stucco perched above the waves on the eastern side of the island—the side that faced the open sea. From the window, a trim square sealed with a shutter of dark red wood, he could see the ocean and sky, twin endless bands of a lighter and darker blue. As he watched the play of sunlight on cloud taking shape across the heavens, the succession of images seemed to him a panorama of divine versatility, God throwing out a series of quick sketches in uncorrected strokes, the way the Japanese were said to paint in ink. Each effort was at once unfinished and perfect, the light and shadow full of implication as if the painter’s thoughts were running ahead of his hand. The balance between the abstract and the concrete, the geometric and the sensual, delighted Seavey. He was pleased with his thoughts and the working of his mind. He folded his woolen trousers out of the sea trunk and laid his socks in rows upon the bed’s soft cloth, happy to live in a world ruled so gracefully.

  Adams had sent his men scurrying over the island to gather delicacies. The banquet that evening started with a salad of coconut palm for which an entire tree had been cut down and stripped to reach the heart of the top. The firm, moist flesh of the palm was layered with slices of a rosy-pink onion that tasted to Seavey peculiar and over-exuberant, like some strangely sweetened earth. Between courses, over glasses of an indefinable sherbet, the men compared their religions.

  “We do not believe,” said the Prince, “that any man or saint or god can stand between Allah and the believer. Thus it is not the divinity of your Christ which we would challenge—that may merely be excess enthusiasm—but the role that he plays in the story of the world. We respect Jesus, but I fear the Christ you make of him is an evasion of responsibility.”

  The Prince spoke excellent English. He also spoke French. Adams whispered to Seavey that the Arab, for all the firmness of his opinions, had an English Bible of which he was very fond and was said to cry over it.

  “But your highness,” Procter smiled broadly, rolling up his sleeves for the mental fight, “for those of our Church what you are calling the role of Jesus is revealed truth. It’s as real as this table or tomorrow’s sunrise. We don’t choose our theology like a man before a buffet. Our truth is thrust upon us. “

  “Actually, Arnold,” interjected Seavey, “I find something appealing in a lack of intermediary between myself and God. Don’t you?” He added the question, not from any real interest in Procter’s opinion, but as a sop to the older missionary, whose irritation at being contradicted Seavey could sense, like a growing humidity in the wind.

  “I wouldn’t get too close to that idea if I were you, Seavey. It’s a fire that’s burned better men than you.”

  “Mr. Procter is quite right there,” added the Prince. “They burned the saint Hallaj for no less. Though of course they first whipped him with a thousand strokes, cut off his limbs, hung him on a gibbet and then beheaded him.” The Prince leaned back, recollected, and sighed. “I believe his last words were: ‘alone with the Alone.’ If we are vessels of the divine spirit”—Abdallah lifted the silver cup of water to his mouth; a fly fled his lips—“we must be careful not to shatter at the sound of Allah’s voice. We must retain our shape.”

  “But perhaps the important thing is to listen. What we answer isn’t cr
ucial as long as we respond somehow. Don’t you find that true, your highness, among your own people? I mean that some don’t listen at all.”

  “Just so. Only certain people hear, though all are . . . ,” Abdallah paused and sought his word, “. . . addressed.” The young Prince fidgeted in his chair. He was a small man with olive skin and black tight curls that fell around his temples. He seemed overwhelmed by the opulence of his clothes. “For myself, I cannot understand people not hearing. Slaves perhaps or people with too much work to do, but not men like ourselves.”

  At the mention of slaves, Seavey turned toward the serving women. They were all obviously African: their nostrils wide and flared, their lips thick, the skin of their cheeks a satin-black. They wore red sashes drawn tight around their waists, their breasts held in halters of thick white cotton. Only Adams saw Seavey’s surprise. “What did you think they were, sir, gentlemen’s daughters?” the old consul whispered to Seavey, then spooned the cooling syrup to his lips.

  Seavey stumbled back to the thread of his thought. “Do you ever feel,” he asked the young Prince, “that being close to God makes one feel distant from other men?”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. When I was home in England I felt that prayer was something one did with one’s fellows. But lately, sometimes, the prayer of others obstructs me. I feel I should lock myself into a small room and pray alone. But then I don’t pray exactly, so much as I just sit there. It’s as if I didn’t feel the need of prayer at that moment.”

  “Perhaps God is addressing you directly.”

  “It’s not that big of a thing”—Seavey swung his arms in the air, trying to represent the missing quality he could not otherwise describe. “It doesn’t feel like revelation, so much as alertness.”

  “Dr. Livingstone told us,” intruded Procter, “that a kind of irritability was the first sign of fever. He meant it, of course, in the scientific sense, as if you were prodding a one-celled creature under a microscope and it shrank back sharply from the needle.”