Rev. John Stott is one of my favourite Muktivedic scholars. He refused to join the army during the Second World War as his conscience and call to serve the Lord didn’t allow it. His estranged father, who was serving in the army as a doctor along with his mother and two sisters (who also were serving in the army), tried to persuade Stott to reconsider his decision by pointing out his obligation towards his country in such an emergency. But till the end, Stott didn’t budge and stuck to his conviction. His father even threatened to stop his financial support to continue his studies at Cambridge. But Stott managed to persuade his father, presenting his position clearly. In the end, his father continued his support but with much pain; and though they managed to reconcile still the estrangement permanently left its strain in their relationship. Though Stott refused to join war based on his conviction again later his attitude towards war changed.
When I was reading this in the biography about Stott, it reminded me of another similar kind of story in the life of Madusudhan Dutt in his relationship with his father. When he became Christian ‘convert’ his relationship with his father too was strained but his father continued to support his education with the hope that one day he might return back to him. But later he stopped it as he didn’t see any hope for it. Though Madhu also reconciled with his father because of the tears of his mother, still the pain which he gave to his parents remained forever. In this context, it is worth reading what the author of Madhu’s biography says:
How did Madhu’s parents react when they failed to stop his conversion? The first thoughts that went through Rajnarayan’s mind must have been: ‘Who is now going to inherit my property? How will I stay in touch with my son? Will I not be socially ostracized?’ But, most important of all, he must have wondered, ‘If I don’t have a son, who will perform the last rites when I die? Both parents were heartbroken at the thought of losing their son. Yes, he was alive; but, given the circumstances, he might as well be dead. Madhu’s earlier biographers have not dwelt upon his parents’ anguish, possibly out of sympathy for Madhu. What must be remembered here is that, though he was hurt, Rajnarayan Dutt took some steps without delay to ensure his son’s welfare. In due course, he spent a lot of money (certainly by the standards of those days) so that Madhu could complete his education. It could not have been easy to maintain contact with a son who was a Christian, since no doubt the traditional Hindus frowned heavily on him. Being a lawyer, Rajnarayan was particularly vulnerable, as his success in procuring work depended on the goodwill of his fellow men. (p.52)
The enormous complexities that rose between Madhu and his parents after his conversion settled down in a few weeks. Gradually, their relationship became better defined. In mid-April 1843, Madhu wrote a letter to Gour {Gourdas Basak}, saying, ‘I am not about to come and live with or rather near to my father.’ In another letter, he mentioned receiving a lot of financial help from home. But his dearest wish of going to England soon was not fulfilled.— Ghulam Murshid, translated from Bengali by Gopa Majumdar, Lured by Hope: A Biography of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, New Delhi, Oxford, 2003. pp. 52-53
The following is from Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a leader, England, IVP, (1999) 2002. In order to relate the whole story, I have to quote in length from this book:
…Nearly ten years after his tribute to Bash {E.J.H. Nash}, he was interviewed for the Christian Bookseller and spoke of his father’s attitude at this time:
He really couldn’t take having a pacifist son, so he didn’t actually speak to me for two years. My mother was very torn, because we were an affectionate family.
When in the holidays I would turn to embrace my father, he would turn away from me. My mother wanted to be loyal to my father while at the same time wanting to be understanding towards me.
She wrote several long letters begging me to join up.{Terry Lovell, ‘The Times and Travels of an Ordinary Christian’, The Christian Bookseller, May/June, 1992}
It is not hard to see how such an experience would leave its mark upon a man. Although after the war a better relationship with his father was gradually restored, it was never on quite the same footing of mutual affection and confidence. Looking back, John felt in later life that he had been ‘very insensitive in the way I handled it with my parents’ {Taped interview, 3/32} and certainly it is not difficult, reading the correspondence that remains, to feel deeply for Arnold Stott, faced with intransigence and what must have seemed perilously like blind willful obstinacy and self-delusion in his son.[emphasis added]—p. 162
A few days later, with no immediate prospect of being able to talk with his father face to face, John Stott wrote a long personal letter … I have made up my mind’…..
The reasons for my decision are as follows:
- Obedience to my call. Whatever you may think of it, I have had a definite and irresistible call from God to serve Him in the Church. During the last three years I have become increasingly conscious of this call, and my life now could be summed up in the words ‘separated unto the gospel of God’. There is no higher service; I ask no other.
Mummy said recently in one of her letters: ‘At present other things come first’. This to me is where her argument breaks down. In my life other things do not and cannot come first. I am not at liberty to put other things first, for I am ‘separated unto the gospel of God’.
As for the family’s idea that a matter of 2 or 3 years ‘cannot make all that difference’ – do you think that 2 or 3 years during which I reject my most sacred calling really ‘makes no difference’? It is largely a matter of principle. Were I to do any service, good or bad, which is not directed towards the one object of ‘preaching the gospel’ in days to come & I should be laying aside the authority of God.
- Service to my country. This may sound paradoxical at first, but let me explain: Mummy said in another letter: ‘give prior claim to service to the country’. Do you then think that I would not be serving my country by going on with my course for ordination? The Government have said the contrary, and it seems self-evident to me that I should be serving my country for the following reasons: (p.165)
(i)….The Times said on 16.1.41: ‘A recent letter … reaffirmed the truth that no scheme of national reconstruction can be adequate which does not include such changes in our system of national education as will make it … definitely Christian in purpose.’ Who is to effect this if it isn’t men trained for the purpose? … Wavell said in December: ‘After final victory will come the real struggle to build up a world worthy of the principles we are fighting for – freedom and truth and peace and goodwill.’ Who is to set forth these principles if it isn’t men who have clung to them and are trained and willing to preach them whatever the cost?
(ii) The country is best served if its citizens are obeying God. The country’s best place is in the centre of God’s will, and it will not attain that place unless its individual citizens are fulfilling God’s will in their own lives: I have already told you how this affects me.
(iii) You are fighting a physical war against ‘flesh and blood’ in order that man may have peace with man. I am fighting a spiritual war against ‘principalities and power’ in order that man may have peace with God. If man is in a state of ‘peace with God’, it follows inevitably and at once that he is in a state of peace with his fellow-men, because ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love’. But even if men were in a state of peace with each other it would not necessarily follow that they would be in a state of peace with God, except in so far as men cannot live in peace with each other unless they are right with God, which is of course the fundamental cause of the chaos in Europe today. I have been called to one war, you no doubt to the other. Both are services to our country. I respect you for your service; will you respect me for mine?(p. 166) (italics original)
….But even while the news of his exemption eluded him, his father was still unrelenting over the question of further financial support. Lily {Stott’s mother} sent him a pencilled letter the following week:
….Johntie, he feels that his conscience will not allow him to continue paying for your education at Cambridge after this term. I’m afraid, dear one, that the whole family thinks that you should do some form of definitely national service in country’s emergency. A capable, fit, and talented man like you should not continue your life as it is when so many others are having to give up everything for the time being. I still hope that you may come round to this point of view – the war has touched you not at all yet – it is so full of tragedy for so many people – there is much that you could do to help….(p.172) As I have said before – the work nearest your heart can be continued alongside the national work – I can’t help feeling that later you will regret it very much if now you detach and shut yourself away from any participation in the world’s crisis….(p. 173)
April 27th was John Stott’s twentieth birthday. His mother sent a cake made with five eggs….John Stott wrote to his father to thank him for a cheque for ₤71 to meet his college bills….: (p.173)
… You are very anxious, I know, along with the rest of the family, and that I should do some sort of national service, and I have sought to show you all from the beginning that I do not feel able to do this….(p…)
This means that I should be called up, brought before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector, and would be ordered to do one of three things:
- Fight
- Do non-combatant service
- Return to Cambridge.
I would agree to the third, but would refuse to do (a) and (b), and that, unpleasant as it may be to all of us, would mean prison. Therefore the alternative before me is not
National Service or Cambridge but Cambridge or Prison.
2.Service to the Country. Here let me answer a point Mummy raised in a recent letter. She said that the Church and both archbishops advocated the doing of national service. This however only states half the truth. The Church and the Government are agreed about the position of ordinands, that they should continue uninterrupted their ordination course so that the country may not be destitute of such men in years to come….(p.174)(italics original)
….But Daddy I want you to realise that I must follow my call. Men down the ages have had to face similar problems, and those who have yielded to the will of the majority have often gone under and never come to the surface again. And I know enough history to know that it’s the men who have stood up for their ideals and championed their cause, come weal come woe, that have left the world a better place. I would not presume to claim equality with the might, but I am seeking to follow their example in my own sincere and humble way. I can do no more, and I ask to be respected.
Think not that I am going to live a normal, peaceful, comfortable, secluded life. I’m going to throw myself body and soul into the struggle for right. My desire is to see the world a better place, and I will not spare myself in this endeavour….
As for finance – you may not feel able to go on supporting me. But were you to be tolerant and magnanimous enough to do it, there will never lack gratitude in your
Ever loving son,
John47 (p. 175) (italics original)
Finally, on 19 May, John Stott received by priority telegram the long-awaited answer as to his father’s continuing support:
AM CONSENTING BUT WITH GREAT RELUCTANCE AND UNHAPPINESS. STOTT. (p.176)
…For the father, moving every day among the causalities of war, and with both his daughters active in the service of their country, it is not surprising that grief and frustration at his son’s continuing obstinacy should be a cause of bitterness and alienation. Granted that they had few opportunities of seeing each other, John Stott’s recollections of how his father would not speak to him for two years, and would even reject the natural advances of affection to which father and son had been accustomed, still make painful reading fifty years later. To an undergraduate inevitably insecure, isolated in what seemed to him a stand for conscience’s sake (and perhaps tempted to dramatize his situation), caught unwittingly in the toils of the Government war-machine, living week by week with hope deferred, it must have been a searing experience….(p.176)
…John Stott became a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. But the day would come when his own study of the Scriptures would carry him beyond any simplistic viewpoint and he would resign his membership because he no longer believed that the pacifist position was the only possible one for a Christian. The issue was sharpened for him by the thermo-nuclear debate of the 1960s; and in wrestling with these issues he came to believe that ‘we cannot say that war is wrong in itself. War has sometimes been, and may again be, the weapon of God’s wrath and righteous judgment.’{JRWS papers. Letter dated 4 November 1939} Twenty years later, because of the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons, he wrote and spoke unequivocally as a ‘nuclear pacifist’, though admitting the moral and political anomalies of such a position.56 Had a biblical theologian been able to unfold to him in (p.177) his days at Trinity the apostolic teaching on the authority of the State, and the Christian theory of the ‘Just War’, then perhaps all this estrangement, loneliness and heart-ache might have been avoided. But history is shaped, not by what might have been but by what was. And in the over-ruling providence of God, it is hardly fanciful to see in these fiery trials the forging of a character fitted to meet a lifetime of challenges ahead.[emphasis added](p.178)
- See, for example his interview with Alex Mitchell, ‘Struggling with Contemporary Issues’, Third Way, February 1982; Stott, ‘Nuclear weapons change the possibility of war’ in Kirk (ed.) (Kirk, Andrew. Handling Problems of Peace and War, London: Marshall Pickering, 1988), p. 46. John Stott expounds the theory of the ‘Just War’ in ‘Calling for Peacemakers in a Nuclear Age’, All Souls Papers, 11 November 1979; but most recently in chapter 5, Stott (The Cross of Christ, Leicester: IVP, 1988).—p.475
When I was reading Rev. John Stott’s story about his conscience not allowing him to do his part in the National service if not involving actual fighting but indirectly as ‘the government has many other plans and very few young fit men are going to get exemption’.25 (p.163)is one thing I cannot understand. He expected his father to continue to support his education from the salary which he derived from the army service. Above all, as his mother rightly pointed out: ‘….everyone should give prior claim to service to the country to which after all you owe so many benefits and which is worth defending—to say nothing about the truly devilish things we are trying to put down….’(p.164).
In the case of Madhu, please read my review on the book Lured by Hope in my blog. All that Madhu’s father expected his son to do is to do the prayashchitta1 so that he could return back home to live with them. This even compelled his father to marry two more women after his mother’s death.2 But Madhu refuses to do so. But because of the tears of his mother he reconciled with his father. After his parent’s death he also inherited their property which actually saved him from some financial crisis.
In both the cases, finally the parents had to suffer a lot and pay the cost for the conviction of their sons. What I cannot understand is that they wanted their support and even inheritance (in case of Madhu) but did not want to do their part in their social obligation as the child in the name of their conscience and call. In most cases, either the converts or their Christian mentors always parade some story of persecution because of conversion and all the suffering that any convert undergoes. But they all easily want to forget the cost that the parents and other family members have to pay for that conversion. Of course, there are several genuine persecutions and I am not denying it. But if we do proper study and research we can note that in most cases, particularly in India, the parents and relatives alone suffer more than the converts because of their conversion. I have witnessed several such parents whom I met in person who poured down their heart to me. In general, in most cases the parents do not even expect their ‘converted’ child or children to give up their faith in the Lord, but to do their social obligation which won’t force those converts to ‘compromise’ with their faith in the Lord. All the talk about compromise and syncretism is the wrong understanding of the Muktivedic principle about our bhakti in the Lord and our social obligation towards our parents, family and nation. Here, the Christian mentors often fail to learn properly from Muktiveda about it and also teach and guide their ‘converts’. One can write a separate book on this subject by analysing several case studies.
Don’t make others suffer and pay a cost for your conviction in the Lord because of a poor understanding of Muktivedic principle on this subject of one’s social obligation. Every family is a gift from God and everyone has both a moral and social obligation towards their family and country when there comes a time to do that. In one place when a Hindu ‘convert’ challenged my approach before others, I told him: ‘you want your family name, fame, property and other things. But when it comes to your social obligation you want to run away in the name of your faith. Then give up everything. Are you ready for it?’ For this, he hads no answer.
Refusing to participate in the family functions, not obliging the parent’s expectation—if not in the choice of life partner, at least to conduct the marriage according to family tradition, refuse to do the final rite to the parents, not to serve the nation in emergency, etc. [there is no end to this list] are some areas where wrong teaching is given to the converts. They simply use two words ‘compromise’ and ‘syncretism’ not even understanding what these two words actually mean? Of all the religions in the world, Christianity is the most syncretistic religion and we conveniently forget all the compromises that we make in so many areas in our personal life when it comes to our commitment to the Lord. But we want to parade about our faith/bhakti by others paying the cost for it.
Notes
- Rajnarayan Dutt wanted his son to go through a ritual that would symbolize a ‘penance’, so that he might be allowed to start living at home. Madhu refused. In view of strong social opposition, Rajnarayan could not let his son return home; nor could Madhu find anywhere to stay that was reasonably close to his parents. All he could do was visit his parents, particularly his mother, from time to time.
As for his education, things began to go seriously wrong on that front as well. When Madhu tried to go back to Hindu College, he discovered that its doors were closed to him. As it happened, only high-caste Hindus were allowed to study there. It took another ten years for this particular regulation to be relaxed….— Murshid, op. Cit. p. 53
- The second step Rajnarayan took had less to do with Madhu, and more to do with Rajnarayan’s concern for his own welfare in the other world, as well as the state of his assets in this one. In Madhu’s absence, someone—preferably a direct descendant—was required to inherit his wealth, and perform the last rites when he died. With this end in view, he decided to marry again. It is not very clear exactly (p.66) when he married his second wife, Shibsundari. She died soon after their marriage, possibly without ever setting foot in his house in Calcutta. At first Rajnarayan suffered pangs of guilt when he married for the second time. But when Shibsundari died (Rajnarayan described her as Janhabi Debi’s ‘handmaiden’), he lost little time before marrying for the third time. His third wife was called Prasannamoyee. It is said that when Madhu visited his mother, she asked Prasannamoyee to look after him and offer him refreshments.—ibid. pp. 66-67###
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