In September 2007, Mother Teresa’s little book of personal correspondence, Come Be My Light, was published and shocked the world by revealing that for most of her life, certainly since the early 1950s, she had been weighed down by a terrible sense of depression and of the absence of God. “There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote in 1953. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started the work.” Then, in 1959, “If there be no God, there can be no soul—if there is no soul, then Jesus—you also are not true.” Like most who try to lead a holy life, at times she found it very hard to pray. Her “darkness” plagued her right up to her death at age eighty-seven in 1997. Upon reading excerpts in Time magazine, I was saddened by her suffering. But I was amazed too at her courage and the grace she showed to us. Many saintly souls down the ages have been troubled by despondency and doubts. Her achievements, in my eyes and in the minds of countless millions, are all the greater in that light. In her presence you felt the power of purpose emanating from such a tiny, elderly woman. She made you feel that all things are indeed possible.
For the second feature I wanted to focus on a Canadian-born, American-based Pentecostal minister, Mark Buntain. Like Mother Teresa, Buntain has since “gone to his reward” as they say in some Christian circles, but what a remarkable story of dedication and of service he had. He had come to my attention sometime previously in a short news story in a Pentecostal magazine headed ST. MARK OF CALCUTTA. I had never heard of him before and I was certain most of our readers hadn’t either. Buntain and his wife had been in Calcutta for over thirty years. The salary was very low; they were rationed to one bucket of water each per day for all their needs; but I have never met a happier couple. Buntain’s record was phenomenal. He had a motor mechanics school for young boys living on the streets. They were given a uniform each morning when they showed up at the school’s entrance and left it behind when they went out to go back to the street each evening. Many had no family. In the school they were taught among other things how to build school buses for his program of schooling and feeding children who lived near the garbage dumps outside the city and scratched out a pittance there. Not only had he established a school for training nurses to meet the needs and hopes of homeless girls, but he had built a modern hospital as well. In fact it was Buntain’s hospital that cared for Mother Teresa on more than one occasion in her later years.
I didn’t share Buntain’s theology any more than I did Mother Teresa’s. But there was everything that truly mattered in common between us. He was so clearly doing the true work not just of a Christian but of any truly spiritual person, whatever their profession of faith. In fact, immersed as I was for the first time in a country where the prevailing, dominant religion was Hinduism, and seeing how in the case of both Mark Buntain and Mother Teresa it was human need that was the determining factor and not denomination or religious faith, it was brought home to me as never before that all our religions are really metaphors for the same Divine Mystery. At their core there is only the one imperative or commandment—to treat one another with true compassion, especially those who need it most. This was the spiritual message that fermented in me from all my various travels as a religion editor.
The same truth shone through when we met the third and final person featured in our Asian odyssey, Dr. Helen Huston, a medical missionary with the United Church of Canada. Here again my interest had been caught by a small news story, this one in the United Church Observer and headlined DOCTOR ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD. That phrase haunted me from the first time I saw it. The article described how Dr. Huston was running a small front-line medical clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Accordingly, when we left Calcutta we took a flight up to Kathmandu. There we hired a car to take us along a very dangerous single-lane road built by the Chinese into the remote interior of the country. It was a long, hair-raising journey of 140 kilometres made more so by our meeting the occasional large truck and having to stop suddenly and back up incredible distances in order to find a spot in which to pull aside and let it pass. There were no guardrails and the gorges on either side were at times totally precipitous. When we reached a tiny village called Dumre we asked the driver to meet us at the same spot in four days’ time. We then arranged for a porter/guide to go with us. He shouldered our packs, including Bob’s heavy camera equipment, and headed towards the snowy peaks in the distance. The name of the remote village that was our destination was Amp Pipal.
In the far distance we could see Annapurna gleaming in the early afternoon sunshine as we made our way across rice paddies, forded cold, snowmelt-filled streams and kept steadily climbing towards our destination. At one point a troop of monkeys scampered ahead of us across the sodden fields. It was very late in the day as we headed into the steep climb up Lig Lig Mountain to the nursing station. The path wound around as it rose until we were deep in the shadow of the mountain itself. It was then that a near disaster struck. I had taken the lead and suddenly, where the solid ground of the path should have been, there was only empty air. Grass growing out of the side of the opening had concealed it in the shadows. All at once I was falling, sliding into what seemed like an abyss. Within seconds, flat on my back and clawing at the steep wall of the gorge, the aluminum frame of my pack caught on a root. I held my breath and gave a yell. Just then I heard Bob Olsen shout and then a thud above me. He too had stepped into the hole in the path and had tumbled. Luckily, his camera strap had looped over a branch above and held him. Suddenly I felt the Sherpa reach down, and with a grip that was utterly surprising in a man so slimly built, he extracted me from my predicament. He did the same with Bob. We were both very shaken by the experience. When we returned to the spot a couple of days later on our descent, we looked over and could see the small huts of a settlement near the valley bottom. It was a dizzying height and it had been a very close call indeed.
The clinic or nursing station was the only such facility within over a hundred kilometres and had in its care a whole series of small villages tucked into folds in the mountains. There were no roads in most of the area, so the “ambulance” was a pole with a hammock slung under it that could be carried on the shoulders of two men. They walked single file along the narrow paths and across the swinging rope bridges over chasms where white water often churned below. When a person was ill, the family accompanied him or her to the hospital and stayed in a rough inn in order to be available to cook and do other necessary chores for the patient. In the short time we were there, Dr. Huston tended to the widest possible range of illnesses, including a man with a very badly infected eye. He had slashed it while working in a patch of sugar cane and, on the advice of some would-be helper, had rubbed rat dung in it as an alleged cure! There were cases of leprosy as well as a host of other ills. You could see from the faces of these finely featured people just how much Helen Huston meant to them and their families. It seemed to me to be the only kind of missionary work that made any sense. These folk had their own millennia-old Hindu faith. I knew from my familiarity with the Vedic scriptures, and especially the Bhagavad-Gita, that when the outer trappings were stripped away, the core doctrine was actually very close to what I believed myself. It looks outwardly like a religion of many gods and goddesses. However, there is only one ultimate source of divinity, or “Godness,” and the various deities are manifestations of that. Each of us is a bearer of the divine light, or Atman, within.
When we finally got back to Kathmandu and caught a flight to Calcutta prior to returning home, the pilot came on the intercom not long after takeoff. He said that Mount Everest’s peak was usually covered in clouds or mist but that at the moment it was perfectly clear there. So he announced he was going to do a favour to everyone aboard and fly as close as safety permitted. It was a truly glorious sight and a fitting close to our adventure on the other side of the globe. We felt a profound sense of gratitude. We had had the rare privilege of meeting with three “saints,” had been preserved from serious harm by a deceptively slight Sherpa, and had seen the highest mountain in the world in all its breathtaking glory. It made what was probably the best Christmas series of any. In the fourth and final article I had the opportunity