personal faith and devotion. She was not a trained singer but had a pleasant voice and was just taking her turn.
A day or two later I was playing alone in our front yard near sunset. We had a Weeping Willow tree there, and the low, golden sunlight came slanting through its trailing branches, which were just beginning to sprout their tender leaves. I stood still, with the melody of that hymn and my mother’s voice filling my head. Even to a child, the situation, the sound, the whole late-sunlit scene were powerfully, transcendently poignant. There was an awareness of Spirit, of Reality quite beyond; but for that moment, intersecting my simple, day-to-day reality.
I was perhaps six or seven at the time. I had no language to express such an epiphany. I still don’t, really, but am profoundly grateful for that unspoken Word that let me spread my spirit’s childhood wings. That was God, touching me.
Of other childhood epiphanies, I am remembering just two. For one of them I was probably a bit younger, because there were more children on the compound, including a couple of “big kids.” They had organized a game, maybe some sort of war game. There was a patch of tall grass, and I was told that I was to lie there. I must remain very still—just lie there until someone came for me. Perhaps I was supposed to be one of the wounded; I don’t know.
The voices moved away, and everything grew still. Where I lay, I could look up, between some stems of tall grass, into the sky—a deep, tranquil sky of mid-afternoon. There was a small, white cloud moving slowly across it, and then another. I had never before felt how deep the sky is. I was lifted out of myself, out of my world, received and absorbed into that serene vastness.
How did the experience end? Did someone finally come for me? Apparently, the bigger kids had forgotten this wounded casualty. As I remember, I at last got up and went looking for them.
The other childhood epiphany I am calling up takes me to a different venue—Sorai Beach, a missionary resort on the northwestern coast of Korea, where our family had a summer cottage. The cottage stood on a bluff, with a zigzag path that made a steep descent to rocks and a bit of stony beach below. We mostly went to the community beach, a beautiful stretch of sand at a ten-minute walk; but this day Archie, Elsie, and I had taken the steep path down to explore the rocks. I was probably seven or eight.
We found a place where the tide had left a small pool in a deep cleft of rock. That pool was a microcosm of the sea world, with green moss on the rock, a few strands of seaweed—even a couple of sand crabs scuttling nearby—while the warm sun lit up its clean water. I was fascinated by this miniature seascape. Then I happened to look up. My gaze took in the zigzag path up the bluff. At the top was a shape, one corner of our cottage roof thrusting out and beyond it, the crystalline space of sky. For that moment, it wasn’t sky. It was Beyond—Spirit—what is ineffable. I had—and have—no words for it. My spirit felt, for that brief, timeless moment, its reality.
3
Voyage of the S. S. Sphinx and Beyond
In Korea, as I was growing up, the term of service for Presbyterian missionaries was seven years, followed by a one-year furlough in the United States to be used for rest and refreshing. The furlough was also for promoting the mission cause—visiting churches, renewing contacts, spreading information, and inspiring a positive response.
Because Dad’s medical leave extended the furlough during which I was born, he and Mother offered to extend their succeeding term to eight years. Having returned to Korea in 1920, they would leave in 1928. Dad, who always had a plan in mind, had learned that our family of five could make the journey “by the ports” for not much more than going straight across the Pacific and the continental United States. “By the ports” meant boarding in Japan a ship that would cruise down the coast of China, around the Malay Peninsula, across the Indian Ocean, up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean; then, by a different vessel and after travel in Europe, across the Atlantic to New York.
There would be stops in numerous fascinating ports along the way, as well as opportunities for land excursions. We children would be a bit young to get the full benefit—Elsie just twelve, Archie close to eleven, and I nine-and-a-half. But the next furlough would find all three of us in college.
Dad secured passage on the S.S. Sphinx, a ship of the French line Messageries Maritimes. It was my good fortune that, in Hong Kong, a British family with a son named David came on board. Now I had a playmate who was just my age. There were quite a few other children, particularly after the ship made port in Saigon, then the capital of French Indo-China. But they all spoke French and couldn’t understand us; nor we, them.
David and I learned our way around the ship. As she cruised into equatorial waters, canvas awnings were stretched above the open deck aft, where we Second-Class passengers could stroll or sit. David and I discovered that we could walk and even bounce on the taut canvas, although as our coal-burning vessel steamed along and soot gathered on the awning, we heard loud objections from below when some of it sifted through. That was French that we could understand, without knowing the words.
Another time, in our games we made us a flag. We went to the extreme aft rail of the ship, to the short flag pole, and started to haul down the red-white-and-blue of the French national flag so that we could raise our own. A sailor saw us and came swiftly to push us aside. We got the gist well enough, through his shower of French expletives, as he angrily restored the Tricolor of France to its rightful place.
There was no air-conditioning as yet—the Sphinx steamed along with portholes open. One evening, at the early Children’s Dinner, I was seated below one of them when a freak wave struck the ship’s side and the frothy crest surged through the porthole, drenching me, to the stifled merriment of several nearby tables. I felt deeply chagrined, as Elsie took me back to our cabin to get changed. It was a long voyage—though longer, I’m sure, for our parents than for us three. But eventually we reached Suez, at the southern end of the Suez Canal, and there left our ship, to take a train to Cairo.
I won’t catalog all of our travels. In retrospect, I admire how Dad and Mother were able to stretch what they had saved over the seven or eight years, so that our family of five could manage modest accommodations and a considerable amount of tourism. In Egypt it was just Cairo and its environs—then on to the Holy Land, British-controlled Palestine. Our parents were people of devout faith, well-versed in the Gospel story. To be in Jerusalem, to visit Bethlehem, the Jordan River, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee—these places, and the sites said to be linked with the life of Jesus, all were meaningful to them, and perhaps somewhat so to my siblings.
For me, it was just new and different to be moving constantly from place to place, even if the sites seemed much the same. I do remember one encounter with a shepherd boy who showed us his skill with a Palestinian sling—how he put a stone in the pouch fitted with two long thongs. Holding both of them in one hand, he set the stone pouch to whirling around his head at a dizzying speed, until, with incredible timing, he released one thong, letting fly with the stone straight at his target, which it hit with a frightening crack. This was a sight for a nine-year-old tourist to remember.
Another memory, both of sight and sensation, was sinking up to my neck in clear, cool water of the Sea of Galilee. Dad had found a small inn on the lakeshore that had a sheltered cove at one side. We had no bathing suits in our luggage; but Mother decided that the cove was private enough for us to go swimming in our underwear. The day was hot, and it did feel wonderful, just to settle into that limpid, refreshing water. There were smooth stones on the bottom, and when I raised my eyes, the far shore lifted and wavered a little in the hot air on that tranquil lake surface. It was, for a mature Christian, a holy shrine, as it would be for me later in life. For then, it was just a completely delightful setting to experience.
After
