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- Author: Kathryn T. Long
- Full Title: God in the Rainforest
- Category: #books
- Few Waorani talked about such things, and when they did, there seemed to be little consensus about what specific beliefs people held in common. Some anthropologists suggested that this reflected the pragmatism at the center of Wao culture. Having a coherent belief system wasn’t as important as living well in the present. “The Waorani believed that people had souls and that there was an afterlife where life was much like the life they knew, but no one spent a lot of time worrying or talking about it. What mattered was to make life work.”
- The Stams’ total consecration to Christ made theirs the iconic missionary narrative for American fundamentalists. The emphasis on their triumph reflected a shift in the missionary narrative to incorporate the ideals of the “Victorious Christian Life” or the “Higher Christian Life,” coming out of Keswick holiness, a movement with British and American roots that stressed Christian living on a higher plane.
- The narratives of Brainerd and early nineteenth-century missionaries idealized the values of Edwardsean “disinterested benevolence,” whereby true holiness was demonstrated by a willingness to die without seeing converts or other results from missionary labors. Piety was proven by faithfulness amid apparent failure.
- Of course, secrecy also kept Rachel and anyone else from calling into question any aspect of the men’s plans. It reflected a blend of caution, heightened drama, and perhaps competition. The men may have been protecting the Waorani, but they also were protecting themselves from anyone who might challenge their pursuit of God’s will.
- Despite the risks, “God’s leading was unmistakable.” The smooth progress of the mission seemed to indicate God’s protection. Not to have responded would have reflected disobedience and unbelief.
- All saw the “astonishingly friendly” encounter as an answer to prayer and, once again, evidence of God’s involvement in the project.
- Olive Fleming, the youngest of the wives, looked back years later at her private struggles: “At one point, I pled with God to bring Pete back for the Quichua work. Then, realizing that I really wanted him back for me, I felt guilty, as if it were somehow selfish to miss my husband. My thoughts leaped from one extreme to another as I tried to understand why this had happened. I couldn’t believe God would allow the sacrifice of five men for only fifty Indians.”
- Nor were single women an oddity among Christian workers abroad. Among the personnel of conservative faith missions, women outnumbered men nearly two to one.
- The themes of heroism, boldness, bravery, and sacrifice in evangelical newspapers and magazines were a response to persistent questions: Why did it happen? Why would young men with so much potential risk their lives and ultimately die for a small rainforest tribe nobody cared about? Why did God allow them to be killed?
- Humanly speaking, perhaps the men should have gone more slowly. However, Burns noted, “the heart of the martyr is deeply pressed with the urgency of the hour.”
- The book helped define what it meant to be an evangelical during this period. Even so, neither Through Gates of Splendor nor the two biographies had the impact on missionary recruitment that readers often assumed. The men died at a time when interest in career missionary service already was booming.
- Dayomæ’s actions were completely foreign to Wao culture, where there were no such things as required group activities or one person taking the floor to speak while others remained silent.
- Meals were another challenge in cultural adaptation. The Waorani ate rapidly and with plenty of sound—“a great slurping and sucking.” In three or four minutes a group of men could demolish a pile of plantains and a pot of meat without a bare minimum of the social niceties expected by Westerners.
- These deaths raised the troubling issue of the eternal destiny of people who died as an indirect result of missionary efforts to contact the tribe but who had not yet had the opportunity to hear the full Christian gospel.
- Saint’s absolute commitment to the impact of Bible teaching—and her confidence in the clarity of the evangelical message of salvation—made it difficult for her to understand Elliot’s questions and concerns, particularly since the Waorani seemed to be responding to Dayomæ’s Bible stories. But Elliot wondered if such stories, repeated by rote, could even begin to communicate the truth of Christianity to people whose language apparently had no adequate vocabulary for matters of faith.
- Saint worried about Elliot’s “tendency to reach the Aucas with love—instead of [with] the Message of the Word” and feared that her questions indicated deeper doubts about basic evangelical doctrines.
- Additionally, the decision to make Dayomæ, an indigenous woman, the central figure challenged the usual evangelical practice of featuring the missionary heroism of people like themselves.
- Readers seemed less convinced by another aspect of Elliot’s emphasis on obedience: her proposal that evangelicals drop their four-year fixation with the Waorani and instead pay attention to what God wanted them to do with their own lives, a point she had already made in a Christianity Today interview.27 This suggestion was largely ignored.
- However, as anthropologists later found, there was no effective mechanism in Wao culture for ending the vendettas. Christianity provided such a mechanism. It was particularly useful because the Waorani who killed the original five missionaries were members of Dayomæ’s extended family, and Elliot and Saint were kin to the slain men. By Wao standards they should have come to Tewæno seeking revenge. Instead they arrived with gestures of goodwill and, through Dayomæ, spoke of God, a divine being of forgiveness and peace. If the missionary women, whom the Waorani originally believed were cowode—“barely human cannibals”—did not seek to avenge their kinsmen’s deaths, perhaps the message they brought would provide a way out for the Waorani as well.
- Even more perplexing to Elliot, the two women had been supported by an outpouring of prayer from around the world and still had not been able to resolve their differences.
- But by the time she returned from her furlough in the latter months of 1960, the project of Christianizing the Waorani seemed to be in motion, regardless of her direct contribution. For more than five years, even before her husband’s death, she had prayed for the Waorani and had longed to live among them. Now the answer to those prayers seemed somehow flat.
- Dayomæ’s openness to new things was typically Wao. Theirs was a traditional culture with very little concern for tradition. “Tradition was not something to be bound to, and people were not criticized for being different or doing things differently,” observed the anthropologist Jim Yost.3 The transitory nature of life in the rainforest bred a pragmatism and an intense curiosity that readily accommodated new ideas, even competing and contradictory ones, if useful. There was no need to worry about the future or calculate the impact of change “because rot, mold, and death will all take over quickly anyway.”
- Note: Tradition as a means of control becomes necessary once the scope of our actions grows beyond “rot, mold, and death”. Not a problem for hunte gatherers. Increasing problem as society becomes more complex.
- The promise of peace associated with Christianity was the most significant thing SIL and the Tewæno community had to offer. “I suppose we are all very much aware that we are not offering the people any better way of life from the material standpoint,” she wrote. “For what are a few machetes and kettles compared to the unrestricted game reserve they have always enjoyed? And we are offering them unknown territory for known, a foreign land instead of home, dependency for self-sufficiency, subjection to outside powers instead of resistance, and hunger where there has been plenty.”25
- the declaration provided a convenient catalogue of both hypothetical and actual misdeeds. It legitimized critics and offered a vocabulary for their concerns.
- Yet Dayomæ could not read, and over the years she began to lose enthusiasm for teaching and translation work. The one aspect of Christianity that had the most profound impact on Waorani life—that Christians were peacemakers who no longer speared—threatened to become the sum total of faith for many.
- Peeke noticed this phenomenon when she talked with Waorani on the ridge who wanted to move to Tewæno. “To decide for God is no more than to agree to make the long trip to Tewæno and to join forces with former enemies… . To say ‘Yes!’ to relatives who prepare fields and homes and invite them here, is to say, ‘Yes!’ to God.”51 When people arrived, the Christianity they encountered seemed a religion of negatives: don’t kill, don’t have more than one wife, don’t marry someone who is not baptized, don’t leave this clearing.
- Yost’s arrival set the stage for a clash of styles and philosophies. Over the years Saint had promoted a protective, authoritarian, and isolationist approach, while the newer members of the team favored policies that would equip the Waorani with the skills needed for encountering the modern world. All felt they were trying to act in the best interest of the people.
- Outsiders had conflicting expectations for the future. Some—usually tourists and adventurers—wanted the Waorani to remain “free” and uncorrupted, living in harmony with their environment. Other cultures changed, but the Waorani were expected to remain static and primitive or they would be “spoiled.”23 Unaware that they were encountering a native culture that was intensely pragmatic and had little patience with tradition for tradition’s sake, these visitors viewed any change as an end to Eden. For others, often Ecuadorian officials committed to integrating the Waorani into the national culture, change could not come soon enough. They wanted the Waorani to become “civilized” Ecuadorians.
- Yost noted the irony that “they sell the things that distinguish them as different so they can buy the things that make them more like those [from whom they] are buying! … Wiidä sell blowgun for boots today. I sit here bemoaning the changes, but to him it’s the [same] excitement [as that] of getting that first car.”
- Yost documented additional problems in Tewæno that others were aware of, but no one had wanted to face. Christianity as practiced in Tewæno was ritualistic and lifeless; translation of the New Testament had come to a standstill; and, in October 1974, four Waorani from Tewæno were enticed into becoming hit men for a Quichua feud and speared three people.45 Most painful and toughest to resolve was the reality that Rachel and Dayomæ ran Tewæno in ways that were unhealthy for all its inhabitants—the other SIL workers and Waorani alike.
- Yost suggested that Wycliffe begin by encouraging all Wycliffe and SIL staff to take the Waorani out of the limelight.43 Lindskoog, too, looked for ways to lower expectations. “People should be warned against the tendency of idolizing the Auca work and thus getting vicarious satisfaction to compensate for discouragements in the home church.”44 Lindskoog’s comment touched on a reality that WBT, mission agencies, and others would find hard to acknowledge during the years to come. Saint had created a culture of dependency among the Waorani, but it was equally true that during the twenty years since the missionaries’ deaths, segments of American evangelicalism, including Wycliffe, had become deeply dependent on the inspirational and emotional power of the Wao story. It had become a drama without parallel and proof of God at work in the world.
- Second, it became clear to many visitors, even those sympathetic to SIL, that the spread of Christianity among the Waorani was not an epic story of ever-increasing spiritual success.
- The baptisms offered some hope that the Bible would be read by the younger generation, a welcome sign since many of the older generation, such as Yowe and Quemo, had not been able to overcome cultural barriers that prevented them from learning to read. Most young people, in contrast, were literate, but in the absence of the violence experienced by their elders they saw little practical reason to embrace Christianity. Peeke and Jung, of course, hoped that the availability of the New Testament would change that perception.
- Despite the popularity of such projects, the known number of practicing Christians among the Waorani never exceeded more than about 20 to 25 percent of the population, lower than assumed by most evangelicals in the United States. Many of the most active were from Dayomæ’s kinship group. Historically they had the greatest exposure to missionaries, and several had been among the nucleus of Bible translation assistants.
- Initially, however, Saint stressed that the greatest threat the Waorani faced was a crippling dependence on outsiders. According to Saint, the “harsh reality” he had discovered “was that the Huaorani church of the midnineties was less functional than it had been in the early sixties,” when he was a boy. The church, he asserted elsewhere, was a “travesty,” with no elders and an inability “to govern themselves as believers.”3 Well-meaning missionaries, “the overbearing, over-indulging outside Christian community,” were to blame.4 During the forty years since peaceful contact in 1958, missionaries had done next to nothing to help the Waorani to form a “self-propagating, self-governing, and self-supporting church.”5 In articles, interviews, speaking engagements, and a book, Saint pointed to the Wao church as a case study illustrating the dangers of dysfunctional relationships between missionaries and indigenous people.
- Others questioned his assessment. According to Jim Yost, significant numbers of Waorani were practicing their faith, but in ways adapted to their culture. Historically, extended families (kinship groups) were the only social institution the Waorani had. “When I go back, late at night I hear grandmothers, fathers and mothers teaching their children and grandchildren scriptures in the quiet of the night and solitude of the home,” Yost wrote. “I hear prayer coming from home after home throughout the night. There are no well-kept buildings, but genuine, strong faith still exists.”
- These Wao young people never experienced the level of violence and murder that turned their elders toward faith. They have struggled to find the meaning of Christianity for their generation. These generational differences may have contributed to disagreements among anthropologists and others over the extent of Christian commitment among the Waorani.