Sadhu Sundar Singh
Last night I dreamt of Sadhu Sundar Singh, a remarkable man - Christian teacher, evangelist, and mystic - who led a short life.
I grew up with a framed photograph of Sundar in our family house. In the dream last night, I saw him in a photograph too, his intense eyes staring at me from his radiant face.
A convert from Sikhism, he survived many threats to his life (poisoning, assault, snakes thrown into his bedroom, years of hardship walking on the roads as a penniless sadhu, thrown into a pit of bones in Tibet, his own suicidal feelings when young), and though a Christian missionary, believed in universal salvation for all.
Edward Babinski writes:
He was quite independent of outward Church authority in all his religious life, thought, and work. He dropped out of a Christian seminary that he briefly attended. Neither did he attach much importance to public worship because in his experience the heart prays better in solitude than in a congregation. He was also highly displeased with what he found when he toured western nations that for centuries had the benefit of the Bible and whose central figure of worship was Jesus. Sundar proclaimed almost prophetic denunciations upon Western Christianity, and laughed at the way the West looked down upon religious men of the East as mere “pagans” and “heathens.” “People call us heathens,” he said in a conversation with the Archbishop of Upsala. “Just fancy! My mother a heathen! If she were alive now she would certainly be a Christian. But even while she followed her ancestral faith she was so religious that the term ‘heathen’ makes me smile. She prayed to God, she served God, she loved God, far more warmly and deeply than many Christians.” (1)
If you would like to read more about Sadhu Sundar Sigh and his life, go here, here, and here.
He is remembered by the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia on the 19th of June, in a few days time; see here and here .
References:
(1) “Sadhu Sundar Sigh”, by Edward T. Babinski, Retrieved from https://www.tentmaker.org/biographies/singh.htm.
Photo at top of the page: retrieved from https://gobeyond.blog/2019/10/09/apostle-of-the-bleeding-feet/.
