Ashland, Oregon, USA
Friday 22 November 2019
Thank you, Blog Recipients, for allowing me to share my Korea experience with you. And thank you, Sue Graves for making it possible for me to do so. Sue is remarkably adept at all things compter-wise (and mechanical).
The forthcoming “Korea 1908” book is important, not just to me, personally. It is bigger than me, bigger than the personal story of the David B. Gamble family, for it is the story of the power of the compassionate individual to make a difference.
When Horace J.Allen, the first Protestant missionary in Korea, arrived, the Hermit Kingdom had only recently opened itself to foreign trade and intercourse with the outside world. Korea in 1884 was an ignorant, superstitious, wretchedly poor, and suspicious society. Common medical cures sought to release demons from the body of the patient with large soon-to-be infected punctures. Education was limited to contemplation by a wealthy few of specific Chinese characters. Farming and plowing depended on a small metal shovel. Women were not given names, and wives were called “what you may call her” or “she.” Years of a life were lost to mourning the deaths of family members and the royalty and worshipping the deeds of long-deceased ancestors. At one time, Korea had been a world leader of progress, inventing the first magnetic compass, creating the first printing system (a century before Gutenberg), developing an alphabet so accessible that it can be learned and is learned in just a few hours. All these achievements were lost as Korea settled into a quagmire of Buddhist worship and Confucius observance.
As is the way of the world, the government of Korea as well as the governments and political leaders of China, Japan, Russia, and the United States lived prosperously and used Korea and its people as a pawn in their war games. The brutal takeover of Korea by the Japanese militaristic regime in 1905 was made possible by the United States. But if the America government conducted a farce of democracy’s values, the missionaries of America, particularly those of the Methodist Episcopal and the Presbyterian Churches, redeemed the America that opened its doors to the “the poor, the tired, the huddled masses.” Afire with evangelistic zeal, the missionaries went to Korea, quickly to understand that the Love preached in the Gospels was best expressed by ministering to the basic needs of the people, by making available education, modern Western medical care, and practical sanitation.
They were a special group, these missionaries. Dr. Oliver R. Alison, M.D., left a thriving medical practice and well-paid posts at Toronto University to bring his pregnant wife and three children to Seoul, South Korea, where he built what is now Severance Hospital, today one of the largest and most modern hospitals in all of Asia. Jesse Watson HIrst, M.D., who assisted Dr. Avison, decided while attending Princeton to become a medical missionary; to this end, he put himself through medical school, developed a private practice that paid off his school debts, and arrived in Korea at the age of forty. Similarly, Doctor Rosetta Sherwood Hall and Dr. Mary M. Cutler both decided as young girls to become missionaries, went to medical school and developed private practices so that they could enter Korea as medical missionaries with experience. These lives are typical of the compassionate individuals who became missionaries in Korea because they wanted to make a difference.
And they did make a difference. Missionaries, predominantly American, but also from other nations, went to Korea, ate Korean food, learned the Korean language, and worked quietly and unknown to none other than the missionary societies that were supporting them in their home countries. Many were forced to quit the field and returned home sick and enfeebled. Many returned and worked on. South Korea itself survived the political maneuvers of the Korean War and dictatorships and is today a nation of forceful. bright, educated individuals. For not only did Korea receive help from American missionaries, but the Koreans accepted the help and learned to use the help for their own purposes.
This story of the Korean missionaries may seem irrelevant to comfortable Americans with jobs and two cars. We do not live in poverty and superstition. We do not appear to live in a police state nor in ignorance. We have television, The New York Times, and federal agencies full of scientists with multiple degrees. Yet as the American government asserts itself to its people and the world under the governance of Big Pharma and Monsanto look-alikes joined with the self-serving ultra-rich, to repeat the story of the power of the individual in the face of tyranny or ineptitude is increasingly necessary. Americans and much of the world live in a dazzle of glitter and gloss even as the natural resources to sustain the glitter and our very lives are fast disappearing. As greed, not exclusively corporate, manipulates our minds, poisons our bodies, pollutes the air we breathe, trashes the environment and the food that sustains our lives; as unsafe technologies, which include cell phones, 5G, and wireless environments, protected by lies and propaganda, destroy our health and strength; as we annihilate the animals, deplete the soil, sicken the oceans, the waters, and all living beings that are giving us life and as this life-threatening devastation continues unabated, the power of the compassionate individual will become life-saving.
The Berlin Wall fell seven years after Pastor Christian Führer opened St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig to Monday prayer meetings for peace. The few who attended in 1982 grew to many, and in October 1989 over 70,000 gathered at St. Nicholas Church to walk with candles in the streets, peacefully protesting the Russian occupation. A bloodbath was expected; hospitals called in extra staff, but Erick Honecker inexplicably did not allow police action. One month later, the Berlin Wall fell without a single shot*. Thus came a world-changing event through the vision of one pastor, even as the nation of Korea was changed by the concern of individual American missionaries.
The story of the work of the American missionaries in Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—a story of steadfast compassion—is why the forthcoming “Korean 1908” is important. It tells a story that has been told before and far better than I can tell it; nevertheless, it is a story of that deserves to be remembered, to be told and retold.
*
