Holy Week is a good time to honour martyrs, those who bear witness to their faith by sacrificial living or by surendering life itself. Elisabeth Alden Scott Stam was raised by missionary parents in China in the early 20th Century. After missionary training at Moddy Bible Institute she married and returned to China. They had a daughter in 1934 and six months later, during the Chinese Civil war, she and her husband were executed by Chinese Communist soldiers. In the looted wreckage of their home, written on scraps of paper used to wrap around chinaware, a number of her poems were later found. They had been preserved by their faithful cook, disguised as mere wrappings.
The story of the deaths of John and Betty Stam is almost forgotten. The book The Triumph of John and Betty Stam written by Mrs Howard Taylor is now available here and there on Amazon, but like many classics of Christian faithful Christrian witness is now an almost forgotten genre. Some forms of post-modern and post-colonial theology have taught us to recognise the failings and consequences of the role of Christian missionary activity in Western imperial politics. Fair enough, and there is plenty to require a long repentance
But when all due consideration is given to this, it doesn’t in my view eclipse the significance of faithful Christian witness, the combination of compassion and courage shown by countless followers of Jesus who discovered in their own experience the cost of sacrifice in their own personal passion story. So I honour this woman and her husband, who the morning she and her husband were beheaded, managed to hide her baby Helen in a rug, later smuggled to her grandparents; this woman who whatever the murky implications of national politics simply wanted to share her faith by the practice of kindness; this woman whose passion for God led to the personal passion of martyrdom. Accounts of their death seem embarrassed by terminology – ‘put to death’, ‘murdered’, ‘executed’ – each with its own connotations of the motives of those who killed them. More important was the motive that took them there in the first place – passion for God, the call to bear witness to the love of God in Jesus, a love for a people amongst whom they chose to live.
Here is one of the poems, used to wrap china – I note the irony of the image – china wrapped in the poetry of Christian devotion, China wrapped in the witness of devoted Christian living.
"Stand Still and See"
Exodus 14.13.
"I’m standing Lord.
There is a mist that blinds my sight.
Steep jagged rocks, front, left, and right.
Lower, dim, gigantic, in the night.
Where is the way?
.
"I’m standing, Lord.
The black rock hems me in behind.
Above my head a moaning wind
Chills and oppresses heart and mind.
I am afraid!
.
"I’m standing, Lord.
The rock is hard beneath my feet.
I nearly slipped, Lord, on the sleet.
So weary, Lord, and where a seat?
Still must I stand?
.
He answered me, and on his face
A look inefffable of grace,
Of perfect understanding love,
Which all my murmuring did remove.
.
"I’m standing, Lord.
Since Thou hast spoken, Lord, I see
Thou hast beset; these rocks are Thee;
And since thy love encloses me,
I stand and sing!"
The epitaph on her gravestone reads, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain". When we’ve learned what we must learn from the mistakes and wrongs of history, It’s no part of post-colonial hermeneutics to minimise the sacrifice and integrity of such remarkable witnesses, who in following after Jesus, entered their own Passion story.
Leave a Reply