Buchman with Pandit Nehru

This year marks the golden jubilee of Dr. Frank Buchman's historic visit to India. Which perhaps also marks the beginning of MRA in India. As we start Globol Hoho, it may be appropriate to revisit Buchman's early experiences. Following extracts are from Frank Buchman - a Life, a biography written by Garth Lean and published by Fount Paperbacks, London.

...immediately after he arrived back from Europe, he had discussed with a group of young businessman the idea of opening a Hospice on the European pattern. Soon, necessity overtook planning. One snowy night there was a knock at Buchman's door. It turned out to be a house-boy from one of the nearby mansions who had been driven out into the night for some trivial misdemeanour. Buchman took him in and, eventually, found him a new job.

Then he heard of a college student who was literally starving. Buchman wanted to invite him too, to share he had, but realised that he did not even have a spare bed. One of his young friends in the congregation soon resolved that problem.

It was the same young man, who told Buchman of a boy he had seen in a tuberculosis ward. The boy's father had just died and his mother, who had once been cook to the Governor of Pennsylvania, was addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Mary Hemphill and her two boys were living in one of the most squalid parts of Philadelphia - searching the garbage-bins for food. Buchman called on her and found her washing herself thin over the laundry-tub trying to make a living, a woman totally without hope. He needed a housekeeper and invited her to join him along with her two boys.

Meeting this family made him decide to give up drinking alcohol. If Mary took a drop, she would to her addiction; so he too must not touch it. The decision, lasted his lifetime. 'That work', said Buchman afterwards, 'was a fellowship in a store, where it was easier for workers and domestic help to gather together. With them I gladly shared my all and learnt the great truth that where God guides, He provides.'

In May 1904 Buchman formally founded a Hospice. By November his own warmth of heart, Mary's cooking and the insatiable need in the district house.

'It is his (Buchman's) and the Board's purpose', record the Ministerium's minutes for June 1905, 'to actualise as nearly as possible the Christian family life, with all its comforts, refinements and wholesome influences.' Buchman took the job of 'housefather', at $600 a year, with 'general charge of the house in material and spiritual things under the direction of the Board.' Unfortunately, the chairman of the Board, Dr. J.F.Ohl, was determined that the hospice should make the balancing of its books a priority and, indeed regarded fund-raising as one of the housefathers' principal jobs.

Buchman choose as housemother an elderly New Englander called Sarah Ward. Between them Buchman and Miss Ward managed to create an atmosphere which was both homely and friendly.

'I believe I was expected, but certainly not that night,' wrote one college student who stayed there for a summer. 'Practically everyone had gone to bed; Mr. Buchman had, I know. He was up immediately, however, and welcomed me in his dressing-gown as warmly as an old friend.'

'Eating', he went on, 'was a most enjoyable affair. The meals were very simple, but well-cooked and there was always plenty of everything. Much was made of every occasion of note. Fourth of July, a distinguished guest, a birthday: all were made an excuse for some slight celebration at table. After breakfast, there was family prayers in the parlour.'

'One sensed at once the spirit of the hospice,' wrote John Woodcock, a minister who lived there for a time. 'It was not an institution, it was a family. If one of the young men went out for the evening he knew that, after a certain hour, he would be admitted only in response to his ringing the doorbell. But, however late the hour. Frank was invariably there to open the door with never a sign that he had been put to any trouble, nor by any look that might embarrass the young man; but rather to invite him to share... something to eat.' He was also learning to win the confidence of individuals. The story of 14-year-old George, which Buchman often told in later years, was typical.

'George', he would recall, 'was an orphan who came to live with me. We spent the first week happily together. I told him my best yarns. We had our meals together, and I gave him a great deal of attention but, with all this, I never gained his confidence. One Friday night he said he was going down town. Round about 9.30 I saw a form come up the street, something zig and sometimes zag.

'My heart sank and the question came, what to do? I could see from my window he was trying to fit the key into the key-hole, but did not seem to make the connection. He began violently shaking the grating of the door, naturally blaming the door and thinking it to be at fault. Someone finally let him in, he made his way up to the room next to mine, and I saw that he was safely in bed without speaking to him or letting him know of my presence.

'Now, how to handle George? It came to me next morning not to go down to breakfast, because I thought if I saw the red in George's eye, I might say too much - so I waited until the middle of the morning and then went down to the place where George worked. The minute George saw me, his head fell. He thought, of course, that I had told the manager.

'I turned to George and said, "George, what about having some lunch together?" We had fish and, while he was picking the bones, he said to me, "I was drunk last night", an awfully difficult thing for him to say, because he was fearful of what I might say. I didn't say anything. He then volunteered the information that it hadn't cost him very much, only twenty cents. He wanted to appeal to my sense of economy! 'He then changed the subject and wanted to know about my Sunday School class. He wanted to talk religion. I knew that the time for that was not ripe yet, so I said my Sunday School class was going on all right. Then he knew he had to come to the point. He said, "You know, I thought to myself as I came up 20th Street last night, 'if he scolds me, I will go out and do it again.' " We then smiled, and he left. He said, "I think I will come to your Sunday School next Sunday."

Not surprisingly, the hospice was failing to balance its books, and Buchman's relations with Ohl and his Board became increasingly strained. Ohl kept up a constant barrage of criticism. The cooking at the hospice might be good, but was it not extravagant? Again, what about the rooms being occupied by Mary Hemphill and her sons, for which they paid nothing?

On 3 May 1906 a special committee of the Board was set up 'to devise methods of decreasing expenditure and ensure the permanency of the Hospice.' It decided that a housekeeper should be taken on 'so that the housefather can give his time to spiritual care and, more important, the gathering contributions, the collection of dues and securing of new members'. Buchman, they implied, had been both careless and extravagant.

As the months went by, the situation became worse and Buchman found himself fighting a rearguard action. He put out at least one report, called Hospice Incidents, to try to illustrate for the Board the effectiveness of his work.

The conflict eventually came to a head in the summer of 1907. Buchman decided to make the matter an issue of confidence even at the risk of losing his job, though he seems to have felt there was very little danger of that.

In October 1907, he submitted to the Board a seventeen-page handwritten document. The hospice, he declared, was not a boarding house. 'The boarding house woman cannot afford to give them a dinner at Christmas and Thanks giving that they can remember to the end of their days. It would be extravagant on the part of the boarding house. It does not pay.'

Then, there had been a number of occasions when his personal liberty had been interfered with and his actions questioned. If a man was old enough to be entrusted with such a work, he was also old enough to decide the minor details of his own conduct. 'If you are to have a man at the head of this work to bear a man's responsibilities, he must be treated as a man and not as a child.'

Next, Buchman laid down the conditions under which he felt prepared to continue. First of all the Board must show its confidence in him: he had repeatedly had occasion, he said, to doubt men on the Board who were supposed to be behind him. All the hospice staff must be directly responsible to him. He must have the power to remove anyone who had proved unsuitable. In future, moreover, nobody should be appointed without his full knowledge and approval. He should be granted a month's vacation and his salary should be raised to $1,000 a year.

It was a passionate and uncompromising statement of Buchman's case. His tone suggests that he was entirely confident that he would win, perhaps because he regarded himself as indispensable.

That night the discussion with the Board went on until midnight. Led by the implacable Ohl, its six members insisted that the hospice must be financially self-supporting. That, Buchman knew, could mean only one thing: he would have to resign. Next morning, he did not appear for breakfast and when John Woodcock knocked at his door he 'heard muffled sobs and then "Come in." 'I knew then what had happened and understood his feelings,' wrote Woodcock later. 'He responded, however, to the suggestion that he get up, have breakfast, and then go out into the country for the day. There, walking and talking seemed to help him to think more clearly and to arrive at some reasoned conclusions. That night he went before the Board and offered his resignation.' The resignation was accepted on 24 October.

Buchman's whole heart had been in the hospice. Now, his hopes had come crashing down. He had virtually been dismissed, he had been belittled by men who, he felt, simply did not grasp what he was trying to do. Ohl's attitude is apparent in his subsequent annual report in which, without even a formal mention of the founder of the enterprise, he simply stated that it was 'now well-organised'-*. Buchman's world was in ruins. He was an outcast in his own creation. As day followed day and he relived again and again the fateful hours with the Board, Buchman began to conceive a bitter hatred for those men.

The exhaustion due to months of unremitting work, added to the turmoil in his spirit, made him ill. He saw a leading Philadelphia physician who told him that he was worn out and prescribed a long holiday abroad. His father gave him $1000 and on 29 January, 1908, Frank Buchman sailed for Europe.

* The new director, the Revd Joseph Schantz, was, however, to write Buchman on the 25th anniversary of the hospice, in October 1930, urging him to attend: 'We would so like to have you present. Will you do this, Frank? The Hospice has been a wonderful work in spite of its poor plant. At least 25,000 men have lived in its atmosphere in its 25 years of existence.'