Continuing insights into Frank Buchman

...One Sunday, on a whim, he dropped in on a service in a little stone-built chapel. It was sparsely attended - a congregation of only seventeen - and a woman was leading the service. She spoke about the Cross of Christ. It was hardly a new subject to Buchman. This woman, however, spoke so movingly about the Cross that, for time, it became a living and life-giving experience for him.

'I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me. They probably had, but I'd got so mixed up in the wrong that was the seventh wrong man. Right in my conviction, I was wrong in harbouring ill-will. I wanted my own way and my feelings were hurt.

'I was the centre of my own life. That big, "I" had to crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and he told me to put things right with them.'

As he left the chapel Buchman's one thought was not so much to forgive those he had hated, but to ask their forgiveness for the way he had behaved. Back at the house where he was staying, he sat down and wrote letters to each member of the Board. One of the letters - the one to Dr. Ohl, dated 27 July 1908 - has survived in the archives at Mount Airy.

'Am writing', declared Buchman, 'to tell you that I have harboured an unkind feeling toward you - at times I conquered it but it always came back. Our views may differ but as brothers we must love. I write to ask your forgiveness and to assure that I love you and trust by God's grace I shall never more speak unkindly or disparagingly of you.

'The lines of that hymn have been ringing in my ears -

When I survey the wondrous Cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.'

Buchman appended the same lines to each of the letters and each time, felt the weight of the words in a completely new way. 'It's easy to repeat those lines,' he said later. 'I know because I'd done it over and over again myself. But that day those lines had become great realities. And the last line cost me most of all. I almost wrote it in my own blood.'-*

At tea that afternoon Buchman related what had happened to him, and among those who heard the story was a Cambridge undergraduate. 'I want to talk to you,' he said to Buchman. They walked around Derwentwater. Before they returned the young man, too, had found a release similar to Buchman's. 'That was the first man that I ever brought face to face with the central experience of Christianity.' Buchman commented.-** From that day Buchman began to help people, not from a position of rectitude but from the reality of knowledge that he too was a sinner and that he had been forgiven.

Fifty years later, John Woodcock, the man who had helped Buchman to decide to resign on the morning after the hospice Board meeting, put the whole mater into longer prespective. 'I think we both felt that we were straight and they were wrong,' he wrote to Buchman. 'We do know now that what seemed to be the breakdown of your life's work was only the opening of the gate which God alone could open, through which we go to our real life's work.'

Dr. Jamshed J. Irani, talked at Asia Plateau about the importance of family life. Following illustrations are from New World News, January 1948.

The futility of expecting a spirit of unity at the conference table that did not exist at the breakfast table

The honesty and trust which he fights for at home are reflected in the spirit of understanding in the union negotiations

*Buchman used to say that he had received no replies to these letters. Ohl noted on the back of his letter from Buchman, '... you will notice that he gives no address. Had he done so I surely would have written.'

**Fourteen years later, passing through Liverpool, Buchman telephoned this man, who told him that the talk had 'regenerated the whole principle of his life.' His name is not known.