In the beginning...

“I was born in India?” A child’s question about her beginnings is a serious need for information. We are a spiritual being on a spiritual journey, and a created being, needing to know how and where we came to “be”.

Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu, South India, was the appointment for my Salvation Army parents, Captains Arthur and Mavis Burtenshaw. With toddler Douglas they arrived in January 1946 and returned to our home state Western Australia in April 1948. They had served during tumultuous preparations for India’s independence, its birth in August 1947 and postnatal challenges that included the assassination of Gandhi in January 1948.

They made a new beginning in the country each had chosen before meeting at officer training in Victoria. In the aftermath of WWII, and with prayerful consideration of my mother’s third-month pregnancy and future hospital facilities, we sailed away in a troop ship.

Arriving in Ceylon after six weeks, a ferry trip to India was followed by a long train trip in third-class carriages. We were already taking in many new sights, sounds, aromas, tastes, language, climate and customs; Nagercoil added to these with housing, settling in, beginning work and learning Tamil.

What a privilege to return in November 2004 and revisit scenery, aromas, sounds, language first absorbed through my baby senses. This unrealised treasure was awakened during a Short Term Exposure Trip to a Uniting Church partner — the Church of South India.

“In the beginning was the Word ... All things came into being through him” (John 1:1, 3). All things ... like the subcontinent of India lapped by the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal; palm trees, lotus flowers, banana trees, southern rice paddies.

During and after the trip I reconnected with my people in a familiar love as if I had never been away. I enjoyed their unique Carnatic music, garlands of fresh flowers cool against my face, and delighted in their many loves: God, celebration, colour, dance, hospitality.

We had a busy program, but sometimes I reflected on the exciting opportunity to see the land of my birth and wondered if there was an unconscious impact in not growing up where one is born. In compassion we grieve for people — known, unknown — who never had the chance to reconnect or even to know whose child they were.

We value our beginning through God the Creator; yet it matters also that we are human beings conceived, and born, in geographical locations. Do the chronological times and political situations of our beginnings affect the first awareness of our life, our world? What circumstances challenge our faith in God as loving Creator?

Sometimes an “ending” experience threatens to be a living death; yet we dare to believe that every ending is also a beginning because the faithful re-Creator is with us.

After the STET, I flew to Nagercoil for four days leave. Too soon came the flights home, arriving December 15 as a tired, privileged person reconnected to her second beginning place.

December 26: Oh, no. No. Lord, not those places we visited; not those laughing children we met and photographed — and the poorest of the poor, the fisher-folk in coastal areas — and people enjoying Chennai’s Marina Beach just like our team one Sunday evening. And I visited Kanniyakumari with my host family — God, I feel as if all of them are my people ... each one with plans, hopes.

“In [each new] beginning is the Word ... and the Word is God” — Emmanuel, God with us, in the beginning, and in the ending, and in between.
Yes. Thanks be to God.

The Rev. Gwen Graham is Resource Minister with the Cudgegong Cluster in the Central West. She undertook the self-funded STET as Continuing Education. Gwen recommends Assembly’s annual STETs to our partner churches.