Just before he was about to leave for Switzerland, Sundar received a letter from a man named Sir William Willcocks. Sir William explained that he lived in Egypt and was the builder of the Assuan Dam on the Nile River. He had read about Sundar, and what he read encouraged him so much in his faith that he wanted Sundar to visit him. Sir William offered to help Sundar get a visa to enter Palestine and escort him through the land of the Bible.
Sundar was excited by the prospect. Since becoming a Christian, he had always harbored a secret hope of one day visiting the Holy Land. And now here was an invitation from a man who offered to help make his dream a reality.
On January 28, 1922, Sundar set out for Port Said, Egypt, by steamer across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and finally through the Suez Canal. Sir William met Sundar at Port Said, and the two men rode by car into Palestine. Everything about Palestine enthralled Sundar. He had read and meditated hundreds of times upon every event recorded in the New Testament, and now he was able to see those places for himself. He spent hours praying at the Mount of Olives and in the Garden of Gethsemane. He passed through Jerusalem and went on to Bethany, Jericho, and the Dead Sea. He bathed in the Jordan River at the spot where, tradition said, John baptized Jesus, and he visited the workshop in Nazareth where Joseph supposedly practiced carpentry. Time after time as he made his way through Palestine, pausing to pray and meditate, Sundar told Sir William, “Christ is always with me wherever I go. He is walking with me at my right hand.”
While traveling in Egypt and Palestine, Sundar was asked to preach in the cathedral of Jerusalem and at a large Coptic church in Cairo. While in Egypt, he also visited a church that tradition said marked the place Jesus and his parents had fled to after their flight into Egypt.
When his tour of Egypt and Palestine was over, Sundar was grateful for the privilege of having had the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. He knew that no matter what happened to him, he would always treasure the experience.
On February 27, 1922, Sundar arrived in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the following day he began a strenuous speaking schedule. Since the Swiss people spoke one of three languages, French, German, and Italian, Sundar had to speak through an interpreter. When he had visited England, Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and Australia, he had preached in English, the language that those who came to hear him spoke and understood. But now he had to speak in English and wait while his words were translated into the local language of the group he was speaking to.
Sundar’s first speaking engagement was in a town called Bienne. Much to his amazement, over three thousand people arrived to hear him preach. A number of the people who could not fit into the overcrowded hall climbed trees so that they could catch a glimpse of Sundar when he left the building.
The meetings in Switzerland continued night after night in various towns and villages. In Tavannes, Switzerland’s clock-making capital, all the workers were dismissed at 3:00 pm so that they could hear Sundar speak that evening. In Neuchatel the newspaper estimated that ten thousand people came to hear Sundar speak.
While in Switzerland, Sundar received invitations to speak in Germany. He crossed the border and began a preaching tour of that country. Over the years Sundar had studied Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and he was particularly glad to visit and see firsthand many of the historic sites associated with Luther. The day after a visit to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther had nailed to the church door his ninety-five theses that sparked the Reformation, Sundar wrote to a friend in a letter, “Yesterday I went to Wittenberg, the Cradle of the Reformation. I saw the house in which Martin Luther used to live, and the Church where he used to preach. On the door of the Church he wrote ninety-five articles about the Reformation, and he is buried in the same old Church. This evening I am speaking in the Church.”
Sundar also visited Halle, where professor August Franke had started his famous orphanage and where the Moravian mission leader Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf had attended school, as had George Müller, who had also started a famous orphanage in Bristol, England. From Halle, Sundar went to Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, and Kiel. Everywhere he went, immense crowds greeted him, eager to hear the simple message he had come to preach.
From Germany Sundar’s tour took him to Sweden, where he caused a sensation. In a letter Sundar wrote, “I am speaking in some of the beautiful villages of this country, and people come from seventy miles to the meetings.” In fact, special trains were scheduled to carry all the people who wanted to hear Sundar speak to the meetings. Many Swedes said they had never experienced anything quite like the sensation Sundar caused in their country.
Similar numbers of people gathered to hear Sundar preach in Norway before he traveled on to Denmark. While in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sundar was asked to visit the royal palace, where the dowager empress of Russia lived. The empress wanted an audience with Sundar, and when he inquired as to why, he learned that the dowager empress was the daughter of the king of Denmark and the mother of Czar Nicholas II, who had been murdered along with his wife and children four years before, in 1918. The dowager empress wanted to talk to Sundar about the loss she had experienced, and when the two of them had finished conversing, she asked Sundar to pray and bless her.
From Copenhagen, Sundar traveled on to Herning, Denmark, where fifteen thousand people waited to hear him speak. Total silence fell over the crowd as he delivered his message, and many of those in the audience had tears running down their cheeks by the time Sundar had finished preaching.
From Denmark it was on to Holland, where Sundar talked to university students in Utrecht, dignitaries at The Hague, and housewives in Rotterdam. Not surprisingly, Sundar was totally exhausted by the time he had finished his tour of Holland. He would have loved to return to India right then, but he had promised that he would travel to England and speak at a huge gathering of Christians at a place called Keswick, and he would not go back on his promise. As tired as he was, Sundar crossed the English Channel and prepared to face yet another crowd.
Chapter 15
The Perfect Life
Sundar was tired and unwell by the time he arrived in Liverpool, England. But with great effort he kept his promise to speak at the Keswick Convention. However, as soon as he had fulfilled the obligation, he gladly boarded a steamer and headed back to India. The long voyage did him some good, but he was still tired as he made his way back to Sabathu in northern India.
Back home in India, thirty-three-year-old Sundar made a slow recovery, and during the last months of 1922 he undertook a tour of many large cities in India, including Delhi, Benares, and Lahore. While in Lahore he visited his old school, Saint John’s Divinity College, and spent a day with one of the missionaries in the city who still remembered him.
How long ago it now all seemed to Sundar when he had fled his home and set out to follow Jesus Christ, not knowing where the journey might take him or even how long his family would continue to spare his life.
While on this trip he visited his father in Rampur. Sundar found him in good spirits, rejoicing in his Christian faith, but his body was now frail and old. In April 1923, six months after he had visited, Sundar received word that his father had died. According to Sher Singh’s will, his estate was to be divided between Sundar and his one remaining brother. The estate consisted of a number of acres of land and a large sum of money. Sundar sighed when he learned the details of the will. He had told his father many times that he did not need financial help, yet he knew that his father had wanted him to buy a house to use as a rest stop between his preaching tours.
As he thought about this notion, the idea of having a house to come home to began to appeal to Sundar. He imagined sharing the place with people in need, keeping one room for himself where he could sleep, pray, and write books. And so he decided to accept the money from his father’s estate, but he turned the land over to his brother so that the parcel would not be broken up.
It did not take long for Sundar to find just the house he was looking for. It was an old mission house situated in the middle of the poorest area of Sabathu. Sundar knew it was not the type of grand house his father would have wanted him to spend the inheritance on, but he did not care. He felt comfortable in the place and soon invited his friend Dr. Peoples from the leper hospital and his family to move in with him. Dr. Peoples, his wife, and their four children were delighted with the new housing arrangement, which suited Sundar perfectly. Sundar now had a room to come back to whenever he wanted but did not have to worry about who was taking care of the place while he was gone.
Sundar was still tired from his trip to England, so after completing the purchase of the house in Sabathu, he spent the next year writing two books, Reality and Religion and Search After Reality. These two books were soon translated into over forty languages, and as they were distributed worldwide, requests poured in for Sundar to speak at venues all over the globe. Some of the invitations likened Sundar to Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas. An American writer urged Sundar to come back to the United States for another visit, saying, “You can’t make the excuse that India is your own country. Are you forgetting that now you belong to the whole world?” But Sundar refused all of the invitations. He felt that he had already been a witness in the West and that his heart did not belong to the whole world but to the people of the dark country of Tibet.
Sundar tried to go on preaching tours around northern India as much as he could, but his health continued to deteriorate. In 1925 he developed an ulcer in his left eye, and despite the best medical attention, he lost his sight in that eye. However, this did not seem to unduly worry Sundar, who wrote to a friend in Germany:
As I returned last month from a preaching tour in the villages, my eye became inflamed and caused me great pain.… I am not sorry about this suffering because it is a great privilege to be allowed to suffer in this way, it is a means of blessing for me as it keeps me humble and gives me an opportunity for prayer and intercession. I do not want to be at all sad if I should lose my sight, for God has opened my spiritual eyes which can never become dim. I thank God for this gift and this blessing. I thank you for your prayers and I likewise continue to pray for you.
After losing the sight in his left eye, Sundar found the glare of the sun dazzled him, and he took to wearing dark glasses whenever he was outdoors.
In April 1927 Sundar was determined to return to Tibet. He set out from Rishikesh with a group of Tibetan traders who were returning home via the Niti Pass. They had traveled only forty miles together when Sundar became violently ill. He was suffering from internal hemorrhaging, and the traders carried him in a semiconscious state back to the nearest train station and put him on a train to Sabathu. When Sundar finally reached Sabathu, he was more dead than alive, but the doctors at the leper hospital nursed him back to health.
Once he was feeling better, Sundar returned to writing, producing two more books and answering the hundreds of letters that flowed in from around the world.
The following year Sundar planned to enter Tibet again, but he waited too long for his Tibetan trader companions to arrive, and by the time they showed up, it was too late in the season to attempt the journey and return safely.
Ten months later, in April 1929, Sundar was determined to make it to Tibet for the summer. He was especially eager to encourage a little band of Christians who lived east of Lake Mansarovar, as well as other Tibetans who were inaccessible to the few Moravian missionaries who worked close to the border.
