What makes a missionary? What is the drive that sends men into deserts and jungles to face fever and frostbite, indifference and hostility? When so many nearer to home need converting, why should five young Americans die in a hail of spears in an Ecuadorian jungle trying to bring the Gospel to a tiny tribe of Indians whose language was almost unknown, whose cultural level was close to zero, and who killed every stranger on sight?
One of the famous five who were killed by the Auca Indians in Ecuador on Jan. 8, 1956 was Nate Saint (TIME, Jan. 23, 1956), and some clues to the making of a missionary are to be found in his biography, published this week under the title Jungle Pilot (Harper; $3.75). The author is Russell T. Hitt, editor of the interdenominational Protestant magazine Eternity, but as Editor Hitt admits, the book was more than co-authored by Nate Saint himself, who kept a diary in which his personality comes through strong and clear.
Unclipped Wings. Nathanael Saint was seventh in a family of eight children who grew up in Huntingdon Valley near Philadelphia in an atmosphere of deep Puritan piety. Their father, Lawrence Saint, an eminent designer of stained glass (15 of his windows are in the Episcopal Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in Washington), took his Christianity straight and Biblical. There was prayer meeting on Wednesdays, two services, plus Sunday school, on Sundays. Says Nate Saint’s father: “We didn’t encourage the children’s friends to come and play on Sunday. I read the Bible and each of the children prayed, beginning with the eldest.”
In 1944, Nate was a crew chief in the Army Air Corps when he heard the call to the mission field. The 21-year-old, who had been hipped on airplanes since he was eleven, wrote to his mother and sister: “The Lord clipped my wings … it seemed logical to suppose that an inherent yen to fly defied the Lord’s will, but He said ‘no!’ ” As his letter was on its way home, another from his father crossed its path with a clipping about an organization called the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship. Now renamed the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, the organization used light planes to airlift missionaries and supplies in inaccessible parts of the world. Nate Saint had found the way to use his two loves—the Gospel and the air.
Breaking into Prison. Life in Ecuador for Nate Saint, his trained-nurse wife Marjorie, and their three children was a story of emergencies and hardships that would pale the most jazzed-up TV script. Nate wrote of hairbreadth landings on narrow jungle airstrips that were “like parking a car at 70 miles an hour.” Nate’s “parish” covered a growing number of Protestant mission stations in eastern Ecuador. “It is our task,” he wrote, “to lift these missionaries up to where five minutes in a plane equals 24 hours on foot . . . It’s a matter of gaining precious time, of redeeming days and weeks, months and even years that can be spent in giving the Word of Life to primitive people.”
But when Nate heard of the Auca Indians, all his missionary enthusiasm seemed to focus on getting to those primitive tribesmen. He wrote it down 21 days before they killed him: “We realize that it is not the call of needy thousands. Rather it is the simple intimation of the prophetic word that there should be some from every tribe in His presence in the last day, and in our hearts we feel that it is pleasing to Him that we should interest ourselves in making an opening into the Auca prison for Christ.”
The opening was made. In Ecuador, Nate’s missionary sister, Rachel, and Betty Eliot, widow of one of the martyred missionaries, have won the Aucas’ confidence and have begun to teach them reading and the Scripture.
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