Home Shantanu Dutta A Tall Woman in a Salwar Kameez
A Tall Woman in a Salwar Kameez PDF Print E-mail
Shantanu Dutta
 
For the second time in  a few months , I find myself writing a tribute. It has been a long day. My body is tired, my spirit more so. Yet, when my e mail popped up to a release from the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, that a lady by the name of the name of Viviennne Stacey had passed away, I had to stop in my tracks. For like Tom Little, about whom I wrote some time ago, Vivienne Stacey is a woman I can’t easily forget, though I must have met her last a couple of decades ago.

 I was a student then and on Sunday evenings, I used to attend a fellowship titled the Newnes' Fellowship, simply because it met in the home of a family titled by that name. And every so often the speaker would be a lady by the name of Vivienne Stacey, a towering woman in her Salwar Quameez, as fluent in Urdu as in English if not more. It has been many years, and I do not remember at all, what she preached or spoke, but what I remember till today is her deep and unconditional love for the people she lived among and served, incarnated in her dress, her language, her vocabulary and possibly her food habits etc hich I did not get to see. This was at a time, when inculturation was  not yet quite the normal thing.... in fact in many circles, it was even frowned upon as a sign of compromise, probably the 20th century version of what another generation would call going native.

 Vivienne at the time, when I used to meet her had just joined IFES, after close to twenty years in Pakistan and was also associated with  agency called BMMF. Both BMMF’s successor and the IFES member movement in India, UESI have since become abiding influences in my life. The obituary from IFES mentions that Vivienne was born in 1928 and IFES where she faithfully served for many years was born long after she was not just born, but well and truly active in service. I have no idea if she ever retired... I think people of that generation ever retired ... they just shifted gears and changed roles.

I don’t know if it would be fair to say that people like Vivienne Stacey aren’t around today, for I am not familiar with the landscape enough to say that, but this may still be the place and the time to pay tribute to that generation of people who may slowly become extinct as the 21st century progresses not because commitment is lacking in people, but because world geography and political geography is hanging. Such people as Vivienne were not perfect as of course we are not and in the light of hind sight they have attracted bad press for being paternalistic, patronizing and fostering unhealthy dependency. Such a portrayal may not be entirely wrong, for they were a product of their times in as much as we are a product of ours. But they served they purposes of God in their generation, quietly, and equally importantly loyally and faithfully and often receiving little reward or recognition on this earth. Even as their tribe slowly comes to an end, we need to remember and recognize the long serving legacy they leave behind.
 

Verse of the Day

Hebrews 6:10
“For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.”

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