Currently Reading...“Chasing The Dragon” By Pullinger
“IMMIGRATION control boarded the ship and I stood long in the queue longing to disembark and get on with my adventure. All the places we passed earlier on the voyage seemed so flat by comparison. Here was perspective. Here were mountains shimmering and fading into the midst…
I found myself with peace and as I recognised that this was the place God had chosen I said thank you.”
***
The words from Jackie Pullinger author of Chasing The Dragon.
Can it be done? The signs we read about holiness can they really work? Is it possible to heal the sick by the laying of hands, cure them, speak with the language of the indwelling spirit, put off druglords from violence simply by eye-contact and finding the Kingdom of God the Bible speaks about by listening to a hearty dream from childhood? Is it possible? In this day and age of T.V. imagery and individuality it would be wise to caution against believing that there are proofs or works of the Holy Spirit, but when I read Jackie Pullingers Chasing The Dragon 21st anniversary edition even the logical side of me begs to differ in favour for the works of the divine. Pullingers Chasing The Dragon as of 2001 was 21 years old, is a personal testimony about her experience from a young but aspiring English missionary during the late sixties ministering to the wretched residents in the drug-infested Walled City of Kowloon Hong Kong. In the forward she is described as haven given this testimony somewhat reluctantly in the tradition of humble saints. Having said that because she is persuaded that writing this her book may lift and win over hearts and minds for her cause she gives it a go and charges the reader to dare believe her anti-social, spectacular yet highly believable encounters. Whatever Jackie went through, however unusual it may seem to many even this day she explains the events she witnessed as if we were there with her, and she is really just like us. There aren't many pretensions here, and she did cut down on using flowery language to intensify the passion of the scene, but what she did bring to the foreground through her experience was change, the grace that change with mercy brings.
And the situations the author finds herself against speak of this grace out loud. When I came to certain instances I did want to put myself there just to imagine what I would do.
The time-frame of this books narrative does jump about the place. From the beginning Chapter dating from the late sixties the Author is following her friends blood-trail in a dark alley to a few years forward more chapters down, and then a years back again some chapters after. Jackie acknowledges the unorthodoxy of her narration from the outset, but I think this gives the book a feel of spontaneity with characters often fading away leaving their charming impressions early in the book but when pages pass they are only mentioned as reformed or loosely connected with the person who she presently describes having previously done this or that.
Its like; "O' really who would have thought?" Kind of brings more about the characters she talks about initially through loose reference. By the way two extra chapters are added in this special edition, but in no way are the details she gives repetitive or over explained. The drug addicts the author ministers by opening a youth centre and teaching English and Music at first are mainly teenage boys. The girls are their money through sex to pay for the habit. And these are the ones she must in her own words live with, love and become as equals as friends. Here is how Jackie briefly describes what she sees as her mission: “My mission was to help the Walled City (Hong-Kong, Kowloon) people understand who Christ was. If they could not understand the words about Jesus, then we Christians should show them what He was like by the way He lived. I remember He said: “If someone forces you to go a mile, go with him two miles.” There seemed to be a lot of Christians who did not mind walking one, not many could be bothered to walk two, and no one who wanted to walk three. Those in need that I met seemed to need three.”
(p45)
Most of the boys that are drug-addicts are in gangs for status and safety, while the instituted religion of the Triads serves the gang that they have a personal duty and even national cause to their country and to themselves. Some ganglords quite nobly associate themselves only with opium, disapproving any class-A or harder drugs, while other disillusioned souls, need to get higher and higher in both drug quantity and type. Yet somehow these same children are the ones who give this book its colour. Their usual scepticism to foreigners, Christian ones at that. Their simple reflections of what society should be, and how to run their lives.
The scene of this book does seem dangerous as the youth worker Jackie is female and Hong Kong did have its political factions, rival gangs as they were still under the English and wanted liberation. But she uses her femaleness or the fact that she is a female as a blessing, going where men would be beaten and gives quite a rebellious testimony from this. That is why a certain triad member says to her something like you are lucky we even put up with you foreigner if you were a man you would have been beaten up or killed.
They say the "truth is stranger than fiction." Well, perhaps an open-mind is needed to take in what is really being discussed about this rare experience. Opening a youth centre, and running it between the notorious streets of rival gangs, speaking no word of modern Chinese at first, still manages to get protection from dark drug lords whom she refers to in the chapter named "Big Brother Is Watching You." In a situation when the former addicts her friends were thinking of resorting to violence for Jackie's sake this is what she had to say:
"I was not particularly worried for myself though I would really be frightened and I would not like it, if somebody wanted to kill or slash me, but I would not be likely to grab a knife and stab him back. More likely I would fall on my knees, pray and die."
(p181)
She does things her own way, which is her faith in Gods way. Always listening to the inner-voice as it was her childhood dream to initially be a missionary. A dream that got covered by other passing things but still came at the ripe right time and she pursued this dream with a passion. One of the earliest memories of Jackie's childhood was of God and the last judgement which she recalls as a four or five year old musing near a heater and feeling it burn.
Jackie keeps her backbone strong pretty much through the entire experience she describes even in seemingly tragic events. As the Author's reflections don't lose their simply odd but true humour and shows how cheerful in gloom she was.
This sense of humour which we all find unexplained when it approaches at the most oddest hour is what humanizes her narrative, and the situations lived.
The situations she wishes to witness are situations which the Hong Kong officials want nothing to do with, and this is why there is a line about this ignorance or fear of drug reformation that believes "once a drug addict always a drug addict" in fact some authorities are attributed to saying that the only way to come off drugs which they can perceive is death, but Jackie and her faith begs to differ and she convinces them even lawyers as to who really holds the power to heal and help these victims off their addictions.
When reading this it seems that any individual who may not know how to make sense of the signs of the Holy Spirit described at the end of Mark's gospel may read clearly the humanity and humility that make the evidence of these signs clear almost believable unlike what may have been seen on T.V and miles away at that. Jackie on the other hand was initially a sceptic of these gifts at least never believed that she would or could be used by them. It is interesting to note how she illustrates how it felt to receive them or be received by them. How she didn't know when IT happened until she mentally let go. She also goes deeper and I think makes more sense later when she says it didn't make that much of a difference to her Christian life until she was told how to use it in a practical and faithful way which she then does and does bravely throughout. From this I feel that she is showing the movements of the spirit in her and her ministry. She also goes through the laying of the hands another sign or work and how she leaves addicts in still motions with shut eyes secretly praying or receiving divine visions in spirit. In other situations telling her audience or those beside her not to laugh as she prays almost aloud for the healing of a sick one who pulls through. They do receive Jesus by receiving her (see Mathew 10:40 in the Gospels). She and the many Anglo-American volunteers whom she soon shows how to help pray silently in tongues frequently in buses, on roadways almost without ceasing. And this is why she is rewarded with their thanks even to the point where she has a dream or like a dream of her in a choir-like procession singing and dancing all the way. Bringing for the first time MUSIC to the lonely and dark alleys of the Walled City.
THE thought of "abandoning" or “forsaking all” has not escaped me, and I am sure all of us called at some time or the other have been blessed to contemplate the thoughts of total dependence on God that is if we are honest with ourselves. Some do dare, and get rewarded from their faith and courage in the form of hundreds of brothers and sisters and tens of mothers and father figures on this earth, and who knows what after. Jackie strikes me as product of this rebellious lot.
When getting along through this book I suppose there is a time when the question: "Why Hong Kong?" Would be asked. That is: why is the spirit like this there? Or why does she make it sound so easy the way the spirit works and is received? How does this strange Holy Spirit find its place? There is help for this, as even the author of this book realises that there is something spiritually fruitful about the Asian land as compared to her homeland England when she writes that foreigners, English foreigners who came to see what was going on did see and receive the spirit as proof but when they left the country and ministry they came to realise that the spirit stayed behind. I suppose they would be asking themselves; why doesn't it work now? Why doesn't it work at home in front of their people? Perhaps the saying where I am there my ministers will be (see Johns Gospel) answers that. As Jackie a minister in Christ left all to start up in a foreign land that needed God. Not knowing what to expect but following and listening to the inner-voice ripe for her believe in what God may do.
I remember missionary week when it came in my attended church, how the Priest there once said why do we people here (developed countries) allow suffering if we are blessed spiritually and materially? Well the sad thing from all this is that some of us here or anywhere will never really know how blessed we are until we face up like in Jackie's case, and put ourselves voluntarily into a situation whereby our only hope is in the belief in the Christian God and what he wants to do with us or where he is leading us.
Discussing the “Chasing The Dragon” May 30th/04....
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