'AMERICA HAS NO SENSE OF DANGER'

'One afternoon Buchman sent for me and told me what he thought of spoiled, selfish, bad-tempered women and the effect they had on their husbands and children. He looked me straight in the eye, and said: "This is love and it's going on." That afternoon I went for a walk with Bunny . . . We were crossing a field. Bunny, wearied by my nagging, lay down on a plank of wood and flung his arms out. I looked down on him and suddenly caught my breath. The plank was an old piece of fencing. It had a cross-piece nailed across the top. Bunny was lying stretched out on a cross.

'I realised for the first time how I crucified him with my selfishness. I began to realise the courage of a man like Buchman who cared enough to tell me the truth and to cure the things in my nature which made me so difficult to live with. When he said it was love, it was precisely what it was.’14

Her husband wrote of another aspect of Buchman's approach: 'Like a true surgeon Frank knew the necessity of bringing healing. I too had been spoilt and selfish. One day the necessity for change was made clear to me by a friend. I deserved the corrective, but healing had not been brought about. I remained in an unhappy state. Frank sent for me. He looked at me with compassion and spoke three words, "Don't stay bleeding." Then he prayed. I wish I could remember that prayer. I only remember the sense of healing and peace which came into my heart. I went out of the room a different man.'15

During the time at Tahoe Buchman often brought up in the full morning meeting the personal faults he had observed in his colleagues. Bremer Hofmeyr, the former Rhodes Scholar from South Africa, had borrowed a hammer from a local resident and not returned it. Buchman spent much of one morning underlining the sloppiness of some of the men and what such negligence would do to the confidence of the community. Alan Thornhill, when his turn came to be fireman for the night, vaguely thought his job was to prevent fires - and no fire was lit to make the breakfast porridge the next morning. This hardly called for comment.* A cook for what turned out to be a disastrous dinner for a special guest hardly dared appear next morning. To her astonishment all Buchman could say was, 'That soup!' and dissolve into laughter. But often Buchman felt that these minor mistakes needed serious discussion, for they could be a key to making intelligent but impractical individuals into whole personalities. It was the old Gospel principle of 'He who is faithful in little is faithful in much.'

(* Thornhill's own comment was: Oh, son of Oxford's dreaming spires, You really are a smart one. You thought your job was stopping fires, When you were meant to start one!)

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