GREEN GLORY

A Missionary Life:
Rev. J. Wesley Day
China, Malaysia, Indonesia

Side Trip: Bricks and Porcelain
From a Sermon on Jeremiah 18:1-11, The Potter and the Clay

This is the best-known illustration of God's power over men and over history.

Jeremiah lived at a time when the people of Israel were doing many evil things. The rich were eating up the poor, crime and corruption were common, people were not worshipping God in their hearts, but turned to the worship of many gods. Yet they believed that because their people were God's favorites, no harm could ever come to them.

Jeremiah was against all that. And to get his message across, he visited the potter's house, near Jerusalem, and later told what he saw.

And what he saw was this: A potter was making a pot. In the making, something went wrong. The potter did not make the vessel he planned to at first, because it was ruined. Instead, he made something else.

And he told the people: You are like clay, Israel. God intended to make something beautiful out of you. But because you have been marred by sin, he will have to make something else. But be sure God's will will be done!

To make articles from clay three things are needed: 1. the clay. 2. the artist -- the potter, and 3. the process -- the procedure -- suited to the clay to make it what the potter desires.

The clay used provides one of the limitations of the potter. Poor clay will make a poor pot, and earth which is not clay at all may not have in it the possibility of making a pot at all.

When a child I used to play by the seashore. Sometimes with other boys I would watch the waves coming up the beach, then I would imagine each wave was an advancing army, and I would build a fort to hold back the enemy hosts. One wave would come up and touch my fort of sand. Then another wave would come and touch it, and several more, and nothing would happen to my fort, which I would think was defending me very well. Then a great wave would come, would run over my little fort of sand, and as the great wave swept out to sea again, there would be nothing left. I had built my fort out of sand, which melted away when moving water reached it. The nature of the sand was a limiting factor on what I could build with it.

In northwest China is a wide area of country covered by windblown loess soil. It is a very fine soil and has at least one unusual characteristic. It can be cut like a cake, and it will retain the shape in which you cut it. It is hundreds of feet deep in places. You may be walking along a path through a cornfield, and see a curl of smoke rising from a little chimney in the cornfield. You walk up to where the smoke is, and come suddenly to a cliff. Peering over the edge you look one hundred or more feet to the floor of a valley below. In the valley are some houses against the cliff, in fact some of the rooms of these houses are cave rooms dug into the cliff. From the cave rooms the people have bored holes up to the corn field above, from where the smoke of their fires can go out.

During the war, in 1937 I spent one night in a big cave, called a "Yao" in a loess cliff in Shansi. It was comfortable, went far into the cliff, and seemed very well protected. The people had a complete hotel by simply diffing long passage ways into the cliff, then moving in furniture.

However, one year I read of a big earthquake in part of northwest China. The soil in which the caves were dugwas shaken like ashes in a sieve. The cliffs and caves were shaken down, and thousands of people in their cave homes were buried alive.

The fine fine windblown soil, though it cuts like a cake and stands for decades against the rain, had its limitations; it could not stand a good shaking. He who would build in it must live within its limitations. The potter, like the builder, is limited by the material he uses.

The treatment of the material in preparation also has a great deal to do with the result.

In a valley behind our mission in Kalgan was a broad area where they made brick. To make brick is very simple. They take forms andf fill them with mud, and place them on the ground, then they lift the frame, leave the cake of earth to dry in the sun. When it is dry, they have a bricvk, all ready to use.

These are called "sun-dried" bricks, and are used very commonly throughout the country. They are very cheap, and for many purposes good enough. Thus when we wanted to keep thieves out of our yeard, we built a wall of sundried bricks, adding a layer of good bricks on the top, like a roof to protect somewhat against the rain. It lasted for a while, and didn't cost much.

However, one summer I made a trip through part of China, and came into a town in Shantung province where it had been raining without letup for two weeks.

As I walked through the poor section of town I saw a pitiful specatacle. The mud brick walls from which the homes of the poor were made were just melting away in the continuous rain. It seemed like the whole section fo town was melting away in the long-continued downpour.

Bricks made by just drying them in the air can't stand much.

There is another kind of brick which is made and can be bought in Kalgan. It is made from the same clay as the sun-dried bricks. But a good brick cannot be shaken apart, and it will not melt in the longest rain. It is brick which has been made by fire. Hardened by going through fire, it is very strong.

In these potteries near Kalgan they also made simple pottery. I have not watched the process, but it must be taht used in the days of Jeremiah. The potter near Jerusalem, we read, had a potter's wheel upon which he shaped the clay. This consisted of a havy disc below to give momentum, and a lighter disk above for the shaping fo the clay.

They make ordinary rude articles in Kalgan, like flower pots and water jars for daily use.

In another part of the country, in a certain town in Kiangsi Province, I have seen beautiful porcelain, renowned the world over, and made in that place.

I do not know whether the difference between the clay pots of Kalgan and the beautiful porcelain of Kiangsi, which graces kings' tables, is due to the clay, or to the artists, or to the process of manufacture. But there is certainly a difference in the result, and it must be due to one or more of these three things.

While traveling through I put my available cash into two tiny articles of porcelain which still gracefully decorate my little collection of Chinese treasures. I regret there is no evidence of Kalgan pottery in the collection....

-- J. Wesley Day, English Protestant Church, Sungei Gerong, Sumatra, Indonesia, October 18, 1959; in Indonesian in Ulu Church, Nov 1, 1959, and Medan Sekolah Alkitab (Bible School) December 14, 1966.