Forty years later Amy described for one of her “children” a transaction that had taken place when she was alone in a cave in Arima. Having gone there to spend a day in solitude she faced with God feelings of fear about the future. Loneliness hovered like a spectre on the horizon. Things were all right at the moment, but could she endure years of being alone? The devil painted pictures of loneliness which were vivid to her many years later, and she turned to the Lord in desperation. “What can I do, Lord? How can I go on to the end?” His answer: “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate.”2
Her mother ventured to ask in a letter whether Amy “loved anybody very much.” Her answer was evasive. Had she met someone who made the possibility of marriage seem attractive, in spite of her early decision to remain single? Mr. Consterdine’s name had occurred once or twice in her letters—apparently a single missionary, kind, protective, thoughtful in small ways. A young woman of Amy’s beauty, gifts, and exuberance of spirit could not possibly have escaped the notice of any European bachelor who might have been around. If Mr. Consterdine or anybody else had proposed to her, she covered it with complete silence. She was a Victorian, with a Victorian’s scrupulous modesty, and she had given over all matters of the heart to Him to whom alone hers was open.
1. Matthew 16:24 (Phillips).
2. Psalms 34:22.
Chapter 9
The Unrepealed Commission
Breakfast at the Buxtons’ was at seven-thirty, followed by the reading of Daily Light. Then came Japanese and English prayers, and from nine till half past twelve language lessons. The midday meal was dinner. Everyone else in the house had time after dinner for rest and play. Not Amy. Rest and play? Perhaps for some it was necessary, but certainly not for her. Such an expenditure of time for a new missionary! She used the hour to teach English to a little boy who was eager to teach her Japanese—“a comical interchange of information!” Tea was next, then visiting, when Amy and Misaki San went to the village of Yokohama to try to find hearers for the Gospel. They usually had another tea there, then an hour’s Bible reading with a young man.
The schedule was unrealistic. Amy’s associates told her it couldn’t be done, so she tackled it with a smile. She couldn’t do it. After a few months she was forced to quit the English lessons and have a bit of quiet after dinner—not to rest, of course, and not to play, but to write letters. She told the folks at home that her poor head was tired and stupid, she had not studied for some weeks, and the enjoyment she had had at first in her lessons had taken wings. “Quiet,” however, was a relative term. She could get away by herself to write, but “downstairs squeaks a concertina (to be borne for the sake of the cause), outside screams a baby (I wish I had some soothing syrup), from one quarter wails a street cryer, to whom nobody seems inclined to attend, from another hammers a cooper. But the worst of the worst is the nerve-distracting shriek of a terrible tin horn performed upon by a youth who has yet to learn compassion.”
Nights were often broken by noise—a gang of boys, for example, thundering with all their might and main on the front door. “Now we have a highly respectable cook-san, who is the happy possessor of a kind heart and a thick head, foreign clothes (always too tight and minus a button or two). He is strangely obtuse as to puddings, but in matters of this sort he shines. The thundering ceased and he held a parley. It ended in tumultuous defeat on the part of the insurgents, and a victory, flat but satisfactory, on his: they retired from the field, he subsided into his quilts, and we went to dreamland.”
After nearly a year in Matsuye, Amy wrote in the letter she called her “Scrapperie,” read by many people at home, “I shall never, never, never learn Japanese. You may put it on my tombstone: expired in despair. I am in the middle of my lessons, and have stopped short to tell you so. I answer all Misaki San’s expostulations by assuring her that it is much more important for me to warn you to send out no more missionaries to a land with such a language, than to go on longer trying to learn it.” The length of the words alone (tokiakashiteoagemoshimashoka for example) was daunting.
Here is the last straw which has broken the final back of my resolution . . . I wanted to say, “I like fine weather better than wet”—not a complicated expression, one would imagine. It is the twist of construction that staggers me: “Rain of coming down bad honorable weather than even good honorable weather of days of side good is.”
You may learn pages of this, poll-parrot-fashion, but how to form other sentences in such a world? . . . Poor Misaki San is taking it quite seriously and I am scribbling under a perfect hailstorm of “Ah, Weesong [her pronunciation of Amy’s middle name, Wilson] San, dozo stop and learn more. Please say not so! Ah, Weesong San!
But all was not by any means lost. On the anniversary of her arrival in Matsuye she wrote that she had actually been the speaker at a little meeting, meant to be for children only, but men and women, “who would not otherwise waken up enough to trouble to come were attracted by the singing and crowded into the room. The children, “little wild rabbits a few weeks ago, as tame as pet ones now, clustered close about me.” When the room was jammed past toleration they moved into the courtyard and Amy spoke simply, helped by some men who translated into child language, “crumbling the bread, as it were.”
“We had just finished when an old woman who had been listening with great delight to her small grandchild’s performances in the sing-song line, came up to me and pulled my sleeve, saying, ‘All alone you have come, and well we have understood.’ Wasn’t it good of Him? I was half afraid they hadn’t quite. I thought of the last first of May and thanked God and took courage.”
Her letters describe dozens of meetings, always beginning with singing, always with distractions multiplied—the smokers smoked and tapped their tiny metal pipes loudly on the charcoal braziers, mothers nursed babies, undressed older children and rubbed them down, gongs sounded for prayer in nearby temples, terrible-looking idols gazed down from shelves in the houses where the meetings were held. Sometimes, in the middle of a hymn, “a splash in the near distance tells us that somebody is in the middle of something else—but I refrain. Oh, the strangeness of it!”
It was one thing to speak in a public meeting, but the thought of approaching a family as they sat in front of their own house filled her with fear. “Go and tell them about Me,” she heard her Master say. She had gone a few yards beyond them and it seemed silly to turn, the usual buts rose—I don’t know enough, may make mistakes and do more harm than good. Still that solemn Voice I am learning so slowly to recognize, spoke on—’Go and tell them about Me.’ It must be His, so I went. . . . In the simplest colloquial I repeated ‘God so loved the world,’ told them the very little I could, and left them sadly enough. It was so little My words are so few and so broken as yet, but pray that somehow He may use it to bring glory to His dear name.”
As in Belfast and Manchester, Amy sought out the factory girls. She cut an even stranger figure in their part of town than she had in the city slums at home. She was showered with stones and followed by jeering boys, but never mind. When she invited girls to a meeting nearly eighty came, making Amy cry as she remembered her girls at the two Welcomes and how they had sung “God be with you till we meet again.”
Her great longing was to have a “single eye” for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had given her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt others to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate. Why waste precious time, painful effort, on lesser things? Someone suggested that more girls would be drawn to the meetings if she offered lessons in sewing or embroidery and administered only a mild dose of the Gospel. But these girls worked from five in the morning till half past six in the evening. They had one day off in ten. They hadn’t time for foolishness. Furthermore, so far as Amy could see, there was no scriptural warrant for “consecrated fancywork and chatter,” for “fleshly things rather than spiritual.” “I would rather have two who came in earnest than a h
undred who came to play,” she said. “We have no time to toy with souls like this. It is not by ceremonial teamaking and flower arranging, not by wool chrysanthemum-making and foreign sewing-learning, but ‘by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’”1
The young men of Japan we re beginning to learn English, which she regarded as the “open Sesame of the world’s great treasure caves and poison caves too.” She must do something about that, give them an antidote for the Western books full of falsehood and skepticism that were making their way into Japanese. Somehow she fitted afternoon Bible classes for them into her schedule, beginning with the book of Daniel.
Meetings in tiny dark rooms, meetings in courtyards, meetings on the street, meetings for women, for children, for men, for young men, factory girls, farm worker s; meetings in the afternoons, meetings in the evening, often beginning at ten o’clock when the people came in from the fields, and lasting till midnight—no wonder Amy was exhausted. Once while waiting for a late-night meeting to begin she lay down behind some kind Christian women on a dirty mat on the floor, chilled by draughts, assailed by odors, and fell asleep. She woke to hear her name announced as the next speaker, “and before anybody had time to wonder anything, I was wide awake in my place, text found and all. A curious preparation for speaking, you will think, but I think He gave it to me, so it was all right.”
Amy felt that her ability to sleep in such conditions ought to prove to her fellow missionaries that she was robust enough to “live native.” Why on earth did they make such a fuss about her wanting to do this? Their attempts to teach her the wisdom learned through longer experience than hers made little impression, and she continued to try to persuade them to allow her to discard all Western ways. “If there were less of what seems like ease in our lives they would tell more for Christ and souls. . . . We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don’t wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.” She did promise her concerned friends that she would not go against the combined wisdom of them all and rush into a life of extreme austerity, but she was deeply troubled by their objections. “Satan is so much more in earnest than we are—he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”
She felt keenly her own helplessness, awkwardness, and ignorance, and begged her friends at home to pray. All other powers but prayer seemed infinitesimal and useless by comparison. As she thought of the giants of faith like Elijah or Hudson Taylor, she knew that she was nothing but a baby, “shamefully, yes, shamefully small. ‘That which I know not teach Thou me. Lord, teach us to pray.’” She deplored the tendency she found in herself to do more talking and writing about praying than actual praying. She lacked practice, she wrote, so it was small wonder she was an infant in prayer speech. Would her friends at home help? Would they, when they wakened in the night or were busy at work and her name flashed into mind, would they recognize it as God’s telegram to remind them to pray? Would they telegraph back? “Don’t let a moment slip. More may hang upon your instant yielding than you know or shall know till the great Then comes.”
Amy’s attempts to give her readers the verisimilitude of an actual experience by painting verbal pictures were never more ardent than when she tried to arouse spiritual concern for those who had never heard of Christ. She described a chilly little hotel where she sat trying to dry her clothes over a hibachi while she wrote. Behind her was the “honorable place,” a slab of wood on which were arranged golden persimmons, a spray of blossom, burning candles, and a bowl of incense, offerings to a relative whose anniversary of “deigning to cease to become” they were celebrating. Above the offerings hung a picture of a Buddhist dignitary. In the next room was a shrine with ancestral tablets and a many-armed idol of the goddess of mercy. Lamps swung before it, prayers were chanted. It cut deep into her heart to think of the emptiness of it all, the sadness, the cry of the silence of death.
You who can resist the half-articulate pleading of many and many a heart today, can you resist this? From millions of voiceless souls, it is rising now—does it not touch you at all? The missionary magazines try to echo the silent sob. You read them? Yes; and you skim them for good stories, nice pictures, bits of excitement—the more the better. Then they drop into the wastepaper basket, or swell some dusty pile in the corner. For perhaps “there isn’t much in them.” Very likely not; “there isn’t much in the silence any more than in darkness, at least not very much reducible to print; but to God there is something in it for all that. Oh! you—you, I mean, who are weary of hearing the reiteration of the great unrepealed commission, you who think you care, but: who certainly don’t, past costing point, is there nothing will touch you?
1. Zechariah 4:6.
Chapter 10
The School of Prayer
The new missionary who is sure of his call can hardly help expecting to see miracles when he reaches the place of service. Amy Carmichael had had a glimpse, through her work with the shawlies, of how the other half” lived, had experienced what it is to be a quaint figure presenting a hardly credible message, and knew that not by any means all who hear it find it even interesting, let alone compelling. She had seen some fruit, however. God had honored her faith and her labor of love, and there were many “trophies of grace to show for it. Surely in Japan where the need was far more acute she could expect even greater miracles and trophies. She prayed for them. She worked as hard as she could for them. She believed God’s promises. But again and again her letters express her consciousness of the weakness of her own faith and the overpowering might of the obstacles to be removed. Heathendom was a felt presence, never more overwhelming than in an Eastern carnival or matsuri. She wished she could describe such a scene with a fire-dipped pen even with a pen dipped in her own heart’s blood if that was what it took to rouse the people at home from their lethargy.
We are riding together in a kuruma, a Japanese girl and I, spinning along through deserted streets, dark and still. We hear the beat of drum, the clang of cymbal, the hum of a thousand voices. Suddenly it breaks into a roar and we are in the midst of it all, caught in the whirl, swept along through streets all shining with crimson light, over bridges reflected in crimson-lit waters, under arches dropping with crimson fire. It is as if the stars had fallen upon earth, changing color as they fall. A burst of “Nebuchadnezzar’s orchestra” in full swing drowns our voices, should we try to speak. . . . Onward rushes the mighty rabble—men and women in exchanged attire and gaudy colors flit past and mingling with uncanny monster forms they dance the wild matsuri dance, with abandonment inconceivable, every step a parody, every gesture a caricature. Dragons, griffins, reptiles, fishes, birds there are, all dancing, waving fans, shouting, howling, singing, noising in one form or another, in chorus perfectly bewildering. Old crones with wrinkles showing through the paint, babies wrapped in rainbow hues, gazing with astonished eyes, children gay as butterflies and as bewitching, men of good position in grotesque masks, women of the gentler order forgetting all refinement in the strange glamor of the hour—endlessly on and on they swarm. . . . A huge car is coming, drawn by scores of revellers, festooned with flowers and tinsel, wreathed with chains of light. Standing within it and walking before and after are girls robed in silks and crepes, palest shades of pink and blue, glittering with embroideries of gold and silver. Pale, expressionless faces are theirs, dead, vacant, joyless, their heavy half-shut eyes hardly glance at the revelry around them. The weary feet drag slowly on. We turn away heart-sick, for this is heathendom indeed. Our kuruma man speaks: have we seen enough? Ah yes, and far more. He takes us home, and we leave behind us the chaos of sound and color and mirth all hollow and sin all dark and in the silence of a pain we cannot conquer we find ourselves just spirit-crushed, and with no language but a cry.
The passion of her pleas for prayer and for understanding, the vividness with wh
ich she tried to depict what she was up against, were inspired by a genuine conviction that the work she was called to was without question God’s work, and could not possibly be done without the help of God’s people-prayer warriors” who would share the bitterness of the battle with her. There was another bitterness which probably added to the urgency. Rumors reached her from England of continued criticism of her having gone off to Japan. This would vitiate the prayers she needed so badly, so she reminded her friends of her call in 1892, “Go ye,” and in 1893, “Go to Japan.” She confessed that she had made some mistakes during the year that intervened between those calls, mistakes due partly to the fear that if she did not find out immediately where she was to go, the strength to obey would fail and the light of the Lord’s smile would be gone. “So I tried and we tried—and failed. He had to teach us to Be Still and Know. Then when His time came His will was clear.” She asked her supporters to believe that it was God’s constraining hand which had beckoned her away, God’s voice which would not let her stay. “Please, please, what you can’t approve of, won’t you forgive and don’t let the prayer help He means you to give us be lost, for we need it so.”
One experience in particular showed how greatly she needed it. Early one morning she was told that a man nearby was possessed by a “fox spirit.” This spirit was worshipped in Japan, shrines were dedicated to him, and stone foxes were often set side by side with Buddhas. What this demon was doing to the poor man sounded very like New Testament stories—“Wherever he is, it gets hold of him, throws him down on the ground and there he foams at the mouth and grinds his teeth.”1 Amy went straight to her room and asked the Lord why she couldn’t cast him out. “Because of your unbelief,” was His answer. She spent hours on her knees before she asked Misaki San if she believed the Lord Jesus was willing to cast the devil out of the man. Misaki San was startled, but after some thought and prayer, declared that she believed. Amy’s impulse was to go at once, but she remembered that the disciples were told that such a demon required fasting as well as prayer. So she and her friend did both, having sent a message in the meantime to ask if they would be permitted to see the man. Yes, came the answer, but he was very wild. He had six foxes, and was tied up.
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