“To any whom the Hand Divine is beckoning: count the cost, for He tells us to, but take your slate to the foot of the Cross and add up the figures there.”
The temperature was in the nineties, but the mission house was cool with punkahs (huge fans suspended from the ceiling and operated by a coolie with a rope) waving continuously and cups of hot tea, the Englishman’s cooler, always available. Amy’s “brain oppression” lessened, and as she saw others who were far more in need of a change than she, she felt ashamed that she had given in to tiredness. But, she hastened to explain, her giving in was only because of the fear that she might give trouble to others. She assured her friends that she was not thin—she was, in fact, the “opposite of a shadow —and that “promotion” (to heaven) was not imminent.
Amy had been in Shanghai only a week when, feeling refreshed and without excuse for indulging herself any longer in such comfort, she asked God what was next. The answer came as it had when she went to Japan.
“On the eighteenth of July the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go to Ceylon. The CIM people were horrified. Was she well enough to go? Did she know what she was doing? Why Ceylon? How could she go alone? Only the last question was settled. Another missionary was making the voyage and would look after her. Forthwith Amy booked a passage for Colombo. Off she sailed on July 28, sure of one thing: He goeth before. “Only whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest in this most solemn way will understand at all, she wrote pages and pages of explanations to the homefolk who would worry about their “Keswick Child.” It never once crossed her mind that she needed counsel, let alone permission, from those who had sent her. She felt one in spirit with Abraham, “not knowing whither,” and with Luther, “Here I stand—I can do no other.”
“I am prepared for much blame, or at best misunderstanding, but I cannot help it. One dare not do anything but obey when that Voice speaks.” How did it speak? In three ways: through the Word, with unanswerable force, through the inward leading of the Spirit, and (often but not always) through circumstances. She felt confirmed by all of these, although her friends found no confirmation for the last, nor was Amy herself sure there was any infallible warrant for that one in the Bible. The old saints appeared to have gone often in what seemed direct opposition to existing facts. She could see, however, that circumstances, which are all of God’s ordering, might be confirmatory witnesses.
She reviewed the circumstances of this move: She had not wasted much strength in learning Japanese, had had no house or settled station, and few responsibilities in Matsuye, hence would not be missed. Fellow-workers had helped by prayer and by mending and packing her things. The passage to Ceylon cost only ten pounds. When she stopped in Colombo en route to Japan, friends there had remarked that the Lord might send her back to them. God had brought helpful people all along the way. Could there be any doubt that He was in charge? She pleaded all these proofs to her worried loved ones.
“All life’s training is just exactly what is needed for the true Life-work, still out of view but far away from none of us. Don’t grudge me the learning of a new lesson.”
In Hong Kong she caught a chill. On August 2 she wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Very ill—fever—alone—kept—comforted.” She was brought (she admitted it) to the very end of herself, of self-strength, self-energy, everything. “What if I never reach Ceylon at all?” she wondered during a turbulent, fevered night. “What if God’s work for me is to give all up and go home by the next boat?” It would certainly look as though her call was false, her faith misplaced, her Master’s voice misunderstood.
When she recounted the journey years later, selective memory had obliterated all but the faithfulness of God. Every one of the imagined (and, as she found, real) objections people had raised was gone. She told her “children” that it had never occurred to her that anyone might misunderstand. The need for explanations had faded from memory, along with the battles fought all the way to Ceylon. She had not reread the shipboard letters describing the wrestlings of mind and soul—“Oh, just awfully the Devil came with doubts and fears!”
1. See 2 Corinthians 12:9.
Chapter 12
Not Much of a Halo in Ceylon
At dawn of the day the ship was to dock in Colombo a small, tired woman stood on deck, tortured with fear, weak, “utterly unfit for the great dim unknown, coming now so close to me.” A moth, Amy said, could have crushed her then. She picked up her Daily Light and read, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”1 A flood of sunshine fell across the mists and she decided she would trust and not be afraid. Welcomed and invited to stay at a mission cottage in Colombo she was immediately made one of the circle, but felt helpless, trustless, wondered why she had come, and longed for solitude and quiet.
The D.O.M. had word of her whereabouts. What on earth could his darling girl be up to now? Off to Ceylon! Was she about to pull up all stakes in Japan and join another mission? He cabled her at once, advising her against joining any mission in Ceylon. Then he wrote, expressing his serious concern about the move she had made without so much as informing the Keswick Mission Committee in advance. She was devastated. She had left it all in God’s hands, believing He would make things as clear to her constituency as He had made them to her. “But it has not been so, and I see my wrongness and cannot be sorry enough.”
She found that “a tiny band of girl-witnesses unto Him” (three single missionaries whose leaders had both died of fever) had been praying for a new leader to be sent to the village of Heneratgoda. To them it was perfectly obvious that Amy was the answer. To her it was not. She, their leader? The thought filled her with new fears, but as they met and prayed together she believed that while she was not meant to lead them she could be “the string to the beads.”
Making it clear that she must not be regarded as a member of the Village Mission of Heneratgoda she moved into their thatch-roofed hut. Its floor was composed of what Amy’s Victorian sensibilities allowed her to describe only as “mud and horror. ” During every minute of every hour they were under the meticulous scrutiny of many eyes (“these good folk seem fond of character-study”), a thing unsettling, of course, but “an easy way of entertaining one’s friends—live and let look!” She found beauty in the surroundings, always particularly observant of birds.
Yesterday I had five delightful minutes watching a honeysucker. There, in the bright sunshine like a bit of blue flame among white flowers, the tiny chirping thing flitted to and fro. Now poising itself on a spray of shining blossom, diving its curved beak deep into each fragrant flower, never marring a petal, now fluttering in and out of the bush on which they grow, its clear electric tinting showing well against the green, and now for a moment motionless, half hidden in the whiteness, a little living jewel in a snowdrift of sweet flowers.
With her usual determination and earnestness—never mind that she was supposed to be convalescing—she plunged at once into meetings. “Bright lamp shining in the midst of bright flowers, bright dark eyes shining upon us, bright praise songs rising from lips closed till now, soft moonlight shining upon all.” Here she was in a new field of service, a new language to learn, the old, old story to tell. Children were most open to hear that story, and she began to gather them, “dear little brownies with necklaces and bangles, such a contrast to the quaint tots of Japan, the queer little imps of China.” When one three-year-old refused to join the singing, she forfeited the privilege of sitting on Amy’s lap. A thumb went into her mouth, she sulked, was put on a chair in the corner, and told she was a sinful child. Three times in an hour the child fell off the chair. When she was told she could not go home till she was good, “a smile of much delight lit up the sweet contentment of her face and she remarked triumphantly that she did not want to go home. The opposite tack was tried at once and within five minutes the fight was won and with more mischief than penitence, I’m afraid, the monkey declared herself ‘good.’”
Heathenism in all its forms Amy found appalling. She descr
ibed a celebration which took place just across the lane from their little house:
Through the moonless dark we can see the flare of torches, the glimmer of lamps, the flicker of tapers. The woman there was ill, they had a devil-dance over her, now she was recovered and they were paying the vow to the demon who had withdrawn as requested. One man is playing a sort of long-shaped tomtom, hung round his neck, two more are dancing up and down and round and round on a marked circle, sacred to the presiding spirit. Two or three boys are arranged in corners to yell at given periods. On the ground lies the woman. Behind the performers three altars stand, decked with creamy water lilies, lit with tapers floating in split coconuts, and on each there is rice in little piles, a few coins, and sprays of the exquisite areca flower. All around there are people, men and women and boys. They will go on all night. In the early morning the dance will vary, they will sing something different too. At present it is a continuous drum thump, bangle-jingle, weird cry, and monotonous chant. They are propitiating the demon and at the same time trying to frighten him away. . . . “Doctrines of demons” are no myth here. . . . I turned to my Bible: “Be strong and courageous, be not afraid or dismayed, for the King of Assyria nor for all the multitude that is with him, FOR there be more with us than with him: with him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles. And the people rested themselves upon the word of Hezekiah, King of Judah.”2 And so, I think, may we.
When this woman from the windswept seacoast of Ireland found herself “away in the heart of heathendom with my sister-girls in this dark, dark jungle” she was telling the straight truth as she saw it. She turned with an instinctive deadly nausea from any coloring of the facts, any slightest bending of the truth in order to create a more interesting picture. She was far ahead of her time as a missionary reporter. The constituency was accustomed to a certain triumphalism in missionary stories. Not that there were none like Amy who told it straight, but there were many who popularized mission work by dramatizing the successes and skipping lightly over what was far more commonplace than success. “There isn’t much of a halo in real life,” she wrote, “we save it all up for the missionary meetings.”
The original letters (reprints of which Amy had expressly forbidden) show evidence of another’s attempt, if not to color the facts, at least to sweeten them a bit. Someone had crossed out parts not thought suitable for reprint, such as mention of fleas, lice, or “slimy, crawly things,” filthy slime through which she had to wade, and, in a reference to the inability of the Singhalese to focus their minds, the editor has deleted Amy’s aside, “if minds they have.”
The hard work of visiting—“Do you throw a halo around it?” she wrote:
You go to a hut and find nobody in, you go to the next and find nobody wants you, you go to the next and find an old woman who says yes, you may talk if you like, and she listens in an aimless sort of way and perhaps one or two more drift in, and you go on, a prayer behind each sentence if you are speaking through interpretation (but I hope I won’t have to do that always), an undercurrent flowing all the time, if you are sitting silently listening to somebody else speaking. Perhaps they are thoughtful enough to object—“We ourselves are Buddhists, why should we change? Do you kill animals? We don’t want a religion like that.”
If you ask them don’t they eat eggs and fish, they say oh yes, but they wouldn’t poach an egg (i.e. break the shell!), boiling it is different. They wouldn’t kill a fish, they take it out of the water and it dies of its own accord. . . . It is so disappointing sometimes, just when you think you have got a little bit of the glorious Truth wedged in, when the heart seems touched perhaps by the wonderful story of Calvary, some little triviality comes up, and some question about pigs or eggs sends you back to the very beginning. But there are the bright bits, too, times when a flash of Heaven’s own sunshine lights up the darkness of the darkest mud hut, and one such moment is worth a lifetime’s plod.
Although Amy was told that it was a risky business in Ceylon for single women to visit Buddhist priests, she did it. Taking questions from a crowd also was dangerous. She did that too. A priest turned up in an open-air meeting one day and put these questions: You Christians believe God leads people who are in earnest to the Truth, do you? Yes. Do you deny that Gautama Buddha was in real earnest? No. How was it, then, that he did not find it? Amy’s answer, recorded in a letter: “To our Father and his Father we may leave the gentle Buddha. To the Indian Prince Siddhartha (the teacher of whom Buddha was the deified incarnation), as to the Persian King Cyrus, He may have said, ‘I have even called thee, I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me.’—but what of those,” she added to home friends, “who today are seeking and, so far as we are concerned, seeking as vainly as he? There are some such. In inland China Mr. Hudson Taylor found one. All old missionaries can tell of a few rare souls found blindly groping, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him. Oh that our skirts may be free from the stain of our brother’s blood!”
Because of a doctor’s verdict that it would never do for Amy to return to Japan—she had “brain exhaustion”—she had finally settled down, she wrote in November 1894, to study the Singhalese language. Her luggage was to be sent in a year or so from Japan, and the D.O.M. was shipping a box of clothing to Ceylon for her. She had reached a measure of peace. The Lord’s field for her work would be Ceylon. “All is settled,” she wrote on November 14.
On November 27 she learned that the D.O.M. had had a stroke. Within an hour she set out for Colombo, borrowed warm clothing from a missionary, and sailed for London the next day.
The journey was a nightmare from start to finish. She was so ill she could remember little except pain, fever, fear, heat, then, in Naples, icy wind. The Lord sent along His angels, one of them in Rome to rout her from sleep on one train and get her on the right train for Paris, another a Frenchman who piloted her across Paris to the train for Calais. A rough Channel crossing. Her mother meeting her in London on December 15. December 16—her twenty-seventh birthday. It is doubtful that there was any festivity. Then long days of blank. Finally the faces of beloved Keswick friends, a doctor’s face. Through it all the urgent thought, “I must be well. I must get to Broughton Grange.” She got there in time for Christmas.
1. Nehemiah 8:10.
2. 2 Chronicles 32:7, 8.
Chapter 13
To the India of the Raj
England was very good to me.” Thus Amy summed up in her autobiography the ten months spent there.
She neglected to mention that she became a published author. Marshall Brothers of London brought out during that year (1895) her first book, From Sunrise Land, a collection of letters from Japan with illustrations by the author and William Wilson, the D.O.M.’s son.
It was not her idea. She had to be talked into allowing the material to go into print. Persuaded at last, she explained her primary reason in the introduction:
“These little letters were written just for ‘home’; remembering this, your kindness will excuse mistakes and informalities. And the same plea applies to the little sketches scattered throughout. . . . Others could tell you far more, and far more worthily, of the showing forth of His hand in their part of the great Mission Trust. Will they believe that this thought presses, and that the more conscious of it we are, the more grateful we shall be for their prayer? Please pray! Please ask that the Master may stoop to use a thing so simple and so small, to lift even one into the Love wherewith He loves.”
Rereading the book later she was, like most authors, not happy with it. Tolstoy is said to have lamented, when he read War and Peace years after it first appeared, “This must all be done over.” In Amy’s copy of From Sunrise Land she wrote, “Bad rhymes in parts, bad writing all through.”
The D.O.M. was overjoyed to have her at home again, believing at first that she had been “given back” to him. He recovered from the stroke, but soon knew that he would have to relinquish her once more since she had no
intention of staying. The doctors’ verdict that the tropics were not to be considered again did not in the least deter her. If any mission anywhere would take her, she was going.
In the spring a letter came from a friend in Bangalore, India. The climate there, she wrote, was healthy and delightful. Good news for Amy’s friends. Bad news for Amy—“it sounded much too easy.” On second thought, her going there would “lighten things for those who found it hard to see that I should go anywhere,” so she applied to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and went to London in May for an interview. She was not an Anglican, but was warmly recommended by Keswick leaders who were Anglican clergymen. In an informal meeting on July 26 at Keswick she was accepted. The next day she spoke at a missionary meeting in the tent. “Who can forget,” wrote a clergyman, “Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael’s farewell address, ere she left for her life of sacrifice in India, as she unrolled a ‘ribband of blue’ with the golden words, ‘Nothing too precious for Jesus?’”
Amy was with her dear “Fatherie” on his seventieth birthday, but both had to face the imminent, wrenching, second parting. “Of the blistering days before I sailed and of the goodbye I will say nothing. We shall all be together soon in the Father’s Country.”
She sailed on October 11, “with many a backward look at Japan,” and a few wistful ones at China, the country to which she had felt drawn ever since hearing Hudson Taylor speak of its millions’ spiritual need.
The country whose shores she reached in November of 1895 had been under British rule since 1600. London merchants had had their eye on the riches of India’s spice trade, then under the control of Dutch privateers. Outraged when the price of a pound of pepper went up five shillings in 1599, a group of twenty-four merchants met to establish a small trading firm. The East India Company was chartered in December of that year by Queen Elizabeth I, giving them a monopoly of English trade with the “Indies,” which comprised China, India, and Indonesia. It was not only pepper they were after. Wondrous tales were told of gems the size of pigeons’ eggs, endless forests of pepper, indigo, cinnamon, and ginger, and potions guaranteeed to perpetuate youth and virility. In August of 1600 Captain William Hawkins anchored his galleon north of Bombay and set off inland to find the world’s most powerful monarch, the Great Mogul. The emperor granted him not only trading rights, but offered a beautiful girl (an Armenian Christian, it was claimed) from his harem.
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