A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  Never once were the members of the Band asked to come back and teach again. “Go!” said one woman, “We neither want you nor your book nor your way.” An old leper called out, “Who wants your Lord Jesus here?” A devil-dancer with her hair matted and twisted, her face spotted and smeared with idol marks, snarled at them, “Your god is no god. If I come to him my devil-god will kill me. He is god. Yours died, you say—died and was buried. Your god is no god. Go away and tell your lies somewhere else. Who asks you to tell them here?”

  Not all rejected the Truth. There were now and then occasions of tremendous joy when, at sunset, all the Christians streamed out to the nearest lake and the new believer was “buried with Christ in baptism.” “A little to the right the devil shrines, a little to the left the devil temple, and we on the shore watching, praying, singing.”

  One boy stood straight and fearless as he told his story. His father was a sage. One day the boy said, “Father, I have a load, the burden of sin is heavy. What can I do to get rid of my sin?” “Learn the Thousand Stanzas and your sin will melt away.” He learned them, but the burden was heavy still. “Is there no other way?” he asked. “You are young. Wait for a year or two, then you may find the way.” But what if he should die? At last “a thirst like the thirst for water came, and I was thirsty, thirsty.” He heard the Christians sing a gospel song, “Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling.” Next morning he came to Jesus and drank. “Where was my burden then, where was my thirst? Gone—as the dew when it sees the sun!”

  One day Amy had an encounter with a very unusual woman. She looked intelligent, could read, knew the classics, quoted poetry “in, for a woman, a most bewildering fashion.” She scorned Blessing, the widow who had believed only a month earlier. “What could that ignoramus teach me?” the woman wanted to know. “You say you must not tell lies, and here is a regular big one! Learning indeed! Her very grammar is defective! She is the merest block of wood!”

  I am only one month old,” said Blessing, “I have no wisdom to answer you, but I can read this Book of God and my name is in His Book and in my heart His peace and joy are dwelling. Is not joy better than much learning?”

  Not till afterwards did Amy learn that the woman was a temple woman, a prostitute, “married to the gods,” whose life was spent in the service of the priests and worshippers. Not one from among them had ever been converted. No one had ever been allowed to work among them. The discovery of this system was like a sword in Amy’s missionary soul. Something must be done. Someone must find a way somehow to touch these women for God.

  1. “The first Englishman to camp among the people of India as a missionary of Christ.” Amy Carmichael, Ragland, Spiritual Pioneer (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1951). p. vi.

  2. Luke 14:26 NEB.

  3. Ponnammal: Her Story gives the date of her joining the itinerant band as June 1897.

  4. Acts 16:14.

  Chapter 18

  The Cost of Obedience

  The great passion of Amy Carmichael’s life was uttermost love, which meant uttermost obedience. The prayer of Jeremy Taylor was always hers: Lord, do Thou turn me all into love, and all my love into obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption.

  This was the spirit she sought to instill in the members of the Starry Cluster. The question of jewels illustrates their earnestness. Jewels, a word which embraced all gold or silver necklaces, bracelets, bangles, and rings (for nose, ears, and ankles as well as fingers), were, in Tinnevelly, by far the most important elements in a woman’s appearance. “It is a pretty custom,” Amy wrote, “and we thought nothing of it. Our Band members wore the usual quantity. It is considered part of their dress.” Its significance, however, went far beyond prettiness. Women were more or less sold to their husbands for so many rupees’ worth of jewels—a man with a B.A. could command so many, an M.A. so many, this caste so many, that one so many. In this way the quantity of jewels a woman wore declared her husband’s honor as well as her family’s wealth.

  Amy herself wore no jewels of any kind. A strict Irish Presbyterian upbringing probably forbade such vanity, so her desire to identify with Indian style could not allow her to go so far. Nor did she oil her hair, a fact which made her startlingly conspicuous. She gave in once and anointed her head in order to avoid the inevitable remarks, but the scent she found “prohibitive.” The very few photos we have of her reveal beautiful, soft, wavy, dark hair, in distinct contrast to the gleaming, sharply parted, satin smoothness of the Indians’ hair. Her bun was not worn low on the neck as was theirs. It is doubtful that her upbringing included any special sanctions regarding coconut oil or the exact elevation of a hair bun. It is more likely that the flat, tight look did not strike Amy as particularly becoming to herself. Vanity (probably unrecognized) made her willing to differ here, as the notion of physical protection made her willing to differ in the matter of foreign shoes, sun helmet, and umbrella, things which identified her unmistakably with colonials.

  “Gradually as we sought to know more of our Lord and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, the conviction grew upon us that these things (i.e. jewels) were out of place in His own chosen workers—His separated ones—and that this conforming to the law of the fashion of this world was of the flesh and not of the Spirit.” Hair oil, hairstyles, and shoes were not, in Amy’s view, an indication of conformity to the world’s fashion, any more than were topees and umbrellas, which were believed indispensable if foreigners’ brains were not to melt.

  Jewels, on the other hand, were in a separate category. “I love the old native customs. I cannot bear the foreignizing element so common in much mission work in India, so it was much against the grain that I faced this thing at all. But here God’s Word ran one way and custom another. There was no help for it. We prayed that if God wanted the question raised He would raise it among our workers, apart from us, and He did.”

  A man had asked that his wife be allowed to travel with the Band for a while in order to learn to serve others. They consented, and he came one day to ask her to give him her jewels. He did not think them appropriate for the sort of life he desired for her. Ponnammal overheard his words with intense interest. Only the evening before she had heard a child (referring to Ponnammal) say, “When I grow up I will join that Band so that I may wear jewels like that sister.” Ponnammal asked the Lord about this and the answer came, “Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God.” The message was unmistakable. She saw herself as the Indian world would see her—unjewelled, a marked woman, an eyesore, an offense. To take off her jewels was unnatural, disgraceful, even hypocritical. But in the Lord’s eyes? He would see the love that lay behind the action. She went home, took off the jewels, laid them at His feet.

  “Lord, Thou didst empty Thyself for me. I empty myself for Thee.” One by one the other women of the Band followed. The “outside Christian world” laughed them to scorn, but an English preacher, F. B. Meyer, came just in time to strengthen the Band in its conviction. He was the first they had ever heard mention the jewel question. Other women who heard him saw it as utterly impossible. “Where would my glory be if I took them off?” said one. “Where would my husband’s be? Tinnevelly women never will!” So the Band became a “peculiar people,” knit together in their desire to be “otherworldly, separate unto Jesus.” When a teenaged girl escaped from her Hindu home and joined them, Amy had a talk with her about jewels. The child, with very bad grace, tore off two foot jewels. No, said Amy, Jesus was now her jewel—would she not give Him all? The girl took off all but one ring. She looked at the members of the Band, jewelless, singing “Jesus is my jewel.” Off came the ring.

  Years later the oddity appeared as an eminently practical thing when a watchman of the robber caste said, “If those girls, those hundreds of girls, wore jewels according to custom, not all the money in the world could hire a watchman to guard the place.”

  Fi
nancial provision for the Band came as it had come when Amy needed money for the Welcome Hall in Belfast. It was prayed for. Her own personal needs ever since she had left for Japan had been fully underwritten by Mr. Wilson, but money for the needs of the Band and for travel expenses (hundreds of rupees per month) came from other sources. The Church of England Zenana gave twenty-five rupees per month to hire a pair of bullocks, and readers of the Scrap letters sent money, which Amy called “the sinews of war.” But she was scrupulous in her adherence to the principles learned in Ireland. She would not mention a need to any but God until it had been met. Even that had its hazards. “The mere telling of how a need was met is often like telling of a need, which is asking crookedly instead of straight out,” she wrote in Scraps. “But this much I will say—with every fresh need has come a fresh supply.” The Band women learned the lesson, and sometimes a little pile of change would appear on Amy’s table with a note to say that it had not been needed.

  They sought opportunities to speak to little children, coolies, educated men, women whose caste dictated that they must help with bricklaying, anyone at all who seemed the least inclined to hear, and often those who were not in the least inclined. The “punkah wallah” was a skinny old man who sat on a rattan stool and patiently pulled the rope which activated the huge ceiling fan. In the dead calm of midday heat it is not surprising that he sometimes fell asleep (Amy stitched into one of her Scraps a photo of him with eyes closed, his turbaned head leaning against a mat). Hoping to do the poor old soul some good Amy asked, “How do you pray?”

  “Our Father who art in heaven.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “How should I know? Am I a parson that I should understand?”

  One day Amy stopped a Christian wedding procession to ask why they had idols on the corners of the wedding car. They were not idols, she was told, they were nothing but dolls. Indeed they were heathen idols, she protested, and had no place in anything that called itself Christian. There was a great argument but in the end she succeeded in trading some tracts and English-made dolls for the idols, which she took home for firewood.

  Most of all the Band longed for contact with Brahman women, who were virtually unreachable and showed no interest whatever. One day some of them were sitting on a verandah, looking bored and weary. Amy asked if she and her helpers might sing to them. Yes, they said. A group gathered. They heard perhaps twenty minutes’ worth of “plain Message-giving, illustrated with pictures. Amy stood on the bottom step of the verandah and begged the women to allow her to come nearer. They were horrified and refused. Men began to gather, hundreds of them, so she turned and asked them please to go away, for they could hear anytime. It was the women the missionaries had come for. But the men drew nearer and the women moved away. Finally Amy spoke to the men, as straight as ever I could,” trying to put things simply enough for the women to understand while at the same time holding the men quiet.

  “You haven’t an idea how hard it is to get a real chance with Brahman women. They never let us into their houses in these old Hindu towns. It is next to impossible to get any quiet in the street even if they will let us speak there, which they seldom will. Brahman women are as out of reach as if they lived in Central Africa, more so sometimes.’’

  The Band visited the Village of Vishnu’s Heaven where there was a fort which no woman had ever been allowed to leave. Men went in and out, as did a few Untouchable servant-women, but the women of the fort were prisoners. Once, it was said, a little girl of four had had the audacity to look out the door in the high mud wall. She was killed at once. Amy and her Indian sisters went to “view the wall” and to pray that it might somehow be breached. Along came a man who offered to escort them inside. They were given a few minutes to speak to the women of one of the houses. What hope had such women?

  “No words of mine can give you any idea of the awful difficulty surrounding any Hindu or Mohammedan girl or woman who dares to take a stand. It is terrible for the men and boys, but infinitely more so for the women. Things no pen could write—at least mine could not—go on behind those prison walls. They are utterly in the power of ruthless relatives. Nothing but a miracle can bring them out.” A girl who had shown an interest in Christianity was murdered; a boy was drugged, his intellect ruined for life. Because of bribery the police were often on the side of the family in whatever measures they chose to take. Anyone who wanted to follow Christ had to leave all in order to do so.

  “Why the dreadful wrench of coming out and leaving all for Christ? Because it is absolutely impossible for a Mohammedan or Hindu to be a Christian at home. In a very tolerant house they may be allowed to read the Bible and pray. In very rare instances exemption from various idolatrous ceremonies has been allowed, but open confession and baptism—NEVER.’’

  “She shall burn to ashes first,” said one of the men. “She may go out dead if she likes. She shall go out living—NEVER!” There was nothing for it but obedience at all costs and at all risks.

  For Amy, as for any true-hearted soldier, there was the element of thrill in battle. The reality of danger energizes and sharpens the faculties. “Will Gold [a high-caste woman who had shown an interest] come out? If so we shall be in the very thick of the fight again—Hallelujah! Will God move in Beautiful’s heart so that she will dare her husband’s fury and the knife he flashed before her eyes? If so, our bungalow will be in the very teeth of the storm, angry men all around it, and we inside, kept by the power of God!”

  Miraculously another girl in addition to Jewel of Victory escaped. There was the same furor and consequent need for protection at Palamcottah. When the time came for the annual trip to the hills, Amy received permission from Mrs. Hopwood to bring the girls along. This was her chance to spend uninterrupted time with them, teaching them what discipleship meant. Amy Carmichael never sugarcoated the terms. They must learn to love the Lord and to forsake all—even their beloved Ammal (Amy)—to follow Him. She saw the danger of their becoming dependent on her, clinging to human love rather than to divine. They were desolate. One of them said she would be “like a withered stump in a field” if Amy sent her back to Palamcottah. The feeling was mutual. She felt for the girls what Paul felt for Onesimus: “my very heart would fain have kept him with me.” But to them she was adamant. They must learn to stand. The one whose name meant Ladychild, when only four months out of the “horrible pit” of heathenism, confessed, “When I’m told to do what I don’t like, something springs up in my heart which says, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t! Don’t!’ and I listen and think, ‘No, I won’t do it.’” Amy saw that some of the “miry clay” was still sticking. A new heart was what the child needed, she explained.

  Victory was overjoyed to receive a letter from her brother, but the contents brought tears. “Most beloved and cherished, most precious and most beautiful, as the apple of the eye, as the jewel among jewels, as the ruby, as the pearl, as our joy and delight, our immaculate and learned and advanced in all wisdom, yet all wisdom-despising younger sister. . . .” Then followed a string of pathetic stories—one member of the family ill, another weak with waiting for Victory to come home, another who had tried to see her but could not catch a glimpse “even with the extreme corner of the eye.

  “In the Hindu Religion,” the letter went on, “as you ought to understand, Caste and Piety are one and the same. Piety IS Caste. Caste is Piety. Why then do you defile your Caste? Have you entirely defiled it? If so, you have entirely defiled your family. If you choose to write, write, but not upon a subject with which my mind has no affinity.”

  One scene burnt into Amy’s mind as never before the horrors of caste. She had seen a little boy of three or four who seemed to be suffering with his eyes. He lay in a swinging bag hung from the roof and cried piteously the whole time they were in the house. Two months later she visited the same house. There he lay, crying still, though his cries were weary and much weaker.

  They lifted him out. I should not have known the child—the pretty fa
ce drawn, full of pain, the little hands pressed over the burning eyes. Only one who has had it knows the agony of ophthalmia. They told me he had not slept “not even the measure of a rape seed” for three months. Night and day he cried and cried—“but he doesn’t make much noise now.” He couldn’t, poor little lad. I begged them to take him to the hospital at Palamcottah, but they said to go to a hospital was against their caste. The child lay moaning so pitifully it wrung my heart and I pleaded and pleaded with them to let me take him, if they would not. Even if his sight could not be saved something could be done to ease the pain, I knew, but no—he might die away from home, and that would disgrace their caste.

  “Then he is to suffer till he is blind or dead?” and I felt half wild with the cold cruelty of it. “What can we do?” they asked. “Can we destroy our caste?” Oh, I did blaze out for a moment. I really could not help it—and then I knelt down among them all, just broken with the pity of it, and prayed with all my heart and soul that the Good Shepherd would come and gather the lamb in His arms. I can hardly bear to write it—but you have not seen the little wasted hands pressed over the eyes and then falling helplessly, too tired to hold up any longer and you have not heard the weak little wails. And to think—it need not have been! The last thing I heard them say as we left the house was “Cry softly, or we’ll put more medicine in!” The little hands tightened over the poor eyes as he tried to stifle the sobs and “cry softly.”. . . Oh friends, is it not a cruel thing, this horrid hydra-headed caste? Those women were not heartless, but they would rather see their baby die in torture by inches than dim with one breath the lustre of their brazen escutcheon of Caste!

  For seven years, almost without a break, Amy worked in the country towns and villages. Her letters tell story after story of the battle—Hindu houses practically impregnable; an inquirer now and then who gives great hope, only to disappear again behind the thick walls; the drama of discovering one bright, eager face in a crowd, of having the breathtaking joy of teaching that one for a brief time and then the sorrow of seeing him turn his back.