A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  Early the next morning Amy was having her chota (early tea) on the verandah when Servant of Jesus, looking astonished, suddenly appeared with Preena. “She did not know about the angel, I expect, and she could not understand it: at all.” The child ran straight to the white lady, climbed into her lap, and began to chatter away. “My name is Pearl-eyes, and I want to stay here always. I have come to stay.”

  Preena’s memory years later of her precious “Amma” (mother), was of her taking her into her lap and kissing her. “I thought, ‘My mother used to put me on her lap and kiss me—who is this person who kisses me like my mother?’ From that day she became my mother, body and soul.”

  If it had not been late afternoon when Servant of Jesus found Preena, she would have taken her back at once to the temple house. If the Band had not arrived at the bungalow that night, there would have been no one to take her to. If Preena had succeeded in making her escape earlier, Amy would have been fifty miles away. Surely all this was a wonder of providential timing. When she told the story for the first time in Things as They Are, Amy began the chapter with David Livingstone’s words, “It seems to have been a mistake to imagine that the Divine Majesty on high was too exalted to take any notice of our mean affairs. The great minds among us are remarkable for the attention they bestow upon minutiae . . . ‘a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without your Father.’ ”

  Slowly they grew to know the child and delight in her. “We watched her wonderingly. She was perfectly at home with us. She ran out, gathered leaves and flowers, and came back with them. These were carefully arranged in rows on the floor. Then another expedition, and in again with three pebbles for hearthstones, a shell for a cooking pot, bits of straw for firewood, a stick for a match, and sand for rice. She went through all the minutiae of Tamil cookery with the greatest seriousness. Then we, together with her doll, were invited to partake. The little thing walked straight into our hearts, and we felt we would risk anything to keep her.”

  Preena was followed, of course. The temple women (“We are servants of the gods!”) came to the bungalow, crowds gathered, there was an enormous fuss. Preena would not go with them, and Amy would not force her. Amy dared not go near the child then lest they think she had some power to bewitch her. Arulai, one of the Band, took her away out of sight and the child clung to her and sobbed, imploring her not to let them take her. Their punishments were cruel—Preena had scars to prove it. Arulai managed to soothe her and took her back to the angry crowd. The little girl stood bravely before them all. Would she go with them? “I won’t!” was her answer, and they went off, declaring that they would write to her mother who had given her to them.

  For a while the Band continued their work as before, but when they returned to the bungalow in the evenings, there was a child to welcome them. “I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled; and I remember, too, thanking God that it was not wrong to be comforted by the love of a child,” Amy said. She was soon nicknamed the Elf. One morning the Elf asked Amy, “Can you be good without God’s grace?”

  Amy replied that she certainly could not.

  “Well, I can!” said the Elf. “I want to pray now!”

  “Now? It is eight o’clock now. Haven’t you had prayer long ago?” Six o’clock was rising time.

  “No. That’s just what I meant. I skipped my prayer this morning, and so of course I got no grace; but I have been helping the elder Sisters. Wasn’t that right?”

  “Yes, quite right.”

  “And yet I hadn’t got any grace! But I suppose,” she added after a moment’s thought, “it was the grace over from yesterday that did it.”

  Amy Carmichael learned things from this child that “darkened the sunlight.” She heard firsthand of the secret traffic in the souls and bodies of little children, things unthinkable, impossible at that time to write about. Rumors which had reached Amy from time to time during their travels she had tried to dismiss as utterly preposterous. When she had (in the most delicate and circuitous terms, no doubt) tried to broach the subject to missionaries who might know the truth, she was squelched with remarks about her vivid imagination, “more ardent than informed.” The rumors could not be true. They could not possibly be true.

  There is some question as to whether the most elementary facts of life had ever been explained to Amy Carmichael. The word sex was unmentionable earlier in this century. A missionary who worked with her many years later insisted that Amy not only did not then know the truth about sex, but never learned. Whether her ignorance can be said to have been quite so abysmal is doubtful, but it is clear enough that her Victorian mind refused to admit thoughts which were so unpleasant and certainly unnecessary. Did she understand just what she was saving little girls from? “She did not know,” said the above-mentioned missionary. “She only knew it was horrible.”

  Just how horrible it was she did her best to put into words. Things as They Are has a picture of a half-naked holy man. “This photo is from death in life,” she writes, “a carcass, moving, breathing, sinning. . . . I knew something about the man. His life is simply unthinkable. Talk of beasts in human shape! It is slandering good animals to compare bad men to beasts. Safer far in a tiger’s den than that man’s monastery. But he is a temple saint—earthly, sensual, devilish. Now put beside him a little girl—your own little girl—and leave her there—yes, leave her there in his hand”

  The evidence for emotional and physical cruelty within sex, in India, whether marital or extramarital, has always been strong. The high rate of suicide among young women today supports this. Amy needed only to imagine the details. The overwhelming desire to save the children became a fire in her bones. “Sometimes the broad smooth levels of life are crossed by a black-edged jagged crack, rent, as it seems, by an outburst of the fiery force below. We find ourselves suddenly close upon it; it opens right at our very feet,”3 wrote Amy, and Walker corroborated it, “We are skirting the abyss, an abyss which is deep and foul beyond description, and yet is glorified, to Hindu eyes, by the sanctions of religion.”4

  But how were they to track down these children? “The helpless little things seemed to slip between our fingers as we stretched out our hands to grasp them, or it was as though a great wave swept up and carried them out to sea. In a kind of desperation, we sought for a way. But we found that we must know more before we could hope to find it. To graze upon the tips (of herbage) is the Tamil synonym for superficial knowledge. If we were to do anything for these children it was vain to graze on the tips of facts; it took years to do more than that.”5

  1. Swami Harshananda, All About Hindu Temples (Mysore, India: Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education, 1979).

  2. Things as They Are, p. 160ff.

  3. Things as They Are, p. 188.

  4. Amy Carmichael, Overweights of Joy, p. 35.

  5. Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord, p. 22.

  Chapter 21

  Children Tie the Mother’s Feet

  Patiently they went on with their itineration, camping, seeking an entrance into homes, holding “Open Airs,” with the usual disruptions—“a bullock cart rumbles round . . . a herd of cows, perhaps fifty strong, with their calves, and as many buffaloes, each bent on making its way straight to its own habitation regardless of obstruction, tramples through the throng. One evening I was sitting on the doorstep of a house, with a dozen women round me, when suddenly a beast appeared, and without a moment’s hesitation, walked straight over me and in.”1

  The Scrap letter for June of 1901 lists the members of the Band as Ponnammal, a widow, delicate, sensitive, highly strung, “a harp—God plays upon her and she responds to His touch”; Marial, “a dear, good, sturdy little soul with far more independence than any of the others”; Pearl, the one-armed, the only unmarried woman among them, tall, angular, thoroughly good and trustworthy; and Blessing, “a grand old muddler with a brave singleness of soul.” Blessing had a singular habit o
f shaking down her hair and twisting it up again as she talked. Forty years later Amy laughed as old Blessing described Amy’s singular habit, her manner of moving—not walking or even running, but “flying,” always looking at her watch “lest we waste moments.” As she told the story, down came the hair and, with a quick twist of the skinny old hand, up it went again. “And frequently,” said Blessing, “yes, frequently you said to me, ‘Art thou an elephant to walk so very slowly?’ ”

  Working with the Band and learning from them were five convert girls: Jewel of Victory, twenty, who had come in 1898, the first from a high caste, brave and steadfast; Jewel of Life, nineteen, who came a year later; Arulai (Star), fourteen, a girl of intense nature—“She has been won for some purpose, yet to appear”; Liberty, sixteen, fat, slow, with not enough energy to get into mischief, but she had borne great things for Christ, been beaten, had her arm torn with nails; and Jewel, who had held on to faith through thick and thin.

  By June of 1901, only three months after Preena’s arrival, Amy had become Amma (from Tamil ammal, “mother”) to four more little children. They were not temple children, but for one reason or another needed care and were received for Christ’s sake. The convert girls helped to look after these, who were nicknamed the Imp, Pickles, Brownie, and Tangles. (Poor little Pickles in a short time turned out to be “a fraud,” though we are not given a hint as to why, and was sent home.)

  “Children tie the mother’s feet.” It took rather a long time for the truth of this Tamil proverb to dawn on Amy. Driving herself as she had always done to buy up every opportunity for evangelism, she was now sleuthing for temple children as they journeyed and camped, and trying to be a part-time mother to the Band, the convert girls, and the babies. It was not a very satisfactory arrangement, but missionary life is full of unsatisfactory arrangements and Amy could not bring herself to believe that she should give up the work of evangelizing. Who would do it?

  God has many ways of gaining His servants’ attention. In July Arulai became desperately ill with typhoid. This girl, “won for a purpose, yet to appear,” seemed to be dying. All journeyings came to a halt while Amy and her helpers, for three anxious and gruelling months, gave themselves to nursing. Arulai recovered, but the truth had not yet been borne in upon Amy that mothering is a fulltime job and her family needed a home. She was a missionary. Mothering was not what she had had in mind when she answered God’s call. And as for a home—had she not renounced all such earthly comforts? She had given up all thought, probably in the cave at Arima, Japan, of having a husband or a home. She wrote:

  If Thy dear home be fuller, Lord,

  For that a little emptier

  My house on earth, what rich reward

  That guerdon were.

  The willingness to sacrifice that springs from a loving heart rather than the desire for spiritual distinction is surely acceptable to God. But, as in the case of Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac, the sacrifice itself is not always finally required. What is required is obedience.

  The Heavenly Father knew what the family needed and had been arranging an answer when the question of a home had not even been asked. “Before they call I will answer, and while they are yet speaking I will hear.”2

  The combination of events which had brought Preena and Amy together showed the “mysterious ways” of God’s moving. Another event, no less remarkable for its mystery since it was in itself an evil, played its part in the group’s settling down. At about the same time that Preena escaped, a man in Australia was murdered. A missionary named Storrs who was to teach a class of divinity students in Dohnavur “happened” to be in Australia just then, visited the murderer who had been sentenced to death, and led him to Christ.

  It is not clear from Amy’s account exactly what happened to Mr. Storrs next. He was “overstrained by this” (presumably by the man’s having been hanged) and “lost his power to sleep.” He could not return to India. Someone else would have to teach the divinity students. By the end of the year it was clear that there was only one possibility: Thomas Walker. Walker must go where the students were: to Dohnavur. The “Family,” of course, must go with him.

  So it was that they moved from the eastern side of the district to the western, “intending to move on when the cloud was taken up, according to the word in Numbers 9, ‘or whether it were two days, or a month, or a year, that the cloud tarried upon the tabernacle, remaining thereon, the children of Israel abode in their tents, and journeyed not; but when it was taken up, they journeyed.’ ”

  Dohnavur, seen at first only as a center for evangelistic work (there were fifty or sixty villages within a radius of five or six miles), became home for the Family and, though she did not know it yet, Amy was rooted for life. From Ireland to England she had followed the Shepherd, then to Japan to China to Ceylon to England to India—Bangalore, Palamcottah, Pannaivilai, and at last Dohnavur.

  The dilapidated mission bungalow had a leaky roof, a mud floor, and one small window. But “soon we found what a perfect place our Father had chosen for us, for at last children were saved, and moving about with them would have been impossible. If we had searched all over Tirunelveli we could not have found a place that would have been so safe and could be made so beautiful too.”

  Amy could not yet see that she must give herself entirely to the children, and in January of 1902 off she went again, this time for a six-weeks’ mission with the Walkers in Travancore, leaving Ponnammal in Dohnavur to cope with the Band, the converts, and the “Lotus Buds,” as they called the little children. As many as twenty thousand came to the Travancore meetings. The language there being Malayalam, two interpreters were needed for the speakers (Amy and Walker), as well as prodigious lung power, since public-address systems were then unknown. There is no report of spiritual results, but it seems that (through Amy’s efforts?) the Indian minister, a Syrian Christian, was delivered from the outlandish getup which certain English missionaries had chosen for him—a suit of “violent checks” and a hat, in which “he looks exactly like a well-dressed monkey.” A comfortable white robe with wide sleeves was a relief for him and very likely another black mark on the missionaries’ list of Carmichael offenses. She had a propensity for upsetting things.

  If it were possible to poll all the missionaries who have worked in all the world in all of Christian history, it would be seen that missionary work, most of the time, offers little that could be called glamour. What it does offer, as Amy wrote to prospective candidates in later years, is “a chance to die”—or, as Winston Churchill put his challenge during World War II, blood, sweat, and tears. It offers a great deal of plodding and ploughing, with now and then a little planting. It is the promise of rejoicing, given to those who “go forth weeping, bearing precious seed” that gives heart. So it was with Amy. Her home letters are not triumphant accounts of people turning to God from idols, but little stories of the one or two children in a village who were willing to learn one Scripture verse, sing one little gospel song; the bored Brahman women who were diverted for a few moments by photographs Amy showed them; an occasional dialogue with an educated Hindu; a schoolboy who seemed interested in the Bible. But gradually the letters began to be lightened with stories about the children of her Family.

  Amy, age forty-two, with Lola and Leela.

  “Did you get caned in school today?”

  “No, not exactly caned. I was standing beside a very naughty little girl and the teacher meant to cane her, but the cane fell on me by mistake.”

  Their questions were charming:

  “Do fishes love Jesus?”

  “Stones are young mountains, aren’t they?”

  When they saw an English lady wearing a veil: “Don’t they like to look at God’s beautiful world? Do they like it better spotty?” She asked her English friends to send baby vests and lengths of cloth, but not frocks, for which they had no use whatever. She asked for dolls—“girl dolls, please. NOT boys—the games heathen children play are so terribly, unthinkably w
icked that boys should never be given.”

  The Indian girls did their best to care for the children, but Amy’s itineration became less and less feasible. By August she wrote, “Oh, I am getting so hungry for another child!” and was beginning to see that she must allow her feet to be tied “for the sake of Him whose feet once were nailed.”

  1. Amy Carmichael, From the Fight, p. 24ff.

  2. Isaiah 65:24 (AV).

  Chapter 22

  The Vault Beneath the Meadow

  The search for children in peril went on assiduously, but as quietly as possible. They found that there were five reasons for children being dedicated to temples. Sometimes it was because of a vow or obedience to a family custom. Sometimes it was in order to escape some social entanglement such as an out-of-caste alliance. When a poor widow or a deserted wife could not find a suitable husband for her child, she married her to the god. In some cases lack of money to perform the death ceremonies required by the caste tempted a mother to give up her child for her husband’s sake.

  It was three years before a second temple child was found, three years during which the Starry Cluster continued to travel and Amy continued to try to do the impossible. Her Scrap letters were fewer and further between, but she wrote many letters to friends in India, asking for help in finding the children. She investigated every possible avenue of approach to officials who might be of help in saving them, and pleaded with people at home to pray. Her book Things as They Are seemed of no use at all against the huge forces of the system which was Hinduism. One day, desperate to find words fiery enough to burn people’s consciences, she cried out to God to give them. She wrote down the answer in an old exercise book: