This and other incidents showing God’s supply were recounted in a little book called The Beginning of a Story, published in 1908. Here and elsewhere Amy wrote that no appeals for money were ever made or ever authorized to be made. On page 19, however, she did allow herself to say, “Naturally, our greatest need, next to prayer, is just the simple straightforward need of money—to feed our little ones and clothe them, and to provide for the long journeys connected with their redemption and all other expenses bearing upon the salvation of Temple children.” It was a mere statement of fact, so obvious it hardly needed stating. Yet Amy later withdrew the book from circulation, fearing that that line might be taken as an appeal for funds. She did not mind listing other needs in her letters home: prayer first, last, and always; then sewing and writing materials, colored pencils, rattles for the babies, pink or white vests, yardage of sateen (“blue, white, mossy green, terra cotta, or bright golden, not orange or lemon—we have no use for ugly colors. They are not necessarily cheaper than pretty colors. If they were I would pray for grace. . . . I say very humbly, send us something pretty”).
The Family was rapidly outgrowing the buildings, but to plan and finance expansion was a serious business. “Expenditure leads out into expenditure,” she wrote a few years later. “The only expenditure, and all its outworkings, for which God can be held to be responsible is that which He directs.” Questions about finances were asked again and again. Again and again Amy stated her position: Our Heavenly Father knows what we need and gives it to us.
There is no myth, no imagination about it: God does hear when we speak to Him; God does answer us. For money is a tangible, unmistakable thing; you cannot act when you have not got it as you would if you had it. It is not a case of “Believe that you have it, and you have it’’—a kind of faith which has puzzled me from a child. Believe it will come, yes, if you are sure your order is to go forward and buy land or build buildings or save children. But woe unto you if you imagine you have been told to do such things and then find the order has not been signed above. But the sign, the very impress of the signet ring . . . is a solemn thing to see.1
The Cottage Nursery.
Early in 1906 when it seemed that they must expand, they asked for “the impress of the signet ring” in the form of three signs:
1. possession of an adjoining field,
2. money for two nurseries, a kindergarten, and workers’ rooms,
3. a marked increase in the Family.
Two answers came in a short time. The field was purchased. Seventeen children arrived between spring and fall of 1906. The money was not yet in hand, but because of the rains, building could not begin anyway.
No matter how crowded her days and nights, how many demands were made on her time, how impossible privacy or time for reflection might seem to be, Amy Carmichael managed to write. It was a necessity laid upon her. While itinerating and evangelizing and teaching and mothering, any one of which tasks might have exhausted an ordinary woman, she somehow contrived to make time and reserve energy for writing. By this time she had a typewriter, so that was the end of handwritten letters home. Although no Scrap letter survives from 1904 (it is not hard to suppose she was literally too busy to write), and only two from 1905, she wrote Overweights of Joy, a three-hundred page sequel to Things as They Are. It was published in 1906 with the hope that some whose spirits had sunk on learning the terrible facts of the first book would find “something of a cordial” here, although there was no attempt to tone down the facts of Things. Overweights was meant to be a song of praise out of the darkness which was the background of the work. In addition to many more stories of the powers of heathendom and its indifference to the message of Christ, the book contains happy stories and photographs of the children brought out of that darkness into light. Leela was one of those children. She had absorbed a good deal of theology.
“In the beginning,” began Leela in unctuous tones, “the bad devil was good. He was an angel. He lived in heaven. One day all the angels came to sing to God. Then the devil was angry. He got angrier and angrier. He was very rude to God.” Here Leela seemed to freeze all over, and her voice sounded quite deep and awful. Irreverence was far from her intention. “That bad, bad devil said, ‘I won’t stand before God’s chair anymore, and I won’t sing to God anymore. I want to sit in God’s chair, and make God sing to me!’” There was a perfectly horrified pause, as the enormity of the transgression became evident. “So God took him and tumbled him down out of heaven, and he was turned into the devil.”2
One night in a little crowded house in Dohnavur village in 1900 Amy had been asked to nurse a boy with pneumonia. It was her first experience of being in charge of one so ill and although she distrusted the method of treatment (hot oil poultices) she felt she could not add to the family’s distress by suggesting any other. “By the kindness of the Lord, the Healer, he recovered, and so did all others nursed in the same primitive way, but I looked up [i.e. prayed] that first night and asked for a trained nurse.” Nearly seven years later a young woman, believing God had called her to this work, arrived in Dohnavur. She was loving and unselfish, but stayed only a few months before leaving to marry a man she had met on board ship.
Cholera struck the village in December 1906. “Night after night we were in the little stricken huts, day after day, too . . . and what cholera can be no one can begin to understand who has not fought it alone, without a doctor, without modern weapons.”3
The doctor and the modern weapons were a long time in coming. The work of God is done on God’s timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time—His time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, His wisdom past understanding.
Although cholera prowled around the Dohnavur Family many times, never once did it enter the gates, even though it was often necessary for Amma and her helpers to come straight back from the stricken village to the compound, stopping only long enough to change clothes. While God sent no miraculous medical assistance He seemed to put a hedge around His helpless children.
1. The Continuation of a Story, pp. 35ff.
2. Overweights of Joy, p. 264.
3. Gold Cord, p. 56.
Chapter 24
Strife of Tongues
Early in 1907 seven Dohnavur girls were baptized in one of the “shallow sheets of water that make our countryside so beautiful after rain. . . . Behind the calm, bright water, more present in a sense than even the hills whose shore that water washed, we saw the striped walls of the temples. There are joys that are unearthly in their power and in their sweetness.”
Amy had learned to expect attack from the enemy of souls whenever an Indian took an uncompromising stand as a Christian. As the Assyrian king Sennacherib swept down upon Israel just after a time of feasting and gladness, so the enemy struck the little company of Dohnavur. This time it was a triple attack. Amy herself, thoroughly exhausted to the point of breakdown, was ordered home. Of course she disobeyed the order. Home? India was home. To leave it was not an option. But she did go to Ooty where climate and civilized comforts provided respite. While she was gone, a particularly virile kind of dysentery swept the nursery in Neyoor. One baby with dysentery is a full-time job for a mother. Ponnammal, with sixteen babies ill at once, wrote to Amma, “All is windy about us now, but the wind will not last always. The waves beat into our boat; but when the Lord says, Peace, be still, they will lie down. Let all your prayer for us be that we may rest in the will of God while the wind lasts.” Ten of the babies died. Sometimes a grave had to be dug to hold two of them. “My little heart’s joy, my own little jewel-of-the-eye has gone. But Jesus stays with me,” wrote Ponnammal.
News of the worst of the three attacks came in a letter from Walker, who was holding the fort at Dohnavur. The enemy had triumphed this time. What Amy called “a great wind from the wilderness” blew on a girl named Jeyanie, one of the convert workers, so that she was under serious suspicion of wrongdoing. It is not named, but in Amy’s eyes was “worse than illness and d
eath,” and Jeyanie was sent away. Then another was involved in “a coil of trouble” which ultimately rendered her useless.
Scenery near the compound.
Ill and out of reach, Amy was assailed by some of the same enemy’s fiery darts in the form of questions. The dysentery had spread rapidly because of overcrowding. There was only one Ponnammal, so to open a second nursery was impossible. Should they have refused the babies and sent them back to the temples? Unthinkable. Should they have waived the matter of gold, silver, and precious stones and settled for whatever help they could get? “But a constraint had been laid upon us. We could not have done that,”1 said Amy, and Ponnammal wrote, “Let us work until we drop, but let us never lower the standard.”
At this time someone sent Père Didon’s Spiritual Letters, a book which was not mere paper and ink to Amy “but force—wind and fire and dew.”
“The roads are rugged,” he wrote, “the precipices are steep; there may be a feeling of dizziness on the heights, gusts of wind, peals of thunder, nights of awful gloom—fear them not. There are also the joys of the sunlight, flowers such as are not in the plain, the purest of air, restful nooks; and the stars smile thence like the eyes of God.”
Still the babies came, each one given in some way to Dohnavur when she might have been given to a very different kind of life. One brought by train from Bangalore was spotted by someone connected with a temple who made an offer. Another was found by a Bible woman who saw the mother standing on a street waiting for an offer. The “precipices” were indeed steep, and Amy felt all the more keenly the need for a comrade, one “who will be utterly other-worldly, utterly single-hearted, utterly consumed. Don’t think I am that myself! I fall far short of my own standard. But that is what I want to be, and that is what we must be if we are to stand the strain and conquer.”2
Occasionally other missions sent candidates to help Amy. Usually they had to be returned. They were accustomed to walking on the beaten track. The “little pile of red sand” which was Dohnavur was “off track” in more ways than geographical, and the standard insisted on was impossibly high. Amy began to pray that every obstacle might be placed in the way of candidates—any silly story about her which might put them off, every variety of test, all possible dissuasions, in order that those who could be kept back should be kept back. Not one person did she want who was not meant for them.
Two Indian teachers came who seemed to be the answer to prayer. Both foundered on the rock of truth and had to be sent back. “If our children were to grow up truthful they must be taught by those who had a regard for truth; and not just a casual regard, a delicate regard. On this point we were adamant.”3
And so the parting of the ways began. Amy Carmichael was marching to a different drummer. There was no getting around that fact. She called herself “the least of His messengers,” yet it was to her, as to God’s anointed prophet Moses, that “the pattern in the mount” was shown. She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the “chosen people.” She had had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be.
Was love the Gold Cord of life in other missions? An older missionary once said to Amy, “But missionaries always do fall out with one another, and then make it up.”
“We have never lived like that,” Amy replied. “We could not bear to live for one minute out of love with one another,” an answer which she supposed “sounded simply silly to the one who knew so much better than I did about missionary life.”
Did not other missions sometimes hire evangelists? Were there not nominal Christians participating in mission work (not to use them was deemed “impractical”)? Did they understand the motives which led Amy to eschew jewelry, Western dress, and the segregation of Indian and European? Most burning of all questions: was it the Cross that attracted them? Amy did not articulate such questions to them or, so far as one can tell, to anyone. But the questions were unavoidable. She avoided what could be avoided: condemnation—to their own Master they stood or fell, and she left them with Him. She earnestly tried to avoid what can never in honesty be avoided: the exercise of the critical faculty, in other words, judgment. “We seem to be judging when in truth we are only seeking humbly to obey,” she said.
There arose during the early years of the Dohnavur work a fairly strong “Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India” movement among missionaries and Indian Christians. She was a thorn in their sides. Why should she stubbornly refuse to accept the heretofore acceptable—nominal Christianity, for example, or the hiring of workers who hadn’t the “single eye” for God’s glory? Why must she persist in doing the unacceptable—wearing saris, doing work which was beneath her, refusing to pay salaries? The question asked years before by a Japanese, Can you show us the life of your Lord Jesus? was asked again by an Indian. Amy had no other purpose. This was the task assigned: to make the truth visible. When it came to a choice between the good will of the missionaries of South India (and Christians elsewhere) and obedience, there could be no hesitation. She would resolutely follow the Master who knew all about misunderstanding and opprobrium. Even as a little child Amy had known she was set apart. Other children might suck peppermints in church. She was forbidden. Were peppermints wicked? No. There were rules for behavior in the Carmichael family that other families knew nothing about. Never mind the others. “Is that your business, Peter?” said Jesus. “You must follow me.”
Writing years later about the principles on which the Dohnavur Fellowship was founded, she said:
It matters that we should be true to one another, be loyal to what is a family—only a little family in the great Household, but still a family, with family love alive in it and acting as a living bond. To those of us who have lived this life for years it is inconceivable that one to whom this loyalty means nothing should wish to be one of us. It is not at all that we think that ours is the only way of living, but we are sure that it is the way meant for us.
We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.4
Theirs not the only way of living? Yet, in the last analysis, was there any other? “It cannot be done.” The attempt to live strictly in obedience to the Word of God taught Amy and her co-workers the meaning of Jesus’ stern words, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” She expressed something of this lesson, stern though it was, with gentle irony and humor in her poem, “The Calm Community of the Criticized.”
If, though all unawares, and not of ill intent,
Thou steppest one inch outside the beaten track;
If thou in deed or word or preference
Depart from the Accustomed, or ransack
The unexplored, bright treasure-mines of life
And drawing forth their jewels make the House
Religious, as men call it, a glad place—
O then hide, hide thy face.
Or make quick pretence
Of suitable penitence,
For drum and fife
Are out against thee: perish thy mad nous
Or what it was that set thee grubbing where
A decent missionary never should be found.
They’ll chase thee off the ground,
They’ll harry thee,
Proclaim thee singular,
The while the truly sane and sober tar
Thy broken reputation for good sense.
At first, unconscious thou that things are thus—
Being innocent of all intentional wrong—
Thou wilt not know the fervent, general fuss
Pertains to thee at all; but gradually
It breaks on thee that various eyes are bent
Upon thy course, the lightness of thy gains
To scrutinize; and thou wilt see ere long
That certain hands hold firm a piece of chalk
To write thee up upon the wall. Advised
Be thou then, O my friend, in time;
Ponder the manner of thy careful walk;
See that thy very thoughts are close emmewed;
Tune all thy bells to play the usual chime,
Or brace thy spirit to be flayed alive
For its own good. The which if thou survive,
Thou’rt labeled one of that community
Who loving much can suffer woefully,
And yet mix laughter with their foolish pains,
And go on unsubdued—
The Calm Community of the Criticized.5
Rumors flew about this extraordinary woman, who at first had no idea that the “fervent, general fuss” pertained to her at all. Once an Anglican canon asked her to speak at a drawing-room meeting in Madras. The last thing Amy sought was the limelight. It had nothing to do with what she called “K.B.,” King’s Business, and it might hinder the work for the children. Furthermore—was she to appear before these Britishers in her sari? Courtesy to her host, however, won the day, and she stood up before the crowd in the bungalow. “The atmosphere was in the main frigid,” said one who was there.
Her opening sentence confirmed one of the rumors. “I had a dream last night.” She was reputed to be a dreamer of dreams.
“I thought I had come to this gathering, and an aged child of God with many years’ service behind him was asked to pray. ‘O Lord,’ he said, ‘here we are gathered together for yet another meeting, and Thou knowest how tired we are of meetings. Help us to get through this one.’ ”
The humor melted some of the ice on that occasion and her listeners allowed themselves to laugh. Perhaps the little sari-clad dark-haired dynamo was not quite so stuffy as they had imagined.
A Chance to Die Page 18