A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  But criticism continued. Someone suggested that her efforts to save temple children were nothing more than a stunt, meant to draw attention to herself. The temple system was centuries old—what did she think she could do about it? Preposterous allegations found ready acceptance: She was a dictator, she opposed marriage, her Indian girls worshipped her.

  No wonder she wrote,

  O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,

  My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill,

  Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still.

  Back let them fall from me, my clamorous foes,

  Confusions multiplied;

  From crowding things of sense I flee, and in Thee hide.

  Until this tyranny be overpast,

  Thy hand will hold me fast;

  What though the tumult of the storm increase,

  Grant to Thy servant strength, O Lord, and bless with peace.6

  1. Gold Cord, p. 58.

  2. Scraps No. 2, 1907.

  3. Gold Cord, p. 66.

  4. Amy Carmichael, Roots, p. 55.

  5. Amy Carmichael, Made in the Pans (London: Oliphants), p. 37.

  6. Toward Jerusalem, p. 2.

  Chapter 25

  Place of Dragons

  Eight years after Servant of Jesus and Preena had come to Amy’s verandah in Pannaivilai, another woman and child materialized as unexpectedly on her verandah in Dohnavur. It was March 1909.

  “Protect us!” the woman begged. Her relatives wanted to take the child from her and marry her to a man of their own choosing. “Muttammal is my only child. I cannot bear to give her up.” Amy took them in, but found that the woman was “thoroughly wicked.” She disappeared for two weeks, then reappeared, demanding the child back. They were forced to comply by order of the sub-magistrate. It proved to be an intricately tangled case, and Amy’s letters were full of it for months to come.

  In August Muttammal was released to Amy by the court on the condition that she keep caste. This was a great inconvenience to the Dohnavur family and a sore trial for Muttammal since it meant that she must cook her own food in a kitchen all by herself. The poor child fretted against this till she read the story of the meal prepared for the disciples on the shore. “Who cooked the fish?” There was a long pause. “Why, our Lord must have cooked it Himself! It doesn’t say an angel came to do it.” Another pause. Then, in awed and penitent tones, “And I didn’t want to do my own cooking!” Close watch had to be kept at all times, for if anyone succeeded in tying on her the marriage jewel, she was legally his property. There were repeated summonses to court, the relatives trotting out “proofs” that the girl was being illegally detained, and arguing among themselves as to whose were the rights. It was a cardinal principle of British rule in India that religious neutrality must be maintained. Amy’s claim that she was protecting the child from danger, whether from marriage customs or religious activities that were iniquitous, was seen as a breach of that principle. A year or so before Muttammal’s coming Amy had visited a temple child, “a little dove in a cage,” and had seen the powers of the system at work.

  I did not find that she minded her cage. The bars have been gilded, the golden glitter has dazzled the child. She thinks her cage a pretty place, and she does not beat against its bars as she did in the earlier days of her captivity. As we talked with her we understood the change. When first she was taken from school the woman to whose training her mother has committed her gave her polluting poetry to read and learn, and she shrank from it, and would slip her Bible over the open page and read it instead. But gradually the poetry seemed less impossible; the atmosphere in which those vile stories grew and flourished was all about her; as she breathed it day by day she became accustomed to it; the sense of being stifled passed. The process of mental acclimatisation is not yet completed, the lovely little face is still pure and strangely innocent in its expression; but there is a change, and it breaks the heart of the friend who loves her to see it. “I must learn my poetry. They will be angry if I do not learn it. What can I do?” And again, “Oh, the stories do not mean anything,” said with a downward glance, as if the child-conscience still protested. It is worse with that little girl today; there is less inward revolt; and tomorrow how will it be with her?1

  So it would be with Muttammal if the mother had her way. Amy would not give up the fight.

  Life in Dohnavur was not “put on hold” while Muttammal’s case dragged on. Day and night the babies were there. In Amy’s Bible, on a card pasted inside the front cover, are these words:

  “These children are dear to Me. Be a mother to them, and more than a mother. Watch over them tenderly, be just and kind. If thy heart is not large enough to embrace them, I will enlarge it after a pattern of My own. If these young children are docile and obedient, bless Me for it; if they are froward, call upon Me for help; if they weary thee, I will be thy consolation; if thou sink under thy burden, I will be thy Reward.” The words are followed by a picture of the Shepherd, reaching for a lamb while a vulture hovers overhead.

  Amy’s children were growing, inquiring, needing to be taught. She must be more than a mother. As she walked the paths of the compound, worked in the nurseries and kitchens, lay on her grass mat at night and thought and planned and prayed, she was forming what might be called a philosophy of education. To name it as such would not have occurred to her, but certain principles began to emerge. Two things, both central to her character, her work, her writing, forbade the use of fiction in any form, including fairy tales. These were her concepts of truth and of soldierhood. She quoted from Plato’s Republic: “‘War implies soldiers, and soldiers must be carefully trained to their profession. They must be strong, swift, and brave; high-spirited, but gentle.’

  “But how must they be educated? In the first place we must be very scrupulous about the substance of the stories which they are taught in their childhood. . . . Truth, courage, and self-control must be inculcated by all the stories that are employed in their education.”

  She saw fiction, not as a powerful vehicle for Truth with a capital T, but as a waste of time and, much worse, a threat to the foundations of character. When “true fairy tales,” far more magical than any of man’s devising, were “happening” every day in field and garden, why lead the children into make-believe? What God made was Reality to her. Anything men made was a poor substitute.

  “I do not think our little lovables lost anything of the silvery glamour that should make the first years of childhood like moonlit water to look back upon, or the golden sparkle either, that is sunlight on that same water.”2 It is possible, however, as one member observed years later, that they had lost something necessary: the capacity to discriminate between fact and fancy. The exercise of the child’s imagination was limited to personifying the flora and fauna, but was not free to roam through castles and caves, the throne-rooms of kings or the workshops of elves. Perhaps Amy feared that the children might be drawn toward Hindu mythology or “wisdom” writing, stories with a sometimes dubious moral, thought to be the source of Aesop’s fables and other similar literature.

  “We never suggested questions and never answered any that they did not ask (we had as much as we could do to find answers to those they did ask) but we, as it were, ran to meet their minds in welcome. It was a merry kind of schooling, and left many gaps, but it had some uses.’’ They learned about color, and examined the chlorophyll in leaf cells through a microscope. They collected shells, abandoned birds’ nests, stones, flowers. They went on a field trip to watch a refiner of gold at work. One especially bright girl began to study Greek while recovering from illness, so that she might read the New Testament in the original. The children were allowed to have pets, and were taught to treat them with gentle sympathy or at least with respect, even the termites, who were “trying to be good’’ by doing their job industriously, and the cobra and bandicoot, who had not “asked” to be a cobra and a bandicoot.

  Besides hymns and songs of faith, Amy wro
te hundreds of songs especially for the children, from the simplest little game songs (“Rabbit dear, do come here, we want to play with you”) to songs embodying science lessons about the potter wasp, the rotifer and the animalcula, or a work song taken from words of the Apocrypha, “Hate not laborious work, joy, joy is in it.”

  Muttammal had been claimed again by her mother, but in December of 1909 she was once again released to Amy’s care. The January Scrap letter tells of the journey home together, “in a dream.”

  At last the red roofs of the bungalow and nurseries appeared through the trees. Slowly the bandy crawled along the rutty lane leading up to the gate. Then there was a delirious rout, a rush and a shout and a sense of everyone everywhere—Muttammafs monkey, Tumbie, was tossed in upon us, a rolled-up ball of fur. . . . But that welcome, like some other best things, has to be left undescribecl. It was an hour of perfectly unshadowed joy. My birthday had been spent in Palamcottah where the dear sisters made it as birthday-like as such a battle day could be, but now came the proper jubilations. After a welcome afternoon tea I was established on a stool in the compound. My room had been decorated during tea time, though as no one knew we were coming I could not imagine how the palm branches and other glories had been produced.

  Then in a long line from the nurseries and Rooms of Love and Joy came the babies in blue and the children in white and yellow, all carrying flowers, such a pretty, pretty picture in the softened evening light. Nearly all the bigger people had a tiny packet wrapped in tissue paper. Each contained a pocket handkerchief worked in drawn thread by the giver.

  Amy Carmichael loved celebration. If the Children of Israel needed feasts and celebrations and piles of stones to teach them the significance of life and death and sacrifice and the leading of God, why should not the children of Dohnavur need the same? Her deep sense of the importance of observance of special occasions pervaded the life of the compound.

  In 1910 Suhinie, one of the loveliest of the convert girls who cared for babies, whose story is told in From the Forest, was taken with a seizure and died within a few hours. While Amy’s grief was honest and human, she saw the Homegoing of a baby or any of the Lord’s lovers as an occasion for joy. Her love of the natural and simple determined the method of burial which became the Family’s standard. Clad in an old white sari, Suhinie was carried to the garden, later called “God’s Garden,” on a cane cot covered with flowers. “If the Lord Jesus does not come first, this is what I shall ask for,” Amy wrote. “No waste, for the living are so needy, no fuss, only loving hands near, and only flowers between me and the good earth.”

  The schoolboys, led by Mr. Walker, were first in the procession, then the bier, followed by the women. “Coming home, I remembered Aristides: ‘And if any righteous person of their number (speaking of Christians) passes away from this world, they rejoice and give thanks to God; and they follow his body as if he were moving from one place to another.’ So we sang the happiest things we could.”

  In accord with this vision of life the first nurseries had been built of the simplest, most natural materials—sun-dried bricks with earthen floors and thatched roofs, like the ordinary Indian buildings surrounding them. They had not reckoned on the time it would take to maintain such buildings. Termites (the cute nursery song notwithstanding) were a constant nuisance, constructing their tunnels up the walls. The mud floors had to be treated each week with cow dung to harden the surface. Thatched roofs were the perfect target for any who might want to take revenge by setting them on fire.

  Could it be right to spend the Lord’s money on more expensive materials? If it was given specifically for that, they would accept it as His permission. As usual, they asked Him about it. The money came, specially designated, and they built a nursery and kindergarten with burnt brick for walls and tiles for roofs and floors. The rooms were Indian—unfurnished except for plain cupboards. There were brass vessels, kept bright with hand polishing, using wood ashes. The beds were grass mats, laid on the polished red tiles. The floor tiles in the schoolroom were the children’s “blackboard” on which they wrote and drew with chalk.

  The visitor today sees the same scrupulous cleanliness and order which was of such importance to the founder. She taught the children to keep their little world orderly—theirs was not a God of confusion. Paths were swept daily, floors scrubbed, gardens weeded, “because of the cloud of witnesses”—the communion of the unseen body of Christ and all His angels, who saw where no human eye might see.

  And why should not the place be beautiful? Some years before, when Amy was in Travancore on an evangelistic tour, she had admired the ancient style of its buildings in contrast to the “hideous English style” of one of the rajah’s palaces.

  “Why people should build ugly buildings when they might as well build beautiful, is as great a puzzle to me as why they should go in for ugly colors when pretty ones are to be had. But we noticed wherever we traveled that the most graceful and beautiful things flourished best out of the sphere of English influence.”

  The style of the Dohnavur structures as they are today combines what she found in Travancore with certain elements brought by missionaries from China. All of the buildings are of the same red color as the earth out of which they seem to have risen. Earth-red, too, are the seven-foot walls which surround the property. A visitor cannot fail to notice these, and may question the wisdom of thus separating the Family from the world outside. To Amy the disadvantages, great as they might be, were not nearly so great as the necessity to protect the children. Occasionally a tiger found its way from the nearby hills, but there were other “tigers,” far more to be feared.

  All through the year 1910 there were rumblings about Muttammal. She was not out of danger. In January 1911, Amy was summoned again to court. In March came “the supreme hour of the long fight, the hour of utmost defeat, when for the first time we tasted public shame and scorn, and knew how little we had drunk as yet of the cup of our Saviour’s agony for souls.”

  On the night before she was to appear in Palamcottah in court she lay on the cane cot on her verandah in the starlight. Her child Muttammal lay in her arms. We do not find the mother frantic with anxiety, or seeking, by sundry deceptions, to steer the child away from the reality of what might take place. Instead she speaks to the little girl, so lately introduced to Jesus, about His mysterious message to John the Baptist just before he was beheaded: “Blessed is he who is not offended in Me.”

  “I took her hands in mine and looked down into her upturned face. ‘Promise me, whatever happens, by His grace, you will never be offended in Him.’” Muttammal promised.

  Amy went alone to court in the morning. “We were as those smitten in the place of dragons.” The clerk floundered slowly through thirty or forty pages, the voice droning through the heavy heat till he came to words which “stung like a whip-lash”—Muttammal must be returned to her mother, all legal costs to be paid by Amy.

  At the moment of the verdict Amy experienced a sudden strange, triumphant joy, a shining, perhaps, of the Lord’s face. She could not explain it, but it was worth all the subsequent hours which were “emptied of all conscious illumination.”

  What she did not know was that by this time Muttammal had disappeared from Dohnavur. No one knew where she had gone. Weeks of silence and uncertainty passed, broken only by an anonymous postcard with the words of 2 Chronicles 16:9,3 suggesting that Muttammal was safe. It was months before she learned the story. A guest, Mabel Beath, to whom Amy had confided, had dressed the child as a Muslim boy and sent her out of the compound by a certain gate. Two Indians met her with a bandy and by circuitous means she was taken to Colombo, Ceylon.

  For Amy, of course, the situation could be far more serious than heretofore. Prison looked like a very real possibility. Other children might be endangered. But she dung in faith to the promises of God and went for her usual holiday to the hills. There she met an old friend whom she asked for help. He found the child in Ceylon, escorted her to Penang, Sing
apore, and Hong Kong, then six hundred miles up the West River to the home of missionaries. For six months they did not hear of her whereabouts. In October came the letter saying she was safe.

  Four years later Amy had another of her dreams. She saw Muttammal being married to one of the young men of Dohnavur. She told him of the dream; they consulted Arulai, by then a trusted fellow-worker, who said she had been praying about this very thing for a year. For the man there was nothing unusual about an arranged marriage. It was the custom. So in due time letters were written, the two were engaged, married in Colombo (according to every detail of Amy’s dream), and returned to Dohnavur six years after Muttammal’s nighttime escape.

  1. Amy Carmichael, Lotus Buds, p. 307.

  2. Gold Cord, p. 67.

  3. “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.”

  Chapter 26

  Love Is Not a Sentiment

  Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes,” wrote Traherne, “to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go.”

  Holy Children. That describes what Amy Carmichael as mother desired from the very beginning of the children’s work. Many of those children are old women now, living quietly in the red brick bungalows of Dohnavur after years of self-giving. “Be the first,” their Amma had told them, “wherever there is a sacrifice to be made, a self-denial to be practiced, or an impetus to be given.” It was no empty pedantry. Her own life made the truth visible to her children. The word became flesh and lived with them.