A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,

  I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire—

  See in my quiet places, wishes thronging—

  Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.

  And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure

  Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,

  Tarry content my Well-Beloved’s leisure,

  At last, at last, even as a weaned child.

  Chapter 28

  Across the Will of Nature

  Matthew Arnold’s tribute to his father in Rugby Chapel was for Amy “one of the lights I steer by.”

  If in the paths of the world

  Stones might have wounded thy feet,

  Toil and dejection have tried

  Thy spirit, of that we saw nothing.

  To us thou wast still

  Cheerful and helpful and firm. . . .

  Languor is not in your heart,

  Weakness is not in your word,

  Weariness not on your brow.

  We are allowed to see a good many of the stones that wounded Amy’s feet, but we hardly hear her say “Ouch!” The power of her passions breathes in every word she writes, but because her aim was always to tell only that part of the truth which in her view mattered, that is, would edify and strengthen, she often sidestepped a description of what today’s reader would find most fascinating. Walker’s death was without question a stunning blow. Even if it had not come in succession with so many other blows, she would have reeled under it. If she succumbed to as much as a few moments of self-pity, she did not permit herself the luxury of wallowing in it. She knew where to turn to regain a firm footing: first to her God, and then to the thought of others—Mrs. Walker, for example, whose loss, Amy told herself, was infinitely greater than her own. The lesson of the weaned child was learned far more quickly than it might have been because she set about at once writing Walker’s biography, a task which would transform her own loss by giving to the world the story of a hidden life.

  Although at their first meeting she was impressed with the jetblack hair, the earnest eyes, the wisdom and learning and, most of all, the utter absence of narrow -mindedness, she had decided that she did not like him. He seemed to take with less than proper seriousness her desire to burn out rather than rust out. Could he possibly understand such a motive? Later she knew how perfectly he understood. He understood as no one else in India could understand.

  And Amy loved him. To read the biography is to know that she loved him. Her love had never been half-hearted for anyone. She was all that a sister could be for her own brothers and sisters, devoted to each. But Walker was what she had not had at home, an older brother, and far more. She was brilliant, personable, charming—more so, it is said, than his wife. The scenario could have been explosive if all three had not been soldiers under orders. Walker loved his wife. Amy loved and respected her, worked closely with her, although it was not easy for her to live with a couple so obviously in love.

  By the time World War I began Amy had finished writing the biography, Walker of Tinnevelly. She held it back from publication until 1916, feeling that people would not want to read anything other than war news.

  With the war came increased anxiety for the children. The thought of their future had always been of paramount concern. “What are you going to do with them all in the future?” people had repeatedly asked, sometimes with a tone which implied she had not given the matter a thought. ‘She lives in a Utopia,” said one. “I pity her, I pity her with all my heart when I think of all that is before her when her children grow up!”

  “Neither of these sanguine sympathizers nor one out of a hundred questioners has any idea of how their doubts appeal to the anxious part of us, for—-

  Far in the future Lieth a fear,

  Across the Will of Nature

  Like a long, low mist of grey,

  Gathering to fall in a dreary rain,

  Thus doth thy heart within thee complain;

  And even now thou art afraid, for round thy dwelling

  The flying winds are ever telling

  Of the fear that lieth grey,

  Like a gloom of brooding mist upon the way.

  But the Lord is always kind,

  Be not blind,

  Be not blind

  To the shining of His face,

  To the comforts of His grace.

  Hath He ever failed thee yet?

  Never, never: wherefor fret? . . .”1

  There was not only the question about what the children were to do when they grew up but also the question of how their thousands of needs (there were nine nurseries now) were to be met in the process. The temptation to fear became very strong in the early years, “a gloom of brooding mist upon the way,” and Amy was “allowed to taste of the cup which would be poured out for me if the money did not come.” She recalled Allan Gardiner, missionary to South America, who was allowed to starve to death. As usual, her hyperactive imagination went to work on that one. “Suppose the children die and we all (of course) die with them, and the Christian world cries shame on the one responsible, what will it matter, after all? The children will be in heaven, and is that not better than the temple?” She took her questions as usual to the faithful Master who pointed her to the story of the feeding of the five thousand.

  “And, as I believed, the promise was given to me then that there should be baskets over and above our daily supplies, and that, just as those men and women and their children were free to use the pieces of the loaves over from that great meal if they needed them before they reached home, so we should be free to use ours, should need arise before we too reached Home, we and our children.”

  More money than was needed then began to come in, so that by the time the British pound fell and the price of rice rose during the war (sending the cost of bringing a child from the nearest station to fifteen times its former cost), the “baskets” were ready. “Standing on sure ground we can affirm just this: we have never lacked any good thing; and during the years of War, people in the towns and villages began to say, ‘God is there,’ for they could not account for what they saw except by saying that.”

  Life in Dohnavur was very like that of a cloister in many ways, and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, at least in those early days. The work which had to be done was all-consuming, there were few to do it and no time for extraneous activity. But Amy’s sympathies were broad, her reading wide, and during the war she wrote “always with a sense of the sorrow in the homes to which this letter goes. What flaming fires of sorrow you are walking through these months! God comfort you all.”

  As one worker commented, “Amma went from crisis to crisis. She saw things as crises—but we had them, God knows, frightful ones!” Once a village lunatic got loose, came into the compound, entered the guest room where a lady was sleeping, lifted her mosquito net, gazed at her, and then sat down in her chair. She remained calm and the man left, but returned. Amy armed herself with a flashlight and a cane, “hoping he would prove amenable to the light and not require further incentive to disappear.” She did not have to apply either, as the servants appeared and escorted him home. It was all in a night’s work, however. “We have a tame lunatic always on hand who chops our wood and has scraps from the kitchen, but this was a new and not at all a pleasant sort to have about.”

  There were occasions when the mother was able, with a select group of her children and co-workers, to leave the cloistered life of Dohnavur. Often they made forays in the moonlight out to the plain, which necessitated passing through the village. Once they paused in front of the temple where the men were gathered and Amy spoke to them. “They were as attentive as the women, for they don’t hear ‘preaching’ every day and always enjoy a novelty.” Then little Chellalu, one of the more mischievous children, asked in a stage whisper if she too might speak. She “opened fire on those men, pelting them with facts as to their folly in worshipping somebody who did not love them and ha
d not made them.” Her hearers stood amazed. Chellalu explained later to Amy: “When you were speaking, a voice inside me said very loud, yes, very loud, ‘Chellalu! Tell those men about God!’ and my heart said pickapickapick!”

  At Madras Beach.

  Then there was a grand tour to Madras. Amy took fourteen children, five helpers, one servant, and one sittie on the train to the big city. They traveled third-class as always. Why? “Because there isn’t any fourth-class!” On the way they saw for the first time a railway station, telegraph wires, signaling systems, the palace and temple of Madurai, bazaars, motorcars, and then in Madras itself, a motorcycle with a sidecar in which they rode, museums, a foundry, a printing press, a cotton factory and—this was a first for Amy, too—a movie. A friend arranged for a “good set” of pictures to be shown instead of the “usual doubtful vulgarities.” The children thought the pictures alive, and were most astonished at the speed with which the soldiers in the war pictures walked. Amy, tired of the customary Oriental saunter, exhorted the girls to follow the soldiers’ brisk example.

  A clergyman took them to Madras Beach and, dressed in black suit, clerical collar, and sun helmet, strode into the surf to take pictures of the girls, fully clothed in their white saris which were knotted up around the knees, wading. One of the rare photos of Amma shows her sitting in a beached boat, wearing her sari and helmet, surrounded by satin-haired girls with thick braids, her white hand resting on a black one.

  It was during this trip that the issue of furloughs for foreign workers came up. Frances Beath was the sittie accompanying Amy. Her parents, who were in Madras then, wanted Frances to go home to Australia with them. Frances demurred. It was not the time. The parents and many friends thought this quite wrong, a decision not made in freedom but under duress—at least the duress of Amy’s powerful example. She had never taken a furlough. The mother’s feet, according to the Tamil proverb, were tied. Old Mr. Beath pleaded with her to release his daughter. There was no question of releasing her. The young woman was technically quite free to go, but Amy refused to persuade her.

  “Supposing you knew the Lord Jesus was to return soon,” said Amy. “What would you do?”

  “Why, tell her to stay, of course!” said the man without hesitation. In a flash, he saw what he had said. He laughed. They gave their consent. The issue arose again and again in subsequent years when fellow-workers, feeling “a bit skeletonic,” as one of them put it, raised the question of a furlough or even just a weekend off. All were given to understand from the first that the nature of the work made regular furlough plans impossible. If the doctors insisted on what Amy called “exile” for health reasons, it was granted. Otherwise she simply laid before them the principle that governed her own life: Ask not how little but how much can love give? She would allow them to choose the harder road, as she had written just after the Frances Beath experience.

  If we would walk with an ungrieved Lord we must never let the fear of being thought “hard” or, far more subtle temptation, the fear of pain for a younger one whom we love, cause us to influence that one to choose the natural rather than the spiritual. If once a soul has entered the path where the Spirit, not the flesh, is guide, God does not lightly pass over such a lapse. Men may praise it; God condemns it; and those who know their Father know the bitterness of the hiding of His face.

  She quoted again, as often in her writings, Tersteegen’s poem:

  Across the will of Nature

  Leads on the path of God;

  Not where the flesh delighteth

  The feet of Jesus trod.

  O bliss to leave behind us

  The fetters of the slave,

  To leave ourselves behind us,

  The graveclothes and the grave.

  We follow in His footsteps;

  What if our feet be torn?

  Where He has marked the pathway

  All hail the briar and thorn!

  Scarce seen, scarce heard, unreckoned,

  Despised, defamed, unknown,

  Or heard but by our singing,

  On, children, ever on!

  1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 8.

  Chapter 29

  Grey Jungle, Crystal Pool

  Ponnammal, whose cancer had been discovered in April 1913, became very ill again in the following year. Several times she heard music when no earthly music was being played. Amy took it as one of “the many things of life which we may only know in part until for us too the curtain of sense wears thin.”

  The epistle of James says that the sick should call for the elders of the church to anoint them. Should they do that now? They were not sure. Amy was used to being given some sign to confirm a Scripture verse. So they prayed that if they should, someone who was earnest about following this primitive church custom should come along. He came, an old friend from Madras. It was a solemn meeting around the sickbed, the women dressed as usual in their hand-loomed saris, but white ones for this occasion. They laid a palm branch across Ponnammal’s bed as a sign of victory and accepted whatever answer God might give, certain that whether it was to be physical healing or not, He would give victory and peace. It sounds like a simple formula. It was an act of faith, but certainly accompanied by the anguish of doubt and desire which had to be brought again and again under the authority of the Master.

  The answer that came was that Ponnammal, from the very day of the anointing, grew rapidly worse. She lay for days without speaking, her dull eyes half-open, seeming to see nothing. The pain was violent, kept under only by large doses of morphia. “She has been walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I never knew how dense that shadow could become, for I never before watched anyone dying in this slow, terrible way. . . . Nothing was visible but the distress and depression of this most fearful disease.”

  Once when she seemed to be in unimaginable misery she told Amy how she had longed to be allowed to stay. She thought she could help a little “if the pain did not pass this limit.” “It seemed to me the most unselfish word I had ever heard from human lips.” Ponnammal touched the limit at last—the limit divinely set to pain—and her “warfare was accomplished” on August 26, 1915. She would never be replaced. She had been among the best. But “we shall have our best again, purified, perfected, assured from change forever.” That was the ground of hope.

  There was relief in September from the long strain when Amy took a group of children up into the forest near Dohnavur for a few weeks in a government bungalow. It was no longer possible to move such a family to the distant hill resorts, and Amy, always zealously protective of her children, feared European influences there that would contribute nothing to their spiritual welfare. There were worldly distractions which might sow discontent among her children. She saw the need for rest and change, however, and asked God for some provision.

  It was an experiment, and the house was primitive. The floor was cement, there were no facilities, it was dank and cold when it rained. Everything but water had to be transported from the plain by coolies. But the weeks were glorious, full of flower collecting, swimming and diving in the pool of a rushing mountain river, hunting for animal tracks (wild elephant tracks by the hundred), bears’ holes, tiger spoor. Amy and three cohorts gave the others “a shivering half hour” by hiding behind a tree and growling. “There was a wild rush up to the house, and then to our immense gratification we saw the whole household turn out with sticks, led by Sella-mutthu, horribly alarmed but valiant.”

  What the holiday did for the children was salutary. What it did for Amy was something else. In October she was very ill, so ill that, according to a private note in a journal, she “gave way.” To her friends at home she said nary a word about her health, but admitted that “various things happened which interrupted the even flow of life.” (A biographer would be hard put to single out two days in a row when the flow of life in Dohnavur could be described as “even.”) By giving way she probably meant that she let someone else know she was in pain. Perhaps she had to go to bed. “Di
stress of thought of doctor being called to leave far needier people for me. Distress of finding some dear ones overburdened because I had given way.” She prayed, perhaps not for the first time and certainly not for the last, “Do not let me be ill and a burden or anxiety to anyone. O let me finish my course with joy and not with grief. . . . Let me die of a battle-wound, O my Lord, not of a lingering illness. Forgive this prayer if it be wrong.”

  In the same month it was discovered that Arulai, who had been pronounced cured of tuberculosis, now had Bright’s disease, “another of those grave trials which give us a chance to prove the things we believe.” Arulai, Amy’s “Star,” treasure of all treasures, the Elisha on whom Amy had begun to believe the mantle was to fall. On one of the worst days Amy was walking in the circle of nursery cottages called the Round, praying and thinking of Walker, Ponnammal, Arulai—“our three strongest spiritual influences, the three upon whom I could always count for strength of character as well as for spiritual power: Lord, must Thou take them all?” In early November the answer seemed to be yes. Arulai’s pulse faded, she refused her medicine, and could not speak. Amy sent a message to a friend: Come. Arulai dying. She rallied and survived another twenty-four years.

  Amy’s determination not to draw attention to herself had not weakened since she first took the nom-de-plume “Nobody” in the little family journal in Belfast. When her biography of Walker was published, a blurb on the dust jacket—praise she was sure she did not deserve—made her “too ashamed to take any pleasure in the book. O my God, I am ashamed before Thee.” The same motive of self-effacement must have been at least part of what inspired the periodic binges of “covering her tracks” by destroying diaries, a habit which creates tantalizing gaps in the story. Arulai once succeeded in rescuing part of a notebook before Amy had done away with the whole thing, but only God knows how much went into the fire, or into the maws of termites.

  A few years later the governor of Madras sent a wire of congratulation on her having been included in the Royal Birthday Honors List. Consternation was her response. A medal? For service in India, service to Him who had died for her? “I have done nothing to make it fitting, and cannot understand it at all,” she wrote to Lord Pentland. “It troubles me to have an experience so different from His Who was despised and rejected, not kindly honored.” She was persuaded at last that it would be ungracious to refuse the award, but she put her foot down when it came to attending the presentation ceremony.