A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  The time spent in the government bungalow in the forest convinced everyone that such a place, though a more commodious one, was needed. The sign was asked for and given, and after several rugged and strenuous expeditions across the plain, into the thickets and up the steep ascents to three or four thousand feet, the perfect spot was found—a small, disused coffee plantation, the Grey Jungle. Money came in for a house, and building began. There were innumerable setbacks. Coolies quit working. Rains came at inopportune times and walls collapsed. Caste conflicts arose among the workers, so that the children took over the carrying of mud and bricks and tiles. At times the sawyers refused to saw so the carpenters were out of work. When the masons failed to protect the tops of walls and huddled in their huts while it rained, Amy and the children and Arul Dasan (who with his wife, Muttammal, had joined the work in Dohnavur) stood in the downpour handing up the mats to keep the walls from dissolving again. The house was finished during the last year of the war for five hundred pounds. They named it the Forest House.

  “Green, green forest stretching as far as the eye can see on three sides, rising in mighty billows up the mountains, leaving bare only the rocky tops; high climbing, low dipping forest. A valley, like the trough of the wave of forest green. In the middle of the smother of green the red roof of a house, our forest house. . . . In front the trees drop sharply down, like a cliff dropping to the sea, the green, green sea of the forest.” So she described the place in the opening chapter of From the Forest. And the pool, the joy of their ravine, “jade-green, clear, wonderful water-green, and when the angels are in a very kind mood they send a blue kingfisher to fish there. Then the pool is something quite too lovely for this everyday earth, and sets one thinking what the pools must be among the green woods of Paradise. Then, too, it is deep, deep enough for diving, and its floor of clean white sand, the powdered dust of mountains. In this pool we, the holiday children and whoever is up with them, daily turn into water-babies. . . . If you have troubles, the pool washes them off. Worries are just kissed away.”

  In the next few years a number of houses were built in the ravine, including the Jungle House and the Jewel House. They met the need for a place to “come apart,” as the Lord called His disciples, to “rest awhile.”

  Amy loved the forest with a passion. She drank its beauty, literally caressed its rocks and trees, sang about it in countless children’s songs. Here, for example, are a couple of lines she wrote to the elephant:

  His great big flat feet pound and pound

  With a rumpety—dumpety—crumpety sound.

  and to the mosquito:

  Take good advice and promptly go,

  Abominable Mosquito.

  Her long poems on the meaning of suffering, Pools and The Valley of Vision, were probably written here, as well as a number of other books, where isolation, quiet, and coolness made the task of writing less arduous than it was in Dohnavur where such commodities were in short supply. “There is so much sadness in the world, so many hearts ache, so many tears fall, it is rather wonderful to be away for a little while in a tearless world, left just as God made it. . . . these elemental things seem to carry one back to the beginnings, the fundamentals, the things that cannot be shaken, ancient verities of God.”1

  She explored every foot of the purchased land. Long-suffering servants toiled with her up steep cliffs, blazing trails wherever she wanted to go, lugging up crockery and food when the fancy took her to have a picnic by a just-discovered waterfall, or tea on top of a lookout rock. Children swept the paths daily, decorated the house with flowers, were taught not to disturb other forest dwellers—except for snakes and scorpions, and only if they came into the house. “Then I am afraid we must slay them, for they are where they ought not to be.”

  She was most insistent that the children learn to swim. She had learned in Millisle and Strangford Lough, but once nearly drowned in the forest pool when a child dragged her under. Never mind, she told them, the sensation of drowning was lovely. No need to alarm the family back in Dohnavur by mentioning it.

  On a peaceful Sunday morning, in the midst of Sabbath quiet, “like a stone falling plump into a clear still pool,” a fat Brahman gentleman arrived at the Forest House. Amy told the servant who announced his coming to send him to where she sat under a tree. He was a most unwelcome visitor with his retinue, and spoke to her cookboy in a tone “a badly brought up hippopotamus might conceivably use in addressing vermin.” But she asked the servant to bring a cup of milk, and while the man poured it down his throat without touching the cup to his lips, she sat on her stone, reproving herself for disliking the intrusion of this man reputed to be “learned and cultured and full of public charities.” Later reflection produced “A Song for One in Like Temptation”:

  No, not for you He thirsted as He died:

  No, not for you my Lord was crucified;

  Woods, streams, and mountains, innocent are ye:

  Not yours, but mine, the shame of Calvary.

  And dear as ye must be to Him, ye trees,

  And running waters in your purity,

  To heart that broke to save them, dearer these,

  Sons of a poor undone humanity. . . .

  Give me Thy thirst: kindle, O Christ, Thy fire,

  Passion of fire, and love’s sincerity;

  My wild wind-harp, take, make of it a lyre

  Whose music shall win men to turn to Thee.

  1. Amy Carmichael, From the Forest, p. 78.

  Chapter 30

  A Life Without Fences

  What Amy Carmichael called “a new thread” was added to the “gold cord” of their life in 1916.

  The world was still at war. Its depression lay heavy even in so far-off a place as South India. Dohnavur had twelve nurseries now, full of babies and toddlers to look after. There were dozens of children inexorably growing, seeking guidance, demanding more and more of those responsible for them. Arulai, the most responsible of the Indians, had nephritis. In the midst of all this, God seemed to be calling for a new decision of faith.

  “I could not rise to it, the deadly truth had me in its grip: I was afraid.” Amy’s mind, filled with the military history she loved to read, was shaped by battle language. Of what use, she thought now, is a frightened soldier?

  Strength of my heart, I need not fail,

  Not mine to fear but to obey,

  With such a Leader, who could quail?

  Thou art as Thou wert yesterday.

  Strength of my heart, I rest in Thee,

  Fulfil Thy purposes through me.

  We are not told what the fearsome decision was, only that discipline was needed, for God had not given a spirit of fear (that spirit has another source altogether), but of power and love and discipline. She longed for comrades-in-arms who would share the disciplined life she knew she had been called to, who would gladly pay the price, forsake all, and live “a life without fences.” She thought of the Lord, standing on the waves in the storm, with hand outstretched to Peter. “Lord, bid me come to Thee, from any boat, on any water, only teach me how to walk on the sea.”

  There were seven young Indian women, including Preena, the first temple child, Purripuranam, Ponnammal’s daughter, and Arulai, in whom the same spirit was found. Today some would say that Amy Carmichael was their “role model,” a cold and sterile term which implies the mere assumption of a part or duty. Their Amma was far more to them than that. She was mother. They were mothered in every way a child can be conscious of being mothered—physically, emotionally, spiritually. She was a loving and powerful presence in their everyday lives, an older woman who did what the apostle Paul told his protege Titus to instruct all older women to do: teach younger women by example what godliness looks like.

  “We shaped ourselves into a group,” Amy wrote. They took the name Sisters of the Common Life, borrowing from Gerard Grote of Holland who in 1380 had formed the Brotherhood of Common Life, a group of men who worked with their hands and trained “such as sought, apart fro
m the evil about them, a pure and godly life.” Because in India, as everywhere else, a distinction was usually made between the sacred and the secular, the Sisters of the Common Life wanted to erase that line, remembering Him who took a towel. “Put on the apron of humility to serve one another,”1 and “Come unto me and rest—take my yoke upon you”2—these were among their watchwords.

  Amy wanted to share with these women the spiritual riches of books that had put iron into her own soul, so it was essential that they learn English. She gave them Richard Rolle, Raymond Lull, Suso and Tersteegen, Bishop Moule, Josephine Butler, Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Rutherford, Père Didon, Bishop Bardsley, “and the brave and burning souls of every age who had left torches.” Such torches lighted the way of discipleship for these women. They were the ones ready to do whatever needed to be done. “Ask her,” it could be said, “she is a Sister of the Common Life. She will do it.” For them promotion meant not more honor but more work, harder work.

  The Sisters took no vows, it being understood that their orders were “whatsoever Thou sayest unto me.” Marriage might be among the whatsoever, and several did marry, as Amy tells in Gold Cord. What she did not mention, Frank Houghton has told in his biography3: that if one of the Sisters married she ceased to be a Sister of the Common Life. During the early years all European women who joined the work automatically joined the Sisterhood, but later it seemed that not all were ready on arrival for that kind of commitment.

  “There is nothing dreary or doubtful about (the life). It is meant to be continually joyful. . . . We are called to a settled happiness in the Lord whose joy is our strength.”

  When they had read together the books Amy gave them, “we” wrote what Amy called “a confession of love.” Her customary use of the editorial “we” made it seem that all decisions were made in a body, all poetry received by simultaneous inspiration, all feelings harmoniously orchestrated. That, of course, was how she earnestly wanted things to be. She had no desire to be the chief. She saw herself as under orders, along with all the rest. But the confession of love was her work, given to the Sisters, and heartily accepted by every woman who wanted to be one of them:

  My vow.

  Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, by Thy grace I will do it.

  My constraint.

  Thy love, O Christ, my Lord.

  My Confidence.

  Thou art able to keep that which I have committed unto Thee.

  My Joy.

  To do Thy will, O God.

  My Discipline.

  That which I would not choose, but which Thy love appoints.

  My Prayer.

  Conform my will to Thine.

  My Motto.

  Love to live, live to love.

  My Portion.

  The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance.

  Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do Thy will, O Lord our God.

  1. 1 Peter 5:5.

  2. Matthew 11:28, 29.

  3. Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1953).

  Chapter 31

  Where Are the Men?

  One of the features of village life in South India was the Car festival. The Car, or juggernaut, was a towering wooden structure on wheels which bore the Hindu idol. Its dark, carved surfaces, representing various aspects of worship, were covered with streamers, tinsel, and garlands of flowers. One day in 1909 Amy was standing in the blinding heat and smothering dust when, “with shoutings and flingings of arms in the air, the brown flood swept past.” Thousands of men, stripped to the waist in honor of the god, strained and sweated at the ropes. “The flood grew denser, the shouts were frenzied, the Car moved round the corner, rocked for a dizzy moment, and stopped.” There were policemen about, lest any devotee attempt to fling himself under the huge wheels. But it was not the Car or the crowd or the heat or any other aspect of the festival that riveted the attention of the missionary—it was little boys, acolytes, attending the god, one of them on the upper tier of the Car, wreathed in pink flowers.

  Amy could not bear it. She believed that the gods of India, as depicted by their aggressive or seductive images, were satanic, and they who made them were “like unto them.” The things she had learned about the character of Hindu worship, through years of study of the language and the mind of the Hindu, were for her quite literally both unutterable and nearly unthinkable. It was “slime, filth, sin,” she wrote, but “books that whitewash Hinduism are turned out by the dozen now, and it’s terribly unfashionable to feel as we do.”

  These things shaped and colored all Indian thinking. There were exceptions. “India has men to whom these evil things carry no appeal. The ‘light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ has lighted the mind and soul of some who have never heard of the Light of the World. They have not blown out that Light, and surely the Powers of Calvary have reached even unto them,” she wrote. “But never has one ray of light come from the idols of the people, only a darkness which has defiled the mind of millions of India.”

  She could not bear the sight of those lovely little boys captured by that system. Neither could she forget it.

  John Donne wrote, “Ignorance is not only the drousinesse, the sillinesse, but the wickednesse of the soule.” She would vastly have preferred to remain in ignorance of this sort of thing. The vexation to her Victorian soul was nothing compared to the outrage to her Christian conscience. It blackened the sun. She refused to sit blindfolded. She began to investigate.

  As before, she met with bland indifference and denial. But there were Indians who knew and deplored as she did this traffic in little boys, similar to that in little girls. Many were sold or given to temple houses where they became musicians and teachers of dancing and poetry to the girls. Others were adopted by Hindus or Muslims, sometimes for purposes she could only describe as “infamous,” meaning homosexual. Others became the property of dramatic societies connected with the temples, and learned to act in plays which were “wholly unclean, soul-destroying.”

  She received a telegram from Simla urging her to provide the government with facts. She did so, asking that the information and its source be kept confidential lest her own work be hindered by publicity. The result was “much earnest movement” among both Indians and English to end this “black iniquity towards innocence.” At last laws were passed, “thank God, which at least mean to help, but India knows how to evade laws. . . . So we go on.”

  Once an Indian friend, acquainted with the ways of the underworld, took her to a house with barred windows and verandahs and a heavy, bolted door. It was not different from the other houses in the street, but he knew what went on inside. In answer to their knock an old hag opened the door a crack. After the usual polite preliminaries the Indian asked if the children were well.

  “What children? There are no children here.”

  “The boys, O elder sister, the boys who learn here.”

  “No boys learn here,” and the door all but shut.

  “Oh, say not so, sister. Do they not learn songs?”

  “No boys learn songs here.” And the door shut.1

  Later Amy succeeded in walking straight into a house where the boys were taught. A white woman in topee and European dress would never have managed it. The boys swarmed around the lady in the sari, taking her hands, begging her to sit down, “friendly and lovable and keen to make the most of this welcome interruption to an apparently strictly enforced routine.” After an illuminating twenty minutes the interruption was discovered. An angry man rushed in like a whirlwind, sent the boys off to their lessons, and, “too confounded for speech,” returned Amy’s calm salaam as she departed.

  She bought a ticket for the drama, and found that the boy who had invited her into the house was the star of the show—a little queen, “rob
ed in a shimmer of pink and gold jewels, playing a musical instrument, which showed to perfection the delicate sensitive hands. As he played, he turned his little head slowly from side to side and bowed in the approved fashion of beautiful queens.” The crowd, boisterous before, was suddenly hushed, transfixed by the beauty of the child.

  When she spoke to her comrades of the plight of the boys, they pointed out the impossibility of her doing anything about it—her hands were already more than full. Boys were more difficult to rear than girls. Boys’ and girls’ work should be kept separate in India. Where were the men they must have to help them? What about a doctor? No, it was unthinkable. Surely God would raise up someone else for the job. She listened politely. She did not settle for that verdict. Unthinkable? Not to God. She prayed and kept on praying, the face of the little queen indelible in memory, for years.

  One day she knelt by a rock in the forest. There was a quiet pool beside the rock, on the floor of which lay sodden leaves. It was one of those “figures of the true,” a visible sign of an invisible reality—life out of death. “Broken, battered, sodden leaves—these that were ready to sink out of sight and be dealt with in any way, all choices gone, they were near to becoming life to the forest. ‘Learn to obey, thou dust, learn to meek thyself, thou earth and clay.’” She asked that God would either take away the burden for the little boys, or show her what to do about them.

  Forbodings such as we had never known when we began to save the girls oppressed us. We knew more now than we did then of the inwardness of this to which we must set our hand. The fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. Were we ready for that? Was our reputation ashes to us? This was a curious question that came again and again. What if our hopes fell in ruins about us like a child’s castle of cards?2