A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  1. Ephesians 6:12 (Phillips).

  2. Kohila, p. 22.

  Chapter 33

  Rendezvous With Robin Hood

  Naturally, there was some pressure,” was a remark which was somehow allowed to escape. Amy Carmichael’s vocabulary rarely included words like “naturally” and “pressure.” Life on the highest plane could ignore them. Twinges of the tension she felt between that plane and the one where her feet trod find expression in her prayers and poems:

  So let it be, Lord, when we know

  The pressure of life’s crowded street,

  The ceaseless murmur of its flow,

  The mud that lies about our feet.

  O lift our souls, from star to star

  We would ascend, until we be

  In heavenly places still, afar,

  The while we walk life’s street with Thee.1

  The author of those lines was in a position, early in 1921, to sense keenly her need for supernatural assistance. Her lyric was no mere sentiment. Fourteen babies died of flu. Several of the boys were ill and Arul Dasan needed an operation. Nor Scrip, Amy’s sixteenth book, was just off the press. Meant for “the innermost circle of friends,” it told how God continually sent money to the Family, at the right time and in the right amounts. It was no surprise to her that, upon publication of an account of divine provision, faith should come under fire on that very front. Financial supply dwindled as the work expanded. The supply of workers was critically short.

  “Naturally, there was some pressure”—the understatement of the year, encompassing the thousand anxieties of the huge responsibility, the what ifs, the buts, the whys, the help-Thou-mine-unbeliefs. She had to live in the middle of this, to go on making decisions, leading the prayer meetings, writing her letters and her books and her journals, bearing on her mind and in her prayers the name of each individual child, accal, sittie, and annachie (elder brother), of which there were now two, Arul Dasan and an Englishman, Alec Arnot.

  When the disciples returned from their apostolic travels the Lord asked them, “Did you lack anything?” Their answer was, “Nothing.” Would Amy Carmichael give any other answer? She would not. If she had responded naturally, she would have had to say, “Yes, Lord. Money. Workers.” God had promised to supply all needs. On that word, not on the sands of self-confidence, she built her house. Given the forces that battered her frailty she would have scorned any attempt to find an explanation for her strength apart from the foundation on which it rested—a Rock that never budged. When the (metaphorical) rains descended and the floods came, the house stood.

  Pressure? Yes, naturally there was pressure. Spiritually there was always that higher view (not always clearly perceived), that purer air (not always deeply inhaled), which drew her. She saw the facts of life in her own torrid and dusty corner of South India as the very context in which God wanted to make her more than conqueror. Here and nowhere else she would prove Him, here, in the vicissitudes and exigencies of the work assigned. Her Lord too had “learned obedience.” In a poor village home, in a carpenter shop, on the torrid and stony roads of Palestine, she found His footprints and kept following.

  During one of the worst of the financial crunches a sum of money was sent to them under a misapprehension. Amy’s conscience would not allow her to keep it. Twice she returned it, twice the secretary of the society that had made the grant sent it back to her. Finally he kept it, “as you apparently have more money than you know what to do with.” They had no ready cash for the large quantities of grain and stores they needed. The logbook notes that they prayed for it on March 1. On March 2 a friend wrote, recalling that she had been about to take a nap when “something or someone” said, No, you have put it off for two days. Go and do it at once, and she sent off forty pounds in rupees. She had no idea she was mailing God’s refund.

  In the fall of 1921 a story began which held all the elements of drama so dear to Amy’s heart—another sally into enemy territory, a struggle with forces of spiritual evil, contact with a human soul torn by moral contradictions. He was Raj, a famous outlaw, chief of a band of brigands. His name had been in the newspapers for his exploits—several escapes from police, the return of handcuffs: “Take these iron bangles back to the police,” he told his guard, “for to that place do they belong.” He was kind to children, old people, and the poor, brave and daring as Robin Hood, a sportsman through and through. What might not the energies of such a man, turned in a different direction, accomplish for the Kingdom of God? Amy’s imagination was kindled.

  She asked the coolies who worked for her in the forest if there might be a chance of meeting Raj. None whatever, they said. Nothing stopped her from putting Raj into her prayers, and one day she had gone to see some fields she thought of buying when suddenly, from behind nearby rocks, stepped three armed men. Raj was their leader, “a clear-skinned man of medium height, immensely strong apparently, and every inch an athlete. The great flashing eyes glowed like black fires under the bushy black eyebrows; but as the talk turned from point to point they lost their smouldering fires and softened or filled with humor.”

  “See, we have tea here, and bread,” said Amy, opening her trusty tea basket, and they sat down together.

  “There are unseen doors that lead out of the familiar landscape of life into another entirely unknown. Such a door opened then. And we walked straight through and did not know it.”

  For two years her letters were full of Raj. He had been falsely accused, had fled when he received a summons, returned because of his wife and children, found that he had been blackmailed, and fled again. His wife died of the shock. He asked Amy to care for his little children. When the police trapped him at last, Amy found herself in “a battle against the cruel powers of hell.” She was allowed occasional visits. Once she dreamed that the gates opened of their own accord, and when she arrived at the Palamcottah prison the dream came true. She walked straight into the ward and asked, “Do you wish to be baptized?” His answer was yes, and a bishop friend, compelled by Amy’s testimony of Raj’s honesty and the miracle of the gates, baptized him and his cohort.

  No more visits were allowed, so Amy was shut up to prayer. When she learned that he had escaped again she blamed herself—had she not instructed him clearly, had she failed him somehow? She prayed that he would “depart from iniquity.” Apparently he did. Attacks were sometimes attributed to him for which impersonators were responsible. Would he come back, give himself up, lead an honorable life? She kept a light burning at night in hopes of his return.

  By June of 1923 the police found themselves in a very embarrassing position. As many as three hundred armed men, under the command of two Englishmen, had searched for Raj. All efforts had come to nothing and the policemen’s jobs were at stake. The last ditch was a humiliating possibility—might a woman succeed? They asked the missionary lady if she would try to persuade Raj to surrender. She had tried at every meeting, without success, and thenceforward had directed her energies solely to prayer. But the official request galvanized her to action once more. The challenge of seeing a notorious criminal not only choose to face justice but to be known as a Christian was worth any risk. A rendezvous was arranged. Thankful for the brown eyes she had once besought God to exchange for blue ones, she stained her face and hands, put on her darkest sari, and was led through the moonless jungle.

  “‘There will be a sign soon.’ The words came like a breath from a shadow on the outer wall of the little room where she waited.” (Her book Raj, Brigand Chief is told in the third person.) “For an hour the shadow stood and did not stir, then from the jungle outside came a low call like the call of a night bird; a soft whistle answered. ‘They are near,’ breathed the shadow, and a silent guide led Carunia through ways unknown to her, till, like a patch of denser darkness, she saw the two men.”

  Raj came toward her. She stretched out her hands. He took them both in his, fondling them “with the eager touch of a loving child.” She pleaded with the men to trust God for pr
otection for their friends, and to give themselves up. It was too late, they said. They would perish. “If only I heard that you had died without a weapon in your hands,” said Amy, “I could bear it.”

  “Do not fear for us,” Raj said. “Will God forsake us?”

  Two months later the men were trapped. They fired on the police, intending only to scare them off. The police set fire to the house, the men burst out and ran through the village. Raj’s cohort was shot. Raj leaped up onto a bank, swung his gun three times around his head, and flung it away. Then he tore the white scarf from his shoulders and, standing bare to the waist, shouted, “You whose duty it is to shoot, shoot here!” and pointed to his heart. They shot. The bullets missed. Slowly he backed toward a tamarind tree, faced his parents’ graves to the west, did obeisance, returned to the tree and stood with his back against the trunk. Again the police fired—sixteen bullets into the bark around where Raj stood, more bullets in the branches above him and the sand beneath him. Not a bullet found its target. He sank slowly, as though to kneel. They fell on him then. One of them bit his neck to drink “the blood of such a man,” another broke his arm. They dragged him toward the water before a bullet was put into his head at close range.

  Amy was in the Grey Jungle when the news reached her. She had only one question: Have they sinned?

  “No. They died clean.”

  1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 16.

  Chapter 34

  The Sword Smites Sharp

  During the 1920s prayers for new recruits were answered, so far as concerns numbers, “exceeding abundantly.” People were reading Amy Carmichael’s books, prayer groups were being formed around the world for this unusual work, the Scrap letters, intended for an intimate circle of personal friends, became the Dohnavur Letter, no longer handwritten but typed, and even more restrained than Scraps.

  It cannot be said that Dohnavur was guilty of false advertising. Never was it deliberately presented as an exciting, glamourous, or even an interesting place. While Amy’s books are filled with descriptions of the beauty of the mountains, the plains, the forests, the rivers and lakes, the little children, and the love that outsiders seemed to observe (“It is as if you were all kin,’’ said one man. “I see only love, I hear only words of love’’), there are pages and pages which deal with the humdrum, the ordinary, the implacable daily round of plain hard work. While she never meant to make her lot look like a hard one (wouldn’t that make it appear that she had a hard Master?), she did mean to be a realist wherever realism was not inimical to her purposes. She included in her descriptions the heat, the isolation, the primitive conditions; she wrote of calumny, disease, death. All these find expression throughout the writings of Amy Carmichael. It was discipleship she preached, and discipleship she practiced. Those who joined her must understand that it was discipleship, of the New Testament variety, that would be taken for granted. Wounds and scars also were taken for granted, as her poem “No Scar?’’ attests:

  Hast thou no scar?

  No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?

  I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,

  I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,

  Hast thou no scar?

  Hast thou no wound?

  Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,

  Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent

  By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:

  Hast thou no wound?

  No wound? No scar?

  Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,

  And pierced are the feet that follow Me;

  But thine are whole: can he have followed far

  Who has nor wound nor scar?1

  “Not a word of attraction can I write to [a prospective recruit]. It will be desperately hard work, iron would snap under the strain of it. I ask for steel, that quality which is at the back of all going on, patience which cannot be tired out, and love that loves in very deed, unto death.” Not of foreigners only was this expected. Some newly converted caste men were set to work hewing stones and digging foundations for the Forest House—in the presence of low-caste coolies. No sterner test could have been applied to prove the validity of their faith. “Grace in teaspoons would have sufficed for a preaching tour. It is honorable to preach,” wrote Amy, who had seen enough of those who followed Christianity for its prestige. Ditchdigging lent dignity to nobody. “Grace in rivers was required for this. Day by day they grew in manliness.”

  Constantly Amy prayed, and asked her “prayer warriors” to pray, that those who joined them be sent by the Lord of the Harvest. No others would be able to “stem the tide, keep facing upstream,” no others would “keep on fire. And truly on fire they must be if they are to set the native church on fire, for it is wrapped round and round in wet blankets of the devil’s own weaving and soaking.” Steel, tides, fires—every vivid metaphor she could think of she employed to drive home the seriousness of the call. Stones they must be, shaped and fitted by the Master Stonemason, like the stones prepared in the quarries to fit perfectly into their places in the great temple of Solomon.

  There was no psychological grid for missionaries to pass through in those days. Dohnavur asked twenty-five simple questions, among them:

  • Do you truly desire to live a crucified life? (This may mean doing very humble things joyfully for His Name’s sake.)

  • Does the thought of hardness draw you or repel you?

  • Do you realize that we are a family, not an institution? Are you willing to do whatever helps most?

  • Apart from the Bible, can you name three or four books which have been of vital help to you? Apart from books, what refreshes you most when tired?

  • Have you ever learned any classical or continental language?

  • Have you ever had opportunity to prove our Lord’s promise to supply temporal as well as spiritual needs?

  • Can you mention any experience you have passed through in your Christian life which brought you into a new discovery of your union with the crucified, risen, and enthroned Lord?

  In a statement written a few years later, Amy Carmichael put it briefly: Do not come unless you can say to your Lord and to us, The Cross is the attraction.

  It might be enlightening to investigate whether the psychological screening applied to missionary candidates nowadays selects truer (more “successful”?) disciples than did Amy’s set of simple questions. Neither is a perfect sieve. Recruits wrote, were interviewed in London by the earnest and dedicated but deaf and nearsighted Mrs. Streeter, corresponded with Amy, answered the questions to her satisfaction, and eventually appeared at the Dohnavur bungalows in a bullock bandy with bells jingling.

  They came, it seems, in droves, during the twenties. At least one turned up completely unannounced. But they did not all stay. The crucified life did not look quite the same to them in Dohnavur as it had looked on paper. As one famous Christian wrote when a newspaper editor asked what is the trouble with the world, “Dear Sir: I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton.” The trouble with Dohnavur was people.

  The reasons for the many departures from Dohnavur were diverse. Some were asked to leave, some peremptorily dismissed. Some left of their own volition, some because of poor health. This last being a fairly respectable way for a missionary to quit the field, the reasons which fell under this heading were sometimes specious. There were personality clashes which all the prayers for oneness in Christ and efforts toward unity did not resolve.

  Several women, received in all good faith “in spite of social background” (a matter taken into at least some small account) failed to find a niche. One of them, poor soul, “behaved like a kitchen maid” and was asked to depart.

  When the cause was failure of the man or woman concerned, Amy’s lips were sealed. Love covered a multitude of sins. Questions raised were answered with “The full story cannot be told.” More than once a dismissal which she refused to explain to the public brought severe censure on Amy herself, and gave rise to ugly rumors t
hat she was an autocrat who would tolerate no one who refused to obey her implicitly and without question.

  The home in Millisle was a place of principles. Compromise was unthinkable. The home she established in India for her children was likewise a place of principles. She could brook no compromise there. Those who could not bring themselves to subscribe to the standard Amy believed she had received from God were, in her view, turning away from Him. She suffered for them and because of them, yet continued to believe absolutely that the lady who did the “vetting” was called by God to that task in England as surely as she herself had been called to hers. They were one in mind and spirit. Prayer was the very heart of it. They asked for the right people. God knew who they were. God answers prayer. Would He not direct the lady, who seemed to be of a rather sanguine temperament, to those she should accept? The principles were sound enough. A sovereign God, however, works through flawed human instruments to whom He has given the power of choice. Sometimes the choices are mistaken. Divine sovereignty permits those mistakes.

  Probably no recruits were more promising than a family of four who arrived in 1924—the parents, both of them physicians, along with their daughter and their son, a twenty-four-year-old Cambridge graduate. It was said that if Stephen Neill was a candidate for a university prize, then no one else would compete. With a fellowship from Trinity College which gave him every prospect for a brilliant career in the academic field, he opted for missionary work—to the astonishment of at least one of his classmates, Malcolm Muggeridge. The presence of the Neills in ‘‘little Dohnavur” lent a new respectability in the eyes of some who thought of it as an eccentric backwater. There must be more than met the eye if it attracted such distinguished people as the Neills.