While one contemporary of Amy’s claimed that the Neills came with the idea of “doing a take-over,” Amy Carmichael could not but have been overjoyed that the Dohnavur Family now had two doctors and two men. She was suspicious, however, of the credibility others prized so highly (is not the wisdom of the world foolishness with God?), and, fearing a mistake, perhaps in his motives or his grasp of the true picture, had written more carefully and straightforwardly to Stephen than to any other who had offered. He was not deterred. “He seemed to love all, and feel with us about all.”
Her fears were not unfounded. Perhaps Neill had expected a more visible recognition of his exceptional gifts. One co-worker thought he had somehow hoped to become Dohnavur’s bishop, although he was not yet even ordained as an Anglican priest. “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” he said, but before long he began to see the place as a world of illusion, insulated from the outside world by the high red walls within which love never failed. He could agree that love never dies away, but that it was always victorious? No, that simply was not the case.
As for the woman responsible for the whole phenomenon, “young recruits came to South India and found a myth,” he said, a woman who had infallibility “pushed on her.” “No smallest disagreement was admitted,” yet he remembered peaceful hours spent over breakfast on Amy Carmichael’s verandah as they worked together on the editing and revision of her book Raj, Brigand Chief. He perceived her as one living in a hushed atmosphere of awe and veneration, keeping a finger on everything, fearing an alien world. The compound, completely detached from village life, was “flooded with Europeans,” who ate in a separate dining room. “Amma” had no Indian equals, feeling none to be as qualified as Europeans for leadership and responsibility. Her stock-in-trade was crises. Life in this lovesome garden spot was a perpetual ferment of crises and deliverances.
The Neill family succeeded in churning up even more turbulence. Dr. Neill, the father, “made a hit with the girls,” according to one observer, something no man within those precincts had ever presumed to do. To Amy this was a serious threat to the strict separation she felt was necessary in the midst of Hindu society. It is conceivable that this threat was exacerbated by a (perhaps unwitting) feeling of rivalry, not only with the dashing father but with the scintillating son, who far outdistanced all other struggling students by learning Tamil in six months. To make matters worse, the Neills saw ways to improve “the pattern shewn in the mount.” Stephen, who had no idea of the perils of mingling with “the outside,” introduced interscholastic sports. The two doctors suggested that the medical work ought to be entirely separate from the compound so that the villagers could get at it, and Stephen told Amma she ought to move the boys away a bit too.
Amy stuck to the pattern. It had been “shewn.” Who could gainsay it? She did not give in on either of the Neills’ points.
It was a bad mix. Within six months the senior Neills left, and before a year was up Amy was in a state of anguish over Stephen. Apparently reports were earned to her by those Neill called her “spies.” He claimed that he was never given a hearing, though this is vehemently denied by some. In Amy’s view the matter was of the gravest nature: “the spiritual fortunes of the work hung by a thread.”
“A dreadful time of distress,” says her diary. “Never such known here before. I am beginning to sink. Lord, save me.” All the years of prayer for clear guidance, for God’s sole selection of workers for Dohnavur, the pattern shewn, the letters written, the assurances given—had it all come to nothing? How the enemy would be gloating! How those who scrutinized the work for evidence of the life of the Lord Jesus would shrug!
Beside the date of May 30 in her Daily Light she wrote, “1925—most painful night of my life.” A prayer “pressed out of” that night was:
O Savior, must the sword
Smite sharp, nor spare?
Then come, O loving Lord,
Give strength to bear.
O Lord of thorns and nails
And piercing spear
The coward in me quails.
Come near, come near.
Later she called May 30 the night of decision, but no action was taken and things went on for months. In July there was “a strange and dreadful” prayer meeting, in which someone “prayed distressingly about friction.” Friction? It was a word never heard, never used, never thought about in Dohnavur, not by Amy, at any rate. If the word was unthinkable to her, to how many—perish the thought—was it not only thinkable but speakable, and in a prayer meeting at that? She could not be sure the prayer was unnecessary. In August she wrote to a close friend, “I do trust no one will ever know how difficult things are now—not even you, you dear!”
Stephen Neill was, according to one laconic colleague, “temperamentally unsuited to the situation.” Dohnavur was a long way from Cambridge. Working under Amy Carmichael was at best difficult for him (he remembered his first meeting with her as “an impression of power”). Apart from her oracular mystique, she had been influenced, he believed, by strong Plymouth Brethren nonconformism, a bitter pill for an Anglican to swallow. She made veiled reference later to this time when “English worship services became impossible because—no, I must not embark on the reasons.”
Neill was known to have given way to several violent explosions of temper during which he beat some of Amma’s boys, yet in his opinion some of the punishments customarily used in Dohnavur, which he did not name, were “rather severe.” No European or Indian worker who was there at the time seemed to know the exact nature of the problem. One suggested that his writings were perhaps not always in theological harmony with her beliefs, but it seems unlikely that Neill wrote much in Dohnavur. He categorically stated that theology had nothing to do with his dismissal, but declined to mention any other reason.
The night of November 28 was “one of the saddest nights of my life,” Amy wrote in Daily Light, next to the words, “Let not your heart be troubled.”
Biographer Frank Houghton covers in six words what happened: “Next day, the severance took place.”
“I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection. The stab is not even beginning to skin over. It’s just red raw,” Amy wrote to a friend nearly a year later.
Stephen Neill went on to become bishop of Tinnevelly, the district which included Dohnavur, but his name was hardly ever mentioned again. Years later he visited the compound. “Amma refused to see him,” said one who was there at the time. Not true, says the one who showed him round the compound. In fact Amy spoke with him kindly.
“Poor, poor S.,” she wrote to one of her few confidantes just after the visit. “It was his spoiling mother and the silly Christian public chiefly. My heart is all one ache for him. . . . This visit has been a burden on our hearts for months. . . . It has deepened our understanding of what we stand for and want to be and by God’s grace must be.”
1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 85.
Chapter 35
The DF Is Born
One day a Dohnavur boy who was visiting Madras was asked whether he was Church of England, Wesleyan, Baptist, or what.
“I am a Christian,” he answered.
“But what sort of Christian?”
“I am just a Christian.”
Nobody had prepared him for such a question. Until 1925 Amy Carmichael had belonged to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, but many who joined her in the work had other labels. Like those nicknamed “Plymouth Brethren” she wanted to practice as literally as possible whatever she found in the New Testament. She found no denominations there. “We can do far more for the Kingdom by being as we are,” she wrote to an Anglican priest who was thinking of joining her, “loving all, belonging to all who love our Lord Jesus in sincerity. . . . We have a welcome everywhere—all societies all over South India welcome anything we can give, for all know that we are not out to harm any.” When the mission in Ceylon had asked her to stay and join them she took Psalms 119:63: “I am a companion
of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts” as the word given to her then. She had held onto that ever since.
The boy’s reply, “I am a Christian,” was just what Amma would have wanted him to say. It was what Peter the Fisherman surely would have said, she thought, and who could improve on that? They belonged to the Household of God. Any who belonged to that belonged to Dohnavur. What else was needed? “The least intrusion of the ‘I and mine,’ an overemphasis on ‘my views/ would be like a pebble striking a pane of glass,” shattering the love that made them one. One way, wrote Amy, is shown to be eternally right—that of 1 Corinthians 1:10, “be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” Any other way is eternally wrong.
For years the Family had attended the Church Missionary Society’s church next door to the compound, but things got too crowded (perhaps not only physically?) and the pastor asked that they arrange their own services. The arranging was according to Amy’s eclectic tastes, incorporating some of the silence of Quaker Meetings the D.O.M. has taught her to appreciate, some of the liturgy which she selected from the Anglican service, and some of the freedom of the Free Churches. In early years an ordained man was usually in charge. Later it was more often someone who had received only “the mighty Ordination of the Pierced Hands.”1
The break with the Anglican church was timely. When Stephen Neill went on to become the bishop of Tinnevelly, the thought of his being in a position to influence the children growing up under Amy’s care was distressing. She explained things later: “When the local bishop has been a friend whose coming we felt would help towards the spiritual life of our company, we have asked him to come to us from time to time, and when he was not we have not.” Had they been a part of the Anglican mission they would not have had that choice.
Among things that did not matter to Amy Carmichael were the method of baptism and the interpretation of certain Bible passages which scholars disagreed on. “Of one mind” need not mean identity of opinion, but “a community of sympathetic kindness.” Three things mattered: the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the power of God to deal with His enemy, and loyalty to one another.
The “living bond,” or gold cord which held the Family together was love. Always remembering that bleak walk along Japan’s coast in the fog and rain with one who seemed to take for granted the lack of love among missionaries, Amy never slackened in her efforts to see that Dohnavur was different. She succeeded. Not that all who lived there demonstrated what she called “Calvary love.” She herself, as her little book If so piercingly shows, felt sometimes that she knew nothing of that love. Some of the Family were openly rebellious. But Amy succeeded in creating a different climate in the place, odiously different to some. Did she think her way was the only way for Christians to live? No, she said, not at all. “We are sure it is the way meant for us,” because prayer “is the core of our day.”
Amy, at fifty-seven, in 1925.
It was a charitable effort, meant to thread its way delicately between condemnation of all other ways and the view that one way is as good as another. Where prayer is not the core, unity is not required—but of course Amy would not have called that Christian. There was no getting around it—“her” way was the only way that could be called Christian. “How can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.”
The committee of the CEZMS in London was responsible for the guidance of their missionaries. The board had asked questions she could not answer: How much did they plan to expand? What financial liabilities would they incur? “We soon passed the place where we could look to any for counsel except the One who was near enough to us to tell us what to do from hour to hour. It was His word which had caused the work to begin and only He (we write reverently) knew what we should do.” So it was obvious that London was simply too far away. Geographical distance made communication difficult. Other distances made it impossible. There was her temperament—mystical and impractical it must have seemed to the men trying to monitor her activities, her disclaimers notwithstanding. And there were the less definable spiritual differences, such as an amorphous ecclesiology and a do-it-yourself creed.
On July 6, 1925, the group in Dohnavur severed all ties with the societies to which they had belonged. They needed a new legal identity in order to hold property, so they were officially registered in 1927 as the Dohnavur Fellowship. The “Memorandum of Association” states its object: to save children in moral danger; to train them to serve others; to succour the desolate and the suffering; to do anything that may be shown to be the will of our Heavenly Father, in order to make His love known, especially to the people of India.
That the break was a friendly one is indicated by the Church Missionary Society’s having donated both the original bungalow and the guest house to the Dohnavur Family.
There remained the serious question of who was to be the leader. The constitution of the Dohnavur Fellowship made no bones about who was the supreme Authority. It was the Unseen Leader, the Lord Jesus Christ. The human leader, Amy Carmichael herself (who was not named), “seeks, in cooperation with the other members, to carry out the mind and will of the Divine.’’
They had been praying for years for a hospital, and for a leader for the boys. The arrival of the Neill family looked like the beginning of the answer to both prayers, so the disappointment was keen when they left. In 1924 a young missionary en route to China with the Children’s Special Service Mission, Godfrey Webb-Peploe, had visited Dohnavur. He was the grandson of one of the great Keswick speakers Amy had known, a strong point in his favor, and she could not help thinking of him as a possible leader on whom her mantle might fall. She wrote in the margin of her Daily Light, “Goodbye to G.W.P.—A broken day,” and added these lines from Alfred Noyes’ “The Torch Bearer”:
Let me not live in vain, let me not fall
Before I yield it to the appointed soul.
Some months later Godfrey’s older brother Murray, a physician, decided to go to China as a medical missionary. His widowed mother was to accompany him and wrote to Amy that they would like to stop in Dohnavur en route. That letter was “like the moss rosebud of old home gardens that is hardly to be recognized as a rosebud at all.” It was to blossom in unimagined blessing.
There were now seventy boys in Dohnavur. The thought of their training, education, and spiritual guidance had lain heavy on Amy’s mind for eight years. Questions tormented her: Where were the leaders they needed? What if they were never found? She took her questions to the Lord, and He asked her a few of His own. “Are you prepared to perish with Me, to be counted a fool and worse than a fool by your own world, your missionary world? May I deal with every shred of your reputation just as I choose, and will you be silent? Are you willing to obey in everything, every time, everywhere?”
Five years before this time Amy had stood in the sunset with eight of her fellow-workers, looking over the plain, wondering how to reach the many scattered villages where there was no Christian witness. The towns were shut to the Gospel. But if there were a hospital?
“It was as though there swam into our view a Place of Healing, furnished with all that was required for the help of the people, and we saw the work of the place led by one in whom were the instincts and convictions and the glad abandon of the spiritual pioneer.”2 They went home and wrote down their hope in the logbook and signed their names under the date, January 30, 1921.
Three years later the Neills came, and a doctor from Ireland named May Powell. When Murray Webb-Peploe came he threw his energies into the medical work with Dr. Powell, in makeshift rooms of the old buildings. Amy began to see the two brothers as the very men they needed, Godfrey as Saint Francis for the boys, Murray as Saint Luke for the hospital. She tried to banish the thought—those men were called elsewhere. For the first time in her life she understood the power of the temptation to covet. The command against
coveting included “thy neighbor’s manservant.” These two servants were called not to India but to China.
On the night of October 8, 1926, Amy was sleeping on the sand at Cape Comorin when she had a vision. With a sense of light and joy she saw Godfrey and Murray at Dohnavur. But “dreams have no conscience,” she said, and she was not troubled by thoughts of China’s loss. Later, in spite of her wide-awake conscience, it seemed to Amy that God was telling her to pray that they might join the Dohnavur Fellowship. A discipline problem arose shortly after her vision which gave special urgency to the need for men. A boy had said “a very bad thing before the younger boys, too deadly to speak about to Helen, so they came to me.” After prayer for guidance, she shipped him off to Muppanthal, a place they had bought for people with special needs. She furnished him with paper and envelope on which he was to write to her when he had “got through this thing, seen its badness, and hated it.” Then and only then would he be allowed to come back.
“Poor little lad,” she wrote to Murray, “he sobbed as if his heart would break, but it had to be, and will do all the other boys good. All over five know this mire, and the Canaan ways of this land.” She emphasized the need for a “brother, strong and fine and jolly with them as their own. The older men are all married. Helen does all a woman can do.”
The impression that she was to ask for the Webb-Peploes was so strong as to be unmistakable. Yet—as usual, her mind wrestled with the question—might she be mistaken? What if the command were not divine at all, but the human in disguise? How could she ask for what would mean loss to others? Wasn’t such prayer treachery? Ask now was what she believed she had heard.
A Chance to Die Page 25