A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  She asked. The prayer of faith was bombarded again. One day, alone in the woods, her courage collapsed. She waited, “drinking from wells of bitterness and fear.”3 Then “came a question, tender, poignant: ‘You fear to cause loss and hurt to your fellowservant; would I ask you to do so? You fear to intrude into the life of another; would I ask you to intrude? Have I been so long time with thee and yet has thou not known Me?”

  Even then the fears did not entirely subside. Assurances alternated with doubts. “There is a place where the human fails, breaks down, turns to ashes. Hope has not a single foothold. In such an hour there is a perishing of everything unless the soul waits in silence for God only.”4

  Silence. Amy was silent. God was silent. But He had heard. Godfrey was already on board ship, headed for India with his mother. He had rheumatic fever and needed a rest. Two weeks after the vision at the Cape, they reached Dohnavur, and a few days later he believed God called him to resign from the CSSM and join the Fellowship. Two months went by before he was free to reveal his decision to Amma.

  She was overjoyed. Half of her prayer answered! She went on praying. Would not God bring Murray as well? It looked impossible. He had finished language study in Nanking and begun work in 1927 in a CMS hospital in Hangchow. Political events soon squeezed him and all British nationals out of the area. Soviet Russia offered to help Dr. Sun Yat-sen organize an expedition to crush the military governors of the north. An officers’ training school was established in Canton, an army was raised, and the British were ordered to evacuate. Murray spent a few months in Shanghai.

  For Amy the battle went on . . . and on. “Unless the Lord and Master of us all, blessed Captain and Pilot, turned the helm this way, we don’t want you,” she wrote to Murray. “I cannot pretend that if He did turn the helm I should be sorry, wretch that I am!” Later she told Murray, “There was a day when I did not know how to bear it. The powers of darkness closed down upon me.” Two years after Stephen Neill left Dohnavur, Murray Webb-Peploe arrived. Those two years were to Amy “the age-long minute,” as she noted in her Daily Light. She expressed her prayer of that time in a poem:

  Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow

  Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea,

  What matter beating wind and tossing billow

  If only we are in the boat with Thee?

  Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute

  While Thou art silent and the wind is shrill:

  Can the boat sink while Thou, dear Lord, art in it?

  Can the heart faint that waiteth on Thy will?

  Neither she nor Murray knew then that he was to stay, but Amy dared to go on hoping, and felt that God was giving her strong reason to hope. She sat up in bed that evening—it was May 31, 1927—and read Daily Light: “Blessed is she that believed; for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. . . . For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.”

  On August 25 came the first gift for the building of a hospital—one hundred pounds.

  1. F. W. H. Meyers, St. Paul.

  2. Gold Cord, p. 279.

  3. Ibid, p. 359.

  4. Ibid, p. 360.

  Chapter 36

  A Secret Discipline

  Dear, dear Mother of Murray,” wrote Amy Carmichael to Mrs. Webb-Peploe in the summer of 1928. “He’s sonthum (our own). You know it—you know what it means of heart’s joy too deep for words just now. I have tried to write but cannot. I can only say this and leave you to understand.

  “In joy, the greatest that could have come on this side of heaven, and in grateful, grateful love, Amma.”

  Events in China had led to Murray’s release from his commitment there. On July 13 he wrote a note to Amma, “May I stay here? Murray.”

  “It is all beautiful, the sure leading . . . I ponder it all, turn over every step in the wonderful ordering of events and worship God—I don’t know anything as humbling as an experience like this. We had a thanksgiving service at 11. None of us found it easy to put our thanks into words, I least of all. I blundered through somehow but so poorly that I could only look up and say, ‘Lord, please understand without words, for they won’t come.’”

  Amy’s vision at Cape Comorin became reality. Her prayers for leaders for the men and the medical work had been answered precisely as she had hoped. These men exemplified for Amy a quotation from Dean Church: “Manliness is not mere courage, it is the quality of soul which frankly accepts all conditions in human life, and makes it a point of honor not to be dismayed or wearied by them.” Would the pathway be more level and smooth from now on? Could she breathe a deep sigh of relief and turn over the reins, as it were, to the two strong men?

  Not by any means all the reins. The Dohnavur Fellowship was a family and Amy Carmichael was, of course, the mother. Whether she had ever thought of Godfrey or Murray or any other man as the father is unlikely, but she began to try to think of Murray as father, at least to the boys. For years she had been grooming her beloved Arulai for the leadership of the whole family. It asked for a certain spiritual intensity and perspicacity she had not found in any man. Barclay Buxton in Japan—“My ever-beloved chief. There will never be anybody quite like him”—had come closest to the ideal. Thomas Walker ran a close second. But there was no such giant around now. In old times God used weak things to confound the mighty. Why not now? Arulai, a woman who had been learning for years to breathe the same heavenly air Amy breathed, seemed to Amy to be the one on whom God had laid His hand.

  In one of his letters Murray called Amy the “skipper.” There was no question of her authority. “Under God there was only one boss and that was Amma,” wrote Hugh Evan-Hopkins, who joined the Fellowship later. “She wouldn’t proceed with any course of action until everyone had agreed, but who dare oppose her? We were awed—perhaps excessively so—-by her wisdom and experience. She was a remarkable woman, alarming to a raw recruit, with a sort of aura about her.”1 To another there was nothing of the sort. He spoke of her “absolute humility. You never felt she was someone superior.”

  When Murray decided to stay, Amy asked May Powell, who had been with her for several years before his arrival, whether she preferred medicine or surgery. Surgery, was her answer. “I’m so sorry,” said the skipper, “because Murray will do the surgery.” Case closed.

  Then there were the babies. Dr. Powell had cared for them up to this time. Amy decided that would be not hers but Murray’s job from now on.

  “When Amma had seen a thing very clearly she expected the rest of us to see it as clearly. It was all wrong,” says Dr. Powell now. “He lived outside the compound—they couldn’t get at him. But I broke Amma’s rule by not going to her. I was all wrong—be sure to put that in!” So I have put it in.

  During the next two decades some interesting and capable men joined the Dohnavur Fellowship. Alec Arnot, the first foreign man to join, put in years of solid work in agriculture and building. His contribution seems, however, to have been undervalued, or perhaps he was outshone by his successors. When he left for furlough he was not invited back, even though his wife, Gwen, whom he had acquired in Dohnavur, would be greatly missed as a teacher.

  A young Anglican priest from Australia, took what Amy warned him would be “a big step from the cathedral to the missionary scrap heap.” Like other clergy before him, Hugh Evan-Hopkins and Bertie Berdoe, he found himself, ecclesiastically, in an awkward limbo. He was put to live with small boys, teach handcrafts, and train a choir. It was what he bargained for. In one of her earliest letters to him, before he had been accepted, she wrote, “I think of you in all the beauty and dignity of cathedral life, and with opportunities to broadcast and so on, and then I think of you as a buried seed. Is the contrast too tremendous? No, because the called and chosen can by God’s grace be faithful, and to follow the Crucified is all that matters to the true lover and disciple. I magnify your office, I magnify your calling, only it does mean
, for it must, death, that life may abound.” She had tried scrupulously to give him an honest preview.

  He came. The difficulties were as real as predicted. uShe gave me a thorough scolding because I was not pulling my weight,” he said, “told me my heart was divided between the work I had left behind (I was precentor at St. Paul’s, Melbourne) and this work. We prayed together. She had a very special care for single people. Always thought of others, wanted to know if their experience spoke of the love of the Lord.” After much hesitation he reluctantly returned to Australia.

  The necessity of working under women put a severe strain on some of the men who came. One, at least, a man with military experience, did not have to work under women—except, of course, under Amy herself. She appointed Ronald Taylor medical superintendent over the heads of three doctors, Angus Kinnear, Christian Rogan, and Nancy Robbins. Taylor’s authoritarian approach, particularly to the Indians, was a bit overwhelming. Totally unable to conform to the Dohnavur way of working, he could not stay.

  I inquired of an Indian who had spent many years in Dohnavur if most of the men found it difficult to work under female authority. “One hundred percent of them,” was his reply. “But the women? Never, in all my wanderings, have I seen thirty or forty women live together in such harmony as I saw in the DF.”

  Sex complicates things. It complicated things enormously for the DF. In the early days of the work things were freer for the boys and girls of the DF than for Indians. Mixed bathing was allowed in the Forest, and as late as 1936 boys and girls went together for bird walks with Godfrey Webb-Peploe, starting out as two separate groups, returning home boy and girl hand in hand.

  Later, because of her knowledge of the Indian mind rather than because of any Victorian notions, Amy felt that the rules must be tightened. Their Indian neighbors could not bring themselves to believe that men and women, boys and girls, could live and work in the same area and not indulge in sexual relations.

  “We would gladly have had boys and girls study together in our school,” Amy wrote in Roots (an unpublished paper giving the principles of the DF and what underlay them), “but though by this time this was beginning to be possible even in this very orthodox part of India (though sometimes with grievous results) such children had parents who had probably arranged their future partners already, or at any rate soon would. Family connections, Caste, Clan, and certain Caste rules decide Indian marriages. We were outside Caste and Clan and had no family connections. It would take too long to explain why and how this affected the question of co-education, and the free life of the West. . . . We had to be careful to give no cause of offence or lead any into temptation in this as in all else.”

  One of the bizarre rumors which was circulated in spite of all precautions was that Dr. Robbins, while living in a tiny village house, had “invited a man” into it, and that he had “undone his veshti.” The truth was that he needed surgery on a finger. Although there was a dusty wind blowing, she took the tattered sacking which served for a curtain off the window so that the crowd of villagers might see the whole show. She had him lie on the floor and, with the help of her Indian nurse, operated. Not for a moment were the three of them hidden from the eagle eyes of the spectators.

  So there was always “the men’s side” and “the women’s side,” “the boys’ side,” and “the girls’ side,” with walls and gates between. Members of the Fellowship (often called DFs) were expected to maintain what seemed to European outsiders unnecessarily strict segregation between the sexes. It was not as strict as sometimes reported. DFs had meals together and there was consultation and discussion on matters concerning the work—always, of course, “in public,” in and around the bungalow.

  While maintaining that members of the Family were to follow the leading of their Lord, Amy took responsibility for approving and often for arranging their marriages. When Murray Webb-Peploe began to take an interest in a new missionary from Holland, Oda Van Boetzelaer, every conversation had to be chaperoned—“In Dohnavur you don’t speak to a woman unless she’s your wife,” he said, so they chose “the blindest and deafest old lady in our family and parked her at the end of a long verandah.”2 The courtship, slowed not only by rules but by illness, was strung out over many long months. It was Amma who suddenly decided on the wedding date. Murray needed a long rest in Australia. Who could accompany him if not OdaP So, at Amma’s behest, they were promptly married and off they went.

  Amy’s description of the wedding gives no hint that she was conscious of any ambivalence. The blessing of God was on the couple. “In the quiet light of the Unseen Presence standing very still in reverence are Murray and Oda, he in his Indian white, she in her mauve sari, a single rose in her dark hair. . . . There is a sense of shining.” Everyone sang “O Splendor of God’s Will,” and “it was all solemn and sweet beyond words, and real” But Amy had strong private reservations which she did not admit until years later when subsequent events seemed to vindicate them.

  Because the work of the DF could not be carried on at all without a number of single helpers free from family responsibility, there was criticism that Amy Carmichael was opposed to marriage. She did her best, as did the apostle Paul, not to oppose it in principle, though Paul made it crystal clear that singleness was, in his opinion, the better way.

  It is a good principle for a man to have no physical contact with women. . . . I wish that all men were like myself, but I realise that everyone has his own particular gift from God. . . . each man should live his life with the gifts that God has given him and in the condition in which God has called him. . . . as far as young unmarried women are concerned, I must confess that I have no direct commands from the Lord. Nevertheless, I give you my considered opinion. . . . amid all the difficulties of the present time you would do best to remain just as you are. . . . those who take this step [of marriage] are hound to find the married state an extra burden in these critical days, and I should like you to be as unencumbered as possible. . . . The unmarried [woman] concerns herself with the Lord’s affairs, and her aim is to make herself holy in body and in spirit. . . . I am not putting difficulties in your path, but setting before you an ideal, so that your service of God may be as far as possible free from worldly distractions.3

  This states exactly the ideal that Amy had held since before she left England, and it was the ideal set before the Sisters of the Common Life. The old women still living who grew up in Dohnavur say that it was the crème de la crème who were especially encouraged to remain single. For those less gifted Amma was not so reluctant to arrange marriages.

  Psychology would find more than one explanation for the silence Amy herself kept as regarded her own love life. If we choose to accept the psychologists’ rather than her own explanation, we know nothing which would distinguish her from the rest of the race—she was human, she was a woman. But a woman who purposes to live for God may be distinguishable from others in at least some ways. Her own explanation of her silence is more interesting (and possibly more important) than the psychologists’.

  “There is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others,” she wrote in the story of Kohila. “No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence.”

  She broke her silence a little when, late in life, one of the Indian women who worked and lived most intimately with her asked why she had not chosen “the other life.”

  She told Neela then that a letter had come on the eve of her sailing for Japan. She did not say who wrote it. She did not say it was a proposal. She said merely that it “looked towards what you call ‘the other life.’” She waited quietly. Deep down in me a voice seemed to be saying, ‘No, no, no, I have something different
for you to do.’” She held to that word when her woman’s heart longed for a man’s love. That day in the cave in Arima, Japan, was one of those days, a day full of fear of a lonely future, when the Voice spoke again: “None of them that trust in Him shall be desolate.”

  Again at Ooty, she confessed, there was another proposal, or at least the overture to a proposal. She gave Neela no details. She did not use the word proposal. It was, she said, the last time the “other life” pulled. She added, “It was not a question of giving up His service. It never had been that. And now what was (as others would have told me) such a good thing would have led out into wider opportunities than ever before had been mine, but it would have led out of India. Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? Shall I do this? And all I heard in answer to that was, ‘No, no, no. I have something different for you to do.’” Shortly after that the work she would never have done if she had been married began. Small wonder she wanted comrades in singleness.

  “One thing more,” she added, as Neela was taking dictation of the autobiography meant for the children. “Remember our God did not say to me, ‘I have something greater for you to do.’ This life is not greater than the other, but it is different. That is all. For some our Father chooses one, for some He chooses the other, all that matters is that we should be obedient ‘unto all meeting of His wishes.’”

  In the end Amy decided to delete from her autobiography all that part of the story. The pages were put away somewhere. The Family did not need to know.

  This poem may refer to this particular secret discipline:

  O Prince of Glory, who dost bring

  Thy sons to glory through Thy Cross,

  Let me not shrink from suffering,

  Reproach or loss.

  The dust of words would smother me.

  Be all to me anathema

  That turns me from Gethsemane

  And Golgotha.

  If Thy dear Home be fuller, Lord,