Mere business sense would have seen it as a poor time to advance. Funds were very scarce. In July there was a four-thousand rupee deficit. But when did Amy Carmichael ever operate on the basis of mere business sense? This, she declared, was “the very time to look for an advance!”
She liked to give picturesque names to places. Eruvadi, for example, she prettily translated “Song of the Plough.” The great hump of a mountain seen in some of the pictures in Dohnavur books was Tiruvanna Malai, which she called “The Holy Washerman,” mistakenly reading the Tamil word for washerman into a word which meant “holy elder brother.” Indians were too polite to call attention to her error, and foreigners adopted the name in ignorance, as they did the Village of Uncrowned King, which was actually the Village of Crowned King.
Kalakadu was a town a few miles from Dohnavur whose name meant scrub-land—not very auspicious, but, in Amy’s view, spiritually descriptive. “No faintest willingness was ever shown by anyone in that town to listen to the Gospel.” It seemed an impregnable town, therefore one for which they prayed mightily and hoped tenaciously. God willing, it would not remain a spiritual scrub-land. Amy gave it what she hoped was a prophetic name, Joyous City, with no idea of the irony that name would one day hold for her.
In 1926 she had gone to Kalakadu with a small group from Dohnavur to preach outside the huge temple fastnesses. Finding a drama company about to make a presentation nearby, Amy forthwith went to the manager and, to the amazement of her companions, made her first stage appearance. It was an opportunity not to be missed of telling the strange story the crowd had never heard before—of Jesus and His love. A week later back they went and this time found lurid magenta handbills being distributed to the crowds:
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
From 9.00 to 9.30 this evening the respected Carunia Ammal and the respected Mr. Proctor of Dohnavur will lecture on the Great War in Mesopotamia and on the story of Raj the Brigand. Because of this definite feature tickets will be on sale. . . .
So Ronald and Amma stood in the blazing lights and told the announced stories, bringing them round to another Great War, the war they were fighting, and what it meant. While the actors were making up backstage, the manager did his best to persuade them to remain for the show. The answer was no, thank you.
Apparently there was no indication in Joyous City of “ears to hear,” nor would anyone think of renting a house to these Christians. But after five years there was a slight break. A house that had stood empty for three years was offered to them for rent. It was haunted. They were warned of the danger—something would happen, a curse would fall. They took the house for the dispensary two Dohnavur women wished to open.
Amy, to whom the special dates of her life were always fraught with deep significance, had no inkling on the morning of October 24, 1931, that this date would be another life-changer. She was visiting the Dohnavur dispensary in Song of the Plough that morning, and praying for guidance about money. For a long time she was silent. Then she prayed this: “Do anything, Lord, that will fit me to serve Thee and to help my beloveds.”
That afternoon she was driven to the “haunted” house in Joyous City to make sure that all was as she wanted it to be for the women who were to live there. At first the key could not be found, so it was twilight before they were able to open the door. Amy went to the newly built palm-leaf shed which was to serve as “The Place.” The coolies had dug the bore hole just inside the door instead of at the back where it belonged. In the darkness she fell across the opening of the narrow pit, broke her leg, dislocated an ankle, and twisted her spine.
Hadn’t she been warned? The curse of Allah was on any who would challenge Islam.
She was in much pain. The car went back the four miles to Dohnavur to bring May and two others in a lorry to act as ambulance. May put a splint on the kaal and, making her as comfortable as they could, they took her to the hospital at Neyoor. One of the women described it as a “cyclonic” night, wild and stormy, pelting with rain. They could not rule out: the possibility of demonic interference. Who knew what powers might have been released by that curse? Yet their confidence in the One who sets limits to those powers remained unaltered.
The lorry jerked and bumped its way for forty-six excruciating miles over gullies and washouts. A nurse named Mary Mills who was with Amma said she wished she could take the pain from her. “I knew that she meant to bear it herself instead of me. Then I heard myself answer, Your joy no man taketh from you. . . . a certain heavenly word given to me for whoever should want to do that loving thing.”1
The morphine May had administered was wearing off before they reached Neyoor, where they turned Amma over to her friend of many years, Dr. Howard Somervell.
1. Amy Carmichael, Rose From Brier, p. 18.
Chapter 41
The Toad Beneath the Harrow
When Amy Carmichael was brought home from the hospital, no one foresaw that for the rest of her life her world would be the room in the main bungalow which had been her bedroom, sitting room, and study. Called the Room of Peace, it became for her what the apostle Paul’s prison cell was for him. Her chains were of a different kind than his, but she saw herself, like him, “a prisoner of the Lord,” having paid a price for the beginnings of a witness in a closed town.
In the Dohnavur letter, which by then had become Dust of Gold, Amy described the room:
It was not built to be a personal room at all, but a general home-room, with a wide verandah so that many girls could sleep here with me. A teakwood partition divides the room in two, a great convenience in long illness, and as you come in through the blue curtains near the door you see on the right hand teakwood panelling and on the left the bookcases to which the household come when they want biography, missionary and otherwise, and books of other kinds too; for all through my life friends have sent me books. They are my great luxury, my mental change of air.
Facing you as you come in are three big windows looking out on greenness where a pair of blue kingfishers continually fish for minnows in large vessels set under the trees.
The visitor today finds a mounted tiger head on the left wall of the entrance corridor, then a picture of a snow-capped mountain, painted by her friend Dr. Somervell, who had climbed high on Everest. Then a pendulum clock and something that certainly was never there in her lifetime, one of the rare photos of her. There is a little room off to the left where the precious logbooks are kept, then a door opening onto the verandah with its nearly zoo-size birdcage which she used to fill with brightly colored birds. Bougainvillea in shades of pink, purple, and salmon, and scented white jasmine grow up the pillars of the verandah. Her writing table stands before the three unglazed windows. The teakwood partition makes a dressing room which leads to the private bath, still with its primitive stone fixtures. Over the mirror are the words SERVANT OF ALL.
The Room of Peace.
As she had put up texts in her cabin on shipboard and her rooms in Japan, China, and Ceylon, she put up texts in the Room of Peace. A very large one reads, GOOD AND ACCEPTABLE AND PERFECT.1 On three separate plaques, hung together, are the words I KNOW, FEAR NOT, ASK HIM. There is a quotation from the Confessions of Saint Augustine, “By one who loveth is another kindled.” On a wood cabinet are painted blue letters, “A purpose sustained Thou wilt guard. Then He said unto me, Fear not. Despairing of no man.” The largest textboard of all says GOD HATH NOT GIVEN US THE SPIRIT OF FEAR.
The bookcases have been reorganized by now. One of them holds her favorites, which include The Cloud of Unknowing, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, Little Flowers of St. Francis, The English Liturgy, William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown, Richard Rolle’s Book of the Lover and the Beloved, Francis Paget’s Spirit of Discipline, Hymns of Tersteegen and Others, Companions of the Way, The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, St. John of the Cross’s Spirit of Flame, Bishop Handley Moule’s The School of Suffering, Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, and books by Evelyn Underhill, Julian of Norw
ich, Père Didon, and many others.
While old books were to Amy “wells,” from which she drew cold, pure refreshment, modern books were often “sawdust,” “thin,” “skimmed milk and tepid tea.” With more time to read than she had had in Bangalore when she declined Aunt Annie’s offer of novels, she loved those of John Buchan, “clean as sea wind,” which carried her far from her surroundings.
Amma’s complete healing was taken almost for granted at first. The injuries, after all, were not serious in themselves. For months after the accident the logbook meticulously followed her progress. “Amma walked six steps,” “Amma walked ten steps,” “A. carried to prayer room for meeting,” “A. stood for short spells,” “went for a drive,” “first night without pain.” In August 1932, it notes, “A. walked out to verandah quite well,” and on December 4, “walked down steps into Prayer Room. . . . Almost too much JOY. We sang ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’ We thank Him who promised us this.”
Again and again the expected recovery appeared to have been given. Again and again hopes were dashed. When cystitis struck, the whole Family (not informed, of course, of the nature of the infection) gave itself to prayer, dividing the day into fifteen-minute watches, cabling to England and Australia (without Amma’s knowledge) for prayer help. Help came. Then healing. But it was only a reprieve, not a pardon.
She began to write letters to the ill, in pencil, a little at a time, from her bed. Then they were typed up and “looked like a book,” which became Rose from Brier, a book written not, as most books for the ill are written, by the well to the ill, but by the ill to the ill, “a rose plucked straight from a brier.”
The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes;
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.
Amy had often been that toad, and had found it hard to be grateful to the butterflies, even when they came “dressed like very good Christians.” So she wrote the letters “before the sharpness of the prod of a single tooth” was forgotten. She had spent hundreds of days and nights under “the awful trampling power of pain” before she let that book go.
It seems inexplicable now, when patients are hounded out of bed and mercilessly exercised immediately after surgery, that an injury which seemed highly treatable should have resulted in her becoming a lifelong shut-in. It must be remembered that she had been a poor sleeper most of her life; physiotherapy was not available, the range of analgesic drugs was small. Perhaps she was overprotected. But she lived in a time when women were permitted to be invalids.
Amy was able to walk, though not without pain. Her “pain threshold” was very low. She could go to the bathroom, the verandah, occasionally the prayer room, and, whenever she wanted to during the first year or two, out for a drive in the Ford. “Such blissful drives. Godfrey used to bring his harp and two or three girls or Sitties came and we used to stop somewhere in view of the hills and they sang. It was heavenly. I often live in those evenings now,” she wrote in 1943, “the dear love of all was like the blueness of the sea. Once we went to Caruniapuram and picnicked under the hills.”
Neuritis took hold. Electrical treatment “played games with it,” and her left hand was deformed for a while. Twice she was able to be carried up to the Forest, a long and rigorous journey even if you were riding. “One evening I all but raced down the Forest House verandah. It was the last time. Arthritis set in.”
More than three times she prayed Paul’s prayer that the “thorn”2 be removed. The answer was always the one that came to him: My grace is sufficient.
To one of the young Englishmen she wrote, “I wonder if the Lord is not saying not to me only but to you, my Own: See to it that you are in perfect accord with Me and then trust Me to withhold no good thing. If health be that good thing, O how joyful it will be, and every morning I waken with the hope, ‘Perhaps today.’ But I want first to want His will, be that will mine or not.”
It was not Amy’s will to be served. She who had come to India to be servant of all must learn to be served by all. “I had so fully expected to be like the old ox in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, who kep a goin an a goin’ till he died a-standin’ up, an’ even then they had to push him over,’ that I had been shedding my possessions, not accumulating them.” Now she must accept luxury (“how I loathe it and fear it”)—a proper bed instead of a mat on the tile floor, a room much larger and more beautiful than necessary, all manner of comforts and pleasures which flowed into the room from people who loved her. “My only trouble is that I have had so much too much. The Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”
1. See Romans 12:2.
2. 2 Corinthians 12:7.
Chapter 42
The Servant as Writer
Though the woman in the bed had no choice but to be served, “servant of all” was still her watchword. One kind of service still open to Amy, when pain did not make it impossible, was writing. As we have seen, she had been writing all her life, almost compulsively. An experience was not complete until she had given expression to it on paper. Sometime before the accident friends had asked her to write the story of the Dohnavur Fellowship and how it began—“just what is hardest to tell,” she said, “because without foolish fuss it is impossible to escape the personal.” Her publisher wanted “a religious document.” She answered with a convenient Tamil word which means can’t or won’t, depending on the speaker s feeling. It would take a higher authority to persuade her. It came early one morning when “a quiet private word ended this ineffective unwillingness.”
So it was that Gold Cord was begun, probably in 1931, and finished after she was confined to bed, though the reader could have no idea of that. The setting of the book she described as “a tragic page of history; not a date but is linked to great events in one or in many of the nations, or to those overwhelming distresses that the very names Armenia, Russia, China, Central Asia, suggest. And all that has happened in India is never out of mind. But the story holds to a single course. It looks across the open frontier to the Country whose forces move unseen among us; for they are the things that matter most, ‘and the life of the spirit has no borders.’ ”
Like all Carmichael books, Gold Cord omits the personal whenever possible. There is no mention of the accident. It is nevertheless deeply personal, deeply revealing of the character and the vision of the author—dedicated to truthfulness, full of love, sensitive to beauty both inward and outward, large of heart and mind, seeing the visible always in the light that streams from the invisible. Though none of her books is “about” her, all are, like all books, the product of who the author is. “A man’s heart determines his speech.”1
Facing each chapter is a quotation from another’s writing or one of her own poems or both. The end papers show a scale plan of the Dohnavur compound and a map of the southern corner of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) District. Sepia-tone photographs capture scenes in the compound: a moon-gate, a little girl polishing a brass vessel, close-ups of some of the more beautiful of the Dohnavur children, the House of Prayer, the Path of Quietness, to name a few; and outside: temple walls, plains, the Holy Washerman’s Mountain. But pictures of Amy Carmichael? Not one, in this or any other book published during her lifetime. “There is nothing nice about me, was her view, “I am nothing and less than that.” When someone persuaded her that she must allow a photograph for the sake of her children who loved her she gave in, “in a weak moment,” thought it “horrid,” and regretted it ever afterwards. “I never can understand how anyone can love such a thing. I often hope that those who have not seen me won’t see me till I awake in His likeness.”
The story is told of a noted American minister who had made up his very strong mind to take a picture of the by then famous Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. He was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia, a tall, powerfully imposing man with a booming voice. When I heard the story, I visualized the encounter with the small, gentle lady in the Room of
Peace.
“Who won?” I asked.
“She did, of course,” was the answer.
Gold Cord begins with a metaphor—the children’s search for the source of “their” river in the forest. “A tree had crashed through the forest just where the banks were too steep to climb and the undergrowth was too entangled to penetrate. The trunk was covered with orchids, and was a beautiful thing, but it barred the way. Below it was a deep, clear pool.” The children could not reach the source. Amy could not go back to the beginning of her story, so she began with the “pool,” that day in Belfast when she and her brothers helped the old woman with the bundle, and a mighty phrase about gold, silver, and precious stones flashed through the fog. There would have been no Dohnavur story to tell if she had not made up her mind that day to build in materials indestructible.
When she had finished Gold Cord, she went on to write thirteen more books, making a total of between thirty-five and forty, depending on whether one counts those which appeared in different forms. Total sales of British editions exceed half a million, all this, of course, with nothing approaching high-powered advertising. By 1950 there were translations into fifteen languages. Twelve of the books had been put into Braille in England, eight in the United States. When a Christian magazine described them as popular she was distressed. “Popular? Lord, is that what these books written out of the heat of the battle are? Popular? O Lord, burn the paper to ashes if that be true.”
She wrote very fast, by hand, on a table or, when in bed, on a writing stand. She seldom rewrote extensively. “Perfection I can never touch, but I do dislike loose threads lying about in a book, or weak lines and needless words.”
She disliked pictures hanging crooked on the wall. She knew how to put her hand on any letter or paper she needed, and always looked “in corners and at the backs of things.” She was in control.
A Chance to Die Page 29