A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  Her style is graceful, often poetic, always lucid. Her descriptions have the power to give to the reader an experience. Her convictions about the handling of truth were sometimes in conflict. To a young biographer she said, “Generally speaking, I think the rule should be—the truth whatever people think. It is truth in a book that helps.” Her test for every word, spoken or written: Is it true? Not always an easy question. Her loyalty to the truth did not bind her to tell the whole truth when there were other considerations, such as, Is it helpful? That depended on definition and other questions: helpful to whom? in what way? She had edited a good many things from the autobiography she wrote for the children because they did not strike her as helpful. “How can I be sure I am choosing those which will be of use to you?” she wrote. She could not be sure. There were three more questions: Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it have the “seed of Eternity” in it? “Nothing is worthwhile if the seed of Eternity be not in it.”

  “There is a false suavity about most that is written from this land now,” she wrote. “We are so afraid to offend, so afraid of stark truth, that we write delicately, not honestly.” Her books give ample evidence of extreme delicacy where the reputations or the edification of others were at stake. Yet it was their edification she had in mind when she wrote at times far less delicately. Delicacy could be perilous. “Our smoothness glides over souls. It does not spur them to action, even though they be Christians to whom the thought of the glory of the Lord being given to another ought to be unendurable.”2

  Next to John 8:553 she wrote in the margin of her Bible, “To hide the truth is no less falsehood than to spread error.” For reasons which her truth-loving soul thought sufficient, she carefully hid certain facts, and charged others to see that they remained hidden. Ambiguities, contradictions, errors, uncertainties, even certain mysteries she seemed peculiarly anxious to avoid mentioning.

  She hated exclamation points on a printed page. When her publishers arbitrarily inserted them in Things as They Are she was incensed. “So fussy. They give an idea of overemphasis.”

  She must have written millions of words. Besides the books which were published she wrote privately for the Family. The long paper called Roots and the autobiography of her early years are examples of these. She wrote hundreds of songs and poems, thousands upon thousands of personal letters, in addition to those with multiple readership such as Scraps, Life of Faith, Dohnavur Letter, and Dust of Gold.

  Most astonishing is the number of letters and notes she wrote daily to her own “beloveds” in Dohnavur. Many of these she regarded as her own long before she met them. Accepted candidates received loving, welcoming letters nearly weekly, sometimes for many months before they arrived. Especially notable is the intimate relationship developed with a young English girl, mentioned in an earlier chapter, who was engaged to a man already in Dohnavur. The girl was nineteen when she received Amma’s first letter.

  “Dear, perhaps Comrade-to-be,” it began. There were expressions of warm welcome, followed by straight-from-the-shoulder words about the matter of marriage before language-learning. “We do not find we can lower our threshold, as Mildred Cable (missionary to Mongolia) puts it. . . . She has seen the weakness that follows making things easy and not soldierly . . . the battle to which we are committed is so terrific that only the tried and proven will stand, all others will give way and break at the moment of crisis. . . . Soldiers don’t ask for ease or expect it.”

  Ill health delayed the girl’s sailing. Amma fully sympathized with the anguish of separation from her husband-to-be. Occasionally she sent a snapshot of him, or wrote about him to Bee. “Bee darling, I love him more every month, and more desire him for you and you for him. He is one of the knightliest men I ever met. Every thought is knightly. He is one in whom a woman’s love may safely rest, as a bird in its nest.” She wrote of his progress in Tamil, his literary touch, and closed that letter with, “Now with you in my arms, Goodbye. Blessings on you, precious child. Your own Amma.”

  In another letter: “To His strength, to His tenderness, I commit you both. You are warriors, and when did warriors ask for an easy time? or no wounds? or no heart-breaks? But He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up the wounds.” There were other testings, “the beating out of the gold that makes us transparent, ‘pure gold, like unto clear glass.’ Goodbye, dear child, His trusted one, His tested one, His beloved one.”

  Bees father was not happy with his daughter’s traversing the globe and asked her to wait three years to be sure of her call, both to the man and to Dohnavur, suspending all correspondence with anyone there, including her fiancé and Amy Carmichael. She obeyed him. Here was her chance to prove the truth of Amma’s words to her, Home, with all its prohibitions and opportunities to die daily” offered training far greater than any Bible school curriculum. It was a long obedience, but the father decided not to insist on the full three years’ silence and relented after two.

  “If any least wisp of glamor is in your mind ask God to let His wind blow it away,” Amma wrote after that hiatus. “There is none of that rainbow thing in the life here.”

  Week after week faithfully the letters went from India to England, letters filled with expressions of love, acceptance, oneness, sympathy and strong exhortations and encouragement. When Bee’s fiancé came to Amy’s room and kissed her, Amy saw it as an expression of a mystical union and wrote, “You are there—you and he and I.” She told Bee that she did not speak to him of her “for I understand too well how much he loves you for that.” Did she imagine that a man in love wants to avoid mention of the beloved? She wrote of the thought that had sustained her when she left her Dear Old Man—the thought of the Wounded Hands parting them, one laid on her, one on him. “He unites you closer than ever and binds you both together to Himself.”

  Amy had many terms of endearment for her children, darling being the most frequently used. For Bee, who was often “darling, she chose a special name, Child of my Bonds. In the pain and limitations of her illness she felt she had been given the gift of a very special child, a child who, she began to believe, might take a place which would soon be empty.

  1. Matthew 12:34 (TLB).

  2. Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, p. 330.

  3. “If I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.”

  Chapter 43

  Saint, Fishwife, Vegetable Marrow

  In the early evening, when the hills in the distance showed faint and blue, in a patch of rough ground called the Field of the Darling-Pool a little girl stood alone. . . . She was wrapped in a sari, bright like a blackberry leaf in September, or the breast of a forest minivet, the one warm note of color there, and she waited, still as a leaf, for something to happen, for someone to speak.”

  So goes chapter 1 of Ploughed Under, written two or three years after the accident. It tells of the early life of Arulai, whom Amy called Star, the girl on whom her hopes of the future leadership of the work depended. As a child Arulai had thought, “If even for one day I might be your daughter it would be as if the heavens touched the earth.”

  Arulai was uniquely qualified. Spiritually she was fitted. She, like Ponnammal, was the godly woman Amma had asked God to produce from the very beginning of her work in India. Intellectually she was awake and alive, having at her disposal the English language, which gave access to Amma’s collection of spiritually nourishing books, and the Greek, in which she loved to read the New Testament. “She was one who could go anywhere, do anything,” Amy wrote.

  Physically she was weak, due to smallpox and various other illnesses. In 1935 she was ill again. Prayers went up, hopes for her healing went up. Then they plummeted. For four years she was up and down, but by 1939 she was confined to bed in a room within sight of Amy’s room.

  She was so near me, not one minute’s walk from this room, and yet I never saw her dear face after one day last October when she came to see me. I could have gone, but at first i
t was always that she was getting better, and it would have made a fuss to go. Then after March 10 it would have been too hard for her for it would have meant parting—and we never parted. I used to get up at night and look at the red roof of her room and ache to go over.

  Amy began to put together a dialogue between “the son” (herself) and the Father, which was later published as His Thoughts Said . . . His Father Said. One of the fragments which may have come out of this separation from Arulai was this one:

  “The son was in deep sorrow, and he said, Never, never did I think of not being with him who is my very heart, when he came to the brink of the river.

  “His Father said, Will he miss thy hand whom My hand holdeth?”

  Arulai was to Amy “perhaps the most precious thing I have on earth.” On April 21, 1939, Amy read 2 Timothy 4, changing the pronouns in verses 6 to 8: “For now she is ready to be offered, and the time of her departure is at hand. She has fought a good fight, she has finished her course, she has kept the faith.” Verse 9 was the one the D.O.M. had sent her, “Do thy utmost to come to me speedily.” For years that verse had been like a knife thrust. “I could not go to him, and one reason was Arulai,” she wrote in the margin of the passage. “Now I can read them without breaking down.” She believed the same would be true some day of the verses which were then “so full of my Arulai.”

  Arulai died on May 24. Amy called it her Celestial Birthday. One of the Indian annachies, Arulai’s nephew, Rajappan, who was very close to Amma (“my son-in-love ), came to the Room of Peace while the others went to God s Garden for the burial. They read together from Pilgrim’s Progress about Christian s passing over, and passages from Revelation.

  To the Child of her Bonds Amy wrote five days later of her “treasure child’s” having seen the King in His beauty. I am learning the lesson set to the weaned child. I am learning to do without. So are you, my very ownest. Let us learn the lesson together.” She kept writing regularly to Bee, and began to call her by Arulai’s name, “treasure child.”

  “You feel preciouser and preciouser with every letter, my Sonthum (own),” “Awoke with you in my arms—I have the feel of you.”

  People who worked closely with Amy Carmichael found it nearly impossible, after her death, to think of any faults. Perhaps memory did its beneficent work of erasure. One man, however, after weeks of thought, volunteered that Amma indeed had at least one weakness: Sometimes she misjudged folk. When asked in what way, he said, “She thought they were better than they were.” If that, her single sin, qualifies for the name, it is rather more endearing than offensive.

  The prayer-poem has been quoted which asks for

  the love that leads the way,

  the faith that nothing can dismay,

  the hope no disappointments tire,

  the passion that will burn like fire.

  Her trust was firm that new recruits would give no cause for dismay or disappointment, would prove to be all they seemed to be in their letters. Amy was determined they would be. But would Amy herself measure up to expectations? That thought caused her to tremble. She begged them to expect nothing at all. “There are days when I hope I shall be gone before you come. I can’t bear to be a horrid disappointment to you.”

  After listening to many unqualified eulogies I finally put a blunt question to some of the Old Girls: Was Amma a sinner?

  “No,” said one with a smile, “She was perfect.”

  “Yes,” said another, “she must have been a sinner—the Bible says we all are—but I never saw it.”

  An Old Boy told me Amma never apologized. Others said they could not remember her ever apologizing, but that might be explained by the foggy memories of some and the fact that no apologies were due others. Perceptions differ. Some saw Amma weep. Not May Powell, who was as Irish as Amy. We may guess that May was not one of those permitted to see Amy’s tears. “We Irish don’t cry,” said May. “Tears don’t come.”

  Some of the poems express an acute sense of the need of forgiveness and help. One confession from her collection of songs is this one:

  The shadows of the underworld

  Compassed about my guilty soul,

  And thunderbolts were on me hurled,

  And lightnings flashed; and on a scroll

  Was written down, without, within,

  The secret of my hidden sin.

  Without, within, I saw it stand,

  In clearest words accusing me;

  Till, as it were, a wounded hand

  Annulled its record, set me free;

  With that the stormy wind did cease;

  A voice commanded; there was peace.

  O Savior, stricken for my sin,

  O God, who gavest Him to grief,

  O Spirit, who didst woo and win

  My troubled soul to seek relief,

  O Love revealed at Calvary,

  Thy glory lights eternity.

  One new arrival remembered her first glimpse of Amma—white haired, with a loving face, expressive hands; happy hearted, never gloomy, lively in worship, festive in rejoicing. “She wanted joy, triumph, tambourines, even after a burial.”

  When Bee arrived Amma enveloped her in her arms and in her love. Their first words were not to each other but to the Lord, thanking Him that at last she was there. Happily neither disappointed the other. A note shortly after her arrival assured Bee that she was still “treasure child.” “Arulai knows it, I think, and is glad. You often remind me of what she was when she was your age.”

  The heart of the woman who could be so stern, so steeled to do the will of God, so intolerant of sham and shilly-shallying and shabbiness was an exceptionally fragile heart. The little notes to Bee are full of poignant hints of its fragility, of the indispensability of the smallest signs of another’s love. “Arulai’s last note has lain (for comfort) beside two or three special notes of yours. . . . I read your beloved little notes for comfort often.”

  When one young missionary was taken to meet Amma for the first time, she came out after only a few minutes. “I have seen the Lord Jesus,” she said.

  A very “down-and-out” widow was brought to see her. Amy talked about the Lord but nothing seemed to penetrate the poor, uneducated mind, further darkened by suffering. At last Amy pointed to a lily and said, “He made that.” The woman gazed at it. Then, with the first glimmer of understanding, repeated, “He made that.” For some time Amma had her come daily for teaching until she felt she could pass her on to someone else.

  An Indian pastor who criticized the work of the Fellowship because children were brought up like “hot house plants,” felt sincerely ashamed of his prejudice once he met Amma. “My doubts vanished. Instinctively I felt that here was a person just beside me who had realized God. I have never seen such a beautiful face.”

  A Canadian woman psychiatrist went to visit, expecting to garner an interesting case study of a neurotic old lady. Five minutes with Amma convinced the doctor she had picked the wrong lady.

  Any display of the old Irish temper was rare, but it was still there. When someone described an emotional scene which had taken place, Amy said, “If I had been there I should have torn up a bush by the roots and laid on like a fishwife. But then I’m not a pacifist!” Something her dear friend Dr. Somervell wrote so horrified her she told him she wanted to throw a soup plate at him. A plaster saint? Hardly. She was much more interesting than that.

  Today’s mind, preoccupied with “self-image,” would worry about Amy Carmichael’s. She needed help. Her self-portrait: “I am a cross between a potato and a vegetable marrow.”

  Chapter 44

  Broken by the Waves

  By the middle of the 1930s it had become fairly evident that Amy Carmichael was not likely to be healed unless God gave a miracle. She was almost never out of pain, yet she maintained daily touch with the Family, seeing different ones every half hour all day, writing long letters to some, tiny scraps to others (“Welcome home, my child. Lovingest of welcomes. Your Amma”)
. Everybody got notes on special occasions: birthdays, holidays, return from a journey, Tamil exams. When Dr. Nancy Robbins was left for five days with the entire responsibility of the hospital, Amma wrote promising special prayer. To John Risk on his birthday in 1936 she wrote:

  “My own David,” using the name of the Bible character he reminded her of. “Did you think I had forgotten? Not a bit of it. Last night at midnight I longed to write (as I hadn’t had time to do so all day) but if I had, there would have been protestations from my little nurse, so I didn’t and then, alas, I woke too late for an early note.

  But He whom thy soul loveth, He has blessed thee already, my John, and His birthday morning blessings are like the dew and like His compassions, ever new, beautiful, heart-reviving.

  “This has been a year of battle, but thank God, of victory, and we are nearer the Crowning Day this morning than ever we were before.

  “‘And having done all to stand.’ God keep us standing. ‘When I said, “my foot slippeth, Thy Mercy, O Lord, held me up.’ ”

  It had indeed been a year of battle. There was never any other kind of year. The Family continued rapidly to increase. One member reported that there was a “crop of very naughty girls” about that time. Some of the older ones were a great disappointment to Amma. She sometimes had them come to her as nurses, which caused raised eyebrows—why should Amma choose such a one for her nurse? Someone who had thought at first that one of them was a poor choice, told herself that she must be “a nice, quiet girl who ‘fit’ Amma.” Later she asked about her. “No,” said Amy, “I saw the weakness in her from the first. I had her with me to strengthen her.” Some responded. Some did not.

  The same motive that inspired Amy to choose a girl who was not naturally appealing applied to her choice of a girl who was—she wanted always to encourage and strengthen. “Give all you ve got to helping them.” Eyebrows were raised in either case. “Never mind,” she told one of the teachers. “Never be afraid of appearing to have favorites, provided you are truly seeking to help them for the Lord and not for yourself.”