A Chance to Die

by Elisabeth Elliot

  The system—the Pattern Shewn in the Mount—was crystallized, not to say frozen, when she disappeared from view. She was not quite invisible. People saw her, of course. Many waited on her, children were brought to her room for Coming Days and other occasions, accals and sitties and annachies had access, but it was always controlled access, as in the case of any executive. For a given length of time, for a special reason, they entered the precincts. It could not have been otherwise.

  The precepts given to Amy were the precepts perpetuated, not only by those who taught and exemplified them to the younger ones, but by constant reiteration and reinforcement in the reams of pages that poured out of the inner sanctum which was “Amma’s Room.” These included not only her many books and Dust of Gold, which was called a “private” letter for people all over the world, but daily messages she believed the Lord had given her for the Family. Many of these have been published as devotional collections under the titles Edges of His Ways, Thou Givest . . . They Gather, and Whispers of His Power. What God gave to her in the silence of her room she—always the mother, doing her God-given motherwork of nurturing—gave to her children on paper, to be read aloud the next day. So there was always a voice—still and small, gentle and loving, and a message—authoritatively prescriptive—issuing forth from that somewhat remote place.

  In addition to these there were the personal letters, thousands of them, every one a perfect model of intimate concern for the individual, gracious encouragement in his particular need or task, and love—the warmest assurance, always, of love. There were papers: Roots, sixty-nine pages on what the DF was, what it did and why, written for insiders. There were instructive papers on subjects such as Fasting, Baptism, Prayer, and Guidance. She was able in this way to clarify what was to be done and why it was meet, right, and their bounden duty so to do, unless, of course, the Unseen Leader should lead them to do otherwise.

  Could they do otherwise? It was often the conservative Indian establishment that stood most stoutly in the way of change.

  “Amma never did it that way.”

  “Amma’s vision has proved right down the years.

  “Amma would not feel happy with the ideas you suggest.” (This last was said sometimes even when one had access to her and she had said the opposite.)

  “If only she were still about and could see the situation for herself,” said one of the Europeans, “she would certainly change it all. She understands things clearly and would overthrow many of our traditions and contented routines. Some really believed this, at times at least.

  Amy Carmichael’s certainty that the lines on which the work had been established were divinely given was never shaken. Believing (in spite of numerous disappointments) that those who joined the work were divinely sent, she was willing to grant a hearing. “You could make suggestions without fear or inhibition,” one of them assured me, “but you were not surprised if they were not accepted. She knew best.” She was settled in her own mind, so anything which would shift the lines in any significant way she could not accept—until, as we shall see, certain radical changes were proposed in the last few years of her life.

  In theory she wanted future leaders to be free from a sense of her hovering scrutiny. She wrote it down in 1946.

  “There is one thing I have often said to you individually. I may have written it—I want to make sure you have it. It is this: when decisions have to be made, don’t look back and wonder what I would have done. Look up, and light will come to show what our Lord and Master would have you do.”

  She wanted to be in the vanguard. She admitted it. But she saw that it was not her place. “Our place is always behind the scenes,” she wrote, intending to emphasize the great importance of encouraging Indians for leadership. The effect of that effort was that she became the generator in the back room that ran the machine.

  Amy tried to retire. Let it be understood that she really tried to turn over the reins to others. Annually she was reelected titular head, kept on ice, as one DF put it. She wished that the next leader could be an Indian, but as she saw it there wasn’t a man anywhere with the patience, the fixed purpose and grit, the courage, the vision, or the daring for the job. She had known two Indian women who, with more experience, more spiritual training, might have fulfilled the qualifications—Ponnammal and Arulai. She counted on other Indian women, up to a point, to do certain things. She delegated responsibility. Indian men were learning, she felt, but left something to be desired. Those in the Fellowship, after all, knew mainly what she had taught them, and that not always very thoroughly. She was still their mother. They were her sons and daughters. The time for cutting apron strings never seemed to arrive.

  The danger of allowing herself to be the foundation of the work was very plain to Amy and she strove to prevent such a happening. Hardly more than a year after the accident she had written one of her “Notes” to the DFs, citing Jesus’ parable of the house building, and Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever.”

  “A work which is founded on anyone on earth is like the house that was built on the sand. When the rain descended, and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, it fell, and great was the fall of it. The only foundation that will stand through the floods is the eternal Rock. . . . Sooner or later every work is searched and tested and tried as by rain and the vehement beating of floods and winds. Then will appear its true character. If it falls it will be because it was built on sand; better then that it should fall. If it stands it will be because by the mercy of God it was built on the Eternal Rock, Christ Jesus our Lord.” She went on to say that her heart’s desire was that the thought of all might be forever fixed on the Eternal, not on the human—on Jesus Christ, the Rock, the same forever.

  When she wrote that note she believed she would soon be either healed or dead. Fifteen years later, neither having occurred, she wrote another note, spelling out for May Powell, who was coleader with Godfrey, qualities to be looked for in a new leader: She must be just, a woman of character, able to make decisions, possessing the kind of love that is never tired out of loving, the power to ride the waves instead of being submerged by them, and a deep conviction about DF principles.

  The fact that Amy addressed this note to May rather than to Godfrey or to Godfrey and May can hardly be ignored. She took it for granted that the leader must be a woman. A man could not be considered to make decisions which would bind the community.

  Nowhere does David Carmichael, Amy’s father, find more than passing mention in her writings. Her mother, in contrast to the vague figure of her father, is strongly portrayed. Amy was the oldest of the children and therefore the natural leader. Her brothers were cherished and adored, but they were her little brothers. Her relationship with the D.O.M. was certainly the most intimate she ever experienced with a man. Their mutual love and respect was of the deepest and tenderest, but there was little or nothing of male leadership and female response. She was probably by far the stronger of the two. Barclay Buxton was her “chief.” She said so often. Thomas Walker, though not her superior in the same sense as Buxton, was a leader whom she gladly followed. They were gone. It was to her that the vision for this work had been vouchsafed. It was she who must bear the responsibility.

  Amy had studied the New Testament passages on the ministry of women. To Conybeare’s note on 1 Corinthians 14:34, “The women must not officiate publicly in the congregation,” she added, “compare chapter 11:2 where they are told to be veiled if they pray or prophesy. Some muddle here?” and in the margin of 15:1-6 she puts, “Mary was the first messenger to men.” She loved the Revised Version of Psalms 68:11, “The Lord gave the word: great was the company of the women that published it.”

  She believed that the apostle Paul’s injunctions about the silence of women must have been meant for a certain group at a certain time. He was not articulating a doctrine of total silence, any more than he was commanding women, as Amy put it, “to go to church with their hair hang
ing down their backs,” a horror of indecency for a lady of Amy’s breeding.

  Having explained the above convictions, she added, “Well, that’s that. All the same I think men were as a rule meant for leadership and publicity and so on—not women, and the very day Godfrey knew enough Tamil for it—and even before—I pushed him into the pool and left him to swim. In other words asked him to take Prayers, the worship in the House of Prayer, and so on. And gladly, oh so gladly, I used to repeat John the Baptist’s words to myself, He must increase and (I did not say but for I was very, very glad) I must decrease.’”

  Chapter 47

  The Razor Edge

  The supreme gift of the soldier is the power to simplify amid confusion, to make a simple syllogism, which once it is made seems . . . unquestionable, but which before it is made is in the power only of genius.”

  This, from John Buchan’s Cromwell, is quoted in one of Amy’s notes to the Fellowship.

  Instead of ‘genius’ read ‘faith,’” she added, ‘‘and you will understand why anything like careless sureness was always far from the one on whom the final responsibility of decisions lay, and who would be, if the decision proved to be caused by a mistaken reading of the will of God, blameworthy.”

  She tells how, when a major purchase of land was to be made, she used to sign the checks kneeling by her desk, “so deeply did I fear.” It was the razor edge between faith and presumption, so exceedingly fine that she had to walk. I know we never moved forward without sureness, and yet there was always this prayer at the root of action. I won’t attempt to explain the apparent contradiction except by this true saying, ‘From the circumference even opposite lines run to the centre.’”

  Sureness but not careless sureness. Fear and faith. Middle-of-the night misgivings and dawn’s renewed determination to take God at His word. The power to simplify amid confusion. Amy had all of the above. She was still a woman, a fallible creature like the psalmist: “When I said, ‘my foot slippeth’ like Paul: “the good that I would I do not”; like John: “yet if any man sin. . . .” Nothing exempted the Dohnavur crowd from being “miserable offenders,” like the rest of the world. The whole lot was daily in need of that amazing grace which had brought them safe thus far, and would finally lead them home.

  “All the conflicts were between what Amma thought God wanted and what others thought God wanted” was the diagnosis of one of the Family. “We all thought we had the mind of Christ.”

  Ronald Proctor, a practical man who confessed that he often saw mud where Amma saw stars, informed her that the old Ford needed to be replaced. It was a simple matter of what was going on in its insides. To Amy it was a spiritual matter, one for prayer and pondering. She told him she really did not “feel” it right to buy a new car. On the next trip the brakes gave out and the old Ford rolled straight for the water. “We were very nearly, feelings and all, at the bottom of the tank,” Ronald reported. That was guidance. The car was replaced.

  Then there was the shattering disagreement with one of Amy’s most beloved, Murray Webb-Peploe, a man of loyalty and truth. Irresistible force met an immovable object. Murray’s wife, Oda, had taken the twins to England for schooling. This meant a much longer separation for husband and wife than when the boys were at school in the hills. The time came when Oda could not go on without Murray. His loyalty to Amma and the work he had no doubt he had been called to was in conflict with his loyalty and love for his wife. There was a tug of war. His mother took Oda’s side. “Years ago you sought my counsel,” she wrote to Murray, . . . but those days passed, and another woman (not Oda) took that place, though you may not have realized it.”1

  What was the man to do?

  He understood and fully subscribed to the principles of guidance which Amy had spelled out for the Family:

  The devil sometimes speaks and tries to deceive us into thinking it is the voice of God. He tries to get us, who long to walk in the light, to follow instead a will-o-the-wisp into the marsh. In the matter of guidance there are three important points:

  1. The Word of the Lord in the Bible.

  2. The Word of the Spirit in our heart.

  3. The circumstances of our lives, which have been arranged by God.

  All three must point one way. It is never enough for any two of them to be taken as showing God’s will. If the voice is God’s all three will agree.

  The thought of Murray’s being drawn away “into the marsh,” as she could not help thinking, was a major calamity for Amy. What could have been clearer than the guidance both she and he had had about his coming to Dohnavur? What could be more important than his place as director of the hospital? Why could Oda not have been content either to educate the boys in India or to send them, as most missionaries had always done, to boarding school? Furthermore, a commitment to the DF, in Amy’s view, was a commitment for life.

  This matter of how the Word of the Lord was received for guidance is illuminated in a letter Amy had written just after the Webb-Peploes had arrived in Dohnavur. They had had the temerity to take issue with Amma over a journey she proposed to make.

  “The word came to me to go to Madura. . . . Nobody saw it possible, but it was clear to me and I knew it would soon be clear to them and so it was. Next morning dear Murray and Godfrey came to me, having got light, then the others most beautifully got light.”

  One of them had read that morning of the manger in Bethlehem, which, by what would appear some rather fancy mental footwork, gave meaning to the thought of the heat and the noise of Madura—if Jesus could come to a manger, she could go to Madura. That settled it for him. Others got words of equal clearness and by noon all who understand this kind of leading were ready to pray through.” So to Madura she went, confirmed in her guidance by the unity of her comrades.

  The urging of Murray’s wife, children, and mother were not by any means sufficient reason in Amma’s mind for him to leave. Then he received ‘a jolly stiff letter” from none other than the home director of the China Inland Mission, who was also the chairman of the Keswick convention, W. H. Aldis, telling him to come to Oda. Under other circumstances such a man s counsel would have carried much weight with Amma. Not this time. She could not see this as anything but a grave mistake.

  Early in 1947 Murray went. It was good-bye forever to Dohnavur.

  “Pray that I may be directed in the writing of Dust of Gold” [about Murray’s departure] Amy asked. “Unless it is clearly shown that it is NOT our DF way (though we stand by Murray in it for he has no choice) it will stumble many.”

  She could not bear disunity. Love, the Gold Cord which bound the Dohnavur Fellowship together, must bring about oneness of mind as well as heart. If God had shown her one thing, would He show the rest another thing? There is no instance on record of Amy’s accepting another’s guidance after she believed she had been given clear guidance in a matter.

  Loyalty meant never questioning motives, always looking for an excuse for others’ actions when they seemed out of line, never speaking about a person but always to him. To raise an objection to the Pattern was to skate perilously close to disloyalty.

  One night, in great distress because there had been a disagreement between two people, Amy wrote a many-paged letter “To my children who are comrades in the war. There was truth on both sides. She reminded them of the need to go straight to the other. “O my children, if only you would make up your minds never to doubt the love of another sister or brother in Christ, but always to think the best and never admit an unkind thought in your heart, how happy, how heavenly, life would be . . . If this were the last time I could speak to you I should say just these words, Beloved, let us love, O let us love. We perish if we do not love. Let us love.”

  1. Katherine Makower, Follow My Leader, p. 158.

  Chapter 48

  Maintain a Constant Victory

  On the stroke of midnight, August 14, 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten took his pen and performed his last official action as the king’s representative.
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  “Outside, at almost the same instant, his personal standard as the Viceroy of India, a Union Jack emblazoned with the Star of India, came down the flagstaff of Viceroy’s House for the last time.”1 Britain in that moment relinquished the world’s greatest empire.

  “Never before had anything even remotely like it been attempted. Nowhere were there any guidelines, any precedents, any revealing insights from the past to order what was going to be the biggest, the most complex divorce action in history, the breakup of a family of four hundred million human beings along with the assets and household property they had acquired in centuries of living together on the same piece of earth.”2

  The effects of this stunning piece of history, so cataclysmic for the country, made little difference inside the red clay walls of the Dohnavur compound. Godfrey Webb-Peploe wrote,

  “The great day passed off quietly. The village had a few fireworks and chorused shouting of ‘Victory to India.’ We had a very simple talk by Thyaharaj on the change of government, and then we put up the new flag of India and stood around it and prayed for the country. There was no visible difference on August 16th.”3