When I was 14 years old, a student in boarding school, I first heard of Amy Carmichael. The headmistress of the school often quoted her writings and told of her amazing work in India for the rescue of little children in moral danger. No other single individual has had a more powerful influence on my own life and writing than Amy Carmichael. No one else put the missionary call more clearly.
Of the 36 books she wrote, I think it was the little book If that I read first, and found in it the source of an exhortation we heard often in the evening vespers services: Hold your friends to the highest. If is a series of statements about love, given to her sentence by sentence, Amy Carmichael claimed, “almost as if spoken aloud to the inward ear.” Each page holds a single sentence, with the rest of the page blank. Someone has suggested that the blank space is for each of us to write in large letters GUILTY. I was seared by the words.
“If I fear to hold another to the highest because it is so much easier to avoid doing so, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” I was guilty.
“If I can enjoy a joke at the expense of another; if I can in any way slight another in conversation, or even in thought, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” Such jokes, such slights were habitual with me.
“If I make much of anything appointed, magnify it secretly to myself or insidiously to others … then I know nothing of Calvary love.” Every page pointed up my guilt, but every page aroused in me a deep longing to know that love, to be like the one who showed it to us on Calvary, and to follow him.
As a student in college I wrestled with the desperate desire to be married. I had promised the Lord I would go to some foreign land as a missionary, but I hoped I would not be required to go single. By this time I had memorized many of the poems in Toward Jerusalem. One of those that became my prayer then, articulating what my heart wanted to say but could not have found the words for was:
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?
There was a strong and practical everyday sort of faith that ran through all her writings, an immediate appropriation of the promises of God and an exquisite sensitivity that drew me like a magnet. I read everything of hers that I could get my hands on, and soon my diaries were peppered with quotations labeled “AC.”
She was born on December 16, 1867, in Millisle, Northern Ireland, of a Scottish Presbyterian flour miller named David Carmichael and his wife Catherine Jane Felson, a doctor’s daughter. The eldest of seven children, she often led the rest of them in wild escapades, such as the time she suggested they all eat laburnum pods. She had been told that the pods were poisonous, and thought it would be fun to see how long it would take them to die. They were discovered, and a powerful emetic was administered in time to foil their plans for suicide. Once she led her little brothers up through a skylight onto the slate roof. They slid to the lead gutters and were walking gaily around the edge when they looked down to see their horrified parents staring up at them.
She was educated by governesses before she attended a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school in Harrogate, Yorkshire. It was there she saw that there was something more to do than merely “nestle” in the love of God, “something that may be called,” she wrote later, “coming to Him, or opening the door to Him, or giving oneself to Him.… Afterwards, when I began to understand more of what all this meant, I found words which satisfied me. I do not know who wrote them:
Upon a life I did not live,
Upon a death I did not die,
Another’s life, Another’s death,
I stake my whole eternity.”
When she was 17, seeing on the street in Belfast a poor woman in rags, carrying a heavy bundle, she had what amounted almost to a vision of the things that really matter in life. She and her two brothers, moved with pity for the poor soul, helped her along, though they were embarrassed to be seen with her. Amy described it as a horrid moment, for they were “not at all exalted Christians,” but on they plodded through the gray drizzle. Suddenly words came to her, “Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble … the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide.…” From that moment, for the rest of her life, it was eternal things that mattered.
She began children’s meetings at home, then moved on to work at the Belfast City Mission, where she taught a boys’ class and founded a group for the encouragement of Bible study and prayer called the Morning Watch. On Sunday mornings she taught a class for “shawlies,” working girls who wore shawls because they could not afford hats.
One brother described her as “a wonderfully sincere, downright, unafraid, and sympathetic sister.” Another said, “She was determined to get down to the root of things.” Her sister’s strongest impression of Amy concerned her enthusiasm. Nothing was impossible.
Her father died when she was 18, and the following year brought with it another moment of illumination. At a convention in Glasgow, when her soul seemed to be in a fog, she heard the words of the closing prayer, “O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling.” It was as if a light shone for her.
Her work with the shawlies grew so rapidly that a hall was soon needed that would seat 500 people. The story of how that hall was paid for by one lady and how the land to put it on was given by the head of the biggest mill in the city is only the beginning of a lifetime of seeing a heavenly Father’s faithful provision for material needs as well as spiritual. She decided against receiving any money from those who were not utterly one with her aims, accepting it only when it was truly given to God. Amy Carmichael prayed for money and it came. She soon saw Bible classes, girls’ meetings, mothers’ meetings, sewing classes, and gospel meetings being held in the hall, which was called “The Welcome.”
In 1888 all the family’s money was lost, and they moved to England where Amy began another work for factory girls in Manchester.
It was on a snowy evening in January 1892 that a call which she could not escape and dared not resist came clearly: Go ye. A long and spiritually harrowing period followed as she sought to weigh her responsibilities to those who had never heard of Christ against responsibilities to her mother and, most agonizingly, to Robert Wilson, one of the founders of the Keswick convention in England, to whom she had become like a beloved daughter. His wife and only daughter had died and Amy moved into the house. Although the situation was unusual, and not entirely to the liking of Wilson’s two bachelor sons who also lived there, she believed it was God’s place for her for a time. She loved and revered him, calling him “the D.O.M.” (Dear Old Man) and “Fatherie” in letters to her mother. The thought of leaving him was a keen, sharp pain, something she had to lay on the altar, as it were, and trust God to take care of.
She thought of going to Ceylon, but then the knowledge that a million were dying every month without God in China prompted her to offer herself for that land. In July of 1892 she became the first missionary to be supported by the Keswick convention, and went in September to the China Inland Mission headquarters in London. Geraldine Guinness, who later became the daughter-in-law of the mission’s founder, Hudson Taylor, was one of those who encouraged and prayed for her there. She had purchased and packed her outfit when she received word that the doctor refused to pass her for service in China.
It must have been a blow, but did not in the least deter her in her purpose. She knew she had been called, and had no doubt that she would go—somewhere.
She sailed for Japan in 1893 to work under the Rev. Barclay F. Buxton of the Church Missionary Society and plunged into the work with joy, studying the language and adopting Japanese dress almost at once. It was there that she received a letter from her mother, asking whether she loved anybody very much. She gave an evasive answer. This is the only hint to be found anywhere that she might have had a chance to marry and perhaps was forced to choose between a man she loved and the call of God. Of course I am reading a great deal into the few words her biographer uses to cover this question, but because in my own experience it was such a burning one, I often longed to know more. I wished with all my heart that she had not been so everlastingly self-effacing and cautious in keeping herself out of her books.
Within a year, ill health took her to Shanghai, then to Ceylon, and a few months later she returned to England because the D.O.M. had had a stroke. His hopes were raised once more that she would remain with him.
During this time her first book was published, From Sunrise Land, a collection of letters she had written in Japan, illustrated with her own sketches. Again she received a medical rejection, and again she faced the unknown, still sure that the Lord who had called her so clearly would open a way somewhere, somehow. At last she was accepted by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society at Keswick in July 1895 and arrived in Bangalore, India, in December with dengue fever and a temperature of 105. Some missionaries prophesied that she would not last six months. She lasted 55 years without a furlough.
Nearly a year later she met a missionary named Walker, who suggested that his district, Tinnevelly, was a much better place than Bangalore to learn Tamil, the language the mission had assigned her to learn. Walker offered to be her teacher, and so it was in December 1896 that she reached the place that would be home for the rest of her life.
She was an excellent student. It was not that the language came easily to her. She prayed and trusted God for help, but she did what God could not do for her—she studied. She took comfort from the words of Numbers 22:28, “The Lord opened the mouth of the ass.”
Amy lived with the Walkers in two different towns, where the number of Christians was pitifully small. She gathered together a band of Indian women to itinerate with her, among which was Ponnammal, who was to become an intimate, lifelong friend. They traveled at the rate of two or three miles an hour in a bullock bandy, a two-wheeled springless cart with a mat roof, “bang over stones and slabs of rock, down on one side, up on the other. Once we went smoothly down a bank and into a shallow swollen pool, and the water swished in at the lower end and floated our books out quietly” (Things as They Are, p. 5). They camped near the village at night, visiting in homes or wherever they could find women or children to talk to. Sometimes Walker and some of the men joined them for open-air meetings in the evening.
It was no lark. They found themselves in battle—the Lord’s battle, to be sure, but one in which they were his warriors, up against a stupendous Force comprising principalities, powers, rulers of darkness, potentialities unknown and unimagined. She tried to describe it in a book called Things as They Are, but “How can we describe it?” she wrote. “What we have seen and tried to describe is only an indication of Something undescribed, and is as nothing in comparison with it.” Nevertheless, even the understatement that she did put down on paper was rejected by publishers. It was much too discouraging. People wanted pleasanter stories, happier endings, so the manuscript was put in a drawer for several years until some English friends visited her, saw with their own eyes the truth of things, and begged her to allow them to try again to find a publisher willing to risk it. The book appeared in 1903. Its accuracy was questioned, so when a fourth edition was called for, letters were included from missionaries in India confirming in the strongest terms what she had written.
Amy had a clear eye and a keen ear. She wrote what she saw and heard, not what missionary magazines might have conditioned her to see and hear. One of them, for example, stated that Indian women think English women “fairer and more divine than anything imagined.” But Amy heard them say when they saw her, “What an appalling spectacle! A great white man!” “Why no jewels? What relations? Where are they all? Why have you left them and come here? What does the government give you for coming here?”
“An old lady with fluffy white hair leaned forward and gazed at me with a beautiful, earnest gaze. She did not speak; she just listened and gazed, ‘drinking it all in.’ And then she raised a skeleton claw, grabbed her hair and pointed to mine. ‘Are you a widow too,’ she asked, ‘that you have no oil on yours?’ After a few such experiences that beautiful gaze loses its charm.”
The notion of hungry “souls” eagerly thronging to hear the gospel story is an appealing one and perhaps represents a true picture in some places, but certainly not in South India, or, I found, in South America. I was very thankful for that book. Things as They Are told it to me straight, and thus prepared me for my own missionary work as few other books besides the Bible had done. It told of the great fortresses that are Hindu temples, and of the wickedness practiced there. It told of the utter indifference of most of the people when told of the love of Jesus. It told, too, of the few who wanted to hear.
“Tell me, what is the good of your Way? Will it fill the cavity within me?” one old woman asked, striking herself a resounding smack on the stomach. “Will it stock my paddy-pots or nourish my bulls or cause my palms to bear good juice? If it will not do all these good things, what is the use of it?”
It told of a boy who confessed Christ, an only son, heir to considerable property. He was tied up and flogged but he never wavered. At last he had to choose between his home and Christ. He chose Christ. The whole clan descended on the missionaries’ bungalow, sat on the floor in a circle and pleaded. “A single pulse seemed to beat in the room, so tense was the tension, until he spoke out bravely. ‘I will not go back,’ he said.” Though they promised him everything—houses, lands, a rich wife with many jewels—if only he would not break caste, though they told him how his mother neither ate nor slept but sat with hair undone, wailing the death-wail for her son, he would not go back. Later, Shining of Life (for that was his name) was baptized, and within a few weeks was dead of cholera. As he lay dying they taunted him. “This is your reward for breaking your caste!” “Do not trouble me,” he answered, pointing upward. “This is the way by which I am going to Jesus.”
During those first years, Amy Carmichael learned of the hideous traffic in little girls for temple prostitution. Calling them “the most defenseless of God’s innocent little creatures” she gave herself to save them. She prayed for a way—she had not the least idea how it could be done, but she knew her Master, knew his limitless power, and believed him to show her.
She wrote letters (veiled, always, because the things she saw and heard were unprintable then) asking for prayer. She asked God to give her the words to say which would arouse Christians.
And thus God answered me: “Thou shalt have words,
But at this cost, that thou must first be burnt,
Burnt by red embers from a secret fire,
Scorched by fierce heats and withering winds that sweep
Through all thy being, carrying thee afar
From old delights.…”
In 1900 Amy went with the Walkers to camp in a quiet, out-of-the-way village called Dohnavur, and a year later the first temple child was brought to Amy, a girl of seven named Preena, whose hands had been branded with hot irons when she once attempted to escape. Gradually the child learned that she was to be “married to the god.” She knew enough to detest the prospect and fled to a Christian woman who took her to Amy Carmichael. “When she saw me,” Preena wrote 50 years later, “the first thing she did was to put me on her lap and kiss me. I thought, ‘my mother used to put me on her lap and kiss me—who is this person who kisses me like my mother?’ From that day she became my mother, body and soul.”
And from that time on Amy Carmichael was called Amma (accent on the last syllable), the Tamil word for mother.
She began to uncover the facts of temple life. It was a system that had obtained from the ninth or tenth century. The girls trained for this service were sometimes given by their families, sometimes sold, usually between the ages of five and eight, but often when they were babies. They were certainly not “unwanted” children. They were very much wanted. In order to insure that they did not try to run away, they were shut up in back rooms, carefully watched, and, if they tried to escape, tortured as Preena was. They were trained in music and dancing, and, of course, introduced to the mysteries of the oldest profession in the world.
Amma’s search for the children covered three years, but at last, one by one, they began to be brought to her. Soon it became necessary for her to have a settled place. Dohnavur, which she had thought of only as a campsite, proved to be the perfect answer. Indian women joined her, willing to do the humble, humdrum, relentless work of caring for children, work that they saw as truly spiritual work because it was done first of all for the love of Christ.
By 1906 there were 15 babies, three nurses, and five convert girls training as nurses. There were no doctors or nurses to begin with, of course, not even any wet-nurses to help with the babies, since it was not the custom for village women to nurse a child other than their own. A number of babies died, some because they were frail when they arrived, some due to epidemics, some for lack of human milk. Amma grieved as any mother grieves, for they were her very own children. When one of the loveliest of them, a baby girl named Indraneela, died, Amma wrote.
Dear little hands, outstretched in eager welcome,
Dear little head, that close against me lay—
Father, to Thee I give my Indraneela,
Thou wilt take care of her until That Day.
In 1907 came the first gift of money to build a nursery. It was not long before Amma learned that boys, too, were being used for immoral purposes in the dramatic societies. Prayer began to go up for them, and by 1918 the work expanded to include them.
There were no salaried workers, either Indian or foreign, in the Dohnavur Fellowship. All gave themselves for love of the Lord, and no appeal was ever made for funds. When one sentence in a book she had written might have been construed as an appeal, Amma withdrew the book from circulation. No one was ever authorized to make pleas for money on their behalf. Needs were mentioned only to God, and God supplied them. The work grew until by 1950 or thereabouts the “Family” numbered over 900 people, including children and Indian and European workers. There was a hospital, many nurseries and bungalows for the children and their accals (sisters, as the Indian workers were called), a House of Prayer, classrooms, workrooms, storehouses, hostels, playing fields, fruit and vegetable gardens, farm and pasture lands. It was all “given.” The financial policy has not changed to this day. The Unseen Leader is still in charge, and from him comes all that is needed from day to day, from hammocks in which the tiniest newborns swing, to modern equipment for the hospital. There are doctors, nurses, teachers, builders, engineers, farmers, craftsmen, cooks. There are none who are only preachers. A Hindu had once said to someone in the Dohnavur Fellowship, “We have heard the preaching, but can you show us the life of your Lord Jesus?” Each worker, whatever his practical task, seeks to show that life as he offers his service to his Lord.
The books Nor Scrip, Tables in the Wilderness, Meal in a Barrel, and Windows are records of God’s constant provision for material needs, story after amazing story of his timing, his resources, his chosen instruments. The God who could provide food for a prophet through the instrumentality of ravens and a poor widow was trusted to meet the daily needs of children and those who cared for them, a few rupees here, a few thousand pounds there.
Amma was a woman of great reserve. Loving, unselfish, and outgoing to others, she was acutely aware of the dangers of drawing attention to herself in any way, or of drawing people to herself rather than to Christ. She could easily have become a cult figure, having great gifts of personality, leadership, and the ability to encourage the gifts of others. But she held strictly to Christ as Leader and Lord, and “coveted no place on earth but the dust at the foot of the Cross.” In January 1919, her name appeared on the Royal Birthday Honours List. She wrote to Lord Pentland, “Would it be unpardonably rude to ask to be allowed not to have it?… I have done nothing to make it fitting, and cannot understand it at all. It troubles me to have an experience so different from His Who was despised and rejected—not kindly honoured.” She was persuaded at last that she could not refuse it, but she did not go to Madras for the presentation ceremony.
There are a few pictures of her in the biography, but too few. I would love to have seen many more, but she refused to allow them to be taken, and although there are many pictures of the children and Indian workers in the books she wrote, none are included of herself or of other European workers.
Her biographer, Bishop Frank Houghton, tells us only that she was of medium height with brown eyes and brown hair. When I asked a member of the Fellowship to describe her she smiled. All she could think to say was, “She had wonderful eyes.”
The light that seemed to shine in and through and around this woman was love. When asked what they remembered best about her, many people answered love. There is hardly a page of her books that does not speak of it in some way. Her poems are full of it.
Love through me, Love of God …
O love that faileth not, break forth,
And flood this world of Thine (Toward Jerusalem, p. 11).
Pour through me now: I yield myself to Thee,
Love, blessed Love, do as Thou wilt with me (p. 69).
O the Passion of Thy Loving,
O the Flame of Thy desire!
Melt my heart with Thy great loving,
Set me all aglow, afire (p. 83).
When she thought her time on earth was nearly up, she began to write letters to each one of the Family, which she put into a box to be opened after her death. These letters are steeped in love. One of them speaks of a misunderstanding that had arisen between two members of the Fellowship, and how deeply it had hurt her to hear of it. “Refuse it. Hate it,” she wrote. “It may seem a trifle, but it is of hell.… If this were the last time I could speak to you I should say just these words, ‘Beloved, let us love!’ My children, our comrades in the War of the Lord, I say these words to you again, ‘Beloved, let us love!… We perish if we do not love.”
The kind of love she lived and taught was no mere matter of feelings. It was steel. Though for many years she made it a practice to give each child a good-night kiss, she also believed in canings when canings were called for, but then she would wipe away the tears with her handkerchief. Sometimes she would pray with the child first, that the punishment might help her, and, after she had administered it, she found on at least one occasion that a glass of water effectively silenced the howls.
Again, in the little book If, “If I am afraid to speak the truth, lest I lose affection, or lest the one concerned should say, ‘You do not understand,’ or because I fear to lose my reputation for kindness; if I put my own good name before the other’s highest good, then I know nothing of Calvary love” (p. 24).
Amma was a woman peculiarly sensitive to beauty. The long poems, Pools and The Valley of Vision, contain exquisite descriptions of the loveliness of the world around her, but delve deep into the mystery of its sorrow and suffering,
I saw a scarf of rainbow water-lace,
Blue-green, green-blue, lilac and violet.
Light, water, air, it trailed, a phantom thing,
An iridescence, vanishing as I gazed;
Like wings of dragonflies, a hint gone—
Discovery was very near me then.
But no unseemly, no irreverent haste
Perplexes him who stands alone with God
In upland places. Presently I saw …
Father, who speakest to us by the way,
Now from a burning bush, now by a stream.…
Hers was a mystical mind. A true mystic is an utterly practical person, for he sees the Real as no pedant can ever see it, he finds the spiritual in the material (what T.S. Eliot calls “fear in a handful of dust,” or Thomas Howard, “splendor in the ordinary”). She was logical. She was incisive, vigorous, utterly clear. She could write of a “scarf of rainbow water-lace,” or she could use words that stab like a dagger or scorch like fire: “And we talked of the difference between the fleshly love and the spiritual; the two loves stood out in sharp distinction. In such an hour the fire of the love of God is searching. It knows just where to find the clay in us. That clay must be turned to crystal” (Ploughed Under, p. 187).
To a modern American it seems marvelous that a woman with what would seem to us little formal education and with no “degrees” should be able to use the English language so flawlessly, to shape a phrase so finely, and to write (very rapidly—sometimes 12 to 15 hours a day) with such apparent ease and fluidity. There is not a word in any book or poem which Amy Carmichael had not bought by suffering. There is not an empty word, a superfluous word, a glib word. Every word, every line, has work to do.
Words given to her in the heat of battle have spoken strongly to me in the heat of my own experiences. They have been, in fact, the very voice of God to me, alive and powerful and sharp today as they were 30 or 25 or 10 years ago.
There are markings, of course, in my copies of Amy Carmichael’s books. They are my trusted friends. When I was in the throes of decision as to whether, newly widowed, I should take my small daughter and go to live with a remote tribe of Indians, I circled these words:
“His thoughts said, How can I know that it is the time to move?
“His Father said, And it shall be when thou shalt hear a sound of going in the tops of mulberry trees, that then thou shalt go out to battle. Thou shalt certainly hear that sound. [That sentence is underlined.] There will be a quiet sense of sureness and a sense of peace” (His Thoughts Said).
I remember feeling doubtful about that “sound of going” (2 Sam. 5:24) in mulberry trees. There were no such trees in our jungle, and the sign given to me in 1958 that led to my going to those Indians was not in any mulberry trees. But I found the promise fulfilled, “Thou shalt certainly hear that sound.” God made it perfectly plain when the time came. I understood then her confidence, the sense of sureness and peace.
But subsequent decisions have put me in the same sort of quandary, and I have gone back again to the same little book. “But the son still wondered what he should do if he did not hear a Voice directing him, till he came to understand that, as he waited, his Father would work and would so shape the events of common life that they would become indications of His will. He has shown also that they would be in accord with some word of Scripture which would be laid upon his heart.”
That made sense to me. No audible voices have ever told me what to do, but the providential shaping of events and corroborating scriptures given to me at the time have proved again and again the trustworthiness of the Shepherd.
Amma was visiting one day in 1931 in a nearby village where there had been hostility to Christians. She fell into a pit that had been dug “where no pit should be.” The injuries did not heal, and she suffered acute neuritis in her right arm, arthritis in her back, chronic infections, and the cumulative effects of stress for the rest of her life, hardly leaving her room until she died in January 1951 at the age of 83. During those 20 years as an invalid, in nearly constant pain, she wrote 15 books “out of the furnace,” as it were, and the words of 2 Corinthians I show a part of the service God gave her to do:
“He comforts us in all our troubles, so that we in turn may be able to comfort others in any trouble of theirs and to share with them the consolation we ourselves receive from God. As Christ’s cup of suffering overflows, and we suffer with him, so also through Christ our consolation overflows. If distress be our lot, it is the price we pay for your consolation, for your salvation” (2 Cor 1:4–6, NEB).
I am one of the many thousands, surely, for whose consolation and salvation Amy Carmichael paid a heavy price. That she paid it with gladness and a whole heart no one who has read even a page of hers could possibly doubt.
Like the mountaineer whose epitaph she loved to quote, she “died climbing.” Now she is one of the great cloud of witnesses whose course has been finished, and who cheer us on to run the race that is set before us, looking as they did to Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him, endured the Cross.”
