10. The School of Prayer
Chapter 10
The School of Prayer
The new missionary who is sure of his call can hardly help expecting to see miracles when he reaches the place of service. Amy Carmichael had had a glimpse, through her work with the shawlies, of how the other half” lived, had experienced what it is to be a quaint figure presenting a hardly credible message, and knew that not by any means all who hear it find it even interesting, let alone compelling. She had seen some fruit, however. God had honored her faith and her labor of love, and there were many “trophies of grace to show for it. Surely in Japan where the need was far more acute she could expect even greater miracles and trophies. She prayed for them. She worked as hard as she could for them. She believed God’s promises. But again and again her letters express her consciousness of the weakness of her own faith and the overpowering might of the obstacles to be removed. Heathendom was a felt presence, never more overwhelming than in an Eastern carnival or matsuri. She wished she could describe such a scene with a fire-dipped pen even with a pen dipped in her own heart’s blood if that was what it took to rouse the people at home from their lethargy.
We are riding together in a kuruma, a Japanese girl and I, spinning along through deserted streets, dark and still. We hear the beat of drum, the clang of cymbal, the hum of a thousand voices. Suddenly it breaks into a roar and we are in the midst of it all, caught in the whirl, swept along through streets all shining with crimson light, over bridges reflected in crimson-lit waters, under arches dropping with crimson fire. It is as if the stars had fallen upon earth, changing color as they fall. A burst of “Nebuchadnezzar’s orchestra” in full swing drowns our voices, should we try to speak. . . . Onward rushes the mighty rabble—men and women in exchanged attire and gaudy colors flit past and mingling with uncanny monster forms they dance the wild matsuri dance, with abandonment inconceivable, every step a parody, every gesture a caricature. Dragons, griffins, reptiles, fishes, birds there are, all dancing, waving fans, shouting, howling, singing, noising in one form or another, in chorus perfectly bewildering. Old crones with wrinkles showing through the paint, babies wrapped in rainbow hues, gazing with astonished eyes, children gay as butterflies and as bewitching, men of good position in grotesque masks, women of the gentler order forgetting all refinement in the strange glamor of the hour—endlessly on and on they swarm. . . . A huge car is coming, drawn by scores of revellers, festooned with flowers and tinsel, wreathed with chains of light. Standing within it and walking before and after are girls robed in silks and crepes, palest shades of pink and blue, glittering with embroideries of gold and silver. Pale, expressionless faces are theirs, dead, vacant, joyless, their heavy half-shut eyes hardly glance at the revelry around them. The weary feet drag slowly on. We turn away heart-sick, for this is heathendom indeed. Our kuruma man speaks: have we seen enough? Ah yes, and far more. He takes us home, and we leave behind us the chaos of sound and color and mirth all hollow and sin all dark and in the silence of a pain we cannot conquer we find ourselves just spirit-crushed, and with no language but a cry.
The passion of her pleas for prayer and for understanding, the vividness with which she tried to depict what she was up against, were inspired by a genuine conviction that the work she was called to was without question God’s work, and could not possibly be done without the help of God’s people-prayer warriors” who would share the bitterness of the battle with her. There was another bitterness which probably added to the urgency. Rumors reached her from England of continued criticism of her having gone off to Japan. This would vitiate the prayers she needed so badly, so she reminded her friends of her call in 1892, “Go ye,” and in 1893, “Go to Japan.” She confessed that she had made some mistakes during the year that intervened between those calls, mistakes due partly to the fear that if she did not find out immediately where she was to go, the strength to obey would fail and the light of the Lord’s smile would be gone. “So I tried and we tried—and failed. He had to teach us to Be Still and Know. Then when His time came His will was clear.” She asked her supporters to believe that it was God’s constraining hand which had beckoned her away, God’s voice which would not let her stay. “Please, please, what you can’t approve of, won’t you forgive and don’t let the prayer help He means you to give us be lost, for we need it so.”
One experience in particular showed how greatly she needed it. Early one morning she was told that a man nearby was possessed by a “fox spirit.” This spirit was worshipped in Japan, shrines were dedicated to him, and stone foxes were often set side by side with Buddhas. What this demon was doing to the poor man sounded very like New Testament stories—“Wherever he is, it gets hold of him, throws him down on the ground and there he foams at the mouth and grinds his teeth.”1 Amy went straight to her room and asked the Lord why she couldn’t cast him out. “Because of your unbelief,” was His answer. She spent hours on her knees before she asked Misaki San if she believed the Lord Jesus was willing to cast the devil out of the man. Misaki San was startled, but after some thought and prayer, declared that she believed. Amy’s impulse was to go at once, but she remembered that the disciples were told that such a demon required fasting as well as prayer. So she and her friend did both, having sent a message in the meantime to ask if they would be permitted to see the man. Yes, came the answer, but he was very wild. He had six foxes, and was tied up.
After some hours of which Amy said only that they were solemn, the two went to the house. Stretched on the floor, fastened crosswise on two beams, bound and strapped hand and foot, his body covered with burns and wounds, lay the man. Little cones of powdered medicine had been set on his skin and lighted. They burned slowly, with a red glow. Nothing had so far daunted the fox spirits, but Amy called to mind that the power of God had conquered a demon whose name was Legion. She told the crowd in the room that her mighty Lord Jesus could cast out the six spirits. At the name of Christ a fearful paroxysm took hold of the man, hellish power was loosed, and blasphemies which even she could recognize as blasphemies poured from the man’s mouth. He struggled, was forcibly held down, the women knelt and prayed, the struggle increased. Satan seemed to be mocking them. “Can you think how I felt then?” Amy wrote. “The Lord’s name dishonored among the heathen, and I had done it! Far, far better never to have come!” But she heard the Shepherd answer: My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me. All power is given unto Me. These signs shall follow them that believe: in My name shall they cast out devils. Fear thou not for I am with thee.2
Amy assured the wife that God would answer, and the two went home. An hour later a message came—the foxes had gone, the cords were off, the man was himself again. Next morning he asked to see Amy and Misaki San. Unrecognizable except for the burns, he offered them a spray of scarlet pomegranate blossom and sugared ice water. He and his wife gladly knelt with the women as they prayed, joining in with “Hai! Hai!” (yes, yes).
Amy’s letters to the Keswick magazine, The Life of Faith, are full of stories of prayer answered. One tells of a man and a boy who often discussed the Christians claim that God answers prayer. No, it could not be. But one day the boy was in charge of delivering the cakes to a wedding. He carried them very carefully, but as he stepped from a sampan a fear crossed his mind something would happen to the delicate little cakes. A few minutes later he stumbled and dropped them. There was no time to go back for more, no time even to open the fragile boxes. What should he do? He thought of the Christians’ God, and there on the road prayed his first prayer, “Please let none of the cakes be broken.” It was not until the marriage ceremony was over that the guests were given their boxes of pink and white fan-shaped cakes. Not one was so much as cracked. Back went the boy to his friend. “Now I know that God hears prayer, for God heard me.”
One day Amy gave a New Testament to a student who took it and said, “It will be a seed.” Seeds need to be watered. Prayer was that water, and Amy prayed. On the other side of the world another student, reading a letter from Amy asking for prayer for the Japanese student, “put in five solid minutes’ prayer.” He was Paget Wilkes, an Oxford undergraduate then, who went to Japan, worked in Matsuye, and led to Christ that student for whom he had prayed.
An insight into Amy Carmichael’s understanding of the nature of prayer is given us in her story of what happened at Hirosi. This was a large Buddhist village where only eight or nine Christians shone “like stars in the night.” Amy planned to visit the village, but wanted to prepare herself by praying along the lines of whatever God intended to do there. If she could be sure of that, she could pray with faith. Years later she discovered that Julian of Norwich had held a similar view of prayer: “I am the Ground of thy beseeching: first it is My will that thou have it; and after, I make thee to will it; and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?” As she prayed, Amy felt “pressed in spirit” to ask for a soul, one soul. Next day she went to Hirosi with Misaki San, and a young silk weaver crossed the line”—became a Christian—that evening. A month later they went again. It was two souls she prayed for this time. The silk weaver brought a friend who “found peace,” and an old woman also turned to the Lord. Two weeks passed. Again they went, again they asked God what He wanted to do, and the answer was that four souls were to cross the line. By this time other missionaries in Matsuye had joined in prayer. One of the men felt it was a bit much to ask for four souls, but agreed to ask for two. Things looked anything but encouraging when the women arrived. The Hirosi Christians balked at asking for four. Nobody in town seemed in the least interested. The devil fired his usual darts of doubt: “You can’t expect conversions every time. It’s quite presumptuous. Fancy going back to Matsuye empty-handed! etc.”
Matters were enormously complicated by Amy’s having dropped what she thought an unarguable suggestion, that new converts should burn their idols. Burn their idols? Impossible to let it be known that Christians must do this—it would turn back all inquirers. Amy was adamant, facing what she termed “the Calvary side of the work, a thing to be lived through alone with Calvary’s Christ.” They prayer-meetinged her, asking the Lord to open her eyes, show her the foolishness of transgressing Japanese custom. Then they besought her not to mention idols again. But truth was dearer than success. “I could not buy a soul at the cost of sacrificing truth. The fact that many might and probably would be turned back could not be a proof that this course was wrong, because in John 6:66 we read ‘From that time [speaking of the “hard saying”] many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.’ The servant is not greater than his Lord.” In the meeting that afternoon the people gazed and smiled and felt nothing. It seemed a prison of mocking spirits. Amy was about to close when a woman said, “I want to believe.” Then her son came and knelt. On the way back from the meeting Amy stopped at the home of Christians who had a friend waiting to ask her the way of salvation. That friend was number three. Where was number four? “Why,” said a man, “It must be my wife. She wants to be a Jesus-person, but she is away at her own village.” She came back early the next morning and confessed before her relatives her desire to be a Christian.
For weeks afterwards Amy felt an irresistible divine pressure to ask and receive according to 1 John 5:14, 15: “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” The petition this time? Eight souls from Hirosi. Again there was resistance from the Christians there. To ask for something they did not receive would be “a very bad happening.” Amy had no doubt God wanted to give the eight, and offered to stay longer to give Him time. No, they could not possibly arrange more meetings. So Amy, not about to capitulate, read prayer promises. The dear old undershepherd, a man of “perfectly Gladstonian ambiguity and circumlocution,” had locked horns with Amy over every issue that arose, his whole soul protesting against her categorical imperatives. This time he saw that protest would be futile. Slowly he rose, slowly spoke, “You are a Jesus-walking one; if His voice speaks to you, though it speaks not to us, we will believe.” Their trust, greater perhaps in Amy than in God, was rewarded. In His mercy (He knows the measure of faith He has given to each), eight more “stars” now shone in Hirosi. Later in India, bearing very great responsibilities for decision making, Amy remembered the undershepherd’s words and was strengthened in her resolve when Indian fellow-workers questioned her judgment.
And what about the next visit? Sixteen? No. No number at all was “laid on” Amy’s heart. They went to Hirosi, they had the usual meetings, they prayed together with all the Christians there, some came to Jesus, but Amy did not know how many. “We parted in a sort of singing silence.”
When she wrote the Hirosi story for her “children” she acknowledged, in a veiled way, that she had suffered pain because of those Christians. She did not elaborate. “I do not think that is a thing to talk about.”
Fourteen years later Barclay Buxton’s nephew joined him in Matsuye. He often visited Hirosi, and found that the converts from Amy’s time were still firmly rooted in faith.
Utter holiness, crystal pure, was Amy Carmichael’s desire. She did not see how any true Christian could have a lesser. “If we are not clean when we bear the vessels of the Lord,” she wrote in May of 1894, we may profane His holy name in the things which we hallow. Our very service a defiling thing! . . . The need of Japan: prophets of her own who can and will dare, Elijah-like, to stand alone for God, speaking His word faithfully, be that Word like as a fire, like a hammer, marking out, for lifelong loneliness, the man who is ‘the Voice.’”
She herself set the example and paid the price, sometimes in conflict with fellow-believers both European and Japanese. The matter of using pictures of Christ, a common practice among missionaries, was unthinkable to Amy. No one, she felt, had a right to presume to imagine God the Son. Who could possibly separate manhood from Godhead? She shrank in dread from such holy ground, and reminded those who disagreed that the apostles had avoided all appeal to the senses, trusting in the power of the Word alone. The Church, she said, resorted to pictures only when her power had gone.
The merest suggestion of anyone’s choosing missionary work because it was noble and grand, or a mission field because it was pleasant, horrified her. How could people at home write of a “delightful missionary meeting? Had they absorbed nothing of needs unmet, cries unheeded, griefs uncomforted? Did they attend for nothing but the tea and cake, the conversation, the chance to examine exotic curios, and then tell themselves that they were doing all that could be expected of them? “Missionary work is a grain of sand, the work untouched is a pyramid. . . . Face it. Look and listen, alone with God. Then go, let go, help go. But never, never, never think that anything short of this is being ‘interested in missions.’ Never, until this point is reached and passed, delude yourself into believing that you care at all.” Her own experience at Keswick was anything but “delightful.” The tent, thronged and still. Wave after wave of silent prayer, rising solemnly to God. Brief, burning “soldier-words” from soldier-souls. Silent battles raging within. A long hush. A cry as of pain, unavoidable, demanding an answer. She had given her answer, and on countless occasions in the field had had to reexamine her motives. A young missionary once said to her, I would go home tomorrow if I could. It is all a miserable disappointment, and I thought it would be so nice.” She besought her friends, girl friends, and cousins at home to consider the cry and the call, to welcome all tests of whatever sort before they crossed the seas, and to learn to die to self in any shape or form. Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the Rock-consciousness” of the promise given her, He goeth before.
1. Mark 9:18 (Phillips).
2. John 10:27; Matthew 28:18; Mark 16:17; Isaiah 41:10.