17. Blissful Work
Chapter 17
Blissful Work
Eighteen ninety-eight began with weeks of neuralgia which, combined with the heat, made language study even less of a pleasure than usual, but the Scrap letter of February 17 says, “Hallelujah! Hurrah! The exam is passed! I’m free for souls at last!” While the study of Tamil had certainly been a battle, and would continue to be, the fourteen months which had seemed so long were over, and she could join the real battle, the fight for souls.
Missionary work in a place where Christ has never been named is sometimes less arduous than in places where, though named, He has not been honored by lives of holy obedience. How were the heathen to see Christianity in action, how feel its force, when so many who went by the name of Christian were nothing more than the descendants of people who had “crossed over” during “one of those dreadful mass movements” of the early nineteenth century? They were for the most part from the lower castes, lured by the hope of worldly gain. They lived in a sort of twilight, far from the true Gospel light. As for the upper castes—the Brahmans, the Vellalas, and the trade guilds—their ranks were nearly unbroken, their homes veritable fortresses into which no unclean Indian, let alone foreign missionary, could enter.
“They smile at our belief in a Power they do not see at work, while the power they see is all but omnipotent.” Amy pleaded in her letters for men. Where were the men with mental powers equal to those of the educated Indian, men who would count as refuse the success and acclaim they might have had and “lose” themselves in some out-of-the-way corner of the earth? Were there none like Ragland, Tinnevelly’s “Spiritual pioneer,”1 whose life was lived on the lines of John 12:24, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”?
To those who asked what they could send, Amy answered books. Missionary biographies. She was fortified and cheered to read of Gilmore of Mongolia, Henry Martyn of India, Judson of Burma, Coillard of the Zambesi. Their stories were “a sort of standing dose of mental and spiritual quinine.”
“O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries! Don’t come if you mean to turn aside for anything—for the ‘claims of society’ in the treaty ports and stations. Don’t come if you haven’t made up your mind to live for one thing—the winning of souls.”
Again and again Amy’s hopes were raised as one after another responded momentarily to the Gospel. A caste girl declared that she wanted to be baptized. Would she have the courage to flee her home? If she did, what would happen? Would the missionary bungalow be stormed? “I hope so! I should like to see some real fight. This dead stagnation is worst of all,” Amy wrote. A young wife sat quietly and listened to the story of Jesus, shivering with pain when she learned of the cross. But they were interrupted at that moment, and when Amy tried to visit again the husband forbade it. How could such a woman follow Christ? The words of Jesus came with terrible power: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine.”2
One day Amy went to the villages where old Saral had taught the Bible. She was disappointed to find that little seemed to have been learned. One woman who had heard the Word for five months did not know who Jesus was. Several who had shown an interest died, some of them mysteriously. A widow said, “My heart is weary, my friends cannot help me, nor can the gods I worship do me any good. Your God is God, the true God. I know He can help me. His way is the right way. I believe all that.” But she could not be persuaded to act. It meant breaking caste, and to her that was suicide. Once, speaking long and earnestly with a woman who seemed open, Amy reached out her hand and touched her. The people were infuriated. She had defiled her, degraded her, was trying to drag her by force into the Way.
Someone sent an English magazine which stated that Indian women considered English women fairer and more divine than anything imagined before. That was “very nice to read,” said Amy, but her own experience proved it preposterous. She was taken for a “great white man” because of her sun helmet. There was an argument over whether she was man or woman. All agreed that she was an “appalling spectacle.” Questions were fired: What is your caste? Married or widow? Why no jewels? What relations have you? Where are they all? Why have you left them and come here? What does the government pay you for coming? Amy answered them all, then explained why they were there—to bring Good News. And what did the people do when they heard the news? They simply stared. They sat on the floor and chewed betel leaf and stared.
In one house an old lady leaned forward and gazed with a beautiful, earnest gaze. “Then she raised a skeleton claw and 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 gaze loses its charm. ‘Oil! No oil! Can’t you even afford a halfpenny a month to buy good oil? It isn’t your custom? Why not? Don’t any white Ammals ever use oil? Do you never use oil for your hair?’ ”
Patiently the Good News was repeated, with constant interruptions—two bulls sauntered in, a cow followed, somebody went off to tie them up, children wanted attention, babies cried. Rarely were there five consecutive minutes of quiet. “As the Father hath sent me,” Jesus said, “so send I you.” How much sincere attention was there when He preached to the crowd on the mountain? How many consecutive minutes of quiet had He in which to give His message? So Amy wondered, and went on with the work, “blissful work,” she called it, remembering the answers to prayer in “my dear Hirosi.”
Saral, who had been with Amy for more than a year, went to visit her family and did not return when expected. In answer to inquiry there were excuses. At last it was evident that she did not plan to return. Amy had lost another comrade in the fight, and suffered perhaps a deeper pain than that caused by the indifference of the nonbelievers. She began to pray for comrades who would endure.
Friends in England offered to provide a tent for the Walkers and Amy which would enable them to make longer visits in the villages. Unlike Japan where lodging could be had in something resembling hotels, there was nowhere in South Indian villages where a defiling foreigner could lay his head, let alone eat a meal. The tea basket Amy carried on her forays was always an object of curiosity whose beauties she was required repeatedly to display, and when she wanted to “perpetrate the barbarity of consuming a square inch of chocolate” she had to try to find a hidden corner in which she could retire. With the tent they would be ready for “a regular raid into the Kingdom of Darkness with the glorious Light.” But were they truly ready for such an invasion? The tent was a mere physical provision. What about the readiness to be a vessel broken for the Lord, “continually surrendered into the hands of death for Jesus’ sake,” as the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:11, “so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in this mortal body”? That was the crying need: the life—visible, tangible evidence of the truth of what they preached. Too much talk had been heard, too many professions made, without that unarguable revelation. Camping in the villages would give Christ’s ambassadors the opportunity to show the life they talked about.
The Fight became intense in September when a girl, the first of her caste ever to do so, decided to follow Christ no matter what the cost. There was a tremendous row. The girl fled for refuge to the mission bungalow in Pannaivilai where Amy was living with the Walkers. The relatives pursued her, camped on the verandah, putting the household in a state of siege. The poor old mother threw herself on the floor, thumping her head, beating her breast, moaning. They made all manner of promises if the girl would renege—they would not force her to marry, they would let her go to church, worship God at home, anything, if only she would not break caste. “Only come! Come! We are your own people! Come back to us!” There was a breathless pause. Amy could do nothing but watch the girl suffer, wait for her answer. “I cannot go back,” she said, and they began again. At last Walker entered. “You have had a fair field. You have done your best. She is free to go if she wishes.” Then he turned to the girl. “Do you choose to go?” “NO!” she said, with all the strength left in her. That was the end of that interview, but not of the fight. For days there was palaver, threat of lawsuits, wheedlings, a deposition. The mission school was burnt to the ground. Rumor said someone would blow poison in the girl’s face if she went to church. When the girl decided she had nothing more to say to them and would hear no more from them, Amy spirited her away to the mission house in Palamcottah where she was kept safe. She was baptized in October and given a name which meant Jewel of Victory.
In the same month the prayer for a comrade who would endure was answered. Ponnammal, whose name meant Gold, was a widow of twenty-three, a fourth-generation Christian who had taught Sunday school and attended Mrs. Walker’s prayer meetings. She had been a trusted friend for some months,3 “and we felt she was being trained by God Himself for some special service,” but because of family control she was not free to serve the Lord as she wanted. She prayed for this freedom, and suddenly and strangely it came. There was trouble, the family took sides against her, and she was turned out.
“I think God wants to make me pure gold,” she said, “so He is burning out the dross, teaching me the meaning of the fire, the burnt offering, the death of the self-part of me.”
Ponnammal was one of the “Starry Cluster,” the Tamil name given by the people to the itinerant band. Pearl was another one, an Indian “Lydia”4 whose heart God had opened. She had lost an arm as a child, was treated as a disgrace to the family and lived in a “hole,” the sort of place Englishmen rarely saw, or, if they did, never understood Indian India, the old, old India of legend and song.” There was a widow named Blessing and a married woman, Marial. Amy hesitated to admit Marial because “husbands are so much in the way . . . an obstruction and a nuisance. Women need to escape them,” but Marial’s soldier-spirit was irresistible. Her husband was “hardly a man exactly.” “I have spiritual needs—these I expect my God to supply. I have also physical needs these I expect my wife to supply,” he said, so they took him on as a cook, he being “incapable of higher things,” and Marial was thus free to fight the Lord’s battles.” Sometimes the women traveled with the Walkers, sometimes by themselves. They had a flag made of folds of black, red, white, and yellow sateen, “a most useful text for an impromptu sermon,” like the Wordless Book.
The Band and the bandy.
Off we would go in the early morning, walking, or by bullock-cart, as many of us as could get in, packed under its curved mat roof. Stuffiness, weariness, that appalling sensation of almost sea-sickness . . . but one only remembers the loveliness of the early lights on palm, and water, and emerald sheet of rice-field; the songs by which we refreshed ourselves as we tumbled along in the heat; the pause outside the village we were to enter; the swift prayer for an open door; the entrance, all of us watching eagerly for signs of a welcome anywhere—for this was pioneer work, not work in prepared ground, and in scores of the places to which we went no white woman had ever been seen before.
Sometimes we would get out at the entrance of the village and walk on till we saw a friendly face—and we almost always found one. We usually separated then, and went two and two, and won our way past the men who would be sauntering in the front courtyard, and so penetrated to the women’s rooms; or, if that proved impossible, we held an open-air meeting somewhere; or sat down wherever we could, and waited till someone came to talk, for we found—at festivals, for example—that if we waited in some quiet street, sitting apparently unconcerned, Indian guru-fashion, on a deserted verandah, or under a tree, that one by one people discovered us, and came and squatted down beside us and asked questions.
Sometimes the listeners were tall men in white loincloths with knives at the belt, “fearless, intelligent, with none of that undignified Englishism adopted by city men.”
Later in the morning the Band went home, or back to the tent, breakfasted, and studied the Bible together, searching its pages “through and through for that without which our work would have been vain.” Afternoons and evenings were spent much as the mornings, except when there was street preaching and music on the baby organ.
Camp scene with the Walkers.
A typical campsite would be a bit of sandy jungle cleared of scrub and thorn, as near to a river as possible. Under the mimosa and palm trees three white tents—a tiny one for Walker, barely big enough to hold him and the irreducible minimum of necessities, one for the three servants (a servant to put up and take down tents and see that white ants didn’t devour them, another to cook, one to run errands). The women had a twelve-by-twelve tent with two side-wings for dressing and for storing the beds during the daytime. There were folding tables and chairs, “a shocking number of belongings,” including all food except milk, which was obtainable in the villages. Most indispensable of all were the books and pictures with which they told the old, old story.
Once in a while the Band believed God wanted them to ask specifically for one convert on a given day. On one such day they were on their way back to the tent without having seen a convert. Something the bandy-man said made Amy ask him when he would come to Jesus. “Tonight,” was his answer. He came into the tent, “we all prayed, and he prayed too, and we think the Good Shepherd found him.” A letter from England told them that people there had asked specifically on that date for a convert. What a cynic would call a coincidence Amy called a clear answer, and more than an answer—a sign of the love of the Lord.
Amy experienced a sense of evil worse than in Japan. Once a devotee of the temple, “very very old and very very bad,” with not one “good line” in his ancient, wrinkled face, came to listen. “After the preaching I went to him, poor old man, so old, so bad. He just scowled and muttered some horrible thing and tottered away.”
Never once were the members of the Band asked to come back and teach again. “Go!” said one woman, “We neither want you nor your book nor your way.” An old leper called out, “Who wants your Lord Jesus here?” A devil-dancer with her hair matted and twisted, her face spotted and smeared with idol marks, snarled at them, “Your god is no god. If I come to him my devil-god will kill me. He is god. Yours died, you say—died and was buried. Your god is no god. Go away and tell your lies somewhere else. Who asks you to tell them here?”
Not all rejected the Truth. There were now and then occasions of tremendous joy when, at sunset, all the Christians streamed out to the nearest lake and the new believer was “buried with Christ in baptism.” “A little to the right the devil shrines, a little to the left the devil temple, and we on the shore watching, praying, singing.”
One boy stood straight and fearless as he told his story. His father was a sage. One day the boy said, “Father, I have a load, the burden of sin is heavy. What can I do to get rid of my sin?” “Learn the Thousand Stanzas and your sin will melt away.” He learned them, but the burden was heavy still. “Is there no other way?” he asked. “You are young. Wait for a year or two, then you may find the way.” But what if he should die? At last “a thirst like the thirst for water came, and I was thirsty, thirsty.” He heard the Christians sing a gospel song, “Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling.” Next morning he came to Jesus and drank. “Where was my burden then, where was my thirst? Gone—as the dew when it sees the sun!”
One day Amy had an encounter with a very unusual woman. She looked intelligent, could read, knew the classics, quoted poetry “in, for a woman, a most bewildering fashion.” She scorned Blessing, the widow who had believed only a month earlier. “What could that ignoramus teach me?” the woman wanted to know. “You say you must not tell lies, and here is a regular big one! Learning indeed! Her very grammar is defective! She is the merest block of wood!”
I am only one month old,” said Blessing, “I have no wisdom to answer you, but I can read this Book of God and my name is in His Book and in my heart His peace and joy are dwelling. Is not joy better than much learning?”
Not till afterwards did Amy learn that the woman was a temple woman, a prostitute, “married to the gods,” whose life was spent in the service of the priests and worshippers. Not one from among them had ever been converted. No one had ever been allowed to work among them. The discovery of this system was like a sword in Amy’s missionary soul. Something must be done. Someone must find a way somehow to touch these women for God.
1. “The first Englishman to camp among the people of India as a missionary of Christ.” Amy Carmichael, Ragland, Spiritual Pioneer (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1951). p. vi.
2. Luke 14:26 NEB.
3. Ponnammal: Her Story gives the date of her joining the itinerant band as June 1897.
4. Acts 16:14.