22. The Vault Beneath the Meadow
Chapter 22
The Vault Beneath the Meadow
The search for children in peril went on assiduously, but as quietly as possible. They found that there were five reasons for children being dedicated to temples. Sometimes it was because of a vow or obedience to a family custom. Sometimes it was in order to escape some social entanglement such as an out-of-caste alliance. When a poor widow or a deserted wife could not find a suitable husband for her child, she married her to the god. In some cases lack of money to perform the death ceremonies required by the caste tempted a mother to give up her child for her husband’s sake.
It was three years before a second temple child was found, three years during which the Starry Cluster continued to travel and Amy continued to try to do the impossible. Her Scrap letters were fewer and further between, but she wrote many letters to friends in India, asking for help in finding the children. She investigated every possible avenue of approach to officials who might be of help in saving them, and pleaded with people at home to pray. Her book Things as They Are seemed of no use at all against the huge forces of the system which was Hinduism. One day, desperate to find words fiery enough to burn people’s consciences, she cried out to God to give them. She wrote down the answer in an old exercise book:
Thou shalt have words,
But at this cost, that thou must first be burned,
Burned 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. Doth not the ardent fire
Consume the mountain’s heart before the flow
Of fervent lava? Wouldst thou easefully,
As from cool, pleasant fountains, flow in fire?
Reformers were working in both Bombay and Calcutta, “but the subject bristled with difficulties and action at that time appeared to be impossible.”1 Once she was invited to meet with a group of men who might wield influence in the framing of a law to protect children.
Two of the ten men were in earnest, the other eight enjoyed the talk preparatory and attendant upon all action in India, but they saw no tremendous reason for immediate exertion of any sort. The evil was decreasing: education, civilization, these elevating influences would gradually and pleasantly permeate society. In the meantime, we asked, what about the perishing children? Ah, it was sad, doubtless; that they should perish was indeed regrettable. But after all, were there many imperilled? For his part one old gentleman doubted it, though doubtless, he added cheerfully, unaware of the force of his admission, “a change in the law is much required.”2
Amy went out visiting some of the Indian women who had been mentioned in Things as They Are, hoping to find results from the wave of prayer she believed the book would have generated in England and elsewhere. She reported in her Scrap letter that she found little evidence. One old lady, so kind and hospitable in giving her coconut milk and sweets, said that she had chosen caste over Christ.
People in their kindness tried to distract us from this that could not be forgotten. To be with them, hearing their talk, so clear and friendly, reading their books, looking at their pleasant things, was like being in some clean green field full of blessed flowers. But every now and then the face of the field would fall in and discover a vault below; and in the vault chains and darkness and the souls of young children. . . . The desolation of the children who had no deliverer, the wrong we could not redress, the fear, the cold deadness of forced sin, how little of this could be shown then or can be shown now.3
When she told of the child-wives, twelve or ten or eight years old, people said, “Oh, you mean betrothed! Another case of missionary exaggeration!” No, she did not mean betrothed. “We mean married.”
Katherine Mayo’s Mother India documents case after case of appalling physical destruction (“pelvis crushed out of shape,” “so completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair,” etc.) which resulted from child marriage, which, “like its background of public sentiment, is deep-rooted in the far past of an ultra-conservative and passionately religious people. Anyone curious as to the fierceness with which it would be defended by the people, both openly and covertly, and in the name of religion, against any frontal attack, will find answer in the extraordinary work and in the all-too-reticent books of Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael.”4
One evening when the full responsibility of the compound rested on Amy (the Walkers were in England on furlough), she had what amounted to a vision. The tamarind trees around the bungalow were olive trees, and under them a man knelt alone. She knew it was the Lord, praying there in the garden for the children. So the burden was His, not hers. She need not ask Him to share it with her. He was asking her to share it with Him, to search with Him for the lost lambs. “Who could have done anything but go into the garden and kneel down beside Him under the olive trees?”
Her poem, “The Fellowship of His Sufferings,”5 must have come from that evening’s experience. She is “the lover.” The masculine pronoun refers to herself.
. . . Darkly distinct, he saw a vision pass
Of One who took the cup alone, alone.
Then broke from him a moan,
A cry to God for pain, for any pain
Save this last desolation; and he crept
In penitence to his Lord’s feet again.
. . . Never an angel told, but this I know,
That he to whom that night Gethsemane
Opened its secrets, cannot help but go
Softly thereafter, as one lately shriven,
Passionately loving, as one much forgiven.
And never, never can his heart forget
That Head with hair all wet
With the red dews of Love’s extremity,
Those eyes from which fountains of love did flow,
There in the Garden of Gethsemane.
As she was praying, a pastor in the northern part of the district was traveling. He happened on a group of temple women with children, and prayed then and there that something might be done. Almost immediately he heard of a newborn baby just taken by a temple woman. He was able to rescue her. On March 1, 1904, the first temple baby, thirteen days old, was in Amma’s arms—“the little old, tired baby face, the feeble, weary cry, the little hands moving restlessly as if feeling for a mother.” She nearly died that same night, and “we hardly understood what we had undertaken.” Preena was allowed to name her. She chose one of the precious stones from the wall of the Holy City—Amethyst. The second baby, also saved by an Indian pastor, was named Sapphire. She was a lovely, laughing baby, “a whole round gift of joy.”
A girl named Lavana came, defying her parents’ pleas to return to them. “I cannot possibly come,” she said, “I am a Christian.” They tried to lure her with jewels. “I don’t want jewels. I have Jesus now.” By June the Family had grown to include seventeen children, six of whom were direct answers to the prayer of so many years—they were temple children. The women of the Band were learning that if the Lord of Glory took a towel and knelt on the floor to wash the dusty feet of His disciples (the job of the lowest slave in an Eastern household), then no work, even the relentless and often messy routine of caring for squalling babies, is demeaning. To offer it up to the Lord of Glory transforms it into a holy task. “Could it be right,” Amy had asked, “to turn from so much that might be of profit and become just nursemaids?” The answer was yes. It is not the business of the servant to decide which work is great, which is small, which important or unimportant—he is not greater than his master.
“If by doing some work which the undiscerning consider ‘not spiritual work’ I can best help others, and I inwardly rebel, thinking it is the spiritual for which I crave, when in truth it is the interesting and exciting, then I know nothing of Calvary love,”6 Amy wrote after many years of such “unspiritual” work.
Facilities for the care of these children left much to be desired. A long, low mud room served as kitchen, dining room, night and day nursery all in one. Many of the children were frail when they came and needed mother’s milk. They could find no one in the village willing to feed other people’s children. It simply wasn’t done. Later when a village woman consented to breast-feed one of Amy’s babies in order to save its life, her husband killed her by slow arsenic poisoning for having thus sinned against caste.
Christmas Eve found Amma in the village church with a sick baby in her arms, searching for a Christian mother (surely a Christian mother would be willing?) to nurse it. There was no one. What were they to do now? Who knew how to prepare a formula? How should they know what formula would suit this child or that? Amy had nowhere to turn but God. She asked for wisdom and it came. He sent another blessing that year—Mr. Walker returned, bringing with him Amy’s mother.
“An atmosphere of love and obedience pervades the compound,” Mrs. Carmichael wrote to a friend at home. “In this large family of over thirty, ranging in age from thirty-four years to a babe of nine months, I have not seen an angry look, or heard an impatient word. A set of more loving, unselfish women and girls and children could not easily be found. . . . Since we came here a month ago I can truthfully say [Amy] has scarcely had leisure even to eat. She is mother, doctor, and nurse, day and night.”
One who specially loved this Atah (baby word for grandmother) was little Indraneela, “Sapphire.” During one of the family’s feasts, the children, dressed in crimson and yellow and blue, clapped their hands and called, “Indraneela! Indraneela!” and the baby danced and clapped with them and toddled to everyone who called. She clapped her hands when she saw the flowers, clapped them again with the music.
A few weeks later an epidemic struck. Two babies died, and Indraneela, the only baby left, lay very quietly on Atah’s lap. She heard the sound of the children coming from school, and tried again to clap. Six children were ill then, and the nursing had to be divided. Amy and Arulai were with Indraneela in the early morning. “Just before dawn she called, and holding up her little hand as high as she could reach, pointed up. Then she pointed to a toy music box which we always kept beside her, and when it was given to her she turned the handle till the first notes came. She had often tried before, but never quite succeeded in turning the handle herself. Now she stopped and looked up with those joyous eyes, so unlike a baby’s eyes in steadfastness of expression: ‘Let me to my heaven go! A little harp me waits thereby . . . .’
“She held out her little hands to be kissed, and then, tired, fell asleep. In the few hours that followed we could not help noticing the other-world expression deepening in the baby’s eyes. . . . Then there was a sudden breaking of the silence, one little cry, the baby’s mother-word, ‘Amma!’ ”
An angel came for her, Amy said—gently touched her so that she slept and woke to the music of heaven. Amy took the children to the garden and showed them nasturtiums and convolvulus which were not flourishing as they should have. But one beautiful lily, the first that had ever blossomed there, had opened that very morning.
“If Jesus came to our garden,” she asked, “which flower would you give Him?”
They ran to the lily. “We would give Him this!’
Would she give Him her lily? Indraneela, Amy was sure, was the child of an ancient, royal race. There was something noble about her, something dainty and imperious in her ways. We would give Him this! We would give Him this!—the words kept repeating themselves to her mind. Would she, could she give Him this? As she was resting in her room later that afternoon, trying to gather strength for the baby’s burial, she heard Mr. Walker’s schoolboys reading aloud from the book of Exodus the description of the breastplate of the high priest, which had four rows of stones. In the second row was a sapphire. It was the word she needed. Her Sapphire was “set on His breast.” The child would be safe there.
Dear little feet, so eager to be walking
But never walked in any grieving way,
Dear little mouth, so eager to be talking
But never hurt with words it cannot say,
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.
Three months later a telegram told Amy that her Dear Old Man had died June 19. Two months after that she wrote, “It has not got to the place where I can talk about it yet.”
1. Gold Cord’ p. 29.
2. Amy Carmichael, The Continuation of a Story, p. 7.
3. Gold Cord, p. 31.
4. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 48.
5. Amy Carmichael, Toward Jerusalem.
6. Amy Carmichael, If (London: Society for the Promotion cf Christian Knowledge), p. 43.