24. Strife of Tongues
Chapter 24
Strife of Tongues
Early in 1907 seven Dohnavur girls were baptized in one of the “shallow sheets of water that make our countryside so beautiful after rain. . . . Behind the calm, bright water, more present in a sense than even the hills whose shore that water washed, we saw the striped walls of the temples. There are joys that are unearthly in their power and in their sweetness.”
Amy had learned to expect attack from the enemy of souls whenever an Indian took an uncompromising stand as a Christian. As the Assyrian king Sennacherib swept down upon Israel just after a time of feasting and gladness, so the enemy struck the little company of Dohnavur. This time it was a triple attack. Amy herself, thoroughly exhausted to the point of breakdown, was ordered home. Of course she disobeyed the order. Home? India was home. To leave it was not an option. But she did go to Ooty where climate and civilized comforts provided respite. While she was gone, a particularly virile kind of dysentery swept the nursery in Neyoor. One baby with dysentery is a full-time job for a mother. Ponnammal, with sixteen babies ill at once, wrote to Amma, “All is windy about us now, but the wind will not last always. The waves beat into our boat; but when the Lord says, Peace, be still, they will lie down. Let all your prayer for us be that we may rest in the will of God while the wind lasts.” Ten of the babies died. Sometimes a grave had to be dug to hold two of them. “My little heart’s joy, my own little jewel-of-the-eye has gone. But Jesus stays with me,” wrote Ponnammal.
News of the worst of the three attacks came in a letter from Walker, who was holding the fort at Dohnavur. The enemy had triumphed this time. What Amy called “a great wind from the wilderness” blew on a girl named Jeyanie, one of the convert workers, so that she was under serious suspicion of wrongdoing. It is not named, but in Amy’s eyes was “worse than illness and death,” and Jeyanie was sent away. Then another was involved in “a coil of trouble” which ultimately rendered her useless.
Scenery near the compound.
Ill and out of reach, Amy was assailed by some of the same enemy’s fiery darts in the form of questions. The dysentery had spread rapidly because of overcrowding. There was only one Ponnammal, so to open a second nursery was impossible. Should they have refused the babies and sent them back to the temples? Unthinkable. Should they have waived the matter of gold, silver, and precious stones and settled for whatever help they could get? “But a constraint had been laid upon us. We could not have done that,”1 said Amy, and Ponnammal wrote, “Let us work until we drop, but let us never lower the standard.”
At this time someone sent Père Didon’s Spiritual Letters, a book which was not mere paper and ink to Amy “but force—wind and fire and dew.”
“The roads are rugged,” he wrote, “the precipices are steep; there may be a feeling of dizziness on the heights, gusts of wind, peals of thunder, nights of awful gloom—fear them not. There are also the joys of the sunlight, flowers such as are not in the plain, the purest of air, restful nooks; and the stars smile thence like the eyes of God.”
Still the babies came, each one given in some way to Dohnavur when she might have been given to a very different kind of life. One brought by train from Bangalore was spotted by someone connected with a temple who made an offer. Another was found by a Bible woman who saw the mother standing on a street waiting for an offer. The “precipices” were indeed steep, and Amy felt all the more keenly the need for a comrade, one “who will be utterly other-worldly, utterly single-hearted, utterly consumed. Don’t think I am that myself! I fall far short of my own standard. But that is what I want to be, and that is what we must be if we are to stand the strain and conquer.”2
Occasionally other missions sent candidates to help Amy. Usually they had to be returned. They were accustomed to walking on the beaten track. The “little pile of red sand” which was Dohnavur was “off track” in more ways than geographical, and the standard insisted on was impossibly high. Amy began to pray that every obstacle might be placed in the way of candidates—any silly story about her which might put them off, every variety of test, all possible dissuasions, in order that those who could be kept back should be kept back. Not one person did she want who was not meant for them.
Two Indian teachers came who seemed to be the answer to prayer. Both foundered on the rock of truth and had to be sent back. “If our children were to grow up truthful they must be taught by those who had a regard for truth; and not just a casual regard, a delicate regard. On this point we were adamant.”3
And so the parting of the ways began. Amy Carmichael was marching to a different drummer. There was no getting around that fact. She called herself “the least of His messengers,” yet it was to her, as to God’s anointed prophet Moses, that “the pattern in the mount” was shown. She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the “chosen people.” She had had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be.
Was love the Gold Cord of life in other missions? An older missionary once said to Amy, “But missionaries always do fall out with one another, and then make it up.”
“We have never lived like that,” Amy replied. “We could not bear to live for one minute out of love with one another,” an answer which she supposed “sounded simply silly to the one who knew so much better than I did about missionary life.”
Did not other missions sometimes hire evangelists? Were there not nominal Christians participating in mission work (not to use them was deemed “impractical”)? Did they understand the motives which led Amy to eschew jewelry, Western dress, and the segregation of Indian and European? Most burning of all questions: was it the Cross that attracted them? Amy did not articulate such questions to them or, so far as one can tell, to anyone. But the questions were unavoidable. She avoided what could be avoided: condemnation—to their own Master they stood or fell, and she left them with Him. She earnestly tried to avoid what can never in honesty be avoided: the exercise of the critical faculty, in other words, judgment. “We seem to be judging when in truth we are only seeking humbly to obey,” she said.
There arose during the early years of the Dohnavur work a fairly strong “Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India” movement among missionaries and Indian Christians. She was a thorn in their sides. Why should she stubbornly refuse to accept the heretofore acceptable—nominal Christianity, for example, or the hiring of workers who hadn’t the “single eye” for God’s glory? Why must she persist in doing the unacceptable—wearing saris, doing work which was beneath her, refusing to pay salaries? The question asked years before by a Japanese, Can you show us the life of your Lord Jesus? was asked again by an Indian. Amy had no other purpose. This was the task assigned: to make the truth visible. When it came to a choice between the good will of the missionaries of South India (and Christians elsewhere) and obedience, there could be no hesitation. She would resolutely follow the Master who knew all about misunderstanding and opprobrium. Even as a little child Amy had known she was set apart. Other children might suck peppermints in church. She was forbidden. Were peppermints wicked? No. There were rules for behavior in the Carmichael family that other families knew nothing about. Never mind the others. “Is that your business, Peter?” said Jesus. “You must follow me.”
Writing years later about the principles on which the Dohnavur Fellowship was founded, she said:
It matters that we should be true to one another, be loyal to what is a family—only a little family in the great Household, but still a family, with family love alive in it and acting as a living bond. To those of us who have lived this life for years it is inconceivable that one to whom this loyalty means nothing should wish to be one of us. It is not at all that we think that ours is the only way of living, but we are sure that it is the way meant for us.
We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray—really pray, I mean—with one against whom you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.4
Theirs not the only way of living? Yet, in the last analysis, was there any other? “It cannot be done.” The attempt to live strictly in obedience to the Word of God taught Amy and her co-workers the meaning of Jesus’ stern words, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” She expressed something of this lesson, stern though it was, with gentle irony and humor in her poem, “The Calm Community of the Criticized.”
If, though all unawares, and not of ill intent,
Thou steppest one inch outside the beaten track;
If thou in deed or word or preference
Depart from the Accustomed, or ransack
The unexplored, bright treasure-mines of life
And drawing forth their jewels make the House
Religious, as men call it, a glad place—
O then hide, hide thy face.
Or make quick pretence
Of suitable penitence,
For drum and fife
Are out against thee: perish thy mad nous
Or what it was that set thee grubbing where
A decent missionary never should be found.
They’ll chase thee off the ground,
They’ll harry thee,
Proclaim thee singular,
The while the truly sane and sober tar
Thy broken reputation for good sense.
At first, unconscious thou that things are thus—
Being innocent of all intentional wrong—
Thou wilt not know the fervent, general fuss
Pertains to thee at all; but gradually
It breaks on thee that various eyes are bent
Upon thy course, the lightness of thy gains
To scrutinize; and thou wilt see ere long
That certain hands hold firm a piece of chalk
To write thee up upon the wall. Advised
Be thou then, O my friend, in time;
Ponder the manner of thy careful walk;
See that thy very thoughts are close emmewed;
Tune all thy bells to play the usual chime,
Or brace thy spirit to be flayed alive
For its own good. The which if thou survive,
Thou’rt labeled one of that community
Who loving much can suffer woefully,
And yet mix laughter with their foolish pains,
And go on unsubdued—
The Calm Community of the Criticized.5
Rumors flew about this extraordinary woman, who at first had no idea that the “fervent, general fuss” pertained to her at all. Once an Anglican canon asked her to speak at a drawing-room meeting in Madras. The last thing Amy sought was the limelight. It had nothing to do with what she called “K.B.,” King’s Business, and it might hinder the work for the children. Furthermore—was she to appear before these Britishers in her sari? Courtesy to her host, however, won the day, and she stood up before the crowd in the bungalow. “The atmosphere was in the main frigid,” said one who was there.
Her opening sentence confirmed one of the rumors. “I had a dream last night.” She was reputed to be a dreamer of dreams.
“I thought I had come to this gathering, and an aged child of God with many years’ service behind him was asked to pray. ‘O Lord,’ he said, ‘here we are gathered together for yet another meeting, and Thou knowest how tired we are of meetings. Help us to get through this one.’ ”
The humor melted some of the ice on that occasion and her listeners allowed themselves to laugh. Perhaps the little sari-clad dark-haired dynamo was not quite so stuffy as they had imagined.
But criticism continued. Someone suggested that her efforts to save temple children were nothing more than a stunt, meant to draw attention to herself. The temple system was centuries old—what did she think she could do about it? Preposterous allegations found ready acceptance: She was a dictator, she opposed marriage, her Indian girls worshipped her.
No wonder she wrote,
O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,
My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill,
Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still.
Back let them fall from me, my clamorous foes,
Confusions multiplied;
From crowding things of sense I flee, and in Thee hide.
Until this tyranny be overpast,
Thy hand will hold me fast;
What though the tumult of the storm increase,
Grant to Thy servant strength, O Lord, and bless with peace.6
1. Gold Cord, p. 58.
2. Scraps No. 2, 1907.
3. Gold Cord, p. 66.
4. Amy Carmichael, Roots, p. 55.
5. Amy Carmichael, Made in the Pans (London: Oliphants), p. 37.
6. Toward Jerusalem, p. 2.