26. Love Is Not a Sentiment
Chapter 26
Love Is Not a Sentiment
Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes,” wrote Traherne, “to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go.”
Holy Children. That describes what Amy Carmichael as mother desired from the very beginning of the children’s work. Many of those children are old women now, living quietly in the red brick bungalows of Dohnavur after years of self-giving. “Be the first,” their Amma had told them, “wherever there is a sacrifice to be made, a self-denial to be practiced, or an impetus to be given.” It was no empty pedantry. Her own life made the truth visible to her children. The word became flesh and lived with them.
“When we were very small we were on the wings of her love,” said one, but that love had little of sentimentality in it. Nearly all her children speak of her love, but many mention their fear of her as well. She was strict. “No work that is set on following the Crucified escapes the Cross,” she wrote in Kohila, the story of the shaping of an Indian nurse.1 “It would not wish to do so. Sooner or later, if those who must give account to God do not weaken on some point of loyalty to Truth, they will find themselves bearing the Reproach of Christ.” Always in her consciousness was the solemn charge that was hers as one accountable to God for these little ones. It were better that a millstone be hung round her neck than for her to cause one of them to stumble.
Amy with Lullitha, one of her “Lotus Buds.”
The Book of Proverbs speaks of the need of the rod in the training of children. The parent who does not use it hates the child. Love, therefore, requires self-discipline, self-denial, and courage. It took all of those for Amy to use a cane or a leather strap on a child’s wrists. Like her own mother, she expected the child to hold out her arm without flinching. Often the spanking was followed by a kiss and a piece of candy. Amy took the responsibility of administering these punishments herself rather than asking it of the accals (older sisters) or sitties (mother’s younger sisters, the name used for European workers). She, after all, was the mother. If a sittie or accal felt that a caning was called for, she would send the child to Amma with a note. Those notes, it is reported, did not always reach their destination. At least one child arrived with a bright smile and the candid admission that sittie had sent her with a note. But where was the note? “I swallowed it!” was the answer.
Other punishments were more imaginative. A child who lied might have quinine put on her tongue or a sign that said LIE hung round her neck for half a day. One little girl who lied habitually had her mouth inked and was kept out of school for a day or so. After the second or third time she was taken to Amma’s room. “I was shaking. She sent me to the bathroom for the strap, took me on her lap in front of a mirror, and read to me from Isaiah 53—‘He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ Then she beat her own arm instead of mine and explained salvation to me. Without understanding I said ‘Yes, Amma,’ but I had not changed a whit. When I was thirty-three I was rude to one of the workers and was sent to my room without food to think. When I came out the worker was there. I kissed his hand, he kissed my forehead. That was heaven to me.”
When two little girls quarreled, Amy tied their pigtails together so that they might be obliged to walk in harmony. A child of seven who could not stop biting her nails went to Amy with flowers one day. “Darling, I want to talk to you,” she said, and took the child’s hands. “You have beautiful fingers. What have you been doing to them? Aren’t these the Lord’s hands?” The child was terrified. “Don’t be afraid,” said Amy, and kissed the hands. “Promise me and the Lord Jesus you will stop. Then come and see me again next week.” It worked. The child kept her promise.
“I am reminded of how she suffered for her dear children in pointing out Nature as the Second Bible,” wrote one of them. “I remember her rushing out of her house when she heard that someone was killing a beetle with a stone. She got hold of my tiny hand and hit me with the same stone, stating that the beetle had all freedom to live unless it came inside the house. I was only ten then, so I remember crying, but the lesson learnt was forever to be kind to any creature.”
Amy’s partiality to certain children could not be disguised. Of a five-year-old who died she wrote, “Lulla was perhaps the only child we had who would quite have satisfied the most critical taste. There was a delicacy of feature and c reaminess of coloring which is rare in southern India, and her sweetness of disposition combined with a bright intelligence added something which made her peculiarly precious to us all.” The most critical taste, of course, meant the most critical European taste. Indians with Aryan blood, of fair skin and silky hair, were, naturally enough, most appealing to the European in Amy, as indeed to the upper-caste Indian. The black Dravidians of the south find less place in the photographs she included in her books, though this may have been the photographer’s choice.
“Because I was dark I was always put at the back,” said one. She loved the fair ones. I was caned. Tara, who was fair, was only put in the corner. When years later I asked Amma why, her answer was, ‘You needed the cane. Tara needed the corner.’” To another who taxed her with favoritism she said, “Oh darling—I did not mean it!” and it was forgotten.
“Chellalu and Seela were clever and mischievous,” said another of the older women. “Amma liked them for that. But I was a crybaby. I was dull and did not like lessons. I liked hard work. Even now I like it. 1 had no troubles with Amma. I always did things properly. But she did not love me much. She did not want a sulky child in front of guests. When I was ten years old I went to work in the nursery as a tungachie, a younger sister. Amma did get angry if she found a baby wet. ‘But I have thirteen babies under eighteen months to care for!’ I said. Oh, she was a dear, loving person.”
Amy admitted that they were sometimes so shorthanded that the children who became “little helping nurses” were pressed into service before they were really old enough. But they learned “all manner of useful things,” their devotion to the babies was remarkably constant, considering their immaturity, and they were “trained to look upon it as the most honorable as well as the happiest work.”
When a child came to Dohnavur the date was recorded and celebrated yearly as her Coming Day, since exact birth dates were hard to determine. On that day, in the years before the size of the Family made it impossible, the child was allowed to go early in the morning to Amy’s room and have chota with her in bed. Each child received a tiny piece of scented soap and a card as Coming Day presents, and then there was the wonderful gift cupboard from which she could select something else. Amy would talk to her of what she had been saved from—“a wicked, wicked place”—and of the story of how she came to Dohnavur. One baby, Piratha, arrived while a group were actually on their knees in Amy’s room, praying for the salvation of babies.
Once Amy took a girl to the temple in order to show her what she had been saved from. The lesson was lost on the child. She saw how happy the temple girls were, what beautiful jewels they wore. But years later a temple woman who came as a patient to the Dohnavur hospital described to her the real life. “I was a rebel before,” she said, “but I was grateful after that.”
Tarahai remembers the earnestness with which Amy reminded them, year after year, of the meaning of the name she had given them. “Amma took hold of my hand and said, ‘I gave you your name Star that you might be a shining star for the Lord Jesus.’” Karima meant “Singing Bird,” Dayala “Grace.”
As the children grew up she spoke of her hopes for them. Would they be willing to do what others had done for them—care for babies, wash bottles and diapers, lay down their lives in the nurseries? “I pray that you will be a warrior, and look after children,” she said to Dayala. Amy was quick to see other potentialities. “She was a prophet” was the testimony of several. She encouraged some to be hospital nurses, teachers, bookkeepers, and evangelists. If, as often happened, a girl’s ambitions were quite other than what Amy envisioned for her, the girl would be reminded of the “easy yoke” Christ offers, “but if we make our own yoke we shall be miserable.”
“Amma wanted me to nurse babies,” said one whose name meant Well-Beloved. “I hated that. It was my will to teach. She gave me the Bible verse, ‘Take this child and nurse it for me.’ ” A fourteen-year-old tungachie who seemed a hopeless case and could not control the children was given a whole day alone in a sittie’s room to “listen to God.” If He would give His presence and help, she decided, she would do anything, like it or not. By the second year she had not only learned how to manage her charges well but had found that the doing of humble work for Christ’s sake transformed it into what she now calls “heavenly joy.” Shanthie, who worked as a pharmacist for forty years, found that her greatest desires had been fulfilled. “Duty was my pleasure,” she said.
Motherwork was relentless at Dohnavur as it is anywhere, and in order to oversee the work in schoolrooms, nurseries, milk kitchens, storerooms, weaving and sewing rooms, Amy whizzed from one to the other on a large tricycle. The picture must have been a startling one to a visitor who happened by—this dumpy little dynamo, careening around corners so enthusiastically that more than once she ended up in the dust. Sometimes she would collect a “set” of girls who ran after the tricycle to see a bird in the garden or to go to her room for an ad hoc prayer meeting. There were moonlight picnics, bandy rides, games when she would play bear. She was an arresting sight on horseback, trotting along the lanes, riding sidesaddle in her creamy pale saris, sometimes inviting a child up onto the horse’s back to share the fun.
Although the children’s firsthand knowledge was almost solely limited to the compound, their imaginations ranged far beyond its red brick walls. Early one morning Amy roused a houseful of girls to show them the stars for which, six months before, they had named their dolls: Andromeda, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse. When she took them to see the beginnings of a new nursery for which they had prayed, they named the stones for the mountains of Africa.
Loyal love was what Amy called the taproot of the tree that became the Dohnavur Fellowship. She never got away from the memory of that gray day by the gray sea in Shimonoseki, Japan, when a missionary spoke casually of the lack of love among missionaries. “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death” “See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.” These were the watchwords. Amy resolutely refused to settle for the usual. She would believe God to see a company of His servants knit together in loyal love.
“Never about, always to,” was one of the rules. They were not to speak about another person but face to face. Trust was established on this ground.
Another rule: “It must be Come, never Go. We cannot ask another to do what we have never done or are not willing to do. That is why we ask for our fellowship only those who come ‘without a but, an if, or a limit.’” It was a steep hill they were asking the Family to climb. The leaders must climb it first.
1. Amy Carmichael, Kohila, p. vii.