34. The Sword Smites Sharp
Chapter 34
The Sword Smites Sharp
During the 1920s prayers for new recruits were answered, so far as concerns numbers, “exceeding abundantly.” People were reading Amy Carmichael’s books, prayer groups were being formed around the world for this unusual work, the Scrap letters, intended for an intimate circle of personal friends, became the Dohnavur Letter, no longer handwritten but typed, and even more restrained than Scraps.
It cannot be said that Dohnavur was guilty of false advertising. Never was it deliberately presented as an exciting, glamourous, or even an interesting place. While Amy’s books are filled with descriptions of the beauty of the mountains, the plains, the forests, the rivers and lakes, the little children, and the love that outsiders seemed to observe (“It is as if you were all kin,’’ said one man. “I see only love, I hear only words of love’’), there are pages and pages which deal with the humdrum, the ordinary, the implacable daily round of plain hard work. While she never meant to make her lot look like a hard one (wouldn’t that make it appear that she had a hard Master?), she did mean to be a realist wherever realism was not inimical to her purposes. She included in her descriptions the heat, the isolation, the primitive conditions; she wrote of calumny, disease, death. All these find expression throughout the writings of Amy Carmichael. It was discipleship she preached, and discipleship she practiced. Those who joined her must understand that it was discipleship, of the New Testament variety, that would be taken for granted. Wounds and scars also were taken for granted, as her poem “No Scar?’’ attests:
Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has nor wound nor scar?1
“Not a word of attraction can I write to [a prospective recruit]. It will be desperately hard work, iron would snap under the strain of it. I ask for steel, that quality which is at the back of all going on, patience which cannot be tired out, and love that loves in very deed, unto death.” Not of foreigners only was this expected. Some newly converted caste men were set to work hewing stones and digging foundations for the Forest House—in the presence of low-caste coolies. No sterner test could have been applied to prove the validity of their faith. “Grace in teaspoons would have sufficed for a preaching tour. It is honorable to preach,” wrote Amy, who had seen enough of those who followed Christianity for its prestige. Ditchdigging lent dignity to nobody. “Grace in rivers was required for this. Day by day they grew in manliness.”
Constantly Amy prayed, and asked her “prayer warriors” to pray, that those who joined them be sent by the Lord of the Harvest. No others would be able to “stem the tide, keep facing upstream,” no others would “keep on fire. And truly on fire they must be if they are to set the native church on fire, for it is wrapped round and round in wet blankets of the devil’s own weaving and soaking.” Steel, tides, fires—every vivid metaphor she could think of she employed to drive home the seriousness of the call. Stones they must be, shaped and fitted by the Master Stonemason, like the stones prepared in the quarries to fit perfectly into their places in the great temple of Solomon.
There was no psychological grid for missionaries to pass through in those days. Dohnavur asked twenty-five simple questions, among them:
• Do you truly desire to live a crucified life? (This may mean doing very humble things joyfully for His Name’s sake.)
• Does the thought of hardness draw you or repel you?
• Do you realize that we are a family, not an institution? Are you willing to do whatever helps most?
• Apart from the Bible, can you name three or four books which have been of vital help to you? Apart from books, what refreshes you most when tired?
• Have you ever learned any classical or continental language?
• Have you ever had opportunity to prove our Lord’s promise to supply temporal as well as spiritual needs?
• Can you mention any experience you have passed through in your Christian life which brought you into a new discovery of your union with the crucified, risen, and enthroned Lord?
In a statement written a few years later, Amy Carmichael put it briefly: Do not come unless you can say to your Lord and to us, The Cross is the attraction.
It might be enlightening to investigate whether the psychological screening applied to missionary candidates nowadays selects truer (more “successful”?) disciples than did Amy’s set of simple questions. Neither is a perfect sieve. Recruits wrote, were interviewed in London by the earnest and dedicated but deaf and nearsighted Mrs. Streeter, corresponded with Amy, answered the questions to her satisfaction, and eventually appeared at the Dohnavur bungalows in a bullock bandy with bells jingling.
They came, it seems, in droves, during the twenties. At least one turned up completely unannounced. But they did not all stay. The crucified life did not look quite the same to them in Dohnavur as it had looked on paper. As one famous Christian wrote when a newspaper editor asked what is the trouble with the world, “Dear Sir: I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton.” The trouble with Dohnavur was people.
The reasons for the many departures from Dohnavur were diverse. Some were asked to leave, some peremptorily dismissed. Some left of their own volition, some because of poor health. This last being a fairly respectable way for a missionary to quit the field, the reasons which fell under this heading were sometimes specious. There were personality clashes which all the prayers for oneness in Christ and efforts toward unity did not resolve.
Several women, received in all good faith “in spite of social background” (a matter taken into at least some small account) failed to find a niche. One of them, poor soul, “behaved like a kitchen maid” and was asked to depart.
When the cause was failure of the man or woman concerned, Amy’s lips were sealed. Love covered a multitude of sins. Questions raised were answered with “The full story cannot be told.” More than once a dismissal which she refused to explain to the public brought severe censure on Amy herself, and gave rise to ugly rumors that she was an autocrat who would tolerate no one who refused to obey her implicitly and without question.
The home in Millisle was a place of principles. Compromise was unthinkable. The home she established in India for her children was likewise a place of principles. She could brook no compromise there. Those who could not bring themselves to subscribe to the standard Amy believed she had received from God were, in her view, turning away from Him. She suffered for them and because of them, yet continued to believe absolutely that the lady who did the “vetting” was called by God to that task in England as surely as she herself had been called to hers. They were one in mind and spirit. Prayer was the very heart of it. They asked for the right people. God knew who they were. God answers prayer. Would He not direct the lady, who seemed to be of a rather sanguine temperament, to those she should accept? The principles were sound enough. A sovereign God, however, works through flawed human instruments to whom He has given the power of choice. Sometimes the choices are mistaken. Divine sovereignty permits those mistakes.
Probably no recruits were more promising than a family of four who arrived in 1924—the parents, both of them physicians, along with their daughter and their son, a twenty-four-year-old Cambridge graduate. It was said that if Stephen Neill was a candidate for a university prize, then no one else would compete. With a fellowship from Trinity College which gave him every prospect for a brilliant career in the academic field, he opted for missionary work—to the astonishment of at least one of his classmates, Malcolm Muggeridge. The presence of the Neills in ‘‘little Dohnavur” lent a new respectability in the eyes of some who thought of it as an eccentric backwater. There must be more than met the eye if it attracted such distinguished people as the Neills.
While one contemporary of Amy’s claimed that the Neills came with the idea of “doing a take-over,” Amy Carmichael could not but have been overjoyed that the Dohnavur Family now had two doctors and two men. She was suspicious, however, of the credibility others prized so highly (is not the wisdom of the world foolishness with God?), and, fearing a mistake, perhaps in his motives or his grasp of the true picture, had written more carefully and straightforwardly to Stephen than to any other who had offered. He was not deterred. “He seemed to love all, and feel with us about all.”
Her fears were not unfounded. Perhaps Neill had expected a more visible recognition of his exceptional gifts. One co-worker thought he had somehow hoped to become Dohnavur’s bishop, although he was not yet even ordained as an Anglican priest. “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” he said, but before long he began to see the place as a world of illusion, insulated from the outside world by the high red walls within which love never failed. He could agree that love never dies away, but that it was always victorious? No, that simply was not the case.
As for the woman responsible for the whole phenomenon, “young recruits came to South India and found a myth,” he said, a woman who had infallibility “pushed on her.” “No smallest disagreement was admitted,” yet he remembered peaceful hours spent over breakfast on Amy Carmichael’s verandah as they worked together on the editing and revision of her book Raj, Brigand Chief. He perceived her as one living in a hushed atmosphere of awe and veneration, keeping a finger on everything, fearing an alien world. The compound, completely detached from village life, was “flooded with Europeans,” who ate in a separate dining room. “Amma” had no Indian equals, feeling none to be as qualified as Europeans for leadership and responsibility. Her stock-in-trade was crises. Life in this lovesome garden spot was a perpetual ferment of crises and deliverances.
The Neill family succeeded in churning up even more turbulence. Dr. Neill, the father, “made a hit with the girls,” according to one observer, something no man within those precincts had ever presumed to do. To Amy this was a serious threat to the strict separation she felt was necessary in the midst of Hindu society. It is conceivable that this threat was exacerbated by a (perhaps unwitting) feeling of rivalry, not only with the dashing father but with the scintillating son, who far outdistanced all other struggling students by learning Tamil in six months. To make matters worse, the Neills saw ways to improve “the pattern shewn in the mount.” Stephen, who had no idea of the perils of mingling with “the outside,” introduced interscholastic sports. The two doctors suggested that the medical work ought to be entirely separate from the compound so that the villagers could get at it, and Stephen told Amma she ought to move the boys away a bit too.
Amy stuck to the pattern. It had been “shewn.” Who could gainsay it? She did not give in on either of the Neills’ points.
It was a bad mix. Within six months the senior Neills left, and before a year was up Amy was in a state of anguish over Stephen. Apparently reports were earned to her by those Neill called her “spies.” He claimed that he was never given a hearing, though this is vehemently denied by some. In Amy’s view the matter was of the gravest nature: “the spiritual fortunes of the work hung by a thread.”
“A dreadful time of distress,” says her diary. “Never such known here before. I am beginning to sink. Lord, save me.” All the years of prayer for clear guidance, for God’s sole selection of workers for Dohnavur, the pattern shewn, the letters written, the assurances given—had it all come to nothing? How the enemy would be gloating! How those who scrutinized the work for evidence of the life of the Lord Jesus would shrug!
Beside the date of May 30 in her Daily Light she wrote, “1925—most painful night of my life.” A prayer “pressed out of” that night was:
O Savior, must the sword
Smite sharp, nor spare?
Then come, O loving Lord,
Give strength to bear.
O Lord of thorns and nails
And piercing spear
The coward in me quails.
Come near, come near.
Later she called May 30 the night of decision, but no action was taken and things went on for months. In July there was “a strange and dreadful” prayer meeting, in which someone “prayed distressingly about friction.” Friction? It was a word never heard, never used, never thought about in Dohnavur, not by Amy, at any rate. If the word was unthinkable to her, to how many—perish the thought—was it not only thinkable but speakable, and in a prayer meeting at that? She could not be sure the prayer was unnecessary. In August she wrote to a close friend, “I do trust no one will ever know how difficult things are now—not even you, you dear!”
Stephen Neill was, according to one laconic colleague, “temperamentally unsuited to the situation.” Dohnavur was a long way from Cambridge. Working under Amy Carmichael was at best difficult for him (he remembered his first meeting with her as “an impression of power”). Apart from her oracular mystique, she had been influenced, he believed, by strong Plymouth Brethren nonconformism, a bitter pill for an Anglican to swallow. She made veiled reference later to this time when “English worship services became impossible because—no, I must not embark on the reasons.”
Neill was known to have given way to several violent explosions of temper during which he beat some of Amma’s boys, yet in his opinion some of the punishments customarily used in Dohnavur, which he did not name, were “rather severe.” No European or Indian worker who was there at the time seemed to know the exact nature of the problem. One suggested that his writings were perhaps not always in theological harmony with her beliefs, but it seems unlikely that Neill wrote much in Dohnavur. He categorically stated that theology had nothing to do with his dismissal, but declined to mention any other reason.
The night of November 28 was “one of the saddest nights of my life,” Amy wrote in Daily Light, next to the words, “Let not your heart be troubled.”
Biographer Frank Houghton covers in six words what happened: “Next day, the severance took place.”
“I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection. The stab is not even beginning to skin over. It’s just red raw,” Amy wrote to a friend nearly a year later.
Stephen Neill went on to become bishop of Tinnevelly, the district which included Dohnavur, but his name was hardly ever mentioned again. Years later he visited the compound. “Amma refused to see him,” said one who was there at the time. Not true, says the one who showed him round the compound. In fact Amy spoke with him kindly.
“Poor, poor S.,” she wrote to one of her few confidantes just after the visit. “It was his spoiling mother and the silly Christian public chiefly. My heart is all one ache for him. . . . This visit has been a burden on our hearts for months. . . . It has deepened our understanding of what we stand for and want to be and by God’s grace must be.”
1. Toward Jerusalem, p. 85.