38. The Road Less Traveled
Chapter 38
The Road Less Traveled
Great-grandmothers are said to have pursed their lips a century ago at the sight of an exposed table leg. Queen Victoria once remarked to a maid-of-honor that when she came to the throne young ladies did not have legs. They still hadn’t, so far as Amy Carmichael was concerned. Amy was offended by the English word leg but not by the Tamil word kaal, so even the doctors found themselves inserting kaal into an English sentence when it was necessary to refer to the unspeakable limb.
Amy was appalled at the idea of missionaries playing tennis, and it seems that at one time games for the older Dohnavur girls were absolutely forbidden. Admittedly a sari makes less than satisfactory sportswear, but the possibility that an ankle might be glimpsed was probably the primary reason for the prohibition. While nothing in Indian culture forbade the showing of an ankle, Amy’s idea of a lady’s modesty did. The custom has been conscientiously perpetuated as the Dohnavur women walk around the compound. Even in the rain it is rare to see the hem of a sari lifted.
Games have been part of life in Dohnavur for many years now. Older girls play rounders, netball, and a species of hockey. All swim and dive. Those so inclined climb trees. With Amma’s approval they began country dancing, “most energetically.” In all of these activities plenty of ankle is revealed.
Amy usually wore beautiful voile saris—creamy yellow, white, lavender—with blouses of coordinating colors. While Indian widows and the poorest women wore only the sari without a blouse, the women of the Dohnavur Family wore not only blouses (with a prescribed sleeve length) with their saris, but underneath them tight breast-binders and petticoats. Amma would have nothing loose and transparent on her girls. When four visitors came dressed in Western style in the mid-twenties—“short-frocked Paganism”—Godfrey and Alec refused to allow them into the boys’ compound. Amma borrowed some clothes, dressed them up decently, and prepared herself for a “whole new crop of stories” to be told about what a strange place Dohnavur was.
Amy earnestly tried to eliminate anything which might stir up sexual desire. While village boys wore only shorts, Dohnavur boys wore shorts and shirts, as Amma believed it helped toward purity. The men of the Family wore veshtis, the standard long Indian skirt which could be tucked up for greater mobility, and shirts of Indian design, collarless because of the heat. Amy, of course, found a Scripture verse to corroborate the shirt style: “There shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst thereof: it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of it.”1 Colors were always significant to Amy—blue for love, purple for service, so the doctors were decked out (“can you imagine it!” one of them said) in violet veshtis with mauve tops. Dohnavur people could hardly be anonymous in a crowd. This, Amy felt, was not by any means a disadvantage.
As we have seen, the program for the Family had nothing approaching sex education except a few discreet references to the birds and the bees. If the many dogs in the compound ever engaged in any instructive performances, the lesson was apparently lost on most of the girls. The boys were initiated by having access to the cattle farm.
When a girl reached puberty, she was given a supply of blue and white cloths, but no explanation was offered as to exactly what the process was all about. Indeed, the accals themselves who mothered them had no idea. It was simply something women put up with. Although sex plays a central part in the life of Indian villagers and in their religion (the villages are full of phallic symbols), a girl in a strict Indian home might know no more than a Dohnavur girl. One who was married at the age of twelve later asked her mother why she had not prepared her. “It is the husband’s duty to teach his wife” was the answer.
And all these babies who appeared from time to time? Where, exactly, did they come from? “We thought the Lord laid them in the mother’s bed,” one of the “Old Girls” told me. Their ignorance is not quite so incredible as it may sound, since Dohnavur women seldom went out where they might have seen a pregnant woman.
It was not until the hospital was built and the accals began to care for patients that they were initiated into the astonishing truth. Since it was not a matter to be discussed among themselves, many bizarre distortions were believed. When one of the accals married an annachie, she was so poorly prepared for what he expected that she felt she was sinning grievously. It was not until the 1940s that sex education was introduced, and that only because younger missionaries insisted on it and were willing to teach it. Someone sent a book for children about how babies are made. Amy gave permission to one of the Indian women to show it to another, if her sittie consented.
“I shall never forget the first time I saw the pictures of a little baby in the [Tamil word for cradle] God makes for it—the first cradle, I mean,” wrote Amy. “It helps one to understand what the words mean, ‘He humbled Himself.’ ”
As late as 1946, according to one of the doctors, the ignorance was extraordinary. She spoke to Amma about it, suggesting that even the married couples led a monastic life. She listened, admitted failure, and promised to try to make amends.
There were some strange separations. Not only did Amy Carmichael condone the separation of husband and wife, she was at least partly responsible for arranging it when she felt the work required it. She moved one Indian couple, who had been with her in the work for years, away from their own children to Muppanthal, the place where the retarded were cared for. There was no adequate housing for them, and the wife finally returned to Dohnavur while the husband went off to live in the forest with a ranger. They were never all together as a family again. A Syrian Christian man lived and worked in Dohnavur, visiting his wife, who lived in Kerala, only once a year. One couple who left Hinduism to join them was kept separate for a time. When allowed to be together again, they produced more children than Arnma thought fitting. Contraceptives were unknown to her, but why not practice continence? Long walks, the husband found, did not always “cool him off.” When one of the sitties married, she was separated not from her husband but from the girls she had been caring for—marriage was “too exciting” for them. Amy preferred that they not hear things which might arouse desire.
Marriages within the Family, Indian or European, were few and far between. The Europeans, of course, had come to India forsaking all, which Amma took for granted in nearly all cases included the desire for marriage. As for the Indians, she had difficulty believing that her boys were good enough for her girls. It was often said that the men’s work was spiritually at a lower level than the women’s. “Men always are,” said an English doctor who worked there, “but the corollary was not drawn!”
An Indian who had come to Dohnavur as an adolescent was particularly close to Amma. She used to ask him his innermost thoughts. “Have you any girls in mind, my dear boy?” she said one day.
“Well, maybe so-and-so.”
“Oh no, she doesn’t fit into your life.”
He accepted her judgment. Later he chose another who had Amy’s approval, but the girl rejected his proposal.
“Wait until she agrees,” was Amy’s advice. People in Dohnavur usually agreed. He waited six months, during which he says no pressure was applied. When Amy asked again on his behalf, the girl consented.
A sittie in her early twenties longed to be married but did not dare to mention her feelings. Surely Amma had no such temptations, no idea of the torture of desire others experienced—how could one broach such a subject to her?
“Oh, but she would have understood,” said another, “although one would have hesitated to speak of it.” Why? “Well, because she was so . . . No, if a person felt it right to be married Amma would have accepted that.”
A young Englishman went to Dohnavur, leaving his fiancée, who had also been accepted, to follow him to India later. Health and family difficulties delayed her arrival for years. During this time Amma wrote to her as though she were the most beloved of daughters, “ownest own,” as she often called her, though of course they had not met. Never did a mother pour out tenderer sympathy and deeper understanding on a daughter than Amma poured on this girl on the other side of the world. “The Lord, who is your Dearest of all, can satisfy. He can, He will; but He understands, and I do, those fierce aches for J. I am quite sure that He has you both in His most tender hands, so I am not anxious.”
It would be unfair to attribute Amy Carmichael’s attitude toward sex and marriage to mere Victorianism or mere ignorance. That she was a Victorian is not open to question. Proof of the degree of her ignorance does not exist. It is clear that she took the “road less traveled by”—in this matter as in many others. And “that has made all the difference.”
People sometimes insisted that Englishmen might remain single but Indians could not. This Amy vehemently denied. Paul, she pointed out, was not a Western man. On his authority she defended her reasoning:
In our spiritual position towards our Lord and in His enabling power towards us, there is no difference (between East and West). See Galatians 3:28. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
So it follows that if for Christ’s sake and for the sake of souls for whom He died any one of us, man or woman, gives up what he or she would naturally desire, a home of our own, the resources of His power flow equally to each. To say there is a difference is to say His inspired word is not true, and that is a serious position to take.
This comes close home to us here. We know that unless many Carunias (the family surname given to all Dohnavur girls) are free to give themselves to the work of caring for the children, those children must go to destruction. This means that it is impossible to find wives from the best of the Carunias, for all Anandas (the Dohnavur Indian men). So we believe that to some Anandas love enough will be given to do without that which they would naturally desire. . . .
But is not such a life contrary to nature? Yes it is. But look at the plane. It is contrary to nature for tons of metal to rise above the earth and soar like a bird. What makes it possible? The presence of a Power within which enables it to fly “by its speed and pressure against the air.” So with us. “It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”2
Once, in an hour of need, these words helped me:
Across the will of nature
Leads on the path of God;
Not where the flesh delighteth
The feet of Jesus trod.
Do I regret now that for your sake I chose to do without that which nature desires, what was pressed upon me, so that I might serve “without distraction” as Paul puts it? No, indeed I do not. “You will never regret it,” an old missionary said to our Sisters of the Common Life. And to those who by God’s grace are, and to those who will be Brothers of the Common Life I say the same. You will go through hard days, but you will never regret it. You will never regret it.
1. Exodus 28:32.
2. Philippians 2:13.