39. No Milk Biscuits
Chapter 39
No Milk Biscuits
Bring to India a strong sense of humor and no sense of smell” was Amy’s advice to an accepted candidate, along with warnings of the temptations shipboard offered. She had known many prospective missionaries who were “wrecked on the first voyage and arrived quite useless so far as the kind of thing I look for is concerned.” She usually sent instructions for spending the time—exercise (“the time-honored way of walking hard”), prayer, witnessing, reading. She included passages of Scripture, especially the first three chapters of Ephesians, and book lists, but “keep off novels, even good ones.”
The apostle Paul described himself as “the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things.” The latter was a phrase Amy liked. “We want the offscouring sort.” It fit her idea of the scrap-heap that was Dohnavur. But she made it clear that she did not mean just any sort of offscouring or scrap. “We must have gentlefolk for reasons you will understand later. We want educated, thoughtful minds . . . refinement, character, an inborn loyalty.”
What she did not want was biscuits. “I don’t pray for milk biscuits for the DF, all cut to a pattern and stamped with a single decorous pretty stamp. So many places, to judge by the results, seem to be great biscuit manufacturers and they turn out tidy boxes of biscuits. I pray for soldiers, not biscuits!”
A new arrival might at first see only flowers and babies and bright faces, “and you will feel, I hope, a general sweetness and happiness. . . . Under the sweetness there is a real Cross.”
We follow a stripped and crucified Savior. Those words go very deep. They touch everything—motives, purposes, decisions, everything. Let them be with you as you prepare your spirit for the new life.
Dear, you are coming to a battlefield. You cannot spend too much time with Him alone. The keys of the powers of the world to come are not turned by careless fingers. So few are willing to pay the price of the knowledge of God. They play through life, even Christian life, even missionary life.
Here I have stopped. Am I asking far too much? Does it sound too stern, too earnest? I want to be sure you understand. The last group came out rather quickly, and I had not time to make all this plain.
I need not say anything about what people call “the other side”—the side of life that is full of joy and fun. We have any amount of that and I don’t call it the other side at all. It’s just part of the whole.
When a young woman doctor arrived in Dohnavur for the first time, she was taken to the bungalow to meet Amma in her room. “There was a lightness, brightness, and joy about her. She was loving, lovely, and warm. Not much over five feet, I suspect, with gray hair, wearing a blue sari. She had a twinkle, a gentle sense of humor.”
In the first few minutes of greeting another new one Amma nailed her with the question, “Do you know your Bible well?” No, was the answer, “and I thought to myself, ‘That’s it. Next ship back.’ But I was allowed to stay.”
Amma was an actress. She loved to imitate a Tamil bus conductor. One young missionary remembers her coming into a room bent over a stick, the end of her sari over her head like a shawl, mimicking in a conversation with one of the children the dialect of uneducated villagers.
It was a stimulating atmosphere Amy Carmichael created. “She had tremendous oomph. An English accent, yes, but not one of those plummy public school accents. She could talk on any subject to anyone. You could throw in any question at the supper table. Amma read like lightning,” read widely, and was able to “take the wheat and leave the chaff” of a book. She read George Herbert, George MacDonald, John Donne, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson. Her bookshelves held Trevelyan, Ruskin, a Kempis, Keble, Savonarola, Kingsley, Florence Nightingale, and Saint Augustine. She would bring things to the table to read. “Listen to this!” she would say.
When a newcomer needed help with a Tamil letter or short word, she would spill a little salt on the plain teak table and write with her finger. “Eating came last in her thinking at such times, and there would be a quiet word from someone, ‘Amma dear, do eat a little chicken!’” She encouraged them with tales of her own struggles in Tamil study when the Lord reminded her that He had once made an ass speak.
In the early days all workers, Indian and foreign, ate together. Then they separated. Accals and anandas ate according to Indian custom, from brass vessels and banana leaves, using their fingers, as they sat on the tiles in the bungalows with their children. The food was carried to them from central kitchens. The missionaries had tables and chairs, flowers and candles, crockery and flatware, and were served by people hired from the village. Of course the dichotomy was puzzling to outsiders, and among the insiders there were many wrestlings over this decision. One reason for it was obvious—the family grew. There was no room large enough for everybody. That was a minor reason. Amy explained the major one, the health of the foreigners, in her paper, Roots:
“It seemed wiser to do what would keep us well than to do as we wanted to do. After all, we are not here to please ourselves but to serve India in whatever way our Lord directs.” Foreigners did not seem able (though most were certainly willing) to subsist on curry and rice. They needed their tea and bread and butter. On feast days all ate outdoors together, and often the foreigners were invited to the cottages for a meal.
Nobody in Dohnavur ate beef. The reason was simple: “If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.”1 If anyone had objected that this passage refers not to such as Hindus and Muslims but to weak Christians, Amy would have replied with Romans 14:15, “Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died.” That covered everyone. The force of the Brahman taboo against beef eating can scarcely be overstated. At Dohnavur they felt they could eat lamb, goat, and chicken without offending, so the curries were not strictly vegetarian.
Why the hired servants? When Indian members of the family served the missionary table, they sometimes found that guests treated them as servants, which Amma would not tolerate. She tried to treat all members of the Family as equals. “She made us work very hard,” an Old Girl said, “We were all servants. Amma was a servant too, but we treated her as children treat their mother.”
“Never eat anything you’ve seen a fly on” was supposed to be one of Amma’s rules for new recruits, but they soon saw the impossibility of obeying that one and were exonerated when they found that “Amma didn’t go by that in the least herself!”
Amy Carmichael had no compunction about throwing a new arrival in at the deep end. May Powell told of going to evangelize a village with Amma, expecting to stay quietly in the background and watch the others in action. Amma sat her down on a verandah with a group of women, handed her the Wordless Book, and told her to give a testimony. May had never given a lesson in English, let alone Tamil.
Many so-called “faith” missions require members to raise their individual support. Amy wrote to a candidate for the DF: “For those who have no means we make provision as He enables us. But there never can be any promise even of that. Each one must lay hold on the promises, on God, rather, the Faithful One. . . . I like those who have a private income to keep it and use it (if it is over and above their own needs) as led, from time to time, rather than to join the capital to a common fund. I do this myself (the D.O.M. had provided Amy’s full support) and I think it is the better way. No one draws anything from any society.” That particular candidate had an inheritance which she was willing to turn over to the Fellowship. Amy advised her to keep the principal “to use for Him year by year.” Unhappily, Amy’s policy was not to the liking of all, and more than once foreign DFs probed the private financial status of certain Indian members, pressing them to donate to the Family. When they acceded, a glossy report was carried to Amma of the “willing offering” made. She rejoiced that one more disciple had learned the lesson of giving all. The thought that the gift might not be entirely voluntary never crossed her mind.
Once a year a notice was sent around giving food costs in rupees per month, and those who had private means were expected to pay their share.
Allowances were not given to the children during Amy’s lifetime. Some of them grew up without ever having handled money. Pin money was given automatically to workers when God provided it. When one man returned his allowance, Amma said, “Make sure it is not your pride which makes you refuse. God is not responsible for what He has not commissioned,” meaning, one would assume, that it would not do for him to expect God to supply his needs miraculously.
There was one very great luxury for DFs. “Above all luxuries a bathroom to yourself is to my mind the greatest,” was Amy’s comment. She saw to it that each missionary had her own small room with a large storage jar for water, a basin and dipper. A declivity in the floor with a drain provided a place to stand to pour water over oneself. There were both chamber pots and outhouses, the latter with a footboard on each side of a hole in the ground. Whatever served as latrine was given a polite name, “The Place.”
A life of poverty was the ideal Amy had longed for. “I wanted to have no possessions except what I could carry in a big handkerchief!” Her comrades in the Starry Cluster had understood the desire, giving up their jewelry and their money, living the simplest life as itinerants. But it was a different life that was required now because there was a family. Amy wanted to have things to give them—books and paintings, music and microscopes, the things that had made her own childhood so rich. So, like everything else that was hers, she laid down the desire to have nothing and took up family life and all that family life meant. She was a mother. She lived for her children.
The time came when there was a good deal of pressure to change the Pattern in the matter of payment for work done. While Amy acknowledged that it was indeed much easier to have everything settled by contract, such a system was wholly out of harmony with the principle of family life. The Dohnavur Fellowship was patterned after the traditional Indian family, which had nothing to do with wages or salaries. “There is much done every day in Dohnavur that no caste person would do for pay, however much was offered,” wrote Amy, who mentioned to one of her trainees that she had no doubt cut thousands of small toe-and fingernails—“I who said I would never do any work but ‘preach the gospel.’ It takes some of us years to learn what preaching the gospel means.”
The Pattern was a costly way of doing things. She never disguised the fact. “We ask far more than the usual of our boys and girls, and this way of working asks far more of us”
1. 1 Corinthians 8:13.