42. The Servant as Writer
Chapter 42
The Servant as Writer
Though the woman in the bed had no choice but to be served, “servant of all” was still her watchword. One kind of service still open to Amy, when pain did not make it impossible, was writing. As we have seen, she had been writing all her life, almost compulsively. An experience was not complete until she had given expression to it on paper. Sometime before the accident friends had asked her to write the story of the Dohnavur Fellowship and how it began—“just what is hardest to tell,” she said, “because without foolish fuss it is impossible to escape the personal.” Her publisher wanted “a religious document.” She answered with a convenient Tamil word which means can’t or won’t, depending on the speaker s feeling. It would take a higher authority to persuade her. It came early one morning when “a quiet private word ended this ineffective unwillingness.”
So it was that Gold Cord was begun, probably in 1931, and finished after she was confined to bed, though the reader could have no idea of that. The setting of the book she described as “a tragic page of history; not a date but is linked to great events in one or in many of the nations, or to those overwhelming distresses that the very names Armenia, Russia, China, Central Asia, suggest. And all that has happened in India is never out of mind. But the story holds to a single course. It looks across the open frontier to the Country whose forces move unseen among us; for they are the things that matter most, ‘and the life of the spirit has no borders.’ ”
Like all Carmichael books, Gold Cord omits the personal whenever possible. There is no mention of the accident. It is nevertheless deeply personal, deeply revealing of the character and the vision of the author—dedicated to truthfulness, full of love, sensitive to beauty both inward and outward, large of heart and mind, seeing the visible always in the light that streams from the invisible. Though none of her books is “about” her, all are, like all books, the product of who the author is. “A man’s heart determines his speech.”1
Facing each chapter is a quotation from another’s writing or one of her own poems or both. The end papers show a scale plan of the Dohnavur compound and a map of the southern corner of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) District. Sepia-tone photographs capture scenes in the compound: a moon-gate, a little girl polishing a brass vessel, close-ups of some of the more beautiful of the Dohnavur children, the House of Prayer, the Path of Quietness, to name a few; and outside: temple walls, plains, the Holy Washerman’s Mountain. But pictures of Amy Carmichael? Not one, in this or any other book published during her lifetime. “There is nothing nice about me, was her view, “I am nothing and less than that.” When someone persuaded her that she must allow a photograph for the sake of her children who loved her she gave in, “in a weak moment,” thought it “horrid,” and regretted it ever afterwards. “I never can understand how anyone can love such a thing. I often hope that those who have not seen me won’t see me till I awake in His likeness.”
The story is told of a noted American minister who had made up his very strong mind to take a picture of the by then famous Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. He was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia, a tall, powerfully imposing man with a booming voice. When I heard the story, I visualized the encounter with the small, gentle lady in the Room of Peace.
“Who won?” I asked.
“She did, of course,” was the answer.
Gold Cord begins with a metaphor—the children’s search for the source of “their” river in the forest. “A tree had crashed through the forest just where the banks were too steep to climb and the undergrowth was too entangled to penetrate. The trunk was covered with orchids, and was a beautiful thing, but it barred the way. Below it was a deep, clear pool.” The children could not reach the source. Amy could not go back to the beginning of her story, so she began with the “pool,” that day in Belfast when she and her brothers helped the old woman with the bundle, and a mighty phrase about gold, silver, and precious stones flashed through the fog. There would have been no Dohnavur story to tell if she had not made up her mind that day to build in materials indestructible.
When she had finished Gold Cord, she went on to write thirteen more books, making a total of between thirty-five and forty, depending on whether one counts those which appeared in different forms. Total sales of British editions exceed half a million, all this, of course, with nothing approaching high-powered advertising. By 1950 there were translations into fifteen languages. Twelve of the books had been put into Braille in England, eight in the United States. When a Christian magazine described them as popular she was distressed. “Popular? Lord, is that what these books written out of the heat of the battle are? Popular? O Lord, burn the paper to ashes if that be true.”
She wrote very fast, by hand, on a table or, when in bed, on a writing stand. She seldom rewrote extensively. “Perfection I can never touch, but I do dislike loose threads lying about in a book, or weak lines and needless words.”
She disliked pictures hanging crooked on the wall. She knew how to put her hand on any letter or paper she needed, and always looked “in corners and at the backs of things.” She was in control.
Her style is graceful, often poetic, always lucid. Her descriptions have the power to give to the reader an experience. Her convictions about the handling of truth were sometimes in conflict. To a young biographer she said, “Generally speaking, I think the rule should be—the truth whatever people think. It is truth in a book that helps.” Her test for every word, spoken or written: Is it true? Not always an easy question. Her loyalty to the truth did not bind her to tell the whole truth when there were other considerations, such as, Is it helpful? That depended on definition and other questions: helpful to whom? in what way? She had edited a good many things from the autobiography she wrote for the children because they did not strike her as helpful. “How can I be sure I am choosing those which will be of use to you?” she wrote. She could not be sure. There were three more questions: Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it have the “seed of Eternity” in it? “Nothing is worthwhile if the seed of Eternity be not in it.”
“There is a false suavity about most that is written from this land now,” she wrote. “We are so afraid to offend, so afraid of stark truth, that we write delicately, not honestly.” Her books give ample evidence of extreme delicacy where the reputations or the edification of others were at stake. Yet it was their edification she had in mind when she wrote at times far less delicately. Delicacy could be perilous. “Our smoothness glides over souls. It does not spur them to action, even though they be Christians to whom the thought of the glory of the Lord being given to another ought to be unendurable.”2
Next to John 8:553 she wrote in the margin of her Bible, “To hide the truth is no less falsehood than to spread error.” For reasons which her truth-loving soul thought sufficient, she carefully hid certain facts, and charged others to see that they remained hidden. Ambiguities, contradictions, errors, uncertainties, even certain mysteries she seemed peculiarly anxious to avoid mentioning.
She hated exclamation points on a printed page. When her publishers arbitrarily inserted them in Things as They Are she was incensed. “So fussy. They give an idea of overemphasis.”
She must have written millions of words. Besides the books which were published she wrote privately for the Family. The long paper called Roots and the autobiography of her early years are examples of these. She wrote hundreds of songs and poems, thousands upon thousands of personal letters, in addition to those with multiple readership such as Scraps, Life of Faith, Dohnavur Letter, and Dust of Gold.
Most astonishing is the number of letters and notes she wrote daily to her own “beloveds” in Dohnavur. Many of these she regarded as her own long before she met them. Accepted candidates received loving, welcoming letters nearly weekly, sometimes for many months before they arrived. Especially notable is the intimate relationship developed with a young English girl, mentioned in an earlier chapter, who was engaged to a man already in Dohnavur. The girl was nineteen when she received Amma’s first letter.
“Dear, perhaps Comrade-to-be,” it began. There were expressions of warm welcome, followed by straight-from-the-shoulder words about the matter of marriage before language-learning. “We do not find we can lower our threshold, as Mildred Cable (missionary to Mongolia) puts it. . . . She has seen the weakness that follows making things easy and not soldierly . . . the battle to which we are committed is so terrific that only the tried and proven will stand, all others will give way and break at the moment of crisis. . . . Soldiers don’t ask for ease or expect it.”
Ill health delayed the girl’s sailing. Amma fully sympathized with the anguish of separation from her husband-to-be. Occasionally she sent a snapshot of him, or wrote about him to Bee. “Bee darling, I love him more every month, and more desire him for you and you for him. He is one of the knightliest men I ever met. Every thought is knightly. He is one in whom a woman’s love may safely rest, as a bird in its nest.” She wrote of his progress in Tamil, his literary touch, and closed that letter with, “Now with you in my arms, Goodbye. Blessings on you, precious child. Your own Amma.”
In another letter: “To His strength, to His tenderness, I commit you both. You are warriors, and when did warriors ask for an easy time? or no wounds? or no heart-breaks? But He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up the wounds.” There were other testings, “the beating out of the gold that makes us transparent, ‘pure gold, like unto clear glass.’ Goodbye, dear child, His trusted one, His tested one, His beloved one.”
Bees father was not happy with his daughter’s traversing the globe and asked her to wait three years to be sure of her call, both to the man and to Dohnavur, suspending all correspondence with anyone there, including her fiancé and Amy Carmichael. She obeyed him. Here was her chance to prove the truth of Amma’s words to her, Home, with all its prohibitions and opportunities to die daily” offered training far greater than any Bible school curriculum. It was a long obedience, but the father decided not to insist on the full three years’ silence and relented after two.
“If any least wisp of glamor is in your mind ask God to let His wind blow it away,” Amma wrote after that hiatus. “There is none of that rainbow thing in the life here.”
Week after week faithfully the letters went from India to England, letters filled with expressions of love, acceptance, oneness, sympathy and strong exhortations and encouragement. When Bee’s fiancé came to Amy’s room and kissed her, Amy saw it as an expression of a mystical union and wrote, “You are there—you and he and I.” She told Bee that she did not speak to him of her “for I understand too well how much he loves you for that.” Did she imagine that a man in love wants to avoid mention of the beloved? She wrote of the thought that had sustained her when she left her Dear Old Man—the thought of the Wounded Hands parting them, one laid on her, one on him. “He unites you closer than ever and binds you both together to Himself.”
Amy had many terms of endearment for her children, darling being the most frequently used. For Bee, who was often “darling, she chose a special name, Child of my Bonds. In the pain and limitations of her illness she felt she had been given the gift of a very special child, a child who, she began to believe, might take a place which would soon be empty.
1. Matthew 12:34 (TLB).
2. Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, p. 330.
3. “If I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.”