43. Saint, Fishwife, Vegetable Marrow
Chapter 43
Saint, Fishwife, Vegetable Marrow
In the early evening, when the hills in the distance showed faint and blue, in a patch of rough ground called the Field of the Darling-Pool a little girl stood alone. . . . She was wrapped in a sari, bright like a blackberry leaf in September, or the breast of a forest minivet, the one warm note of color there, and she waited, still as a leaf, for something to happen, for someone to speak.”
So goes chapter 1 of Ploughed Under, written two or three years after the accident. It tells of the early life of Arulai, whom Amy called Star, the girl on whom her hopes of the future leadership of the work depended. As a child Arulai had thought, “If even for one day I might be your daughter it would be as if the heavens touched the earth.”
Arulai was uniquely qualified. Spiritually she was fitted. She, like Ponnammal, was the godly woman Amma had asked God to produce from the very beginning of her work in India. Intellectually she was awake and alive, having at her disposal the English language, which gave access to Amma’s collection of spiritually nourishing books, and the Greek, in which she loved to read the New Testament. “She was one who could go anywhere, do anything,” Amy wrote.
Physically she was weak, due to smallpox and various other illnesses. In 1935 she was ill again. Prayers went up, hopes for her healing went up. Then they plummeted. For four years she was up and down, but by 1939 she was confined to bed in a room within sight of Amy’s room.
She was so near me, not one minute’s walk from this room, and yet I never saw her dear face after one day last October when she came to see me. I could have gone, but at first it was always that she was getting better, and it would have made a fuss to go. Then after March 10 it would have been too hard for her for it would have meant parting—and we never parted. I used to get up at night and look at the red roof of her room and ache to go over.
Amy began to put together a dialogue between “the son” (herself) and the Father, which was later published as His Thoughts Said . . . His Father Said. One of the fragments which may have come out of this separation from Arulai was this one:
“The son was in deep sorrow, and he said, Never, never did I think of not being with him who is my very heart, when he came to the brink of the river.
“His Father said, Will he miss thy hand whom My hand holdeth?”
Arulai was to Amy “perhaps the most precious thing I have on earth.” On April 21, 1939, Amy read 2 Timothy 4, changing the pronouns in verses 6 to 8: “For now she is ready to be offered, and the time of her departure is at hand. She has fought a good fight, she has finished her course, she has kept the faith.” Verse 9 was the one the D.O.M. had sent her, “Do thy utmost to come to me speedily.” For years that verse had been like a knife thrust. “I could not go to him, and one reason was Arulai,” she wrote in the margin of the passage. “Now I can read them without breaking down.” She believed the same would be true some day of the verses which were then “so full of my Arulai.”
Arulai died on May 24. Amy called it her Celestial Birthday. One of the Indian annachies, Arulai’s nephew, Rajappan, who was very close to Amma (“my son-in-love ), came to the Room of Peace while the others went to God s Garden for the burial. They read together from Pilgrim’s Progress about Christian s passing over, and passages from Revelation.
To the Child of her Bonds Amy wrote five days later of her “treasure child’s” having seen the King in His beauty. I am learning the lesson set to the weaned child. I am learning to do without. So are you, my very ownest. Let us learn the lesson together.” She kept writing regularly to Bee, and began to call her by Arulai’s name, “treasure child.”
“You feel preciouser and preciouser with every letter, my Sonthum (own),” “Awoke with you in my arms—I have the feel of you.”
People who worked closely with Amy Carmichael found it nearly impossible, after her death, to think of any faults. Perhaps memory did its beneficent work of erasure. One man, however, after weeks of thought, volunteered that Amma indeed had at least one weakness: Sometimes she misjudged folk. When asked in what way, he said, “She thought they were better than they were.” If that, her single sin, qualifies for the name, it is rather more endearing than offensive.
The prayer-poem has been quoted which asks for
the love that leads the way,
the faith that nothing can dismay,
the hope no disappointments tire,
the passion that will burn like fire.
Her trust was firm that new recruits would give no cause for dismay or disappointment, would prove to be all they seemed to be in their letters. Amy was determined they would be. But would Amy herself measure up to expectations? That thought caused her to tremble. She begged them to expect nothing at all. “There are days when I hope I shall be gone before you come. I can’t bear to be a horrid disappointment to you.”
After listening to many unqualified eulogies I finally put a blunt question to some of the Old Girls: Was Amma a sinner?
“No,” said one with a smile, “She was perfect.”
“Yes,” said another, “she must have been a sinner—the Bible says we all are—but I never saw it.”
An Old Boy told me Amma never apologized. Others said they could not remember her ever apologizing, but that might be explained by the foggy memories of some and the fact that no apologies were due others. Perceptions differ. Some saw Amma weep. Not May Powell, who was as Irish as Amy. We may guess that May was not one of those permitted to see Amy’s tears. “We Irish don’t cry,” said May. “Tears don’t come.”
Some of the poems express an acute sense of the need of forgiveness and help. One confession from her collection of songs is this one:
The shadows of the underworld
Compassed about my guilty soul,
And thunderbolts were on me hurled,
And lightnings flashed; and on a scroll
Was written down, without, within,
The secret of my hidden sin.
Without, within, I saw it stand,
In clearest words accusing me;
Till, as it were, a wounded hand
Annulled its record, set me free;
With that the stormy wind did cease;
A voice commanded; there was peace.
O Savior, stricken for my sin,
O God, who gavest Him to grief,
O Spirit, who didst woo and win
My troubled soul to seek relief,
O Love revealed at Calvary,
Thy glory lights eternity.
One new arrival remembered her first glimpse of Amma—white haired, with a loving face, expressive hands; happy hearted, never gloomy, lively in worship, festive in rejoicing. “She wanted joy, triumph, tambourines, even after a burial.”
When Bee arrived Amma enveloped her in her arms and in her love. Their first words were not to each other but to the Lord, thanking Him that at last she was there. Happily neither disappointed the other. A note shortly after her arrival assured Bee that she was still “treasure child.” “Arulai knows it, I think, and is glad. You often remind me of what she was when she was your age.”
The heart of the woman who could be so stern, so steeled to do the will of God, so intolerant of sham and shilly-shallying and shabbiness was an exceptionally fragile heart. The little notes to Bee are full of poignant hints of its fragility, of the indispensability of the smallest signs of another’s love. “Arulai’s last note has lain (for comfort) beside two or three special notes of yours. . . . I read your beloved little notes for comfort often.”
When one young missionary was taken to meet Amma for the first time, she came out after only a few minutes. “I have seen the Lord Jesus,” she said.
A very “down-and-out” widow was brought to see her. Amy talked about the Lord but nothing seemed to penetrate the poor, uneducated mind, further darkened by suffering. At last Amy pointed to a lily and said, “He made that.” The woman gazed at it. Then, with the first glimmer of understanding, repeated, “He made that.” For some time Amma had her come daily for teaching until she felt she could pass her on to someone else.
An Indian pastor who criticized the work of the Fellowship because children were brought up like “hot house plants,” felt sincerely ashamed of his prejudice once he met Amma. “My doubts vanished. Instinctively I felt that here was a person just beside me who had realized God. I have never seen such a beautiful face.”
A Canadian woman psychiatrist went to visit, expecting to garner an interesting case study of a neurotic old lady. Five minutes with Amma convinced the doctor she had picked the wrong lady.
Any display of the old Irish temper was rare, but it was still there. When someone described an emotional scene which had taken place, Amy said, “If I had been there I should have torn up a bush by the roots and laid on like a fishwife. But then I’m not a pacifist!” Something her dear friend Dr. Somervell wrote so horrified her she told him she wanted to throw a soup plate at him. A plaster saint? Hardly. She was much more interesting than that.
Today’s mind, preoccupied with “self-image,” would worry about Amy Carmichael’s. She needed help. Her self-portrait: “I am a cross between a potato and a vegetable marrow.”