45. I Hold Me Fast by Thee
Chapter 45
I Hold Me Fast by Thee
Avisitor with a serious heart condition told Amy that her doctor had said if she so much as bent over too suddenly she might die on the spot.
“However do you resist the temptation?” Amy wanted to know. Death had held no terrors for the child who swallowed the laburnum pods in Millisle. It looked like a lark then. It looked positively blissful now. When Amy’s doctor suggested in 1934 that she might not have more than five years left, or even only three, before her Glory Day, Amy was elated.
“You would not have said such a blissful thing lightly,” she wrote. “I know He might even now ask for longer than that five years, but that there is even a natural hope of that little while being enough, is purest golden joy. . . . Only pray that He will ‘take from me all slothfulness that I may fill up the crevices of time’ and truly finish all He wants me to do.”
She felt like “a slug on a cabbage leaf.” Her enemies, the various chronic ailments to which she gave biblical names like Sennacherib (who “came down like a wolf on the fold”) and Goliath, did not leave her alone for long. Sometimes she was so hot with fever she got into the water tank in her bathroom. Between the accident in October 1931, and March 1939, she claimed to have had eight nights of “natural” (i.e. undrugged) sleep. Medicines, she believed, were gifts from God. When pills were administered she would take them into her hands, thank God, and ask Him to bless them. She was not fully convinced, however, of the need to use every means known to man to prolong life.
“You dear doctor people have something to answer for sometimes, I think, when you shut that shining door, or at least don’t give it even the gentlest push open.”
The mother of the Family was not the only shut-in in Dohnavur. Others began to feel increasingly shut in and isolated. Perhaps those on whom leadership responsibility had fallen were unconsciously protecting the place from outside contamination in order to preserve the status quo at least as long as Amma was with them. All decisions were referred to her, but full information on which to base her advice was not always made available to her, sometimes because people wanted to spare her such distress.
For many years no outside missionary or Indian Christian ever addressed the Family. One who spent ten years in Dohnavur remembers only three exceptions to this rule: a Chinese woman escaped from Singapore, and two members of the China Inland Mission, one of whom was Bishop Frank Houghton, author of the first Carmichael biography in English (Thyaharaj, one of the Family, had written one in Tamil).
Some of the younger members tired of breathing the rarified Christian atmosphere, unrelieved by any non-Christian breezes. When one of them mentioned this feeling to Amy, her imagination instantly latched on to a remedy. “Do you mean to tell me, said Amma, with mischief in her eyes, “that you’d really like to see one of the sitties drunk?”
Mrs. Webb-Peploe, mother of Murray and Godfrey, had a house in the hills to which Dohnavur people sometimes went for rest and refreshment, “but,” says one, “you had to be insulated there from other missionary ideas and certainly from the rest of the European community. At the time of King George V s Jubilee we were invited to the Club to listen to the wireless description of the celebrations, but it was considered undesirable to go.”
Both English and Tamil newspapers were available to the Dohnavur Family, as well as magazines such as The Illustrated London News. They listened to the broadcasts of the BBC, and Amy regularly read a newsletter called “The Essence of Politics. Because there were some German Sisters of Friedenshort in the Family, she was exceedingly circumspect in commenting on Hitler’s activities in Europe. She thought him a “mad dog” and a “devil incarnate,” while one of the Sisters thought him “perfection.” The rest of the Family had to be cautious and tactful in mealtime conversations touching on war news. While this could not but add to the feeling of isolation and stricture, it is a testimony to the power of love in the place that unity could be maintained at all with such a wide spectrum of nationalities (Indian, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Dutch, German, Swiss—though not all of these were represented all the time), and ecclesiastical connections (Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Plymouth Brethren).
Bee was Amy’s confidante, a sort of safety valve to whom she could let off steam in private. Although she apparently wrote to everyone in the Family, and to some of them hundreds of times, it is difficult to see how anyone could have held a more important place in her thoughts, prayers, and correspondence than the beloved Bee. It was a mother-child relationship, very different from her relationship with her contemporaries in age or her near peers in experience. She allowed herself greater vulnerability with Bee.
“For some time I have been wanting you to have a room within reach; have been trying to get one for you. O Child of my Bonds, I love you very much. Your own Motherling.” Often the time scheduled for Bee’s visit had to be preempted for the sake of someone else. When this happened Amy trusted her to understand. “I wanted you tonight, but then Sittie proposed a ‘new one.’ You are not a new one now, but, my child, deep in, and so ownest that others can be put first.” Again, “I have so many others I must see before I see you that I want you to have just a little love-note to bridge the gap.”
In 1938 Amy speculated that Hitler, having got all he wanted in Europe by the “stand and deliver” method, might say, “Now for the colonies.” “But I am breaking all my own rules in writing so. After all, no one yet knows much about anything.” She was not sure it was right to pray for Hitler since God forbade His people to pray for one under His curse. The apostle Paul’s injunction to pray for rulers applied when justice ruled, Amy noted, and John never said to pray for Nero or Domitian.
As we have seen, she was not a pacifist. She had gone to battle many a time for the sake of a child. Was not the same principle at stake in war? “What would you do if you saw a child tortured to death by a brute? Stand still and let him carry on? Swords may be required so much that coats must be sold to buy them,” she wrote, with reference to Jesus’ instructions to His disciples.1 She did not find world peace in the Bible’s list of signs of the last days.
When England went to war the DF again had reason to thank God for His leading them to settle in such an out-of-the-way place as Dohnavur. “This is a particularly safe part of India. We are just off the line of aeroplanes (I have never even heard, much less seen one!) and if there should be trouble in India this corner would be one of the last to feel it. This means we are left in peace to get on with the Great War.” Airplanes, Amy Carmichael believed, trespassed in the territory of Satan, who is the Prince of the Power of the Air. “Birds only can be trusted in those regions.”
They were not so isolated in Dohnavur as to make them oblivious of the world’s suffering. Amy ‘s letters during the war years make frequent mention of her heartbreak for the ravaged countries. In 1939 to John Risk, an officer of the British navy who was now a DF, she wrote of Poland, “A thousand killed in one city, many while at prayer, many ill and wounded, and little helpless children—and those beautiful Polish horses and dogs and pigeons.” She felt sure that the Lord “has something” for the suffering animals.
Many of the letters include news of Amy’s Scottish terrier, Scamp. He lived on her bed and made life dangerous for any who approached it. She tried to discipline him, but he was so adorable, so sinless, “poor dear little man.” At last for the sake of Scamp’s enemies, her nurses, she had to banish him. There was also a puppy named Tess. “Tess was delicious today,” but posed another kind of threat, this time to Amy’s own spiritual well-being. In her copy of Conybeare’s New Testament, beside Colossians 3:22 she wrote, “not a puppy?” She longed for Bee, who loved dogs, to enjoy Tess, “but the War is the War,” she wrote (no reference, of course, to the World War). “It doesn’t leave much time for anything but itself.” Stick to business, the King’s Business. That was the message.
One day Bee was called to go at once to Amma. She found her sobbing almost uncontrollably. It was the thought of London’s maimed dogs that undid her. Who else could possibly understand her agony—for mere animals?
War stories she read eagerly and shared with the Family when she found in them something spiritually applicable. There was the “gallant lad,” a young airman, who guided his burning plane to his death, refusing to use his parachute in order to prevent a crash into a town.
When a comrade in the Fellowship learned that her brother whom she had helped to bring up was missing, believed killed, Amy wrote, “What noble news. How little you knew you were training a young knight for the courts of heaven. You are honored, but—but—God comfort you tonight.”
In 1942, with the imminent threat of Japanese invasion from Singapore, a plan was drawn up for evacuation of the accals and children between the ages of seven and thirty-five, of whom there were 316. They began quietly to send supplies up to the Forest but the plan never had to be implemented. Between 1939 and 1943 the price of flour increased nine-fold. When the work began in Dohnavur two hundred pounds per year supplied their needs. It was now costing between seven hundred pounds and eight hundred pounds per week.
It was a potentially frightening time for the Family. News of the war reached the children’s ears, albeit in perhaps small doses, things for which their prayers were asked. Their Amma, whom some of them had hardly laid eyes on, but whom others still knew as mother, was apparently hopelessly ill. Prayer had not changed things in the Room of Peace, so far as the children could see. And prices—rising and rising, though rice and curry still filled their bowls. They joined in the prayers for God’s supply.
There were many in the Family who were conscious, as Amy was, of being held by the One who controlled not only the price of rice, the health of each of His children, and incomprehensible matters like wars, but even the stupendous and mysterious celestial structures known as nebulae. She expressed her trust in that God:
Lover of all, I hold me fast by Thee,
Ruler of time, King of eternity.
There is no great with Thee, there is no small,
For Thou art all, and fillest all in all.
The new-born world swings forth at Thy command,
The falling dew-drop falls into Thy hand.
God of the firmament’s mysterious powers,
I see Thee thread the minutes of my hours.
I see Thee guide the frail, the fading moon
That walks alone through empty skies at noon.
Was ever wayworn, lonely traveler
But had Thee by him, blessed Comforter?
Out of my vision swims the untracked star,
Thy counsels too are high and very far,
Only I know, God of the nebulae,
It is enough to hold me fast by Thee.
1. Luke 22:36.
2. “Set your heart on things above, not on things earthly.”