46. The Voice From the Sanctum
Chapter 46
The Voice From the Sanctum
To the burning spirit and the forceful spirit anywhere is easier than the rear. We always want to be in the van.” The spirit Amy Carmichael thus described was her own—burning, forceful—from her enthusiastic guidance of her own little brothers and sisters and her earnest evangelism in the slums of Belfast and Manchester, to her ardent work with the Starry Cluster, leading to the Dohnavur Fellowship. She whose highest aim was to be a simple follower of her Master who made Himself nothing, who took the form of the lowest slave in an Eastern household—she had become, inevitably, it seems, a powerful matriarch of a very large and dependent family. She was no longer in a position to whisk everyone off suddenly to the Forest or the seashore when the fancy took her. Her control was of another kind. The accident, far from diminishing her matriarchal power, enhanced it to the level of a mystique. She was a commanding figure, as the figure of Beatrice seemed to Dante, “commanding as a mother.”
The system—the Pattern Shewn in the Mount—was crystallized, not to say frozen, when she disappeared from view. She was not quite invisible. People saw her, of course. Many waited on her, children were brought to her room for Coming Days and other occasions, accals and sitties and annachies had access, but it was always controlled access, as in the case of any executive. For a given length of time, for a special reason, they entered the precincts. It could not have been otherwise.
The precepts given to Amy were the precepts perpetuated, not only by those who taught and exemplified them to the younger ones, but by constant reiteration and reinforcement in the reams of pages that poured out of the inner sanctum which was “Amma’s Room.” These included not only her many books and Dust of Gold, which was called a “private” letter for people all over the world, but daily messages she believed the Lord had given her for the Family. Many of these have been published as devotional collections under the titles Edges of His Ways, Thou Givest . . . They Gather, and Whispers of His Power. What God gave to her in the silence of her room she—always the mother, doing her God-given motherwork of nurturing—gave to her children on paper, to be read aloud the next day. So there was always a voice—still and small, gentle and loving, and a message—authoritatively prescriptive—issuing forth from that somewhat remote place.
In addition to these there were the personal letters, thousands of them, every one a perfect model of intimate concern for the individual, gracious encouragement in his particular need or task, and love—the warmest assurance, always, of love. There were papers: Roots, sixty-nine pages on what the DF was, what it did and why, written for insiders. There were instructive papers on subjects such as Fasting, Baptism, Prayer, and Guidance. She was able in this way to clarify what was to be done and why it was meet, right, and their bounden duty so to do, unless, of course, the Unseen Leader should lead them to do otherwise.
Could they do otherwise? It was often the conservative Indian establishment that stood most stoutly in the way of change.
“Amma never did it that way.”
“Amma’s vision has proved right down the years.
“Amma would not feel happy with the ideas you suggest.” (This last was said sometimes even when one had access to her and she had said the opposite.)
“If only she were still about and could see the situation for herself,” said one of the Europeans, “she would certainly change it all. She understands things clearly and would overthrow many of our traditions and contented routines. Some really believed this, at times at least.
Amy Carmichael’s certainty that the lines on which the work had been established were divinely given was never shaken. Believing (in spite of numerous disappointments) that those who joined the work were divinely sent, she was willing to grant a hearing. “You could make suggestions without fear or inhibition,” one of them assured me, “but you were not surprised if they were not accepted. She knew best.” She was settled in her own mind, so anything which would shift the lines in any significant way she could not accept—until, as we shall see, certain radical changes were proposed in the last few years of her life.
In theory she wanted future leaders to be free from a sense of her hovering scrutiny. She wrote it down in 1946.
“There is one thing I have often said to you individually. I may have written it—I want to make sure you have it. It is this: when decisions have to be made, don’t look back and wonder what I would have done. Look up, and light will come to show what our Lord and Master would have you do.”
She wanted to be in the vanguard. She admitted it. But she saw that it was not her place. “Our place is always behind the scenes,” she wrote, intending to emphasize the great importance of encouraging Indians for leadership. The effect of that effort was that she became the generator in the back room that ran the machine.
Amy tried to retire. Let it be understood that she really tried to turn over the reins to others. Annually she was reelected titular head, kept on ice, as one DF put it. She wished that the next leader could be an Indian, but as she saw it there wasn’t a man anywhere with the patience, the fixed purpose and grit, the courage, the vision, or the daring for the job. She had known two Indian women who, with more experience, more spiritual training, might have fulfilled the qualifications—Ponnammal and Arulai. She counted on other Indian women, up to a point, to do certain things. She delegated responsibility. Indian men were learning, she felt, but left something to be desired. Those in the Fellowship, after all, knew mainly what she had taught them, and that not always very thoroughly. She was still their mother. They were her sons and daughters. The time for cutting apron strings never seemed to arrive.
The danger of allowing herself to be the foundation of the work was very plain to Amy and she strove to prevent such a happening. Hardly more than a year after the accident she had written one of her “Notes” to the DFs, citing Jesus’ parable of the house building, and Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever.”
“A work which is founded on anyone on earth is like the house that was built on the sand. When the rain descended, and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, it fell, and great was the fall of it. The only foundation that will stand through the floods is the eternal Rock. . . . Sooner or later every work is searched and tested and tried as by rain and the vehement beating of floods and winds. Then will appear its true character. If it falls it will be because it was built on sand; better then that it should fall. If it stands it will be because by the mercy of God it was built on the Eternal Rock, Christ Jesus our Lord.” She went on to say that her heart’s desire was that the thought of all might be forever fixed on the Eternal, not on the human—on Jesus Christ, the Rock, the same forever.
When she wrote that note she believed she would soon be either healed or dead. Fifteen years later, neither having occurred, she wrote another note, spelling out for May Powell, who was coleader with Godfrey, qualities to be looked for in a new leader: She must be just, a woman of character, able to make decisions, possessing the kind of love that is never tired out of loving, the power to ride the waves instead of being submerged by them, and a deep conviction about DF principles.
The fact that Amy addressed this note to May rather than to Godfrey or to Godfrey and May can hardly be ignored. She took it for granted that the leader must be a woman. A man could not be considered to make decisions which would bind the community.
Nowhere does David Carmichael, Amy’s father, find more than passing mention in her writings. Her mother, in contrast to the vague figure of her father, is strongly portrayed. Amy was the oldest of the children and therefore the natural leader. Her brothers were cherished and adored, but they were her little brothers. Her relationship with the D.O.M. was certainly the most intimate she ever experienced with a man. Their mutual love and respect was of the deepest and tenderest, but there was little or nothing of male leadership and female response. She was probably by far the stronger of the two. Barclay Buxton was her “chief.” She said so often. Thomas Walker, though not her superior in the same sense as Buxton, was a leader whom she gladly followed. They were gone. It was to her that the vision for this work had been vouchsafed. It was she who must bear the responsibility.
Amy had studied the New Testament passages on the ministry of women. To Conybeare’s note on 1 Corinthians 14:34, “The women must not officiate publicly in the congregation,” she added, “compare chapter 11:2 where they are told to be veiled if they pray or prophesy. Some muddle here?” and in the margin of 15:1-6 she puts, “Mary was the first messenger to men.” She loved the Revised Version of Psalms 68:11, “The Lord gave the word: great was the company of the women that published it.”
She believed that the apostle Paul’s injunctions about the silence of women must have been meant for a certain group at a certain time. He was not articulating a doctrine of total silence, any more than he was commanding women, as Amy put it, “to go to church with their hair hanging down their backs,” a horror of indecency for a lady of Amy’s breeding.
Having explained the above convictions, she added, “Well, that’s that. All the same I think men were as a rule meant for leadership and publicity and so on—not women, and the very day Godfrey knew enough Tamil for it—and even before—I pushed him into the pool and left him to swim. In other words asked him to take Prayers, the worship in the House of Prayer, and so on. And gladly, oh so gladly, I used to repeat John the Baptist’s words to myself, He must increase and (I did not say but for I was very, very glad) I must decrease.’”