3. Mutton Chops Don’t Matter
Chapter 3
Mutton Chops Don’t Matter
In September 1886 Amy was invited to visit friends in Scotland, and it was there that a second spiritual crisis took place. They went to Glasgow where a convention was being held “on Keswick lines, that is, teaching that was given each year for one week in a large tent in Keswick, in England’s Lake District. The tent meetings had their origin in 1874 in a six-day conference at “Broadlands,” the country estate of the Right Honorable W. Cowper-Temple. The chairman was Robert Pearsall Smith. The purpose, articulated by Smith’s wife, Hannah Whitall, was “the promotion of holiness or the Higher Christian Life.” Canon Wilberforce and George MacDonald were among those attending, along with “nonconformist bankers, ritualistic curates, peers with parsons, novelists with temperance reformers.”1
There was a spirit of such unity, a sense of being lifted to such heavenly heights, a springing up of such hope of an unbroken walk with God, that it was decided to repeat the meetings on a larger scale. Five weeks later, a second conference was held in Oxford, attended by the Vicar of Saint John’s, Keswick, Canon Dundas Harford-Battersby, a former Anglo-Catholic. Both of the Smiths were speakers, as well as a mining engineer named Evan Hopkins. Through their messages Harford-Battersby received “a vision of faith, a sight of the glory of the Lord . . . I shall never forget what I saw then, to my dying day.”2 He also met Robert Wilson, owner of coal mines in Cumberland, and the two became close friends. The following year the vicar wrote to Wilson to propose “a numerous assemblage to look for and wait for a blessing at God’s hands.” The largest hall in Keswick accommodated only four hundred, so a tent was hired, and the famous Keswick Meetings began. It was a “spiritual clinic,” a place where Christians might come “to have the great Physician, the Lord Himself, diagnose and heal their spiritual ailments.”3
Flyleaf of Amy’s Bible.
Keswick teaching spread to other places, and so it was that Amy Carmichael attended the meeting in Glasgow.
The hall was full of a sort of grey mist, very dull and chilly. I came to that meeting half hoping, half fearing. Would there be anything for me? Could there be anything? I don’t remember feeling there was anything (my fault) in either of the two addresses. The fog in the Hall seemed to soak into me. My soul was in a fog. Then the chairman rose for the last prayer . . . “O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling.” Those words found me. It was as if they were alight. And they shone for me.
The restaurant where her friend took her for lunch was not a five-star. The mutton chops they ordered were badly cooked. Mutton chops? thought Amy. What does it matter about mutton chops? The Lord is able to keep us from falling! To keep us from falling! This, this at last, was what she had prayed and agonized for. She wrote down the date, September 23, 1886, in her Bible.
If mutton chops didn’t matter anymore, neither did clothes. When Amy got back to Belfast, the long mourning period for her father was over and it was time, her mother said, to purchase a few pretty dresses—among them, of course, an evening dress for parties. They went to the shop. The shopman displayed his loveliest things. Suddenly Amy decided she could not have them. She was now, in the language of the apostle Paul as interpreted by the Keswick people, “dead to the world.” To Amy, the world meant fashion, finery, luxury of any sort. She would follow Him who had no home, no earthly possessions beyond the bare minimum. She would be “dead to the world and its applause, to all its customs, fashions, laws.” For a girl with her eye for beauty, it is the measure of her commitment that she did not hesitate to relinquish all that seemed to her inimical to the true life of discipleship.
Entertaining her brothers and sisters was certainly not inimical in Amy’s mind to that life. Bursting with vitality, she went skating with them on the ponds of the Royal Botanical Gardens. She taught them to identify the orchids in the conservatories, and conceived the idea of helping them to establish a shop in which they learned about money through the sale of small items to other members of the family: pencils (halfpenny each), india rubbers (one penny), blotters, pens, paper (“cream laid, superfine”). Another project was a family magazine, Scraps. Volume 1, number 1, page 1, reads:
As it is usual in publishing the first issue of any journal to give the reasons for beginning it, together with its politics etc. we will try to relate the circumstances which led up to the existence of Scraps. By having a family paper it was thought that a great deal of pleasure as well as profit might be the result, and that by spending an evening now and then in reading and discussing the items which might appear in such a paper a great deal of amusement and perhaps a little instruction might be gained. It was therefore proposed by Amy and seconded by Norman that such a paper should be at once begun.
The handwriting is Norman’s, elegant and sweeping. A list of rules follows, including the requirement that each member must pay an annual subscription rate of six pence, and must choose a nom de plume. Norman became “Namron,” Ernest “Oddfellow,” Eva “Lulu,” Ethel “Atom,” Walter “Blanco,” Alfred “S.S.I.” (for Silly Silly Idiot), and Amy, not surprisingly, “Nobody.” Mother was elected president, Amy editor.
The pages of Scraps were decorated with cartoons, illuminated headings, and delicate pen-and-ink drawings. None is signed, but Amy’s later drawings on her missionary letters lead me to assume that the finer work in Scraps is hers—exquisitely detailed ferns, cattails, grasses, flowers. There are several watercolors (one shows a shoreline with cottage and trees, masts and sailboats on the water) and a beautiful oil of autumn leaves. Alfred contributed ink drawings—one shows the cook, “Queen of the Kitchen,’’ a dour woman with warts and hairy moles, standing on a stool, a band around her tight curls, an apron pinned to her dress, sleeves rolled up, laced boots; another a “Mill Girl” swathed in a voluminous black shawl; a third a drawing of the cover of a book, Mill Girls and All About Them, by Amy Carmichael.
The editor saw to it that there was, in addition to whimsy and humor, plenty to edify. She reported her conversation with a Bible scholar about soul and spirit. She quotes Shakespeare, Dryden, Kingsley, and Coleridge, includes a vocabulary study with the etymology of tantalize, burglar, and pecuniary. Some of her early efforts in poetry appear, ranging from doggerel:
Oh we are a jolly family
We are, we is, we be—
And very wise and careful
And exemplary are we!
to:
Think truly, and thy thoughts shall be
Spotless with God’s own purity.
On every thought-bud let us bear
The stamp of truth, and love and prayer.
From Scraps we learn that the usual rising time was 4:50 A.M. and that for breakfast the Carmichaels ate brown bread, white bread, bacon, toast, oatcake, marmalade, and tea, with finnan haddie and soda bread added for Sundays. All were expected to dress for tea, to respond when the tea bell rang, and to remain afterwards for prayers. “Tea,” the evening meal, usually meant potatoes, bread, perhaps a bit of sausage or fish, and, of course, pots and pots of tea. No wonder the Christmas hamper from Grandmother in Portaferry was welcomed—she sent turkey, geese, and vegetables. Mice and cockroaches also lived in the house, we find, in spite of various cats and a dog named Scamp.
It was a pious Presbyterian home, and the children’s language was strictly watched. “Queen Motherie” remonstrated upon Eva’s “most inelegant exclamation, ‘Cricky!’ ““But there’s nothing nice left to say, so I can’t help saying it!” was Eva’s defense. The others, sympathetic to the urge to swear, offered alternatives. Why not “Beetles!” or “Earwigs!”? Ernest wrote when April Fool’s fell on a Sunday, “Of course we were all very pious, doubly so as we would not have a chance of being ever so pious on a Sunday for another seven years.”
The Christmas number of 1887 carries a set of character sketches of the family, by “Nobody.” Namron is a sweet child, kindly, loving, unselfish, “in short, very dear in every way. As for faults—a difficulty in believing himself to be mistaken is about all I can say, and this fault is so overruled by good-temperedness that it is almost indeed dormant. When his beloved sister Nobody was ill he nearly carried her upstairs.” Oddfellow was “one of those youths to whom absence makes the heart grow fonder. When you are away from him you realize that you are worth something to him. . . . I think I won’t name his faults, for since beginning to write, I have become conscious that my own are so numerous and so far outweigh other people’s, that the less I say about them the better. Eva: dear, frisky, amusing, loving, innocent, “has a large stock of love ready to draw upon for Birthdays, Christmas, etc. and when one is really ill, there is nobody kinder, she would buy tons of chocolate if thereby she could ease the sufferer—if she had the cash.” Atom: “a gigglety creature, packed full of condensed electricity, very fond of lessons, sweets, rowdyism, wrestling, with a large amount of natural affection.” As for S.S.I., “a dear little jolly old fellow. He is our sunshine.” Blanco was, “of all good-tempered willing fags [flunkies, “go-fers”] he is the goodtemperedest and willingest.” Mother: “There never was such a mother—so good, so loving, so unselfish, so perfect in every way, we can only thank God for her and try to make her shadowed life bright with our love.” Of Amy herself one of them wrote:
Our eldest sister i s the light of our life,
She says she will never be a wife.
Such a promise from a twenty-two-year-old girl might have been taken as a challenge meant only to be refuted. It is to be doubted that Norman and Ernest, at least, took her seriously, and perhaps she did not expect them to. At any rate she kept her word.
That promise may have been partly the fruit of a visit to Belfast during 1887 of Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission. In meetings sponsored by Keswick he said that every hour four thousand “pass through the gates of death into the darkness beyond—Saviorless, hopeless.”
“Does it not stir up our hearts,” Amy wrote in Scraps, “to go forth and help them, does it not make us long to leave our luxury, our exceeding abundant light, and go to them that sit in darkness?” She quoted these lines:
Listen! Listen, English sisters
Hear an Indian sister’s plea—
Grievous wails, dark ills revealing
Depths of human woe unsealing,
Borne across the deep blue sea.
We are dying, day by day,
With no light, no cheering ray.
It was a strange providence that brought into Amy’s life during those very meetings one whom she was to learn to love to such a degree as to make her obedience to the call to heathendom excruciatingly more painful than it would otherwise have been. He was the chairman of the Belfast conference, and the man who with Canon Harford-Battersby had arranged the first Keswick tent meeting, Mr. Robert Wilson. He was a man “of massive frame and of great strength, bearded and burly,” his son recalled. “His movements were slow, his humor deep under a solemn exterior, he was sparing in speech and if pressed to a course he thought wrong took refuge in Quaker silence.”4
At the close of the Belfast meeting Mr. Wilson asked if there were questions, and Amy’s aunts, who were staying with the Carmichaels, had several of a doctrinal nature which Amy wrote out on a pink card with a gold edge. Mr. Wilson asked if he might call at their home.
“He was not quite seventy years old then,5 but he had wavy silver hair. His eyes were as blue and as candid as a child’s, and his face was like a child’s too in its fresh colouring; his big frame almost filled our biggest arm chair. He made a beautiful picture as he sat in the firelight.’’
Amy did not know it then, but she had “turned a corner of the road of life.’’
1. J.C. Pollock, The Keswick Story (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 20.
2. Ibid, p. 28.
3. Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation (London: Marshall, Morgan, and Scott, 1952), p. 39.
4. Pollock, op. cit., p. 30.
5. In fact, he was not quite sixty.