9. Polishing the Jewels: (1902-1929, The Father’s children)
9
Polishing the Jewels
1902-1929, The Father’s Children
The brilliant, flashing chatoyancy in a rough tigereye gemstone is released by a number of violent and painful methods.
First, the stone is blasted out of its solid rock vein or stabbed with pick and hammer. The stone is then thrown onto a conveyer belt and taken above ground. In a gemcutter’s workshop, the stone is gripped in a vise, cut with a saw, ground with a coarse wheel, sanded, polished with tin oxide, and pierced with a drill.
Or, in the case of tumbled stones, the tigereye is locked into a rock-polishing machine for four weeks, no privacy, tossed about with all sorts of companions, scratched, irritated by rough grit almost the hardness of a diamond. Either process is a most unpleasant experience for the tigereye.
The finished product is a radiant jewel of deep honey color, flashing bands of silky gold light, fit for a maharaja’s crown.
“Nothing was ever made easy for her. She was too precious to spoil by the easy.” Amy’s way of preparing the child Arulai for life and service carried over to all her children. Nothing was made easy for them in body, mind, or spirit. Amy demanded absolute truthfulness. “Truth in the inner being” (Psalm 51:6, The Amplified Bible). This love of truthfulness was the foundation for courage and all right living.
One of the little tots who owned a rag doll coveted a piece of lace to go around its shoulders, sari-style. She saw the lace on someone else’s prettier doll, ripped it off when no one was looking, and tied it around her rag doll.
The sermon that Sunday was on the sin of Achan, who stole a Babylonian garment, then hid it. Baby though she was, her conscience bit her. She tore the lace from her doll and buried it in the garden where no one would ever find it.
That night she couldn’t sleep. She felt just too Achan-like, and the Word of God burned even in the soul of a three-year-old. When Amy answered her crying, the story came out. They went, hand in hand, with a lantern and dug up the bit of lace. They prayed together. The sin was forgiven, and the lesson of truthfulness was stamped on the child’s mind forever.
Amy always made sure the punishment fit the crime. A child who had wantonly stripped a flower of its petals was asked to fit them back on. A quarrelsome, antisocial child was put into a small barrel reaching her shoulders until she grew bored with her own company and wished to make friends again.
Hard work was part of life at Dohnavur. He who would help souls must demand something of them. From nursery days on, Amy demanded much of her children. Their reward was not money or treats but to be trusted with harder work.
One young convert loved to sit on the floor reading her Bible or gazing dreamily off at the mountain view outside the window, waiting for the dinner bell. She soon learned that to be happy she must contribute her share to the happiness of the rest of the family. After Amy’s loving explanation and example (for she worked right along with the children), the girl gladly took her turn at scrubbing pots and pans.
Even the five-year-olds helped carry away over fifteen tons of broken masonry after the men and older boys had destroyed an idol shrine on a newly purchased piece of property. Children with baskets of mud balanced on their heads also helped clear away a wall that the monsoon rains brought crashing down in millions of pieces.
Paths must be swept, bedding aired, gardens watered by hand, pots scoured using a handful of grass and some ashes, floor tiles polished until they gleamed and reflected.
Amy understood children needed stories on their own level, but she avoided English fairy tales. They were just too foreign for the Indian child. “Please do not tell my little girl any fairy tales,” said a village gentleman. “The spirits are real to us—and they are all bad.”
“Me’ th
n ?” Is it really true?
“Me’ thn .” True indeed.
How much better that response to stories, she thought. So she wrote her own stories for the children. Books, mountains, forests, sea, and music Amy listed as the chief instructors in her school. She had the advantage in that the children were sheltered from all other influences.
She taught by action songs where the children learned the words in English and acted out the habits of birds and animals. A microscope opened up that new world for them. They studied both English and Tamil, reciting lessons in a sing-song chant.
Amy’s goal was to train good soldiers for Jesus Christ, academic accomplishments being secondary.
If love, truth, and hard work were the foundations of Dohnavur, music built the walls. Amy found the words of many English hymns ambiguous, archaic, even ridiculous—certainly not understandable to an Indian child.
Once she inquired about a little dying boy who had been with them only a short time. “What is he doing?”
“He is lying on his mat, making tunes.”
Two days later he was still singing but with the great angelic choirs.
“There was something in that place that could only be seen through prayerful eyes,” wrote a clergyman who visited Dohnavur. “The three hundred children lived in cottages, each cottage under an Indian girl with about a dozen tiny ones in her charge.
“How much do you pay these young women to care for all these children?” he asked.
“The lady [Amy] replied, ‘It is very expensive work, for they have to be up at all hours of the day and night—it is too expensive to pay for, so none of us gets any salary; we all do it through love.’
“And love in turn brought forth joy. I have never seen such joy on the faces of people. They shine!”
“What will you do with them later?” asked another sort of visitor, eying the mats of babies, the clusters of happily active little tots.
“You will live to regret it!” was the stern pronouncement of another.
Amy could not help wondering about the children’s future if they were not educated. She would not accept less than dedicated Christians who desired to build in gold, silver, and precious stones. Other missionaries in India agreed with her that mission schools were not turning out Christians with strong character and a firm faith that nothing could shake.
She saw the need for both women and men who would give up married life and “attend upon the Lord without distraction,” as Arulai said. She and Pearleyes, now grown up, had made that decision, and their lives were spent in the Dohnavur Fellowship work.
Amy felt that if ever unloving attitudes were allowed to creep into the Fellowship, there would be spiritual decay. Do such standards seem visionary? Amy held to them and so attracted workers of high quality.
Sisters of the Common Life was formed by seven Christian girls at Dohnavur who decided God’s will for them did not include marriage. Others were added to the group through the years, and Amy came to count on them, to ask anything from them, knowing they would refuse nothing for the Lord. Amy’s advice to them was the same she would have given any missionary: Guard against depression. Bear evenly with all that is uneven. Never be shocked out of loving.
Sister Paula alone traveled a total of 25,000 miles to save fifty-nine children.
A corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies alone, in darkness, allowing itself to be changed, cut off from sun and air. But, oh, the harvest! A hundredfold!
“Each child felt itself the only child in the family, so lovingly was each cherished and so abundant was the thanksgiving over virtuous behavior,” Amy said.
The children tended to avoid what was difficult, but once the will was seized and trained in the right direction it held as firm as a steel rod. An Indian child loved with all his mind and strength.
“Even if they are saved from temple life,” wrote an Indian reviewer of one of Amy’s books, “of what use will they ever be? They will revert to type.”
“Perhaps you are on the wrong track,” remarked an acquaintance after a baby died of poisoned milk. “The work seems so difficult and wasteful.”
Amy learned to shrug off such comments, though they buzzed around her head like stinging insects. The children were worth any personal suffering.
Those teaching the children often survived temperatures of 100-110° in the shade. “His leaf shall not wither” was written for Europeans in India, Amy thought humorously.
One day in the kindergarten, Chellalu decided against listening, brought out a long piece of red tape from her pocket, tied her feet together, curled up on the bench, and seemed to be asleep. The teacher did not disturb her. She may have been grateful!
Question time came, and the children, smitten by the grave story of Abraham offering his only son, gave very serious answers. One baby brushed away a few tears.
“What did Isaac say to his father as they walked up the mountain together?”
Chellalu suddenly uncurled, sat up, and replied: “He said, ‘Father, do not kill me!’ Yesh! That was what he said.”
Arulai, grown up and a teacher, believed that the impressions made upon the mind of a little child would last forever. Once the Bible story for the day was the Good Samaritan. The little tots were scandalized at the behavior of the priest and Levite. “Punish them! Give them whippings!” they urged. One little tot left her seat and solemnly marched up to the picture of the departing priest and Levite. “Take care what you are doing!” she said in Tamil, shaking one fat brown finger at them. Then in English, “Naughty! Naughty!”
The Dohnavur children were a delight, but ever uppermost in Amy’s thoughts were the others.
She was harrassed by court cases, legal battles that sometimes dragged on for years. To be the object and subject of criminal cases, one after another! To be the center of such publicity, when publicity was dreaded!
Legally, Amy’s hands were shackled. In 1912 she heard of a young girl who escaped from her life of degradation and fled to a missionary asking for protection. He could not give it, and the girl was forced back into her home. In despair she drowned herself.
The law punished only the offense, not the intent to commit, or even the preparation, unless it amounted to an attempt under the Penal Code. She sent carefully prepared case histories of temple women who “adopted” children, the adoption being merely the “taking” of a child. It was impossible to prove there was no legal adoption since papers could be forged, false witnesses produced. Even if there was proof that a child was not legally adopted by a temple woman, the court would only return the child to her own home, which could be a place little better than the temple.
One sure indication that a child was destined for temple life was instruction in dancing. No good Hindu parents allowed their children to dance. Even the Untouchable women did not dance, with the exception of devil dancers, mostly old women.
An Indian lawyer Amy knew deplored the fact that the government was helpless to pass laws to save children from the temples. The letter of the law must be respected—that the British government would not interfere in matters of religion. The Indian lawyer was saddened whenever he thought of it.
Any attempt to encourage a child to come to Amy or any assistance given to help her to escape would render her liable to prosecution for kidnapping—a criminal offense under law.
Amy’s Indian sisters stood in dread of the very word prison, for himsa—torture to obtain confession—was common. The accals were all young Christians, shy as Indian women were, yet over and over they faced the possibility that Amy could be arrested, convicted of kidnapping, and sentenced to seven years in an Indian prison. They could easily imagine what would happen to a family of women and children left completely without protection.
They not only faced it bravely, in faith, but each one of them said, “Let me be buthil—the substitute. Let me go to prison in your place!”
Did Amy ever regret getting involved in such a risky work? Never. Even if there were no other rewards, the children rewarded them.
Four-year-old Pyarie and Tingalu, side by side, walked demurely to kindergarten class. They carried toys in both hands but dutifully laid them on a table until story time would be over. Arulai was telling of the Unmerciful Servant. To help them understand on their level, she explained that the baby who snatched all the toys was unfair and selfish. Such a baby might even grow up to be like the Unmerciful Servant!
Pyarie and Tingalu looked at the picture, and then at each other. “Oh, bad, nasty man!” they chimed together. “Very, very bad,” Pyarie made it understood.
Prayer over, they both rushed to the table to get their toys. Pyarie reached them first and swept them all into her arms, turning to run. A word from Arulai stopped her. There was a struggle inside the baby heart. Then she ran to Tingalu and thrust all the toys into her lap. Jumping into Arulai’s arms she cried, “Accal! Am I not a merciful servant?”
“Did Peter and John talk English or Tamil?” a confused little girl whispered to her neighbor after hearing the story of the lame man and the disciples.
“Tamil, of course,” said the second child, no doubt at all in her mind.
An older girl, able to express herself more eloquently, once said after being scolded for disobedience: “Within my heart wrath burned like a fire, but my mouth could not open to reply, for inside me a voice said, ‘It is true, entirely true. Accal is perfectly just.’”
Sellamutthu was that accal. She once traveled the equivalent distance from London to Moscow and back to save little Suseela.
The children’s worship service on Sunday was only a half hour long, begun with a moment of silence, with another space of silence halfway through. The service was a joy, and the children looked forward to it all week. Thank offerings were given, something of the children’s own, usually a sticky sweet (sucked only a little while), and once a teddy bear, which was returned (like Isaac off the altar) to the relieved child.
Amy once took a group of older children for an educational tour of Madras, and they visited a jeweler to see the uncut stones. The children easily identified and described each gem. “Where did they learn anything about this?” the surprised man asked. “From reading the book of Revelation,” Amy replied.
Tuesday and Friday evenings were given to demon worship throughout India. Drums, animal noise, cries of dancers continued all night long and could be heard from nearby villages. The older children and the new converts remembered the old life. Nightmares, spiritual strain, sometimes defeat marked those nights. True, most of the demon worship was hundreds of miles away, but miles did not matter when spirit forces pulled.
Every bedtime was preceded with prayer and singing, but those two nights, especially, were fortified with extra time with the children, private prayer with any who were fearful, ending with the beautiful chorus “Jesus, Tender Shepherd, Hear Us.”
The old hymn assures us that “hell’s foundations quiver,” but Amy often said a missionary’s own foundations quivered under satanic attack.
Amy lived a double life all those years. One life was as a happy, laughing companion and mother to the children. The other life was hidden, a living grief over the millions of children who had no help. Not that the innocent suffered, but that the innocent sinned, is what discouraged them.
Lakshmi was such a child, but her story ended happily. She was a seven-year-old slave of the gods. She and Tara listened one night after the old priest had called for little Esli. They heard her screams. “They cannot make me do it,” Tara whispered. “I will save myself.”
The next morning her body was found in the well.
Lakshmi had attended a mission school long enough to memorize the following: “Lighten-our-darkness-we-beseech-thee-O-Lord-and-by-thy-great-mercy-defend-us-from-all-perils-and-dangers-of-this-night-for-the-love-of-Thine-only-Son-our-Savior-Jesus-Christ.”
She repeated it to an Indian lady doctor she visited, who explained it to her in Tamil. My mantra, Lakshmi thought.
The night she made her first appearance on a stage in the temple with men worshipers packed around her so close they could touch her, she was frightened, and the prayer flashed through her mind. There was a burst of torchlight, a blast of music, and before she realized what she was doing she dropped to her knees and repeated her “mantra.”
The temple woman beside her pinched her arm painfully and forced her to her feet, and she danced. Seven years old, married to the gods—and to their worshipers.
One night, covering her bright clothes with a long servant’s scarf, she slipped out of the house and ran down the street, anywhere. A man tore away her scarf and shouted, “A slave of the gods, running away!”
Lakshmi, terrified, began to chant her “mantra” aloud as she ran. She turned down a narrow street, and a white woman stepped out from a doorway. With a cry for help, Lakshmi sprang into her arms, gasping “… for-the-love-of-our-Savior-Jesus-Christ!” and fainted.
“What does this mean?” the lady asked.
“It is a devadasi. She belongs to our god. Give her to us.” The mob threatened to attack, but the white woman shielded the child. “She has claimed my help in the name of Jesus Christ, my Lord,” she said. “Fall back!” They circled around, still muttering, but finally left, and she carried the child to safety.
“My mantra, my charm, worked,” said Lakshmi afterward. “What can I do for your Lord who saved me? Can I dance for Him and sing?”
The white woman, a missionary, explained that the words Lakshmi learned to parrot were not a mantra, but prayer to a living God, which He had answered. Lakshmi came to love Him, but for a year after that someone had to sleep and eat and live every moment with her to clear her mind of the loathsome things she had been taught in speech and deed and thought.
About this time the little Soldanella found her way to Dohnavur. A lawsuit was brought against her and the two friends that helped her, and Amy represented the child in court. More than 2,400 miles of travel were made on Soldanella’s behalf. Finally the case ended. “Dismissed.” The courthouse was burned down by an angry mob, but Soldanella was safe.
Polish—to give perfecting touches. The children were polished by love, truthfulness, hard work, discipline; reinforced by Scripture, prayer, and song. And while she was polishing, in each day that went from 5:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M., Amy herself was being strengthened for even more difficult times.