14. Perfection
14.
PERFECTION
A few months later in Dohnavur, one thoughtful council member suggested that they routinely assemble in Amy’s Room of Peace before their general meeting to pray with her.
“That quarter of an hour was like one long drink of cold water on a hot day!”1 Amy gasped in appreciation.
Amy’s surroundings were improved by the addition of a spacious bird habitat, more an aviary than a cage, on the verandah. But to her nurse’s consternation, she often allowed some of the birds into her room. Her Room of Peace now also displayed Doctor Somervell’s oil painting of Nanga Parbat, the most treacherous peak in the Himalayas. No one had ever managed to reach the summit. Many had died trying. Somervell was a climber of renown himself. Nanga Parbat was an old foe. But to Amy, Somervell would never reach greater heights than he had in rescuing a child from temple prostitution thirty years before. Every day was a mountain for Somervell. At Neyyoor, in 1931, she had heard him being called to administer medicine hour after hour, rarely able to sleep, slogging on always to one more patient.
She continued to write—had she ever been more productive than when she was an invalid? In 1934, she told her publisher—which since 1928 had been the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge—about her latest book Ploughed Under, “A book is a child…I want the book thin. I don’t like podgy books…don’t let my little lover come out fat.…”2
Godfrey had written the Dohnavur Letter for a couple of years. But in 1933, Amy added a second newsletter called Dust of Gold. It was in that new creation that she wrote:
Pray that every book, booklet, letter, that goes out from this Fellowship may have blood and iron in it. Pray that we may never degenerate to the merely interesting, the pretty.…3
The return, in June 1935, of Murray from his furlough in Australia—he came back with wife Oda and two new twin boys—did not bolster her spirits as she had anticipated. By this time she began to suspect the worst: She was not going to recover. Was the Musal dead? She had rested for more than three years and was in more pain now than when she fell into the pit.
Well, what had she expected? She expressed it in a poem for Toward Jerusalem, another book she was working on:
Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me,
I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has nor wound nor scar?4
NO WOUND? NO SOAR? YET, AS THE MASTER SHALL THE SERVANT BE, AND PIERCED ARE THE FEET THAT FOLLOW ME;
Her growing state of mind was only too clear in July 1934, when upon hearing one of the doctors say she probably had only five years left of her earthly existence, she dropped him a note the next day:
I wonder if ever before you made anyone so happy with just a few words.…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 joy. Last night I lay awake too happy to sleep.…Only pray that He will “take from me all slothfulness that I may fill up the crevices of my time,” and truly finish all He wants me to do.…5
And yet at other times—her Gethsemanes—she longed to recover and had to write, “O Lord, forgive…Canst Thou not deliver me from the strivings of my longings to be well and with my Family again? But a thousand, thousand thanks to Thee for their longsuffering love, for everything.…”6
Her thoughts on prayer continued to evolve. On her sixty-eighth birthday in 1935 she wrote:
To pray alone, without the uplifting wings of music and the warm fellow-feeling of others like-minded is I think, a very stripping thing. Nothing but bare prayer is left you, prayer stripped to the bone; and you learn, sometimes with dismay, how little you know of real prayer. At least that is how it often is with me.…7
Godfrey’s duties finally became so crushing and Amy was doing so well with Dust of Gold that the Dohnavur Letter was discontinued. But Amy’s health was not improving. By February 27, 1935, she was recording, “Yesterday a very low day. Read Samuel Rutherford.”8 From 1931 to 1935, she had been carried up to her precious Gray Jungle every September. But after 1935, this trip was deemed too strenuous for her. So, in hot weather, Amy would now have to suffer the sizzling summer heat.
AMY BATTLED SELF-PITY.
She battled self-pity. In spite of her productive writing, she was isolated. And pain never left her. In 1936 she wrote a prayer, “My Lord and my Beloved, I thank Thee for holding off the sharpness of the pain and longing this evening. I can even hear them singing without crushing back the tears. This is the first time it has been so.…”
Again and again she caught herself yearning to be mobile again. When she heard children were being taken on their first trip up into the Gray Jungle, she wrote, “I was longing to see their pleasure as they see it for the first time…when suddenly I remembered that I shall see them when for the first time they look at the loveliness There (heaven). I shall be There to show them everything.…”10
Her earlier petition to spare her from “slothfulness” was not an empty plea. For many months, her strength, her desire ebbed. Amy realized a real need to record the development of the Dohnavur Fellowship since Gold Cord, published in 1932. So she had started this needed work, which she titled Windows, but the strength to pull all the information together just wasn’t there. Such a compilation was much more taxing than a poignant story like Mimosa. Mimosa had been a sensation. Since 1924 it had appeared in nine languages besides English. Letters of appreciation came to Amy from all over the world. And even after her accident, she had written Ploughed Under, the story of Arulai. No, a compilation like Windows was hard to do. So she set it aside. She soothed her regret over it by reminding herself God knew when things had to be done. Suddenly one morning in July 1936, for the first time in eight months, power came to her. She worked on Windows thirteen hours a day for three days!
“I can’t account for it by any rational means,” she shrugged. “Nothing else was different.”
Her strength fired up again in late 1936. Another story, as poignant as Mimosa or Ploughed Under, had to be told. This one she would call Kohila, for the beautiful curly-headed child who first came to Dohnavur in 1913, then had to be exiled for a while. Kohila was darling but had a spitfire temper. Once she had refused to share her room, clinging to it like a tiger. But once in Christ, no one shared more or worked harder. Soon she had been singing the little workers’ song:
I scrub my pots, I scrub my pans,
I scrub my brasses and my cans,
I sweep and scrub each red floor tile
Till I can see it smile.
And as I scrub I feel so gay
It might be my own Coming-Day;
For work is such a jolly thing
It makes one want to sing.11
Maturity of several more years brought Kohila real passion:
Give me a passionate passion for souls,
Give me a pity that yearns,
Give me the love that loves unto death,
Give me the fire that burns,
Give me, O Lord, to be fervent in prayer,
Pouring out all for the lost;
Give me to pray in the Conqueror’s Name,
Spirit of Pentecost.12
Kohila grew into a woman of great commitment to Christ. Few worked harder. She had become a head nurse at the Place of Healing. It was the custom at Dohnavur to deco-rate a person’s room with flowers on her Coming Day. Kohila had always relished this gesture. One of her best friends was soon to have a Coming Day. Up in the Gray Jungle, Kohila knew of gorgeous purple flowers, extra precious because they grew on a high rocky slope and were difficult to get. As she climbed after them, she slipped and fell, and at the age of twenty-eight, Kohila was dead.
Arulai consoled Amy, “You must press the love of God close against yourself. That’s the only way to buffer the pain of this dreadful loss.”
Yes, Amy had to write this story called Kohila. In it she also wrote more extensively than she ever had before of spiritual training. “The thing the devil most fears is prayer!”13 she insisted, never neglecting her favorite weapon.
But necessity taken care of, Amy’s strength would wane again. And worse, her pain would increase. On November 9, 1937—her special anniversary day of coming to India back in 1895—she was too much in pain to see anyone. Still, she gave God thanks when Mary Mills, her “perfect nurse,” said everyone in the Fellowship prayed for Amy in the House of Prayer. It was a time like that when she worried most about her successors. Oh yes, the Webb-Peploe brothers and May Powell were in place. Of them she prayed on November 14, 1937, “And once more I thank Thee for those who are doing everything so perfectly now.”14 But the three were physicians—and Europeans. Amy firmly believed Europeans should be behind the scenes, never in front. “India can be best reached by Indians,”15 she had always maintained. But where was the Indian leadership?
There should have been little concern in her mind. After Ponnammal passed away, Arulai was the natural choice for Indian leadership. In Ploughed Under, published in 1934, Amy declared of Arulai, “She has shared in every part of the work from the beginning.…To me no word so perfectly describes her as the great word loyal. Her faithful heart has never swerved.…”16
For many years, Amy was certain that Arulai was to be the eventual leader of the women’s side of the work at Dohnavur. Her Tamil was good. Her English was good. She read the New Testament and the Septuagint version of the Old Testament in Greek. She was very discerning of the qualities of Sitties and Accals. And she had compassion. The only question was her health, and it had begun to fail in 1935. Though Arulai seemed to bounce back, Amy was worried. And before the year 1938 was out, Arulai’s valiant younger sister, Mimosa, died.
AMY FIRMLY BELIEVED EUROPEANS SHOULD BE BEHIND THE SCENES, NEVER IN FRONT.
“Not yet fifty years old,” grieved an anxious Amy.
Then in the early days of 1939, Arulai’s health failed again. It was not languor, nor weakness, but a precipitous decline. Soon she, too, was an invalid. Amy and Arulai sent letters back and forth. Ironically, the doctors advised against either one visiting the other because of their fragile health. Yet it was Amy who reassured the doctors, “Be at rest about Arulai. She is perhaps the most precious thing I have on earth.…She has been the very joy of my heart, my utterly loyal child, and she is in His Hands who loves her more than I do.…It is the Trust of the Unexplained.…”17
When Arulai became gravely ill, Amy asked of her nurse, “Tell her that after I see His Face the first face I shall want to see will be hers, and for ever and for ever we shall be together again.…”18
On May 24, 1939, word came to Amy that Arulai was with Christ. Amy called all of Arulai’s friends to her room and hugged them one by one. Tears were streaming down her face, but she assured them they were tears of joy. Because Amy was too feeble to attend Arulai’s funeral in God’s Garden, Arulai’s nephew, Rajappan, stayed in Amy’s room to comfort her. Together they read the Book of Revelation and the magnificent portion of The Pilgrim’s Progress where Christian enters the Celestial City.
AMY WISHED FERVENTLY FOR HER OWN “PERFECTION.”
“What glory Arulai has entered!” enthused Rajappan, understanding that Amy’s tears really were of joy.
“Perfection,” murmured Amy. It was no surprise that Amy wished fervently for her own “perfection.”