Who Was Amy Carmichael?
THE SUN HAD BARELY RISEN when Amy Carmichael heard someone outside the bungalow to which she’d returned in the night after a year’s absence. Stepping to the door, she saw a tense-looking woman with a small girl at her side. Amy invited them in.
Glancing around, the woman quickly explained that seven-year-old Preena had turned up the previous evening, having escaped a nearby Hindu shrine. Although she’d sheltered this unknown child overnight, she said, “I would not have dared keep her an hour longer. If you had not been here, I would have returned her to the temple.” Pushing the girl toward Amy, the woman hurried away.
The child instinctively sensed that finding Amy Carmichael was a turning point. Fifty years later Preena recalled, “The first thing she did was to put me on her lap and kiss me…. From that day she became my mother, body and soul.” Amy, however, did not immediately grasp the moment’s significance; she did not realize she had just found her life’s vocation.
For four years, with a married British missionary couple, the Walkers, Amy had travelled by bullock cart throughout Tirunelveli and Travancore, in what are now the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Four young Indian women had joined them. The group would camp several weeks at some chosen spot, making evangelistic excursions to surrounding villages. It was during one such mission in March 1901 that they stopped at Pannaivilai, just in time for Preena to find them there.
The seven-year-old told Amy she’d run away before, sensing that temple dances led to something ugly. She had found her home, twenty miles distant, in three days. But temple women had tracked her down, and her mother, fearing divine vengeance, had handed her over. Back inside guarded temple walls, the women had punished Preena with hot iron brands. Now she stated she would stay with Amy forever.
Mr. Walker made inquiries in the village to verify the child’s story, and soon several women identifying themselves as servants of the gods arrived at Pannaivilai to reclaim her. A crowd gathered, but when Preena refused to go with them the people dispersed.
Preena began telling her new mother what went on in the temple – “things that darkened the sunlight,” wrote Amy. “It was impossible to forget those things. Wherever we went after that day we were constrained to gather facts about what appeared a great secret traffic in the souls and bodies of young children.”
Amy and one of her Indian comrades camped at the edge of a temple village to glean information. With her dark hair and eyes, Amy had only to darken her skin with coffee to pass as Indian when she and Ponnammal mingled with an evening throng of pilgrims. “We discovered nothing by asking questions. To ask was to close every door. We learned by quietly sharing as much as we could in the life of the people, by listening, not by questioning.” They found what Amy described as a fine net thrown over the land. “And the net is alive: it can feel and it can hold.”
The two learned that poverty or shame could drive a young mother – or a widow with no hope of finding her daughter a husband – to sell her child to a temple. Or parents might offer an infant in exchange for spiritual merit. Once “wedded to the gods,” little girls were trained in temple chores and elaborate dances. But they also became sexual slaves to serve the lusts of priests and worshippers.
To explain the complexities of Hinduism, Amy quoted Sir Monier Williams: “It has its highly spiritual and abstract side, suited to the metaphysical philosopher; its practical and concrete side, suited to the man of affairs and the man of the world; its aesthetic and ceremonial side, suited to the man of poetic feeling and imagination.” Yet it also included “the most grotesque forms of idolatry and the most degrading varieties of superstition.”
Amy wrote to supporters in England, hinting at the sexual abuse disguised as religion, but her reports were rebuffed as exaggeration. She felt desperate. “The thing that we wanted to do appeared to be impossible. It was all disappointment, and never a little one saved.”
“At last a day came when the burden grew too heavy for me; and then it was as though the tamarind trees about the house were not tamarind, but olive, and under one of those trees our Lord Jesus knelt, and he knelt alone. And I knew that this was his burden, not mine. It was he who was asking me to share it with him, not I who was asking him to share it with me.”
AMY WAS BORN in Ireland on December 16, 1867, the first child of Catherine and David Carmichael, whose family owned the mills in the coastal village of Millisle. “Blueness of sea that looked happy, grayness of sea that looked anxious, greenness of sea that looked angry – these are my first memories of color,” Amy would write.
A Christian revival that swept the region in 1859 affected Catherine and David, and by extension their children. Amy’s earliest memory was that “after the nursery light had been turned low and I was quite alone, I used to smooth a little place on the sheet, and say aloud, but softly, to our Father, ‘Please come and sit with me.’” It was at bedtime, too, that she absorbed songs and stories. When her mother said one night that Jesus answers prayer, inspiration struck three-year-old Amy: before falling asleep, she prayed for her brown eyes to turn blue. Next morning, she eagerly mounted a chair before the mirror – and was astounded by brown eyes staring back. She ran to report the unanswered request. Perhaps her mother said the sensible words, or else they simply spoke themselves in her mind: “Isn’t no an answer?”
Young Amy could be stubborn. “The will of a child can be like steel,” she reminisced of an occasion when she refused to deliver soup to poor neighbors. “My mother did not know what to do with me, for I would not give in, and was not at all sorry.” As Mrs. Carmichael prepared to take the soup, Amy glimpsed her “reflected in the mirror. And then I found myself looking not at her hands tying on her bonnet, but at her face. Suddenly something melted inside me. In one moment I was in her arms.”
Catherine passed on to her children a love for all living things. Like her, Amy hated cruelty, and her first memory of feeling fury was on seeing another child torment a frog.
Naturally, lively interaction with four brothers and two sisters formed Amy’s character. One evening the returning Carmichael parents were horrified by the sight of Amy leading two brothers along the edge of the roof. Another time she and the same brothers took a rowboat onto Strangford Lough, where tides are said to be among the strongest in the world. Amy steered while the other two rowed, but when the seaward current grabbed the boat, their efforts were powerless. “Sing!” the boys commanded. Amy’s song caught the attention of the coast guard, who sped to the children’s rescue.
Amy’s escapades continued after she was sent to a Yorkshire boarding school at age twelve, and she was often in trouble. Yet it was here that she experienced her conversion, one day during silence in chapel. Although she had always trusted Jesus’ love, resting in it as in her mother’s arms, “I had not understood that there was something more to do, something that may be called coming to him, or opening the door to him, or giving oneself to him,” she said later. “During those quiet few minutes, in his great mercy the Good Shepherd answered the prayers of my mother and father … and drew me, even me, into his fold.”
Around this time financial difficulties hit the Carmichael mills, and Amy was called home from school. Then on April 12, 1885, David Carmichael died of pneumonia. He was fifty-four.
Amy, now seventeen, supported her mother by homeschooling the youngest children. One of her sisters recalled, “If anybody asked me what were the strongest impressions Amy made on me in her youth, I think I would say – her enthusiasms. She would kindle so quickly to anything that promised the betterment of the poor or unhappy. She was fired by the hope that socialism presented when she first read about it.”
One Sunday the Carmichaels passed a shabbily dressed woman on the street, weighed down with bundles. “We had never seen such a thing in Presbyterian Belfast,” Amy said later. On impulse, she and her brothers turned to help the woman. But when other churchgoers passed by, Amy “felt crimson” with embarrassment. Just then, words from First Corinthians “flashed as it were through the gray drizzle: ‘Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble … the fire shall try every man’s work.’ I knew something had happened that had changed life’s values. Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal.”
Amy started gathering local children in her family’s home on Sunday afternoons; and in 1888 she oversaw construction of a metal hall for outreach to Belfast mill girls. With no money for the project, she prayed – and funds came. Trusting God’s provision became her norm. The hall, seating five hundred, opened in January 1889 and is still in use 130 years later. Amy dubbed it The Welcome, although privately she called it the “tin tabernacle.”
Starting in 1888, Amy attended several Keswick Conventions. Founded in 1875, the organization’s purpose was to deepen spiritual life, and Amy met sincere Christians at the yearly conference, including evangelist Dwight L. Moody, Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission, and Quaker Robert Wilson, a Keswick Convention founder now in his sixties, who soon became a close friend of the Carmichael family.
At age twenty-one, Amy moved to England, joining a mission to Manchester factory workers. She took a room in the slum, but her health suffered, and Wilson invited her to join his household in Keswick. She assumed she would support him the rest of his life. However on January 13, 1892, she distinctly heard the words, “Go ye,” which she understood as a call to overseas mission.
During the following months, as she regained her health, Amy studied the Bible and discussed mission with Wilson. “Thee must never say, thee must never even let thyself think, ‘I have won that soul for Christ,’” he told her one day, stopping the carriage by a slate quarry. “There was one who asked a stonebreaker at work by the roadside, ‘Friend, which blow broke the stone?’ And the stonebreaker answered, ‘The first one, and the last one, and every one between.’” Recalling his story years later, Amy added, “The joy of the winner and helper of souls is something apart from every other joy, but it is tarnished the moment the I comes in.”
Eight months after hearing the call to foreign missionary work, Amy moved to London for training at China Inland Mission headquarters. The organization’s doctor ruled that her health was too poor for the conditions in China, so in March 1893 she sailed for an outpost in Japan instead. Her fifteen-month sojourn there taught her some valuable lessons, such as the importance of wearing local dress. She would never forget the challenge of a Japanese man who asked her to show him Jesus’ way of life being lived.
Excruciating headaches forced her to leave in 1894 and she returned to Britain. Then a letter invited her to India. In October 1895, twenty-seven-year-old Amy set sail once more, this time for good. She would never see Britain or Ireland again. When she died in January 1951, at eighty-three, she had spent more than fifty-five years in her adopted country.
AFTER PREENA’S UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL, Amy continued to evangelize. Nicknamed “Elf,” Preena held a special place in Amy’s heart: “As evening by evening we returned from work, there was a child’s loving welcome, little loving arms were round one’s neck. I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled.”
The missionaries’ base was Dohnavur, a rather desolate village established by Europeans seventy years earlier. The Walkers chose the cottages and bungalow, and the group settled into this compound, encircled by a low mud wall and “haunted by flocks of noisy goats,” according to Amy. She was better impressed by the view. “Framed between red roofs and foliage, there are far blue glimpses of mountains … scarped with bare crags, which in the early morning are sometimes pink, and in the evening, purple. But the time to see the mountains in their glory is when the southwest monsoon is flinging its masses of cloud across to us. Then the mountains, waking from the lazy sleep of the long, hot months, catch the clouds on their pointed fangs, toss them back and harry them, wrap themselves up in robes of them, and go to sleep again.”
At Dohnavur, more little girls began arriving. In March 1904, an Indian pastor brought thirteen-day-old Amethyst – a special victory, as her mother had been about to sell her to a shrine. It was a shock when the little one died soon after. Amy later learned that young widows were often mistreated. Amethyst had been born after her father’s death.
By June there were seventeen young girls in Dohnavur. But during the next half year, two more infants died. After an epidemic took the last of these, Amy wrote:
When we went back to the empty nursery, and folded up the baby’s little things and put them away, we felt as if we could not begin all over again. But we were shown that what we had been through was only meant to make us the more earnestly persist. So we set apart the sixth of each month, the date of our little Indraneela’s passing, as a prayer day for the temple children, that they may be found and redeemed from temple service; and for ourselves that we may love them according to the love of the Lord. Sometimes in faraway places, upon that very day God has signally worked for the deliverance of a little one in danger, and always he has met us and renewed our strength. We have never had another Indraneela, but our empty nursery has been filled to overflowing.
When Amy realized her growing family needed a fulltime mother, she struggled to reconcile homemaking with her missionary calling. “Could it be right to turn from so much that might be of profit … and become just nursemaids?” Then to her mind sprang a picture of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. “He took a towel – the Lord of Glory did that,” she wrote. “Is it the bondservant’s business to say which work is large and which is small, which unimportant and which worth doing? The question answered itself, and was not asked again.”
And so Amy – now “Amma” to a houseful of daughters – experienced all the joys and anxieties of motherhood that she had thought would never be hers. To a Tamil proverb, “Children tie the mother’s feet,” she added, “we let our feet be tied for love of Him whose feet were pierced.”
After Amy’s decision to devote herself to the children, many more came. As keenly as the three deaths had been grieved, every arrival was celebrated. And since birthdates were rarely known, “coming days” were acknowledged each year. In 1906 the family grew to seventy, and by 1913 that number had doubled.
“With the coming of each new child we learned a little more of the private ways of this dreadful underworld of India,” Amy wrote. “Sometimes we felt as though the things that we had seen and heard had killed forever the laughter in us. But children must have laughter round about them. Some guests to Dohnavur see nothing but the laughter side, the joy of flowers and babies; but a few see deeper.”
As more children were rescued, more housing was needed. The very day that Amy suggested brickmaking in Dohnavur, to build a fire- and termite-proof nursery, a gift of money arrived – the exact amount needed. The other pressing need was for consecrated women to care for the little girls. Finding such women was a challenge. In Amy’s words, “The care of young children is not among the ‘honorable’ occupations of South India,” and some early helpers left more quickly than they’d come. Such disappointments convinced Amy that the team needed a clear commitment “to unite and fortify them.”
Ponnammal was among the first to join Amy. Mabel Wade, a Yorkshire nurse, came in 1907. By 1916 seven young Indian women, including Preena, had committed themselves. In March of that year they formed a Sisterhood of the Common Life, named for a fourteenth-century group of brothers who, according to Thomas à Kempis, “humbly imitated the manner of the apostolic life, and having one heart and mind in God, brought every man what was his own into the common stock.” Love, born of dedication to God, was the cord that bound the Indian and British sisters.
Perhaps Dohnavur’s “times of vital silence” stem from the Quaker worship of Amy’s months with Robert Wilson. Childhood memories of long Sunday sermons – when she’d devised tricks to combat boredom – played a role too, for she kept Dohnavur worship brief, commenting, “never forget that the human should not be drawn out like a piece of elastic and held so.”
Uppermost for Amy was guiding her children and coworkers toward Christ. She recalled how lonely she’d been when first in India, after making her final break with home and family. When mail arrived from England one day, “she ran to her bedroom, locked the door, knelt by the bed, and – read the letters aloud, one by one, to her heavenly Father.” Sharing the memory with a young Dohnavur sister, Amy said, “Treat him like that. Make him your chief love and friend.”
Over time, Amy framed a “pattern” for the members of the fellowship:
My Vow. Whatsoever thou sayest unto me, by thy grace I will do it.
My Constraint. Thy love, O Christ, my Lord.
My Confidence. Thou art able to keep that which I have committed unto thee.
My Joy. To do thy will, O God.
My Discipline. That which I would not choose, but which thy love appoints.
My Prayer. Conform my will to thine.
My Motto. Love to live; live to love.
My Portion. The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance.
She described the blessings that flowed from allowing this pattern to shape one’s life: “We were first shown the crystal quality of loyalty, for our prayer-life together was to become the chief thing with us all. And it meant depth of conviction about certain matters, and singleness of mind…. It meant peacefulness, too, and … a spontaneous gaiety.”
Amy made “one careful rule: the absent must be safe with us. Criticism, therefore, was taboo.” The team understood; they were not to gossip against each other. “Learn to be a deep well,” Amy told her Dohnavur family. “A deep well doesn’t talk.” More than once, noticing tension between members, she stopped a prayer meeting until trust was restored.
IN 1911 Amy learned that temples took boys as well as girls; boys were also in moral danger in dramatic companies. Seven years later the first little boy arrived in Dohnavur. By 1926, seventy or eighty had come. Two British men joined the Fellowship and led the boys’ home for twenty years. Indian men eventually joined as well.
Amy suffered much during her last twenty years. One night in October 1931 she fell into an open pit, and she never fully recovered from her injuries. In the end she rarely left her room. Yet that suffering bore rich fruit as she continued to guide her community. Fifteen books went to print during those years.
Looking back in 1937, Amy wrote, “When the fellowship was first formed many called it utopian to expect that as more joined us we could ever continue to be of one mind in a house. And yet we saw vital unity in our God’s pattern for a fellowship of Christians. Would he have set an impossible pattern?” And thinking toward the future, she said, “When decisions have to be made, don’t look back and wonder what I would have done. Look up, and light will come to do what our Lord and Master would have you do.”
Dohnavur Fellowship cared for boys until 1984. It still makes a home for girls. Although dedicating children to temples for prostitution was outlawed as early as 1924, the practice persists in some parts of the country, as do the economic and social pressures that lead desperate families to give up their children. As in Amy’s time, children at Dohnavur are raised to serve God through service to others. Many move on to higher education, marry, or find jobs. Some become Dohnavur coworkers. As of 2019, all members are Indian.
THE FOLLOWING TOPICALLY ARRANGED SELECTIONS from Amy Carmichael’s writings are merely an introduction; they should inspire readers to read her books. She authored thirty-five, many of which are still in print. Her first, From Sunrise Land (letters from Japan), came out in 1895. Things As They Are (1903), Overweights of Joy (1906), Beginning of a Story (1908), Lotus Buds (1909), Gold Cord (1932), and Though the Mountains Shake (1943) chronicle the Dohnavur venture. Then there are biographies: Walker of Tinnevelly (1916) tells of the missionary who trained Amy in Tamil and introduced her to Indian ways; Ponnammal (1918), Mimosa (1924), The Widow of the Jewels (1928), Ploughed Under (1934), and Kohila (1939) are stories of Dohnavur sisters; Ragland (1922) is about an early British missionary; and Raj (1926) depicts an Indian Robin Hood with whom Amy had several encounters. If (1938) and His Thoughts Said … His Father Said … (1941) offer answers to questions about life issues. Rose from Briar (1933), Gold by Moonlight (1935), and Windows (1937) offer meditations on nature – or on uplifting quotes and Bible verses – for readers dealing with grief or pain. A book of poetry set to music, Wings (1960), and a book of excerpts from her letters, Candles in the Dark (1981), were published after her death.
The passages in this little book have been chosen to help guide readers in discerning their own call to follow Jesus, and to challenge and encourage them to remain true in the all-or-nothing way of discipleship that Amy modeled. Like any disciple, Amy experienced discouragement, animosity, betrayal, and failure – along with quiet, decisive victories. Her hard-earned insights and wisdom can strengthen believers in the battles we face today.
Carolyn Kurtz, a member of the Bruderhof community, has compiled and edited two other titles in this series: The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus, by Dorothy Day, and The Scandal of Redemption: When God Liberates the Poor, Saves Sinners, and Heals Nations, by Oscar Romero.