The beginning of the Dohnavur Fellowship (part 3 of 3)
Asingam: ‘She always stopped dead’
She once all but told of something done to other children before the tali (jewel) was given to them, but stopped. It was what she did not say rather than what she said, that drove me to try to do something to save children like M.934 With these few dramatic words, we know that Amy knew about the secret things happening in the temples. The child who told Amy everything that happened with the little children was so shocked to recall the stings and bad things she had seen and heard that she could not even go on. It was ‘asingam’, which in Tamil means ‘unclean’.
The same letter goes on with details of her long research and we can admire her profound and detailed notes of what she discovered:
I found too that even the modified English life lived with English fellow missionaries prevented getting at the core of anything, so I often left them and went away alone with one or two India women and lived almost like a Tamil. […] After May 1901 I wrote down and dated everything as it happened.
She knew:
[T ]hat the training of a child, however, all but ensures its moral degradation; a year or less, of that special training is sufficient to obliterate all look of innocence from the face of a little girl.
Of this ‘under-life’ – as Amy called it – and all the evidences, she had seen and heard of this devadasi life, she came to the conclusion that ‘nobody can deny it, it is sanctioned by the temple, as an integral part of the Hindu life’.935
‘In India certainly youth is the time for spiritual decision’;936 this surely could be said from the first girl who was led to Amy and sought refuge with her. After Amy died, that girl wrote:
When I first came, it was the early morning of March 7th, 1901, about 6.30 a.m. Our precious Ammai was having her morning chota. When she saw me, the first thing she did was to put me on her lap and kiss me.
933. This expression here used by way of comparison with the expression of Stanley when he condemned the slave trade in Africa. On seeing the traffic of captured men, women and children to be sold into slavery on the roads in the interior of Africa, he called these roads ‘hell’s highway’. In Mrs Mackay, Mackay of Uganda (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1891), 89. 934. See ‘First contact with Temple children’, (PRONI D/4061/34/1, 1897), 4.
935. In ‘First contact with Temple children’ (PRONI D/4061/34/1), 62. Here Amy explains the word devadasi as ‘The one at the god’s feet, hence his slave’. Devadasi life was not seen as sin. The sin lies in any subsequent ‘dishonour of the family honour’ (p. 10).
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I thought, ‘My mother used to put me on her lap and kiss me – who is this person who kisses me like my mother’? From that day she became my mother, body and soul.937 Little by little, Amy discovered the secrets of the immoral, cruel devadasi system. She was aghast to learn of the hideous, secret underground traffic in little children given or sold to the Hindu temples for the purpose of prostitution. For the children there was not any possibility to escape from this cruel and immoral way of life. One day while she was staying in a hostel, she heard loud voices and cries. This led her straight to a child in danger, ‘and also opened our eyes to one of the sources for which we were searching. The child was saved.’938 Many influential people in India, even missionaries, told her that what she said about the children was pure imagination, and very few were in sympathy. Then Amy writes:
Sometimes it was as if I saw the Lord Jesus Christ kneeling alone as He knelt long ago under the olive trees; – the trees were tamarind trees now, the tamarinds I see as I look up from this writing. And the only thing one who cared could do, was to go softly and kneel down beside Him so that He would not be alone in His sorrow over the little children.939 After Amy died in 1951 the deliverance of these children, their spiritual salvation, and their training to serve others were still the main objectives of the DF:940
Touch a Temple child and you touch the heart of the system which has only one rival in the whole world for its subjugating power. No wonder the devil fights.941 One pastor’s wife, assisting Amy in the salvation of a little child, wrote:
I never knew how very difficult it would be to save these children until I began to try. Then I despaired. I found satan at every point. I nearly gave up hope. I began to think it has gone on so long – this traffic – it will go on to the end. Who can stop it? […] God give it to us to persist.942 It was in Pannaivilai one day, having just returned the day before to that place, that Pearl-Eyes sought refuge, and ‘escaped from the clutches of the gods’.943 That child would definitely change the course of Amy’s life. In her own words:
It was the evening of the eighth of March, 1901, when we, who were back in Great lake again, walked together, singing and playing on tambourines and cymbals, through the palms to the shore of the water which gave the place its name. From the temple nearby, two days before, a little girl had come to us, the first of the company of children undreamed of then. We had been so carefully directed in our journey from Dohnavur near the Western Ghauts, to our old headquarters on the plains of Vishnu’s-heaven, that we were there just in time to shelter little Pearl-Eyes when she escaped from the clutches of the gods. She was the first child in Southern India, so far as is known, to escape like that. Thank God, she was not the last.944
937. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 114.
938. Amma’s Book, 48. Amy adds: ‘The child is in heaven now. It was she who said, “Ring the joy-bells for me”. […] The long happy friendship with Stira Annachie […] began in that cowshed, for the child he came racing in his car from Neyoor to help was the child of whom we heard that night, and in the mercy of God were able to redeem from the priest who bought her from her father.’ 939. Amma’s Book, 48.
940. See B.M.G. Trehane, The Timothys. Schoolgirls in South India (London: Lutterworth Press, 1958), 102. 941. Trehane, The Timothys, 258.
942. Trehane, The Timothys, 290.
943. Ploughed Under, 108.
944. Ploughed Under, 108.
That time Amy saw further and thought of that other door:
Behold a door opened in heaven, and He whom the prisoner of Patmos saw when he looked through that door, He who sat on the throne, the Saviour of the world, had said, ‘Let a door be opened on earth, a door out of the temples of India, and suffer the little children to come unto Me’. And it was so.945 Pearl-Eyes had been sold by her mother to the temple, and there she was prepared and taught all the degradation of temple prostitution. She retold the girl’s words:
Pearl-Eyes heard she was to ‘be married to the gods’, ‘tied to the stone’. Terrified, she flew to the temple, slipped past the Brahmans, crossed the court and stood before the god in the dim half-darkness of the shrine, clasped her hands – she showed us how – prayed to it, pleaded, ‘Let me die’! Oh, let me die! barely seven years old, and she prayed, ‘Oh, let me die’!946 Twice she had run away only to be caught and carried back, beaten severely, and subjected to the terrible temple perversion of that Hindu temple. Finally, as she was running away again one night, she met an understanding woman who brought her to Amy, who gathered the child up into her lap and picked up a ragged doll and gave it to the child to play with. It was then Amy became fully aware of the evils of the temple prostitution practice. Pearl-Eyes talked freely, as she played with the doll. She told Amy things that they did to her body in the temple, demonstrating them using the doll. The date was 07 March 1901. Never Amy could forget that day nor the story the child had told her. ‘The child told me many things. These things burned in me.’947
The stories Amy heard from Pearl-Eyes filled her with horror and made her more determined than ever to bring down the horrible industry of sex trafficking.948 What she had heard from an Indian woman about the traffic of children shocked her and gave her a vision:
‘They are sold like little kids. […] I have gone from mission to mission asking if nothing can be done for them, the broken things – but no one can do anything.’ When she said this, two or three of us were with her by the roadside near a wide expanse of moonlit water; the hills were in the mist behind. As we looked across the water we seemed to see the form of One walking there in the mist, seeking these young lost things who had been sold as little kids. And He was quite alone. […] Then we promised her that we would not refuse such Broken Things if she brought them to us. And so began what would grow into a special work, and we thanked God, as we thought of those streets round that temple, that we had been given that open ear that evening.949 ‘This, then is one look into Hinduism, this ghastly whitened sepulchre, within which are dead men’s bones.’950 Amy’s heart was touched severely hearing of so many young lives being so polluted, and in the name of religion! So many grew up, boys and girls, accustomed to seeing and being part of immorality shielded in the temples with a divine cloak. It made her heart sick and faint. Could she tell everything in letters home? Telling the people of these innocent children used as ‘servants to do devil’s work’ in a place where sin is deified? ‘The whole truth can never be told.’951 But the world had to know, for ‘God’s Truth
945. Ploughed Under, 109.
946. Things As They Are, 166.
947. Ponnamal, 34.
948. For the whole story of Pearl-Eyes, see Things As They Are, chapter XIX.
949. Gold Cord, 339–340.
950. Things As They Are, 190.
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needs no painting’.952 Amy felt that God directed her to a special work, ‘and I understood and knew that for the first time I was inside India, the real India’.953
The child stayed with the band. Amy’s heart was touched. Coming home there was ‘a child’s loving welcome, little loving arms were round one’s neck’. In a very remarkable sentence, she gives us an inside glimpse into her own heart. It goes as follows:
I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled; and I remember, too, thanking God that it was not wrong to be comforted by the love of a child.954 Was her silent desire to be married and to become a mother herself silenced here by God himself, showing her to become the ‘mother’ of this child and, in line with this, to become the Amma (mother) of the Dohnavur Fellowship? She would be the cause to see ‘the birth’ of many children in India for the Kingdom of God and guide them in a motherly way into the arms of Christ. We must not forget that at in that time Ponnamal was a great help to Amy. As an Indian woman she knew what was really going on in the thoughts and the deeds and how the laws of the country were evaded and the children polluted. She even explained the mysteries of the Indian marriage market to Amy. In Amy’s own words, Ponnamal was one who ‘would have gone with me to the mouth of hell, and did, when I had to go there’.955 Thomas Walker called Ponnamal ‘The Princess’, because of the ‘stately way she carried about her with all her gentleness’.956
After the arrival of Preena the itinerating work of Amy came to an end. The decision to stay in Dohnavur was actuated by the coming of a girl from a nearby village of Dohnavur to seek refuge at the bungalow where she temporarily lived. The villagers wanted the girl back but Amy hid herself with the girl in the tower of the village church where they slept for one night. The girl did not want to go back to the Hindu religion now she had found the Saviour. Meanwhile, Thomas Walker was appointed to teach divinity students, and for their sake the Walker family settled in Dohnavur and it was decided that Amy, too, would stay there. And then one by one the babies were brought in and the family took shape. More children came and the little family in Dohnavur grew. Amy felt the power of the evil one in the reactions from the temples or from relatives of the rescued children. Several references in her Bible show that she wrestled with God for them. In the margin of Psalm 79:2 she wrote: ‘She left unknown on Nov. 20.1902 and came to us at Nov. 21.1902. Hallelujah’.957
Dohnavur, this God-given place, was the place where he had brought Amy. Why to a place, half in the bush, which appeared to be desert? In this place was found an abundance of water,958 a prerequisite for life to live there with hundreds of people all in need of water every day. Here the DF would live and grow year by year; the desert reshaped into a paradise-like environment and the water of life flowed from there in various directions. As the years passed, land was bought, piece by piece, resulting in the
952. Things As They Are, 131.
953. Ponnamal, 35.
954. Ponnamal, 33.
955. Ponnamal, 36.
956. Ponnamal, 42.
957. In Amy’s Bible, next to Psalm 79:2: ‘They have given. […] The flesh of Thy saints unto the heaven’. 958. Amy wrote, ‘So this gift was a boon. Even in Dohnavur it was to prove a great help, for the underground water is not found everywhere. […] Without the faintest thought of what was prepared for us, we were led here and established here – here, where this sub-artesian basin had been fashioned, who knows how long ago’ (Though the Mountains Shake, 202–203). present-day settlement. In 1907, after several girls had been baptised, the dark one (the devil) took revenge and a serious outbreak of dysentery followed. All hands were needed in Dohnavur to assist, help and nurse the sick, and nobody could prevent 10 babies from dying. There was oppression from various sides. About what had really happened, Amy was never clear. Amy herself was ill; there was the Neyyoor epidemic, a deadly kind of dysentery. Sixteen babies were ill, and more were sickening and some of them died. Distances seemed immense those days. In Dohnavur also many got ill and an English girl, training to be a nurse, was unequal to the strain and had to leave. Did not the Lord hear their prayers, they wondered in Dohnavur? A small sentence gives us perhaps more light: ‘some whom we trusted snapped, and the staff we had leaned upon splintered and pierced our hand’, and she continued:
A band of evil men (Christians in name, and therefore the more deceptive) all but wrecked everything by trying to injure the young convert girls who were helping Ponnamal. […] Another girl for whom we had waited hopefully drew back when she understood how unromantic our life really was. […] For Dagon is still on the throne. The Power that planned these labyrinthine corridors and halls, the Power these great structures represent, fought then, and still fights every inch of the ground with us.959 In 1906, Amy’s mother came to assist her for one year. ‘As for my mother, she would have gathered all India into her heart; for India’s imperilled children she had only one word, Welcome.’960 This was really a challenge for her mother, who was always willing to break new ground, just like her daughter. When the opportunity came for her to travel to India – she accompanied Mrs Walker who went back to India after a period of sickness and recuperation – she immediately settled things at home in Manchester and went on her journey. Her mother had always stood by Amy during her work in the Belfast and Manchester streets. Converted during the revival meetings held in Belfast in 1859, she had hoped to live for those in need and to help others to know the Lord. Due to her marriage with David Carmichael, she was a mother to her children and assisted in church work in Millisle. Amy about her mother says:
My mother lived like a bird in a cage, a nice cage but still a cage, and she must have remembered how she used to beat her wings against the bars for she never tried to hold me back from anything, even things that were dangerous.961 Catherine Carmichael went to the Lord on 14 July 1913. On 04 July, she had written a letter to Amy with the words at the beginning ‘My own most precious earthly possession’. Her last loving letter is from 10 July, and her last act was to post a cheque, which had been received for the Dohnavur work, to The Christian for transmission. Her friends in Wimbledon knew Mrs Carmichael as ‘the Beloved’. Amy heard this sad news on 17 July and on the morning of the next day she read, in Daily Light, the verse that had been her mother’s verse since 1885: ‘The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knowest them that trust in Him’. Amy had prayed that that verse might be given to her in those days and the Lord provided! Years later Amy wrote to the children:
When my mother passed on we made the Praise Room bright with lights and beautiful with flowers, and you all stood in the dark courtyard and then came into the shining room, and we sang together the most heavenly hymns we knew and were happy in her happiness.962 From Mrs Carmichael’s Wimbledon house the Dohnavur work was brought to the attention of the British people. That same year, Irene Streeter from Oxford became the first Home Secretary for the DF
959. Gold Cord, 59 and 61.
960. Ponnamal, 44.
961. See Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 11.
962. Fragments that Remain, 143.
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in the UK. She had visited Dohnavur in 1909.963 In these early years of the formation of the Fellowship Amy was often overworked, had to work day and night for the children, of whom several were sick, and the difficult times during the trial of Muttamal964 brought her to the end of her physical strength. In those difficult days she wrote many of her songs, which are sung in the House of Prayer to this very day. When Amy’s mother was in Dohnavur she saw that at times Amy was overworked:
Since we came a month ago, I can truthfully say she has scarcely had leisure even to eat. She is a busy mother, doctor, and nurse day and night. […] It is wonderful to me how her health stands it. Of course she is often pretty nearly worn out, but she recovers, and is as bright and vigorous as ever.965 Thomas Walker was one of the most valuable helpers for Amy, especially when lawsuits against her were brought from the temple side. Particularly in 1909 and 1910 a storm arose when in a court case representatives of a family ordered Amy to return a child – her name was Jewel – to them. The case was brought to the High Court in Madras. ‘The matter created a stir all over South India.’966 For some years, the child had to find a place to stay out of the hands of her iniquitous mother who wanted to dedicate her to the temple and therefore she was carried off to China for safety reasons. Walker with his excellent knowledge of Tamil and the judicial system in India made long journeys and spent many days pleading for the child. In his own diary, Walker wrote:
Heard that the girl was carried off forcibly yesterday after giving evidence in court. Now may God grant a mighty intervention! Left Dohnavur at midnight, with Vakil (lawyer) to Magistrate and Inspector of Police about girl’s abduction. Got private information that she is forcibly detained in K-, and after much hesitation [fearing it might do more harm than good] informed Magistrate of it. A man tried to send me off on false track, but we discovered it.967 During these days Amy knew ‘God is unto us a God of Deliverances’; for these words she wrote in the margin of a CIM book; another word from her on the same page says ‘Read again during weeks of tension about little Muttamal, July 1909’. She read repeatedly the words written by Emily Blatchley:968 ‘They that weep as though they weep not’, - not that they are not to weep; but there is for us in Jesus a power to live above the weeping; while the heart bleeds, to live as though it bled not; while the whole soul is shaken, as with an earthquake, by some trial from which there is no escape, for which there is no mitigation, still to be a comfort and steadfast help to those around. If God has denied the luxury, or taken it away, of a human sympathising heart to weep upon, there is still the secret chamber, where we may occasionally find, though alone, the relief of tears; and tears wept on Jesus’ bosom ought to be as great a relief as those shed in the arms of an earthly beloved; and surely they leave more power to go out and stand before others as though we wept not.969
963. See Gold Cord, 137 and 138.
964. See Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, chapter XIX.
965. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 139.
966. Gold Cord, 100.
967. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 325.
968. Emily Blatchley (1842–1874), CIM missionary. Belonged to the first group who went with Hudson Taylor on the Lammermuir Party in 1866 to China. She was the one who chaperoned the Taylor children after the death of Maria Taylor in 1870 back to England for their health and safety. In England, she was put in charge of the editorial work of the CIM Occasional Paper. Read more about her in Taylor, Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission Volume II (London: CIM, 1946 [1918]), 187–188, 233, 263.
969. These meditative words were written by Emily Blatchley of the words of 1 Corinthians 7:29–30, ‘They that weep as though they weep not’, in Save in the Arms of Jesus (p. 337), one of the books Amy had in her book box in 1898 during her itinerating work. The book is in the Dohnavur library.
In the margin of these words Amy wrote: ‘April 12.1909 until July 31.1909’. In December that year another friend wrote:
It is ten years ago this month, since poor A’s terrible ordeal began, and I have been going through it all again. You know what he was, what a splendid, brave, unselfish defender. How well I remember how he came with us day after day to that hot, crowded court, and how bravely he stood up for us; and not only that, but the long hours he gave to interviewing V. and going through papers, even our old milk bills and accounts, to prove that A’s father was not the Shepherd who supplied us with milk, as he claimed to be [a point of importance in the defence]. What Mr Walker was to us I can never say.970 Even on holiday in Switzerland, Walker was working for the children in Dohnavur and their welfare. On 14 June 1911 he wrote to Amy:
All who know anything know that you have been fighting a righteous cause. If we suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are we. I need say no more. Let us continue in prayer. If anyone opens my letters, which I don’t anticipate, they shall have good advice. We know we have done our best to save a little one from evil. If things seem to have gone against us, we can do no more; and it is by no means an invariable rule that truth and right triumph in the law courts of earth. They will triumph, however, in God’s tribunal; and we shall yet praise Him, when He manifests His kingdom and glory.971 In Walker’s own words, he was accustomed to having ‘to look round the corners’.972 He had so identified himself with Amy’s work in Dohnavur that in his last year on earth he wrote to friends in England, 05 February 1912, to look for a lady who could teach the children. It also gives us a nice insight into the standard of education Amy realised in Dohnavur:
I am writing now to ask you to be on the lookout, during your travels, for a lady suited to take educational charge of ---’s children. God may lead you to just the very one. You know our position as to God’s Word, and thorough evangelical principles, as also that spirituality is of the first importance. […] They [the children] know far more than I was ever taught – even the tiniest – about flowers, insects, birds, etc., and are very much alive on the observation side of things. I consider it a unique sphere for one who loves children and is a real educationalist. And there a great possibilities of the children’s becoming a real missionary force.973 From 1895 to 1925, the Church of England supported Amy’s work in Tinnevelly and Dohnavur. After that time, the work continued in the faith mission style, ‘and we had long since learned to set no limits to the dealings of the Lord with His beloved’.974 Nurseries had to be built, and every time the builders were astonished by the plans Amy had for what way they had to build: they had to be homes for a big family. All the bricks were the results of prayer and the masons looked at the money notes as if they had dropped from heaven, ‘as assuredly they had’.975 These were days of battle; Satan never gave up territory without resistance. From one of her fellow workers Amy received a book with the inscription: ‘Remembering battles together. February 9, 1912’.976 For the work in Dohnavur it had been and would
970. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 326.
971. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 438.
972. Walker of Tinnevelly, 327.
973. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 446. Here Amy left out her own name in this quotation.
974. Ponnamal, 102.
975. Nor Scrip, 10.
976. In G. Macauley Trevelyan, Garibaldi and The Thousand (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910). Amy wrote in this book the words of Garibaldi to his soldiers: ‘I promise you weariness, hardship and battles. But we will conquer or die.’ Then
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continue to be weariness, hardship and battles. She faced this reality and knew that only through ‘His Right Hand’ victory would be there for her and her fellow workers.
She gave all the love of her heart to the ‘precious’977 children. She loved them dearly; in her eyes she saw them as precious jewels for God’s service and as ‘Jewels for His coronet’:
We have been given a young, dear life [Star] to tend. And as the soft willow catkins are set round the fragile upright beauty of this lily of the valley, so would the softness of our protective love gather round the precious thing that is a new-born soul.978 Ever since the first little temple child had been led out of the temple house, on the sixth day of every month Amy and the other members of the Fellowship prayed that the burden of these children might be laid on hearts all over India. Every tract of country in India was prayed for by name, asking that in all the districts nurseries would come and ‘not in name only but in reality’ should be a home for these children.979 As we saw, Amy did not choose Dohnavur, neither did she make complete plans for the organisation of the DF. She was fully aware that the Fellowship was not in the mainstream of other organisations; they were blamed by others, and being different, were compared with others. In 1944 she wrote about the beginning of the Fellowship: ‘but I did not see far, as it were frame a policy. It just was so.’ At the back of the letter, we read: ‘1 Cor.4. 13 is exactly in Tamil. I have just read it as if for the first time.’980
‘When Jesus came to Dohnavur’
As the DF came into existence, the hand of God was felt in India.981 In 1891 Rev. R.J. Ward, a missionary from Madras, experienced renewal at the Keswick Convention in England. Back in India, prayer meetings were held to deepen the spiritual all across India and many missionaries were involved. In 1895 in Bombay the first Saturday of the month was set apart for prayer. In 1897 the World Student Christian Federation called for a day of prayer all over India, especially praying to God for an awakening. Rev. Ward started in 1902 a movement of prayer for missionaries of all denominations, and soon more than 800 were praying together. All over the world, prayer circulars were sent to pray for India, and Moody himself longed to see revival there before he died.982 At the 1902 Keswick Convention 5000 Christians agreed to form home prayer circles for the outpouring of the Spirit worldwide. On 29 June 1905, starting in Mukti (Ramabai’s home town), revival spread all over India. From Madras and further
(footnote 976 continues...)
she quotes these words of Jesus’s disciples: ‘We had done our utmost and had failed’. Then she continues: ‘They got not the land in possession through their own sword; neither was it their own arms that helped them; but Thy Right Hand and Thine Arm, and the light of Thy countenance; because Thou hast a favour unto Him’. These are annotated ‘Dohnavur 09 February 1912’.
977. Candles in the Dark, 84.
978. Ploughed Under, 140–141.
979. Cf. Amy’s words in the introduction of Warburton Booth, Take This Child, 2.
980. In a letter dated 31 March 1944. In the Dohnavur library; 1 Corinthians 4:13 goes as follows: ‘When slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like scum of the world, the refuse of all things’ (ESV).
981. For more on the revival in India see Duewel, Revival Fire, 214–252; H.S. Dyer, Revival in India: Years of the Right Hand of the Most High (London: Morgan and Scott, 1907).
982. He died in 1899. southward revival spread very fast across south India, to Coimbatore, Madurai, Nagercoil, Chitoor and other places. In Dohnavur many had prayed for revival. On 22 October 1906, ‘Jesus came to Dohnavur’:
At the close of the morning service, Amy was compelled to stop speaking, overwhelmed by the presence of God. It even became impossible to pray. One of the older children in the Boys’ School tried to pray, but he broke down, and so did the other children. They cried bitterly and prayed for forgiveness. Their sorrow spread to the women.983 Amy, who for so long already had prayed for her children that the Holy Spirit would really work in them, tells us:
It was so startling and so awful. […] I can use no other word, that details escape me. Soon the whole upper half of the church was on its face on the floor, crying to God, each boy and girl, man and woman, oblivious of all others. The sound was like the sound of waves or strong wind in the trees. No separate voice could be heard. […] I had never heard of such a thing as this among the Tamil people. Up in the north, of course, one knew that it had happened, but our Tamils are so stolid, so unemotional I had never imagined such a thing as this occurring.
The prayer went on for four hours:
They passed like four minutes. For two weeks life was apportioned for us much as it was for the apostles when they gave themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word. Everything else had to stand aside. Many weeks later Amy reported ‘that almost all of the children were truly converted ‘out and out’ and she added:
There are conversions in the village, and Christians were quickened to walk in newness of life. […] For all this we do praise God… We have seen just enough to make us very hungry to see more.984 In Lotus Buds Amy referred also to this revival time but her impression was that:
It was not the Great Revival for which we wait, but it was something most blessed in effect and abiding in result; and ever since the tone has been higher and the life deeper, so that there is something to which we can appeal confident of a quick response.985 During that time Thomas Walker was often involved in preaching in Mukti, at CMS stations in central India, Travancore and Kerala. A great awakening had come in central Kerala since 1892 with ‘usual accompaniments of confessions of sin, with great brokenness and weeping and public witnessing of faith in Christ’.986 The Mar Thoma Church invited Rev. Walker in 1902 to evangelise in Kerala. His ministry there brought great spiritual thirst and expectancy of revival for India. Concerning 1906, Rev. Walker reported:
This closing year has been in a very special sense, a year of grace for India. […] Congregation after congregation was bowed before the power of the Holy Spirit in deep conviction and confession of sin. At times, the solemnity and power were almost painful, and we were often in church till midnight. The people of a ‘revived’ congregation would follow us to the adjacent villages to give their testimonies there, and their testimonies did far more than our preaching.987
983. See W.L. Duewel, Revival Fire, 230.
984. In W.L. Duewel, Revival Fire, 230–231; Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 146–148.
985. Lotus Buds, 223.
986. See J.E. Orr, Evangelical Awakenings in India (Delhi: Masili Sahitya Santha, 1970), 88.
987. Orr, Evangelical Awakenings in India, 100.
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The Mar Thoma Church doubled in size in ten years. This was especially due to the work of Rev. Azariah of Dornakal, Hyderabad state, who led and moulded one of the most successful and spiritual movements to Christ that the church in India had ever witnessed.988 After Walker returned to his home station in the south, he wrote: ‘I have returned to the South to find that He has been working during my absence, both in Palamcottah and Dohnavur.’989 In Dohnavur the people stood firm. Amy writes:
After three months’ testing, the work abides and goes on apart from us. It seems to me that is a mark of the real thing. The meetings do not depend on us at all. The thing is of God.990 What happened in India was that God was answering the prayer first breathed at Keswick in 1898, when Pandita Ramabai attended the Keswick Convention, where they prayed for 200 000 Indian evangelists – 100 000 men and 100 000 women – to go through the whole country, every state, every city and every village to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. Before the end of the 19th century, a great number of missionaries in India had embraced Wesleyan ‘holiness’ and ‘higher life’ teachings on the baptism and gifts of the Spirit. The expectancy of the ‘last days’ outpouring of the Spirit grew more intense. What happened in India happened all over the world. Duewel called the first decade of the 20th century ‘the Revival Decade’.991 John F. Goucher, a Methodist minister from Baltimore, during a tour of India in 1912, remarked, ‘I heard more about the Holy Spirit in the time I was in India [it was a visit of a few months], than in thirty years from the preaching here in America’.992
Hidden jewels
‘The story of the beginning of the work among Temple children is very simple.’993 In this way Amy starts her short report of the beginning of the DF. During her itinerating work, she often came across temple children who were playing outside and she tried hard to save them, but always in vain:
In the autumn of 1903, when my comrades Mr and Mrs Walker, had to go to England, I was much alone with the Lord Jesus. It was then, that the burden of the little Temple children pressed so heavily that I could not bear it any longer – ‘Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?’ I asked, and the answer came quite clearly: ‘Search for the little lost lambs with Me’. And so the work began.994 Everywhere in south India were men and women on the lookout to get children for the temples, ‘especially if a child is attractive, or shows promise of being afterwards attractive, you have a child in danger’.995 When Amy started her research into the fate of the temple children, there were about 12 000 temple
988. Samuel Azariah (1874–1945), evangelist, pastor, secretary of The National Missionary Society, missionary to Dornakal, consecrated Bishop of Dornakal on 29 December 1912. He played an important part in laying the foundation for church union in India. ‘In the West denominationalism may be a weakness, but in the East it is a sin.’ In September 1947, the Church of South India came into being. There were 50 000 Christians in the area, many of them Teleguspeaking Christians. At the time of his death, there were close to 250 000 Christians in Dornakal Diocese, making it the largest diocese in the Indian Church.
989. In Dyer, Revival in India, 64.
990. In Dyer, Revival in India, 64.
991. In his Revival Fire, 204.
992. In Oconer, ‘“Keswickfied” Methodism’: 122.
993. The Beginning of a Story, 3.
994. The Beginning of a Story, 3.
995. The Beginning of a Story, 5.
women in south India and each had ‘adopted’ at least one child. The more she became involved in this work the more sympathy she received, even from educated Hindus who realised the iniquity of dedicating a little girl to temple service. Amy did not blame the temple women. They did not choose this kind of life. They were doomed to this life from infancy. ‘She is the result of her environment for which she is not responsible.’996
Her life’s work would become the salvation of many children. For Amy it was like Jesus when he took the towel.997 ‘So we won’t mind if our feet are bound, for it is Love that binds them. His were bound on the cross.’998 Children, so often the object of neglect and abuse, do they not need the strong arms of Jesus encircling them?999 For Amy it became her mission to rescue and raise these children. ‘We gave ourselves to save them.’1000 When a child was rescued, it was for her the ‘joy of joys, a lost sheep found’.1001 These children were like precious stones. Like a miner searches for precious stones buried in the dark mine: after entering into these dark places, he lightens them and so ends the darkness and he finds the jewels hidden there. News of Amy’s courageous exploits reached Christian circles back in England and in 1912 Queen Mary gave her official recognition for her efforts:
We are here to do that very thing. We have for light the presence and the promises of God. There may be someone whom we are trying to help; we are trying to bring out of the dark mine of that personality precious jewels for our Lord. Perhaps we are terribly tempted to despair, because of continual disappointments and what seems like hopeless weakness of character. But we are not alone. The search, the long effort, is lighted by the presence of our God. He is not baffled by personality. His promises are light. So let us go on, despairing of no man, for the jewel mine is His. He died to purchase it. Behold, all souls are Mine is His word.1002 Once settled in Dohnavur, Amy did not want to give up itinerary work. Evangelism had a priority, a work she called ‘pilgrim work’. On 22 May 1922 she opened her Bible at Luke 10:1–24 and underlined the words ‘and send them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself was about to come’. In the margin, she wrote:
Read Monday – May 22, 1922. After Sunday’s prayer Titus, Agnes, Dorothy, Eevie and I set about Pilgrim’s work. We asked for a car so that we could reach the towns all round about.1003 [Next to Mark 9:23] And Jesus said unto him, If thou canst All things are possible to him that believeth.
She wrote:
Pilgrim Work thoughts. See Mark 8:3. June 5.22. If thou canst. Question not answered – ignored. Is this not what He can but what we can. Not the oil that is stayed but the vessels that fail.
996. The Beginning of a Story, 8.
997. See John 13:1–20 where before the last supper Jesus took a towel and washed the feet of the disciples. 998. Candles in the Dark, 35.
999. Here we can also think of the work of Lillian Trasher (1887–1961), founder of the Assiout Orphanage in Egypt. During her lifetime, the Assiout Orphanage cared for more than 25 000 Egyptian children. See J. Johnson, The Top 100 Women of the Christian Faith (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 2009), 98. NB: Amy objected to Dohnavur being called an orphanage: it was a family, a fellowship!
1000. Figures of the True, 22.
1001. Lotus Buds, 231.
1002. Whispers of His Power, 20–21. Amy refers to Job 28:3: ‘He setteth an end to darkness’.
1003. Written by Amy in A. Stevens & E. De Witt Burton, A Harmony Of The Gospels. Part I. (New York, NY: The Int. Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, 1903), Par. 87.
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And next to Mark 8:3 she wrote:
For so much has been done in the past we never find it easy to believe for the present. God has done great things, yes but how can we be sure of the answers to do the same again. Pilgrim work. Sunday June 4.1004 Officially, the Fellowship was registered in 1927 (from 1895 to 1925, Amy’s work was supported by the CEZMS), which legally established the DF as an independent organisation. After registration, she continued in faith mission style, establishing and enlarging the DF. Amy never referred to Dohnavur as an orphanage.1005 It was a Fellowship and ‘His Hand covers us’.1006 A family where all lived together – Amy, the women of the Starry Cluster and the children. There the education of the children took place, and all had some practical contribution to make to the family life, in the village next to the Fellowship compound and in the countryside. From the very beginning, Amy made use of Indian fellow workers, whom she could trust thoroughly. For her it was real ‘happiness of enjoying’, this friendship with the Indian people.1007
The Accals (older sisters) were the leaders in the nurseries; they were assisted by the convert workers, ‘dependable as comrades’. They were next in age to the head Accals. These girls in their teens assisted the Accals and were of great value. This way of introducing them to this nursery work meant that they were ‘developing in character and trustworthiness’.1008 After India got independence, the schooling conditions changed for the Dohnavur girls. For Amy, the education for the children had one object: ‘to prepare the child to serve the Lord Christ’. It was that thought that governed the choice of lesson books and everything else. She needed converted teachers. A new chapter began when after 1947 the government was expanding nationwide its education policy, which meant the Dohnavur school would be inspected if they were to work along government lines. Staff needed to have recognised teaching qualifications, so the primary goal of the education for the Dohnavur children could no longer be training to be Christians only. For further training the children were sent to the girls’ high school at Trichy. There the principal was the daughter of Amy’s first convert in India. Nine girls were selected to study at Trichy and they would be living in the YWCA hostel. However, the idea of preparing children to lead a life with Christ was never lost. The children were always seen not as orphans, but as:
[H ]eirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. From the Dohnavur side, their aim of education was service. From that follows that our task is to make disciples; our desire is to send out witnesses and our vision is India for Christ.1009
The glory of the usual
In the Fellowship no rules were made, but we were of one mind to follow whither so ever our Unseen Leader led us. In other words, we set no boundaries to obedience. We asked for grace, to offer all, ‘without a but, an if, or a limit’. Our standard the one toward the other, we found in our Saviour’s last long talk with His disciples:
1004. In Stevens & De Witt Burton, A Harmony of the Gospels, 111. In the Dohnavur Library.
1005. In her is a book (first edition) by one of the Dohnavur friends, the missionary doctor and mountaineer T. Howard Somervell, After Everest The Experiences of a Mountaineer and Medical Missionary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), in which the author mentions her work and writes about Dohnavur as an orphanage. Amy crossed out those lines and wrote ‘We are not an orphanage’ (p. 22). These words are not in the other editions of After Everest. 1006. This sentence Amy wrote as a remark in Somervell’s After Everest, 23.
1007. Cf. Lotus Buds, 217. ‘Simple, effortless intimacy, that closeness of touch which is friendship, is surely possible’ (p. 217); ‘he spring of heart to heart that we call affinity, the knitting no hand can ever afterward unravel – these experiences have been granted to us all through our work together, and we thank God for it’ (p. 218).
1008. Lotus Buds, 221.
1009. Cf. Trehane, The Timothys, 15–17, 101. Amy saw the babies as ‘missionaries of the future’ (in S. Blanch & B. Blanch, ed., Learning of God. Readings from Amy Carmichael (Fort Washington, MD: CLC, 1985), VIII.
‘Love one another as I have loved you’. Such love took for granted flawless loyalty. In practice we found that prayer was hindered if even the lightest shadow fell upon love. (For how can one pray freely with another about whom there is a doubt, or of whom a critical word has been spoken?) As the roots of the Fellowship ran deep into prayer, this matter of loyal love was seen to be vital.1010 Instead of travelling all over the district Amy stayed in Dohnavur and when she worried about the many who had to be reached, she got God’s reply: ‘I will bring them to you’.1011 The culture Amy created in Dohnavur was not geared towards connecting the children to modern urban life. This does not mean that modern inventions that could be helpful were not introduced; she was the first to introduce electricity into the buildings and a modern hospital with Western doctors and medicine, even X-ray equipment, was available. For special treatment, children were sent to the CMS hospital in Neyyoor. In education they did not follow the Western style, where the individual had a say, but encouraged imitation of the cultural hierarchy of the extended Indian family and living in close harmony with nature, ‘the existence of God, Who is also Lord over the nature’.1012 All this had to do with the overall thought:
We are living in eternity now. God save us, then, from the trivial, the fearful, in prayer as in life. It is an inspiring thing to live in the Presence of the Eternal.1013 The work of the Accals and convert workers was not seen as honourable. This work had no clear ending; it was work in which these girls had to love with the tireless love of the mother. Amy quoted Père Didon who wrote, ‘I do not want people who come to me under certain reservations. In battle you need soldiers who fear nothing.’1014
This work in the nurseries that was so demanding, however, was also full of compensations, ‘for the touch of a little child is very healing’.1015 Amy thought a lot about the work with the little children; this dayto-day work could be dull, tiresome and so demanding that many did not appreciate this work. This drove her to write a chapter about ‘The Glory of the Usual’.1016 Those working in Dohnavur had to learn and to teach a new and difficult lesson: ‘the sacredness of the commonplace’. The secular is not to be divided from the spiritual:
The enlightening of a dark soul or the lightning of a kitchen fire, it matters not which it is, if only we are obedient to the heavenly vision, and work with a pure intention to the glory of our God.
In order to give love to each baby individually, nothing should be done artificially; ‘feelings of personal gratitude come when help of this kind is given’. Very often, the Dohnavur staff experienced almost visibly and audibly that in obeying the Lord’s command, He confirmed His word to the staff and
1010. The Starry Cluster, 5.
1011. The Starry Cluster, 5.
1012. Here Curtis sees the influences of Ruskin and Coleridge, who privileged an experience of nature as confirming the existence of divine power (Curtis, Amy Carmichael’s Aesthetic Legacy, 3.
1013. Ploughed Under, 151.
1014. See Lotus Buds, 227.
1015. Lotus Buds, 227.
1016. Lotus Buds, Chapter XXVI, 239–246. The expression she borrowed from C.H. Morrison, who wrote in his The Unlighted Lustre, ‘No matter how stirring your life be, it will be a failure if you have never been wakened to the glory of the usual. These is no happiness like the old and common happiness, sunshine and love and duty and the laughter of children. […] There are no duties that so enrich as dull duties’.
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children, strengthening them when they were weak and comforting them when they were sad or lacked spiritual strength.
Being content with the place and the work the Lord assigned for them was what the lovers of his name accepted in peace. Amy’s ideas about beauty came from her Presbyterian background and were based upon associating a rustic existence with both moral purpose and aesthetic value. Indian rural life as it had gone on for ages corresponded more with her insights than introducing modern products from the West. Here is what she thought of mass-produced commodities coming from Western countries:
Civilisation, so called, has muddied the Eastern taste, which, taking it all around, is a far finer thing than the Western type as commonly imported. For just as some Eastern nations export things that they would never use themselves, so do we of the West export rubbish to the East; and very often the children saw the opposite of all that we had taught them to care for, made much of and admired. It is a curious fact that the kitchen in a well-to-do do Eastern house is sometimes the only room in the house where one can be without seeing some Western vulgarity. The kitchen keeps to its old ways, and it beautiful earthen or brass or copper vessels are still its unconscious adornments, unless the cheap and the nasty invaded it in the shape of enamel and other ugly ware. Except for this counter influence, we found no difficulty in leading our little ones into the paths that we ourselves had found so pleasant.1017 In outreach programmes, adults and children did practical work and this gave them an opportunity to witness for the Lord in word and deed. Godfrey Webb-Peploe gives a vivid account of the work the boys did in Dohnavur. Along with their schoolwork, they learned carpentry, gardening and on Saturday mornings the cleaning of the compound. The elderly people even worked with them. ‘A willingness to do anything joyfully is what we want the boys to acquire, so we have to start in ourselves to show the way.’1018 Amy leaned heavily on the Accals, especially on Ponnamal ‘who goes through all the nurseries like a fresh wind’.1019 Once a visitor, who had noticed that unkind words were never spoken of the absent and that those who met at meal times were always glad to meet, asked ‘Are you always so absolutely happy in Dohnavur?’ The answer they gave her speaks for itself: ‘Dohnavur had its troubles; sometimes it seemed to have rather a large share of many and grievous troubles; but it was always happy, perfectly happy within itself’.1020
Eileen Kuhn, who served as a missionary in Thailand, once visited Dohnavur and was asked about her most distinct impression. She needed no time to think about the answer; her immediate answer was ‘peace’. The highest compliment for the work.1021 Amy describes Dohnavur some years after it began in these words:
Perhaps no safer and no healthier place could have been found for our little children. No place on the plain is very healthy, the insanitary villages are all too near; but we have a big beautiful field where the air blows, if there is any air to blow, straight across the open country from a gap in the hills. We did not choose Dohnavur. We were living here, itinerating in the whole country round, an almost entirely Hindu tract, with many whole Hindu towns and villages scattered about upon it, when the work for the little children grew up about us, and
1017. Kohila, 12–13.
1018. In Brothers of the Lotus Buds, 25, 29.
1019. Lotus Buds, 219.
1020. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 352.
1021. See E.R. Skoglund, Amma, The Life and Words of Amy Carmichael (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 18. before we knew it we were a family. […] There is a sense of detachment from the noisy modern world. There is time to be quiet, and to think, as well as do.1022 She created a place where children (Figure 14) felt at home. The children loved her and even in their old age they still say: ‘Amma was a wonderful, loving mother for us’. All the children had crept into the cockles of her heart.
Source: © Dohnavur Fellowship. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jeremiah Rajanesan. Photographer unknown.
FIGURE 14: Three girls amusing themselves.
1022. The Beginning of a Story, 9–10.
Shepherd of Israel, what can baffle Love, Or because Divine compassion to remove? Out or a fall, Love makes a stepping-stone,
And quite reverses all the foe has done.
Love, only Love, these mighty things can do, What Love has purposed, Love will carry through.
I, even I, will sing unto the Lord.
For ever and for ever the Adored.
‘Wings’, Dohnavur Songs, 32.