The sanctuary in the desert (part 2 of 3)
Opposition. ‘Never promised fair weather’
Can one change a centuries old tradition?:
In a country where you could feel the deadness, the weight of the death of centuries, you would know that the winning of a single soul is a tremendous miracle.’1273 Nothing could hinder Amy in evangelising and to rescuing India’s children and finding a home for them, though the roads may have been rough and she tired:
We could not return that night, and the hotel was sure to be full. Altogether, it was impracticable. […] All of which only made me more determined to go, if it meant sleeping on the road ten nights, instead of one; as for being tired, what did it matter? Oh don’t blame too much. It was an opportunity which doesn’t come every day, and only the Devil was buying it up.1274 She would not enter temples – since that day in Kyoto (Japan) – but when she knew ‘He is going before’ she would follow fearlessly.1275
Amy had entered a war zone. Behind what was seen, was the ‘Ruler of Darkness’, the existence of certain beings, described as ‘Powers’ in Ephesians VI:12. Sometimes she indicated it as ‘the Actual’. Many times, when windows were closed the Lord opened doors1276 for her to continue her work. She knew that there was ‘this unhallowed correspondence between men and demons. Here in India it exists’. On the way back home ‘we felt we had been very near where Satan’s seat is.’ ‘Nothing can reach them, nothing but the might of the Holy Ghost’:
The devil’s favourite device just now is to move interested people to far-away places. We have had several who seemed very near to the kingdom. Then suddenly they have disappeared:
Young men, showing interest in the Gospel, were rushed into a marriage, ‘so now there is another key turned, locking him into Hinduism’. What was behind this when young seedlings were killed? ‘An Enemy has done this.’
When a young girl was interested in the Gospel, this especially seemed to touch the caste ‘at its most sensitive point’. ‘Men and demons seem to conspire to hold such a one in the clutch of the terrible.’ ‘Till God makes a way of escape.’
1271. In Makower, Follow My Leader, 152–153.
1272. The hymn Spiritus Sanctus was composed in 1878 by Edwin Hatch. Amy copied it in Meal in A Barrel, 48–49. 1273. From Sunrise Land, 126.
1274. From Sunrise Land, 127.
1275. From Sunrise Land, 128.
1276. A Lilias Trotter expression from her diary, 06 May 1906. See Huffmann Rockness, A Passion for the Impossible, 196 and 202.
Chapter 13
Amy’s work had been a catalyst in rescuing young girls and boys from a life in prostitution and had an impact upon a law passed in Parliament forbidding the giving of young children to the temples. Life can be tangled, and nobody can disentangle such tangles. She knew the Lord ‘does not ask us to walk in any path where He has not walked before’.1277 She also had long talks with persons who were interested in the Christian belief, but who feared to break with their family. On 30 October 1900, she talked with ‘the mother of one who wants to follow Jesus. Heartbreaking’.1278
Not everybody was happy with her rescue efforts. Opposition came from fellow missionaries and Indians. Even supporters in her homeland wondered if she was a real missionary or just a babysitter.1279 She was accused of kidnapping young children and for this, she was ordered to appear in court several times. In the eyes of others, her missionary activities were controversial.
Amy expected opposition. Referring to Acts 16:22–25 she said that the storm and the darkness Paul endured is ‘an eternal reminder of what we are all meant to be and do. We are not meant to be fairweather Christians; we are never promised fair weather’.1280
The place of Heavenly Healing
As the number of children grew, Amy more and more saw the need for having medical care for them. The nearby hospitals were not easy to reach and to transport a sick baby could mean their death. On 25 September 1905, Ponnamal – ‘the heroic Indian sister’1281 – went with the sick children of Dohnavur to the hospital in Neyyoor to be treated there1282:
It was not always plain sailing, even at Neyyoor. ‘You are fighting satan at a point upon which he is very sensitive; he will not leave you long in peace’, wrote an experienced friend of Amy’s.1283 Ponnamal permanently stayed with these little sick ones. She is God’s golden gift to the work.1284 During seasons with epidemic sicknesses many children died. ‘Child after child died, the doctors were away, and the help at hand was hardly sufficient to deal adequately with the trouble.’ Nurses at Neyyoor lost heart:
If another baby dies, we shall know the blessing of God is not on this work. […] Then some evil men who lived next door awoke to the opportunity; their wickedness was a nightmare.
They strengthened themselves in the Lord:
The storm will not always last. The waves dash into our little boat, but when the Lord says, ‘Peace, be still’ they will lay down. […] Let all your prayer for us be this, that we may rest in the will of God while the storm lasts […] ‘In battle you need soldiers who fear nothing’, so said Père Didon; and so say I.1285
1277. Candles in the Dark, 86.
1278. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Matthew 10:35.
1279. Johnson, The Top 100 Women of the Christian Faith, 171.
1280. In Thou Givest … They Gather, 69.
1281. Ploughed Under, 141.
1282. See Lotus Buds, XVI, 133–141; The Beginning of a Story, 13.
1283. Lotus Buds, 136.
1284. The Beginning of a Story, 14.
1285. Ponnamal, 47–48.
In the height of the heavy work, Star was sent to Neyyoor to assist.1286 Amy kept in touch with Neyyoor by daily bulletins and frequent visits.
Finally, it was too difficult to send sick children to the hospital in Neyyoor and another nursery was built on the Dohnavur compound in 1908. In contrast with the often squalid housing, the sweetness and the cleanness, its pervading atmosphere of Christian love in a loveless land, its power to bless and its abundance, may well seem to them scarcely to belong to this poor world.1287 The medical missionary effectually illustrated Christ’s mission by reviving it. Here Christian ministry is presented in deeds of ministering love. It was at that time the only exhibition of our Christian religion which some of them could comprehend. In the mission hospital for those far away from God, a true vision of the Great healer could be seen:
The burden of the unrelieved suffering of the people was more than she could endure, and she took it to the Lord in earnest, persistent, prevailing prayer; prayer for a nurse, for a doctor, for a hospital, for means of helping needy souls to find both physical and spiritual healing.1288 As years went by Amy enlisted the prayer help of friends all over the world. As she had experienced during her itinerating work, house-to-house evangelisation in the strong Hindu area of Tinnevelly and Dohnavur, as in the whole of south India, the relief of human suffering and help given during great crises of human life are keys that unlock many doors. As far back as 1920 Amy had felt strongly the need of ‘a Place of Healing’.1289 30 January 1920 was a remarkable day, as was noted down in the logbook, because on that day Amy, with seven others looking at a sunset, was thinking of so many who were difficult to reach, even out of reach: ‘It was as though there swam into our view a Place of Healing’. Amy saw a place where a company ‘in gaiety of their spirit, served with love’. The life of the Franciscans had had a great influence on her:
They were lovers of the Lord and servants of the sick; they loved one another fervently, and money had no power over them. […] But it was there, and so why should it not be here? And the pattern for the hospital was her shown from the New Testament. We had seen nothing anywhere in the pages of our New Testament to give us hope that such a thing could be. […] But it was there, and so why should it not be here?1290 From that date onwards it was put into words and all eight signed their names to a prayer for its fulfilment.
The medical work of the DF started in obedience to the Lord’s command to heal the sick as well as to preach the Gospel. For years Amy had longed to reach the villages around Dohnavur with the Good News of Jesus Christ, but were not her hands and feet tied to the place to care for the children, whose numbers increased yearly? So, how to reach the many scattered villages where there was no Gospel? What if there were a hospital?
And we wondered why there was no medical mission in this part of British India specially bent on reaching those who are practically unaffected by the Gospel. Was it because Christians at home heard chiefly of the successes of the south, of the crowds swept into the visible Church, of the villages clamouring for teachers? What is that they had not ever really understood that the castes to whom the great temples belong are still
1286. Ploughed Under, 135.
1287. The author remembers one occasion in Moçambique in 2004 when a girl of about eight years old came to a medical clinic asking the nurse ‘Is heaven like this?’
1288. Robbins, Greater is He, XV.
1289. Gold Cord, 279.
1290. Gold Cord, 279. Cf. also Meal in a Barrel, 131–133.
Chapter 13
Hindu to the core? Those who are hardest to win for Christ are not being won. Nor have they the least desire to be won. They are either antagonistic or indifferent.1291 The dedication of the Place of Heavenly Healing took place on 15 November 1936. ‘The service was all thanksgiving and adoration.’ A 30-year-old dream of Amy’s became reality. Since 1906 she had prayed, thought and talked about having her own medical facilities. From the 1920s onwards Amy and the Starry Cluster were led in a new direction. Several times, they came into situations in which a demon possessed was set free and came to peace after they had called upon the name of the Lord. Many people came to Dohnavur, hearing that there was help for them. Some who were tormented by evil spirits came and many sick came, all ‘pitifully suffering children’:
They came at the time the children assembled for prayers, and we were all blessed and drawn into a new tenderness, a new awareness of the Presence in our midst.
Many came to Dohnavur and among the people many colourful stories spread of ‘a place of healing! Miracles!’ All this confused Amy and she continues:
We searched our Bibles then, to find our Lord’s thought about this matter; and we read the scores of letters that came from the ends of the earth, each urging upon us some new view of divine healing. There was a day when we asked Him, if He willed it so, to give us the gift, the charisma, that had been in apostolic times. In the bungalow, Amy mostly lay in bed during the long years of her illness. I saw words painted in blue on a piece of rough teak over the doorway of her room: ’Good and acceptable and perfect’. These three words ‘hallow pain’ she said. Those difficult years were lightened for her by the new understanding of the words of Romans 12:2. Against the pain these three words ‘take from it all bitterness, all that stings and rankles; they leave it, still pain indeed, but somehow sweetened, chastened’. In Tamil ‘acceptable’ is rendered by a word meaning ‘lovable’1292:
To accept in this sense is to come with all the desire of the mind unto the place which the Lord shall choose, and to minister in the name of the Lord our God there – not other where. Where the things of God are concerned, acceptance always means the happy choice of mind and heart of that which He appoints, because (for the present) it is His good and acceptable and perfect will.1293 Amy thought that if they had that gift, it would make the Lord known and loved. ‘Would it not glorify His Name? What a joy it would be to see pain instantly relieved. […] There was not anything comparable to the healing of the first century.’ In her diary on 04 May the entry is: ‘Asked for cleansed hands. Asked for the gift – I fear to write it even now, but I did ask, was constrained to ask. Told no one.’
A further note in Daily Light on 12 June goes as follows: ‘Asked for the gift of healing for the sake of others’, and she added the words ‘Answer, “No”’. Then, almost suddenly, the healings ceased. Did the Lord prevent her from becoming too popular and people from coming to Dohnavur for the healing of their bodies and not for the healing of their sins? In the Dohnavur library is a booklet called What The Scriptures Teach Concerning The Laying On Of Hands.1294 Often during her long illness, Amy was ‘assailed’ (as she puts it) by letters and tracts suggesting that if only she would pray the prayer of faith, healing would be granted. On this issue she once wrote:
1291. Gold Cord, 279. In a note Amy refers here to the medical work in China described by her friend Mrs Geraldine Howard Taylor, in her Guinness of Honan, chapter XV.
1292. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 187.
1293. Gold By Moonlight, 35.
1294. J. Webb. (ed.), What the Scriptures Teach Concerning the Laying on of Hands (Bangalore: Scripture Literature Press, 1944).
But our little children had taught us many things. We knew they did not always know what was good for them, and we should have been very grieved if they had persisted in imploring for something, after we had let them understand that we could not give it […] Not, ‘Thy will be changed’ but ‘Thy will be done’, as the prayer we are taught to pray.1295 I have been asked to say what has been our experience in relation to healing and medicals. We have seen our Lord use His servant’s skill and we have seen Him work, as it were direct. Surely He is sovereign in this as in all things? Of one thing we are pure sure – His touch has still its ancient power and we who have seen that Touch heal and renew can never be as those who have not seen.1296 But honestly about the spiritual healings, Amy wrote: ‘The Charisma was not given’.1297 Mabel Wade, a fully trained nurse from Yorkshire, was the first fellow worker and who assisted on the medical side of the Fellowship. She was, like Amy, a CEZMS missionary, but set apart for Dohnavur. The first doctor in Dohnavur was Gladys Webster, an answer to Amy’s years of prayer.
On the mission field the lancet has proved mightier than the sword in opening closed doors. Amy was convinced that healthcare missions were an effective way to spread the Gospel and the key to proclaim Christ in the strict Hindu society of south India. Compassion in Christ’s name speaks loud. She could refer to the many medical missionaries – men and women – who blazed the trail, and whose stories of sacrifice and service convinced and inspired many. In the room where Amy lived, there are still today some paintings, given to Amy by Dr Howard Somervell of Vellore, who was an explorer who climbed the Himalayas and a painter not without merit.1298 Eventually, long before the hospital was built, Amy began to buy land for the House of Healing, as the hospital was called after it had been finished. Already from the very beginning, the first objective of the hospital was to evangelise to the people who came there:
Satan, prince of this world, cares not one jot how many hospitals we build, if only we are satisfied to be philanthropic. […] And may God save India from such schools and hospitals.1299 Amy prayed that when people saw the love of God in operation, they would not only see, but also hear and believe of the one, who is the real healer and think of him as Saviour and Lord.
‘The story of how we had good hope of being able to do more for the people passed out far beyond our borders.’1300 One day Amy was with two other women in the bazaar of a Hindu town, when suddenly a big bazaar man said, ‘You are to have a hospital in Dohnavur – so we hear. […] You will make it a Paradise.’ Amy was surprised and for a moment did not know what to say, until the man added, ‘Yes, Paradise.’1301
1295. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 185.
1296. Tables in the Wilderness, 37–38.
1297. In Gold Cord, 237.
1298. We today should learn from the first medical missionaries, their love and compassion for the sick, the poor, and those who don’t have helpers, may not be forgotten. Cf. also R.B. Dietrick, The Man the Church Forgot (USA: Xulon Press, 2007).
1299. Windows, 56. A member of a Muslim family who was treated in Dohnavur, and therefore cursed by others from their community, afterwards said: ‘But as for us, we do not believe as much as the measure of the rape seed of such talk. We have seen the love of God in operation, and we believe and know that His love is mightier than the power of the demon or the curse of man’ (Windows, 60).
1300. Gold Cord, 289.
Chapter 13
The hospital to be built should be of great magnificence. Amy refers to the word ‘magnifical’ in Daily Light of 04 June 1929, which ‘lifted the matter of cost to the heavenlies – where the air is clear’. Magnifical here means:
[P]erfect for its purpose of glorifying the God of love, so that men and women will be drawn to Him. He is also the God of beauty, and it follows that ugliness jars. He has no pleasure in it – nor in dire.
At the end of 1931 Philip England, an engineer, joined the Fellowship and was given the responsibility for all the designing work and the organising of the builders and the building materials.
The purpose of this branch of the DF can be summarised as follows: healing the sick and relieving the sufferings of so many, especially among the women, the poor and the needy. Great attention was given to help disseminate knowledge of hygiene (public health) for the community. Medical work gave missionaries a unique chance to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The DF maintained a very clear position in their work to save children from moral and physical abuse in an intricate relationship between evangelism, medical work and education. The three always went hand in hand. The way land was bought for the proposed hospital reminds us of Gideon asking for a sign:
All who have followed our story from the beginning know how, in other days, when I was almost alone and very fearful of running before the Lord, I used to ask for Gideon’s fleece, a sign which I could not mistake, and how, often He did kindly answer by a sign.
In these matters Amy walked like a child at her Father’s hand. Land could be bought adjoining the land that already belonged to the Fellowship.1302 The building of the hospital actually started in 1929.1303 Attention was given to the Indian architecture of the hospital buildings. Many buildings had features similar to the other buildings of the DF, some with typical designs made by Amy. A plaque hung high up in the centre of the entrance written in big Tamil characters brought familiarity and acceptance from the Indians.
At the 1930 Keswick Convention, Dr Orissa Taylor dealt with the importance of medical work in the mission field. How many of those present were really converted to the claims of the medical mission? At the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, medical missions were hardly mentioned. Yearly Keswick gave 10 minutes of consideration of the claim of medical missions. Dr Taylor said that the three years Christ was on earth, he spent many of his days healing the sick. ‘Yet for nineteen hundred years they had been preaching till their throats were dry, but they had not engaged in the healing ministry as they ought to have done’.1304 Statistics showing the state of the health care in the India of the 1930s were an urgent appeal for more medical staff.1305
A hospital gives a deathblow to the many miserable superstitions which sometimes cleave to those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their great physician. In the Dohnavur hospital, as was usual at that time in mission hospitals, the doctors were also evangelists. They, too, went out into the villages, helping and assisting in evangelistic enterprise. In a country where belief in signs and omens is cultivated
1302. Meal in a Barrel, 112–114. ‘To hope for such a thing was to hope for the impossible, so we were told by almost everyone. But we have learned to love the word “impossible”’ (p. 128).
1303. Windows, 3.
1304. ‘The Claim of Healing’, in The Keswick Convention 1930, 224.
1305. ‘In Bengal a thousand or more babies died every week from lockjaw. Three million died of cholera every year in India; in ten years many millions died of malaria. Seven million died in one year of influenza in India. And there was the slow death of leprosy. Many of all these sicknesses could have been treated easily if more medical staff would have been there’ (‘The Claim of Healing’, in The Keswick Convention 1930, 224). as a science, it was not to be wondered at when great disasters in the work at Dohnavur, for instance a fatal epidemic, caused the faith to be shaken of all who were not in the deepest way committed to this work and a lot of reproaches were made by outsiders. Mission hospitals as fields for teaching and evangelising have been seen everywhere on the mission field. ‘Far and wide scatter the precious seeds, to spring up later in requests for instruction from villages where the missionary had never gone.’ Dr Poret of Pang Chuang reported that in one year, patients from 1031 villages came to that one hospital, some of them undertaking a journey of 5 to 10 days. ‘One half of our native churches had their origin’, he says, ‘in patients in hospital attendance.’1306
Murray Webb-Peploe was a very much loved physician in the Dohnavur hospital. He and his brother Godfrey were for Amy ‘pillars’ in the Fellowship. Between 1928 and 1929 Murray Webb- Peploe had left China due to political unrest, and assisted in the medical work in Dohnavur, where his brother Godfrey had worked since 1926 in the education of the children. On their way to China, Murray and his mother Evelyn had passed Dohnavur, invited by Amy,1307 and had an opportunity to see his friend Howard Somervell at Neyyoor in Travancore. In addition to being a medical doctor, Murray also cared for the spiritual welfare of the people. Murray could not go back to China and instead came back to Dohnavur. Amy, Godfrey and Murray was a match made in heaven. All three worked in spiritual unity for the welfare of the Fellowship. Amy rejoiced over them:
Oh, these two, what gifts to the world they are, worth all your life of loving sacrifice, worth anything – never have I seen two like them, it is rest and strength and comfort just to have them in the house.1308 On the night of 08 October 1926, Amy was sleeping on the sand of Cape Comorin’s coast when she had a vision in which she with a sense of joy and light saw Godfrey and Murray in Dohnavur. ‘But dreams have no conscience’; was God telling her to pray that these two men would come to Dohnavur? Two years after Stephen Neill had left Dohnavur, Murray arrived.
Murray now worked in the little theatre of the hospital with Dr May Powell. It was an Indian friend of the Fellowship – who himself was not a Christian – who gave the new hospital a typically Eastern name: Parama Suha Salai, Place of Otherworld (or Heavenly) Healing. Amy wrote: ‘We accepted the name, as truly telling what we prayed the hospital should be’1309:
The Place of Healing belongs to the family – even the little children take a keen interest in all that pertains to it – and so it happens that the story of the hospital is interwoven with our main story, like a gold thread running through the web on the loom.1310 ‘Buckingham Palace’, so called by Murray, was the name of the first hospital ward. Amy called the wards ‘Rooms of Kindness’, for ‘ward is too cold a name for such a room’. And when children died they had ‘left us for the Heavenly Country’, or to the ‘Upstairs Nursery’.1311
Soon it was known in the community that in the hospital no bribe was accepted. The Indian instinct for privacy was accepted and people were to feel at home as much as possible. The hospital also served tuberculosis victims and those suffering from leprosy. A well-equipped dental unit is still there today.
1306. In Barret Montgomery, Western Women in Eastern Lands, 134.
1307. In a letter, dated 16 January 1925 (in Makower, Follow My Leader, 74–75).
1308. Makower, Follow My Leader, 83.
1309. The Starry Cluster, 5.
1310. Windows, 3.
1311. Though The Mountains Shake, 19 and 21.
Chapter 13
From the Fellowship, the Accals come regularly to read the Bible for the patients and pray with them. During Christmas, the hospital was vacated, and former patients and other guests came, some from great distances, to hear the Gospel and hear again the vision. Many Hindus come to these meetings these days. The hospital catered for the Dohnavur family and for the six villages surrounding Dohnavur.
When the bells in the tower of the House of Prayer rang out the tune of ‘At Even Ere the Sun Was Set’ everybody knew that some serious operation was about to begin in the hospital.1312 Whatever anyone was doing, or wherever they were, everybody knelt in silence, or sometimes gathered, to pray that the great physician’s hand may be over the operator’s hand. The prayer of the doctor was:
When in the still white room I stand
Thy viewless hand will guide my hand.
Dear Lord, what joy, what peace to be
About Thy healing work with Thee.
Murray Webb-Peploe meant a lot to the hospital. He was concerned with good nutrition (learnt in Australia), for instance that all the workers and patients would get the necessary protein. Murray wanted to live in an Indian way, but at the same time have a balanced diet. Extra milk, cheese and eggs were added to the diet, along with Marmite, as well as more fruit and vegetables. Hugh Evan Hopkins who was there valued Murray’s realistic and practical approach: ‘Murray brought humanity to Dohnavur. […] He rooted us in reality.’1313 Often he was assisted by his mother, who lived at Nothernhay, in Kotagiri on the Nilgiri Hills. The hospital was up-to-date and the X-ray installation would do credit to any Western hospital of a similar size. Amy described the atmosphere inside the hospital as ‘quietness’, so rarely found in Indian hospitals. Philippe Berthoud, who took charge of all the wiring, plumbing and fitting of the X-ray plant, observed that when he arrived from Switzerland: ‘what struck me immediately was the careful planning together with the touch of beauty’.1314 Murray was able to inspire and help many in and around Dohnavur, and people trusted him, which arose from his own close walk with God. ‘He passes on what he receives of the heavenly manna,’ said Amy. There was continuous traffic and intercourse with heavens.1315 After some years, Murray needed a rest and it was decided he would go to Australia for convalescence. He did not go alone; just before his departure in 1933, on 23 April he married Theoda Albertine Baroness Van Boetzelaer1316:
Murray’s and Oda’s Wedding day. A holy Day. Service at 6 p.m. ‘O Splendour of God’s will’ sung before the sermon; ‘Love through me, Love of God’ before the end. ‘Praise God’ in the hall afterwards. They went in the lorry with M. and C. to Caruniapuram where Edith had all ready. She and her party came back here in the lorry.1317 The couple had met in Dohnavur. Oda, as the bride was called, was the first Dutch member of the Fellowship. Murray and Oda came back from Australia with their twin sons in 1935. In the central enclosure of the Place of Healing a new children’s hospital was opened in 1938.1318
1312. See Meal in a Barrel, Chapter IV, 20–24.
1313. See Makower, Follow My Leader, 139.
1314. In Makower, Follow My Leader, 142.
1315. In Dust of Gold, May 1939.
1316. Theodora Albertine van Boetzelaer (born at De Bilt, Utrecht, The Netherlands on June 01, 1903, died on June 11, 1982 in Burgesshill, Sussex, UK). Married at the age of 29 to Murray Hamilton Webb-Peploe on 24 April 1933 in Dohnavur. See Makower, Follow My Leader, 128–136.
1317. Entry in the logbook of the Dohnavur Fellowship, 1931–1941: Sunday, 23 April 1933 (in the Dohnavur library). 1318. Though The Mountains Shake, 18.
Medicine is a great asset in evangelisation and the building up of the indigenous church. Medical care demonstrates the love of God to the pagan heart; it breaks down prejudice, and opens the way for the preaching of the Gospel. Before Dohnavur had its own hospital, the nearest missionary hospital was the LMS hospital at Neyyoor, south Travancore, at a distance of about 35 miles. There was a Western staff and an Indian medical evangelist. ‘There you have the science of the West at work, with the touch of the East upon it.’1319
Nancy Robbins1320 in Understanding to the Simple1321 gives us a vivid account of hospital life in Dohnavur between 1948 and 1957. The life story of village women and their hospital experiences unfolds before our eyes, a gracious and fragrant narrative of human need and spiritual and medical response in rural south India. Itinerant medical work was undertaken from the hospital. In unevangelised districts, out-stations were established. The majority of India’s population at that time lived in villages and patients who needed medical treatment and were unable to travel long distances for medical help were assisted in this way. The examples of missionaries’ sacrificial spirit to do all they could do to help people in need impressed the Indians and gained their confidence and trust.
However good the medical and surgical work may have been, everything was done with the intention to win the patients for Christ. This meant a follow-up in terms of personal dealings with the patients who came. They were not ‘cases’ only1322 and patients cannot be nursed by machinery only. Special care and attention was given to each case. Always the commission was to ‘make disciples’.
In opening a hospital, the Fellowship made a unique mission to provide strategic medical care to the people who otherwise had little access to medical facilities. In introducing medical care, the DF faced a new challenge, not so much from opposition by the Indians, but more from the pressure of the ‘professionalization of missionary work’. Was not the Fellowship divorcing from evangelical aims? Amy herself rejected this trend, seeing in the hospital a unique way to reach the people with the Gospel. The medical work under the DF was directly linked with evangelism and it was instituted in obedience to our Lord’s command to heal the sick as well as to preach the Gospel. It is evident that the medical work played a key role in the extension of the Gospel in south India. National workers, right from the start, served faithfully, hand in hand with foreign staff members. The hospital has never grown big, that was not the aim, but it provided medicines and staff for itinerary medical work, so that many in scattered, far-off places could be reached. The medical mission also played a prophetic role against unethical practices, such as marriage of very young girls. This kind of mission work represented the conscience of the Christian organisations from which they had come.
It had always been Amy’s concern, next to the well-ordered organisation, to give Jesus Christ, and the people for whom he died, the right place in her thoughts and regime. An atmosphere of self-effacing love is as essential in the hospital as skilled surgeons and good ventilation. Patients cannot be nursed by machinery. Special care and attention must be given to the individual.1323 There is nothing like heart-to-
1319. Overweights of Joy, 62.
1320. Nancy Robbins (Karunai Sittie), 1913–2013, served as medical doctor in Dohnavur 1946–1977. It was she who advised putting the children into mixed age groups in the children’s cottages, instead of same-age sets. She was a keen and effective evangelist too.
1321. N. Robbins, Understanding to the Simple (London: Dohnavur Fellowship, 1958).
1322. Cf. the intention of Dr G. Whitfield Guinness in the CIM hospital in Honan: to educate medical students, next to the medical and surgical lectures in Bible study, to keep in touch with the Lord and to urge them to do also the work of an evangelist. He himself gave the example! ‘At home as well as in the hospital, I want to put Christ first’ (Howard Taylor, Guinness of Honan, 198–207).
1323. See the aim of the Christian hospital in Kai-feng, Honan, China, during the time Whitfield Guinness did his medical work there. In Howard Taylor, Guinness of Honan, 244–255.
Chapter 13
heart contact with individuals. Whenever there was a baptismal service in the church several of those who received baptism and were welcomed in the church were ex-patients. In later years the treatment of patients with eye problems got special attention. A little booklet gives us a special light upon this work.1324 A sudden surprising silence fell as Dr Rambo stood looking at his prospective patients, and began to introduce himself to them. He told of his journey down from Vellore, wonderfully protected by our God from all accident and delay. He told of his great desire to bring sight to eyes which by reason of disease could no longer see the light of the sun. And he told how the far more deadly disease called sin blinds the eyes of the soul so that people grope in darkness and despair, unable to see God. Lastly, he told of the Lord Jesus whose love led Him to die in order that sin might be taken away and blind eyes to see their God and Saviour. One of the team then prayed briefly and earnestly that during the coming day might receive both physical and spiritual sight. And our eye-camp had begun. In the women’s ward was one who had come to us wretchedly ill three years ago. Her husband was angry with her because of her illness, and refused to support her. So she quietly sold her jewels to pay her expenses during her lengthy stay in Hospital. The Lord healed her. He also saved her. And at the end of the year, in spite of her husband’s bitter threats and opposition she was baptized. Something in her courageous witness evidently touched her husband, for he changed his mind about her and took her back into their home. The following year he too was baptized, having been won for the Lord chiefly by his wife’s witness. This woman, who is ill again, and who is not very wealthy, hearing of the eye-camp, asked if she might give a gift to help the blind people. Her Christianity is a matter of life and deed, not of pious phraseology, and her gift was very large in comparison with her income.1325
Rules and way of life
The DF compound – ‘a mere and delightful henhouse’1326 grew considerably from 1904. The family feeling was a happy one, and to realise this Amy was assisted by many Sitties and Accals. The children were neatly clothed; Indian dress was usual though without decorations and jewellery. In Amy’s way, it was very colourful although she had her own restrictions. One day Nesaruthina had put a ribbon in her hair, but Amy changed it. Her argument: ‘without a ribbon, this is as the Lord gave it to you, your hair, and not with the ribbon’.1327 On Saturday afternoons expeditions to the foothills were undertaken. Quarrels among the children – they were children like all other children – should not happen and if it occurred, repentance and forgiveness was swift.
There were no salaried workers, Indian or foreign. There were also no workers in Dohnavur who were only preachers. The evangelists shared in the practical work of life – doctoring, nursing, teaching, building, engineering, gardening, farming and so on. As soon as the girls and the boys were grown up, some of the most reliable became fellow workers. There were never enough workers and it was difficult to allow one who was in a responsible position to take a long rest:
[F]or we have no duplicates anywhere; and in a close-knit family the incalculable quality of love must be taken into account in making arrangements for the help of anyone. […] There is nothing so demanding as the spiritual training of the young. It asks for everything we have to give, and for everything always.1328
1324. Recovering of Sight to the Blind (Dohnavur Fellowship booklet no. 31).
1325. Recovering of Sight to the Blind, 3–4 and 12–13.
1326. The Continuation of a Story, 32.
1327. Nesaruthina Carunia, in an interview with the author, 16 November 2013 in Dohnavur.
1328. Windows, 16 and 17.
The work in Dohnavur was difficult due to the constraint laid upon the team to keep the work pure. Amy knew that taking care of young children was not considered honourable work, and the women willing to do this kind of work were often not of a desirable character. It was very difficult, with the high moral standard, to get suitable women to assist in the care for the children. Lowering the standard, and taking anyone as a paid worker, was that an option? It was, until Ponnamal advised: ‘Let us work till we fall, but do not let us have women in as nurses who will spoil the whole work.’1329 What they required was: ‘endurance, courage, a capacity for happiness, love’.1330 Slackness in the work was abhorred, and when people around Dohnavur watched one of the workers, they had to see ‘incorruptible in her integrity’ and ‘imperishable quality of love’.1331 Amy did not want to have negative conversations and she avoided talking in a negative way about other persons. In others people’s work one should accentuate the positive and avoid the negative. Confrontation with the misery or degradation of others, in the midst of the strain of those early days, was sometimes too much. To find the joy in these situations, the faith and the devotion for the undertaking in Dohnavur, strong faith was needed for all the workers. However, Spirit-filled hearts under whatever name, are always tender. They see through many tears of a divine compassion. With so many people of different ages, of which the majority were (unmarried) women, many workers from other continents and young children growing towards adulthood, very easily misunderstandings and gossip penetrated into the community and disturbed the harmony of love.
In 1939, Amy felt she had to write a letter to her children concerning disharmony within the community. In the margin, she wrote: ‘Keep this letter. It is not likely that I shall write again about this of this matter’. The DF had done according to her wish, because the letter is still in the office of the Fellowship in Dohnavur.1332 We will quote a large part of this letter because here we see that Amy went to the core of all disharmony, and pleaded for her children in a spiritual and powerful way, as Moses did for the children of Israel. It hurt her deeply when she sensed that her children, as she felt it, sinned against Calvary love.
The heading of the letter goes as, ‘To my children who are comrades in the war’. She writes about the distress she had as:
I think of a misunderstanding that had never had been between two of you who love the Lord Jesus. We do not know what the reason of this misunderstanding was.
She goes on: ‘This kind of distress comes too often.’ She writes to them that if they go on in this way they will destroy their own soul and grieve the Holy Spirit. One Accal has to serve the other Accal and one Annachie the other. What put all things right is, when ‘you talk together in the Presence of the Lord’. ‘There would be truth on both sides, but the Lord would be in between and guide their talks.’ Amy then refers to former difficulties, how they go ‘into real prayer’. She taught everybody a lesson:
We are too big a family for that to be possible now, but it is as important now as ever it was that all should be clear, who are out of love with any other one. […] O my children if only you would wake up your minds never to doubt the love of another sister or brother in Christ, but always to think the best. […] But why do some of you even encourage that warp to sting’? I beseech you to have done with this. Refine it. Hate it. It may seem a lust, but it is of hell’. We are all human. We may forget things we should remember. […] Speaking to instead of
1329. Ponnamal, 52.
1330. Ponnamal, 58.
1331. Ponnamal, 63 and 97.
1332. Letter written by Amy, 07 December 1939, in the office of the DF.
Chapter 13
the one who did it. […] Will you for the sake of love of Christ have done with them all? Will you make up your mind never again to take up against your neighbour? Will you trust instead of troubling one another? Will you, who are so greatly loved, love? I remember now in the very last birthday meeting […] I stopped and feeling too broken to go on because of something that had happened to grieve love, I said, ‘If this were the last time I could speak to you, I should say just these words, “Beloved, let us love.” My children, my comrades in the war of the Lord. I say these words to you again, “Beloved, let us love”’.
Amy writes about Moses, praying the Lord to forgive the sins of the people:
If not, blot me, I pray Thee out of the book which Thou has written. […] I think of Calvary. I see that love, that pain; I hear the words You said so well, the words of uttermost agony: ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ And when I think of how we, redeemed at such a case can stoop to think of such personal strife and magnify it, and go on doing so, till in very truth we are crucifying the Son of God afresh. And I am ashamed before Him. God forgive us. God forgive us, God forgive you – ‘and if not’ – yes, I can and I do pray this awful prayer, for what is anything to me if you, my children, and the children God has given you and to be content to shame the Lord who has redeemed you? […] God forbid that we should add to the unlove of India and of this sad sinful world. But with Thee is forgiveness. […] Remember these last words. They are too often forgotten. Fear to sin against love. Fear to dishonour your Lord. Fear with a holy fear the worst smell beginning of this hellish sin. Beloved let us love. O let us love. We perish if we do not love. Let us love. Your sontha Ammai. The standard of living and what she expected from all Fellowship members was high. Too high? When asked this question, she replied:
Yes, we believe, as one has said, that history cries out against the notion that a vigorous corporate life can be achieved and a lasting impact can be made by any community which makes few or no demands on its membership.1333
She stood for the hallowing of common things but also for:
• Pre-eminence of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things.
• Obedience to His highest known wish – ‘a wish is a command to one who loves’.
• The truth that the Unseen, the Eternal is of far more importance than the Seen, the Temporal. • The necessity to weigh everything in the scales of the Sanctuary, as even the gold that was brought for an offering was weighed in those scales. This means, not ever. ‘Not what doth man or woman say about this or that?’, but ‘What saith the Lord?’.
• Restful dependence upon all the promises of God. It follows that we have full assurance in the truth of His Book.
• The conviction that those who bear the vessels of the Lord must be clean, that a sin unconfessed, cuts the nerve of prayer and the power to serve.
• Dependence upon God for grace, strength, guidance that we may do the things which He plans beforehand and we should do.
• Love, loyal love the one to the other.
• The principle known as vital unity. By this we mean that underlying unity of spirit which is not affected by race, name of sign.
• The truth taught by our Lord when He said, ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’.
• And everything under the one motto: ‘Love never faileth’.1334
1333. The Starry Cluster, 18.
1334. The Starry Cluster, 18–19.