Under the obedience of Christ (part 2 of 3)

‘God of mountains, I will climb’

One of the favourite Fellowship prayers, too exalted for many, but for the single-hearted a prayer with such a deep insight, was God of the Heights.1719

God of the Heights, austere, inspiring,
Thy word hath come to me.
O let no selfish aims, conspiring,
Distract my soul from Thee.
Loosen me from Things of Time;
Strengthen me for steadfast climb.
The Temporal would bind my spirit;
Father, be Thou my Stay.
Show me what flesh cannot inherit,
Stored for another day.
Be transparent, Things of Time;
Looking through you, I would climb.
Now by Thy grace my spirit chooseth
Treasure that shall abide.
The great Unseen, I know, endureth,
My footsteps shall not slide.
Not for me the Things of Time;
God of mountains, I will climb.

In the whole of Amy’s mission concept, this metaphor of climbing as an illustration of the life of a Christian was one of the most important. In her strenuous missionary life with the many day-to-day entanglements, which could distract one from the one thing necessary, Amy, from the very beginning of the work in Dohnavur, had these words of A.C. Fox in her mind:

Like the staircase in ancient houses,
Long, winding, and strangely dim,
It is faith that is needed for climbing,
Faith, rather than length of limb.
But there is light at the different landings,
And rest in the upper room,
And a larger range of vision,
And glorious thoughts to come.
How much of our life resembles
Time lost in going upstairs;
What days and weeks seem wasted,
But we’re climbing unawares.

1718. In the logbook of the DF, 1931–1941, 01 May 1937. In the Dohnavur library.

1719. In Though The Mountains Shake, 163.

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With these words she could encourage Rev. Walker, who was asking himself if he was using his time as the Lord wanted him to; these words helped Amy when she thought her days on the sickbed were idle days. In her diary, we read, ‘Read many times after 24 October 1931’: ‘Make me Thy athlete even in my bed, Thy girded runner though the course be sped’.

She prayed in November 1935 the words of Vaughan’s line: ‘O let me climb when I lay down’.1720 Amy found her vision for the DF clearly expressed in The Matterhorn and wrote the following sentence from the book on the first page: ‘We make our way wrapped in glamour to the supreme good, the summit’.1721

To his astonishment, a present-day visitor to Dohnavur will see many paintings and pictures of mountains, glaciers and snowy landscapes and these in a climate where never one flake of snow is to be seen. Amy loved the mountains and got many a spiritual insight from them, and due to her friendship with Dr Somervell,1722 the mountaineer and medical doctor in the Neyyoor hospital, several of his paintings still decorate the bungalow where Amy lived.1723 From stories of mountaineering and explorations – like those of Ernest Shackleton – she always drew lessons for spiritual life. In Paul Bauer’s Himalayan Quest1724 is written by the author: ‘Amma, who wants to be one of the mountaineers in Dohnavur but is less than the last of them and on its lowest foothills, April 26. 1939’. When Amy received this book, what was written was: ‘Amma, The Mountaineers in Dohnavur’, but in her own handwriting she added these words: ‘who wants to be one of the mountaineers but is less than the last of them and on its lowest foothills’.

Here we see two things: very often Amy uses the ‘climbing’ as a metaphor to picture the way the Christian has to go through this life1725 and as to how she saw herself among the others in Dohnavur. Not as their leader but just one of the servants, even less than the others. It was Murray Webb-Peploe who, for Amy and the others in Dohnavur, wrote this poem:

Make me to be Thy happy mountaineer,
O God, most high.
My climbing soul would welcome the austere:
Lord, crucify
On rock or scree, ice-cliff or field of snow,
The softness that would sink to things below.

1720. See Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 307–308.

1721. In G. Rey, The Matterhorn (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 185.

1722. Howard Somervell (1890–1975) was a member of the two expeditions in the 1920s to Mount Everest (1922 and 1924). In 1924 he travelled through India from the north to the south, where he was overwhelmed by the needs and the sorrows of the people in south India and decided to stay in Neyyoor to assist his old friend, the missionary doctor Pugh. Neyyoor Hospital was one of the greatest mission hospitals of the London Missionary Society’s Medical Mission. He found here his life’s work, first in Neyyoor and from 1949 in Vellore, Madras State. There he was one of the professors in Vellore Medical School. In 1925, Somervell showed slides of his climb of Everest to the Fellowship family. In D.A. Devapiriam, Vanacharbu-Woodland, 54. For more about Howard Somervell, see J. Reason, Heights After Everest (Howard Somervell of India), Eagle Books no. 69 (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1957).

1723. Many times Dr Howard Somervell (Stira Annachie) from the Neyyoor Hospital offered his assistance when there was a need in Dohnavur. Often, as he administered his work for the children, he visited Amy.

1724. London: Nicholson, & Watson, 1938. The book is in the Dohnavur library.

1725. She had many books on mountaineering, like P.F.M. Fellowes, First Over Everest (London: John Lane, 1935) and F. Younghusband, The Epic of Mount Everest (London: Edward Arnold & Co., n.d.).

Thou art my Guide, where Thy sure feet have trod Shall mine be set- Thy highest word my law of life, O God, Lest I forget, And slip and fall, teach me to do Thy will- Thy mountaineer upon Thy holy Hill.1726 ‘God is the God of the mountains’ Amy wrote in the margin of the foreword of the above mentioned book and she agreed with this sentence there, ‘Climbers have found joy in battling with the mountain giants and the sterner the battle the greater has been their joy’. From Dr Somervell she received his After Everest1727 in 1937 and Amy wrote on the first page: ‘The greatest sentence in this book: The presence of a Companion on the mountains who is not in our earthly party of climbers’. Dr Somervell loved climbing but on a visit to the south, 20 miles from Cape Comorin:

I saw the thing which changed the entire plan of my life, something more impressive than the mighty Himalaya, far more compelling than the call of the mountains. That something was the unrelieved suffering of India.1728 She did not agree with everything that she found in this book. When someone urged that an English Christian is not called to destroy Hinduism, Amy wrote in the margin: ‘How can you obey the command “make disciples” without destroying false faith’. In the first edition of After Everest, Somervell had written: ‘Carmichael’s orphanage in Dohnavur’, and she had written in the margin: ‘We are not an orphanage’. At another place, he had written: ‘Miss Carmichael’s institution in Dohnavur’. Amy refused her name to be mentioned in the book and erased her name and wrote in the margin: ‘No, we are not an institution and we don’t want honour. It is just the Lord’s kind heart’.1729 She agreed fully when Somervell wrote about the temple religion:

And we, His servants, must show them no compromise. […] There is only one power on earth that could have caused this transformation – the power of Him who made Himself of no reputation, and took the form of a servant to show us that all men are equal in the sight of God.1730 When Somervell stated that every country had its social order, Amy wrote in the margin: ‘Social order is not caste. Better not mix up things that differ […] but there is a great and fundamental difference’.1731 Smythe’s The Mountain Vision1732 was read by her with less approval. When Smythe suggested that heaven could be realised by an increasing sense of beauty, Amy put a big question mark and when he asked: ‘What is wrong with this world?’ she wrote in the margin: ‘Much’.1733 When mountaineers got the blessing of the Rongbuk Monastery to deliver them from evil of the mountain

1726. In Rose From Brier, 66; Mountain Breezes, 225.

1727. T. Howard Somervell, After Everest, 128. The book is in the Dohnavur library.

1728. On p. 70, in the first edition.

1729. In the new edition, Somervell did not omit her name and the word institution, but the word orphanage – in the first edition on p. 266 – is not there.

1730. On pp. 279 and 280, first edition.

1731. First edition pp. 284 and 285. Somervell was positive about Ghandi’s ideas, but Amy put great question marks in the margin (first edition, p. 315). The Indian clarinet and the drum, which Somervell tried to introduce in the church at Neyyoor, were strongly opposed by Amy. She wrote in the margin of p. 318. ‘Yes [she agreed with an Indian pastor who did not want this practice] but it instantly calls up the vilest associations. No truly convert wants it’.

1732. F.S. Smythe, The Mountain Vision (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950 [1941]).

1733. Page 3.

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gods, she wrote in the margin: ‘What does God think about that?’1734 See saw too much of the German liberal theology of Dr Bauer in this book.

‘It is the climbing that counts, whether the top will be reached or not.’1735 Very often in her books, Amy reflected on the idea of climbing a mountain as a metaphor for the life of a Christian:

Everest has become a symbol. Everest stands for all that is highest, purest, and most difficult of attainment. As the climbers struggle and gasp towards the summit they are putting heart into all who are striving upward in whatever field.1736 To climb a mountain is to tread not only the heights of Earth, it is to adventure to the very boundaries of Heaven.1737 Are not the sharpest trials the finest furbishing?

The most tempestuous weather is the best seed-time. A Christian is an oak flourishing in winter. God had so magnified and glorified His servant, and exalted Him so highly in His eternal bosom, that no other joy should be able to move us but that alone.1738 Amy admired in the mountaineers that they responded to the call. The mountain was calling. Climbing Everest was a symbol of reaching for perfection. In a Christian’s life, perseverance and endurance are required for the pilgrim’s journey. When in Dohnavur the strain of the work nearly exhausted the workers, Amy wrote to them:

Almost everyone seems to be going through painful ways at present. But they know their God and as they and we all go forward and through these rough waters, and step by step climb our Matterhorns and Everests, we find ourselves drawing nearer to the day when we shall see His face and He ‘shall look us out of pain’ forever and ever.1739 She underlined the phrase in Norton’s The Fight for the Everest,1740 a book she had got in 1926, that:

[I]t is the spirit of the man that made him the great mountaineer as he was; the fire burnt in him […] and while the call lasted his would remain the dominant spirit in any enterprise.

The question on page 155 in the book, ‘Is it worthwhile?’ was for her a question she asked herself often. ‘All that is done here in Dohnavur will it stand in the fire of God when He will test our intentions?’ ‘Does it lend a touch of the supernatural to our vision?’1741 Amy had a strong determination to serve God. Her first biographer wrote:

She never ceased to climb, though often she feared that she was losing ground. In November,1935, she happened on a line in Henry Vaughan’s poems which both cheered and challenged her: ‘O let me climb when I lay down’. Then the spiritual climb could continue when physical movement was impossible?1742

1734. Page 238.

1735. In the first edition on p. 32. On p. 319: ‘There are many other Indian music instruments that could be used’.

1736. Rose from Brier, 67.

1737. Quotation in Smythe, The Mountain Vision, XI.

1738. These words Amy underlined in B. Dobell (ed.), Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) (London: P.J. & A.E. Dobell, 1927), 92.

1739. Fragments That Remain, 106.

1740. E.F. Norton, The Fight for Everest 1924, (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1925), 145.

1741. On p. 155.

‘Sorrows for consolation’

Amy liked to quote Dr Moule when she was confronted with strong heathendom: ‘the servant brings his sorrows for consolation’. The servant of God identifies himself with the Master, who mourned over the opposing people, over a Jerusalem that will not come to the Son of God, that they might have life:

He opened His arms and called those who would not come, and opened the eternal arms for an embrace – to be met only with a contradiction. […] To know Him is to be at peace even under the grief’s of the mystery of sin.1743 Redemption so near to them, but they do not want to know it. ‘Because redemption must mean loss of Caste.’ Being a Christian really meant sooner or later leaving home and all relatives forever. The old people were the most difficult to reach with the Gospel because ‘they usually were too attached to their own faith’ and ‘indifferent’. Their argument was that Christianity ‘spoils our Caste’. Caste and religion were so mixed up that she did not know how to unmix them. She found it difficult to identify herself with the people whom she had come to win for Christ, but always there was the same difficulty. There was always a distance you could not cover – she called it the fatal hiatus – because, coming from the West, missionaries in their eyes were always different.

Amy stood up for her ideas and, concerning mission work, it was not possible to persuade her to another vision. She was sure that in what she did she stood on Biblical foundations. Historically, what she did in forming her own sisterhood was not unique. Separation and the dissenting tradition went back many ages before her, and they continue into the present time. In Dohnavur she always was in good contact with the local Anglican church. As far as the sacraments and the way they had to be performed are concerned, we see that they were of secondary importance for Amy. Having dropped all denominational labels, she did not care whether one was a Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker or an Episcopalian, as long as they agreed about the essentials of the faith. The crux of Amy’s objection to denominationalism was that it imposed human authority on Christian people and overshadowed the Lordship of Christ and promptings of the Spirit in the government of the Church. It is clear that she distrusted human activity and maximised the need for unction and divine calling in Christian service. Since she was raised in a strict Presbyterian home, we can trace many Presbyterian issues in her writings. There never is any negative word about her upbringing in this church. Her rather complex, strong Irish character with its many facets and her staunch Presbyterian belief from Scottish origin had always given her stability, conservatism, preference for authority and exactness of thought. The Irish is a mystic, a bit of a dreamer, emotional but not sentimental, with deep thoughts. She could deal with profound questions and give expression to the truth. Because of her uncommon mental abilities, she refused to conform to the majority and was inclined towards preciseness.

She had no patience with the nuances of compromise and was solidly consistent. Her core beliefs never varied and her mission purpose was always on the same line. This idiosyncratic and independent nature has left us a legacy; we thank God for this and in missiology and among missionaries to neglect her, would be a betrayal of the Gospel. She had a thirst for the glory and honour of the triune God, an unrivalled vision of Christ’s grace, a passion for a holy life and a deep love for the little ones who did not have a voice. As Amma she led many to Christ and helped many to understand themselves and the world in which they lived.

Love: Amy’s keyword

Without Christ I can do nothing,
Without His love I am nothing.
Without love self-sacrifice profiteth nothing1744

1743. From the Fight, 23–24.

1744. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of 1 Corinthians 13.

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‘Love is a thrilling thing. It touches the very springs of the heart. Is there anything in all the world like love? No, nothing.’1745 Out of love Christ gave all. He gave his life also for the lost ones in India. The little Book of the Lover and the Beloved1746 helped her to have this view. ‘Ramón Lull is never unmindful of the world his Beloved came to save. His is no cloistered love.’1747

I have a Saviour, though I thought,
Through earth and air and sea.
I could not find a word, a thought,
To show Him worthily.
But planted here in rock and moss.
I see the Sign of utmost loss.
I hear a word – On Calvary’s cross,
Love gave Himself for thee.1748

Jesus: his name was so precious to her, that she nearly could not find words to express her love for him. In her Bible she wrote:

Many Names are dear, but His is dearer. How it grows more dear as time goes on. Many friends are near, but He is nearer. Always all we want and all our own. JESUS. JESUS. Let us ever say it. Softly to ourselves as some sweet spell. JESUS. JESUS! Troubles spirit lay it on thy heart and it will make thee well.1749 She so loved the Lord, that she felt ‘nested’ in his heart:1750

Live to love, and you will never be lonely. Live in the lives of others, those around you. How they need love! You will never be lonely if you live to love and love to live.

These words, once written1751 by the mother of Margret King1752 to her daughter, Amy found true. Amy absorbed Indian culture and came to understand its people. She longed to reach them and looked them up where they lived. Her Scottish ancestry had given her courtesy and a reserve that had prepared her for the leisurely etiquette of the East. Quick and sometimes impatient as she was, she had learned to sit and relax and have fellowship with the women she met. She had an ‘oriental’ heart. Already in Japan she had the passion to tell the people of God’s love. In her broken Japanese, she taught the people the song ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’ and ‘then the “God is Love” embroidered on my dress, forms the text for a few broken words’.1753 By 1906 Amy had built a family of 70 women and children; in 1913 the number was 130 and in 1929 there were nearly 700 family members; by the time her lifelong serviced ended in 1951, the number was about 900. Is this not a very remarkable record? The explanation of this

1745. Though The Mountains Shake, 36.

1746. Ramón Lull (1235–1315), Catalan mystic. The first missionary who had ever gone to the Muslim world and a great apologist for the Christian faith.

1747. See ‘About the Story’, in Ploughed Under, VIII.

1748. Gold by Moonlight, 2; see also J. Spencer, ‘His Faithfulness’, The Poetry of Amy Carmichael Set to Music (Kansas City: Adorant Records, 2006).

1749. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Matthew 1:21.

1750. Cf. Amy’s underlined words in A.S. Way’s commentary of the ‘Second letter to the Corinthians’, in The Letters of St. Paul, 77. In the margin is written by Amy ‘1912 and 1935’.

1751. In Thompson, Each to Her Post, 61.

1752. Margaret King (1867–1941), Canadian Presbyterian CIM missionary in China.

1753. See From Sunrise Land, 35. richly blessed work lay in her own words of Jeremy Taylor’s prayer: ‘Lord, do Thou turn me all into love, and all my love in obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption’.1754 In her poetry she wrote: ‘O Love revealed at Calvary, | Thy glory lights eternity.’ In a little book (in manuscript form),1755 prepared for the Sisters of the Fellowship, she wrote:

We are trusted to spread the spirit of love. Tenderness in judgment, the habit of thinking the best of one another, unwillingness to believe evil, grief if we are forced to do so, eagerness to believe good, joy over one recovered from any slip or fall, unselfish gladness to do anything to help another entirely irrespective of self – all this and much more is included in that wonderful word love. Love is the golden secret of life; [it is] our most precious possession.1756 When Hudson Taylor once was asked what the supreme qualification for missionary work was, he replied with conviction: ‘a supreme love for the Lord Jesus Christ’.1757 Taylor was drawing on the fullness of Christ in such a way that the Lord met all his daily and hourly needs, and the needs of the great work that had grown up around him. A lot of difficulties and dangers concerned him deeply; he joined in the joys and the sorrows of his fellow missionaries and shared with them all that they went through. But his peace was unbroken, his rest of heart in God complete. One who knew Amy personally once said: ‘Dear Amma – she never understood how the love of God within her was so powerful a magnet that all through her life others were drawn irresistibly to her’.1758 Sometimes people thought they did not do enough for others and then Amy would reply:

But we can love. And love is like light. If the candle of love is shining, then even though it is only a little candle it gives light to all who are in the house. God make us all His candles.1759 Previously in the work for the mill girls in Belfast and later on in the slums of Manchester a deep love had entered Amy’s heart. In grappling with the realities of sin and sorrow for the young girls tempted and straying, for whom she became a real mother, she was to find the deeper certainty, the deeper faith in the saving power of the Gospel. By the power of the Holy Spirit it was God’s love that transformed many unlovely into loveliness and it transfigured the dark, dull lives of many a factory girl:

God forbid that we should ever fail the soul in its need, but we are not an end to any heart, nor can we ever be. Let us then, not fastening it upon ourselves, lead the child of our love to the Beloved, and laying the dear hands in His, move aside. […] Love will find out the way to fulfil the desires that Love inspires.1760 Love was the keynote of her life. Love made her look beneath the surface. With the Reformed heritage, it was her belief that the divisions – that sore wound in the body of Christ – the schisms, a glory in sectarianism, were a truth at the expense of grace, a faith at the expense of love. When someone wanted to go to the mission field the advice of Amy was ‘let those who cannot learn to love it, stay away’.1761

1754. See Elliot, A Change to Die, 125; Windows, 160. Originally, this is one of Augustine’s prayers.

1755. In the office of the DF, Dohnavur, India.

1756. Candles in the Dark, 109 and 119.

1757. Taylor, once asked how he explained the great missionary advance in China, replied, ‘Love first, then suffering, then a deeper love – thus only can God’s work be done’. In Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor in Early Years (London: CIM, 1927), 291.

1758. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 105.

1759. Whispers of His Power, 06 September, 190.

1760. Ploughed Under, 154.

1761. Walker of Tinnevelly, 257. Amy also quotes Père Didon: ‘Nothing but a burning sanctity will convert this unbelieving generation’ (p. 261).

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She always combined loyalty to the old with propagation of the new. All the ‘great’, as for example Paul, Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Booth, Hudson Taylor and Spurgeon, brought their message of cleansing and revival to the existing co-religionists of their day.

Amy learned from the beginning that the price of spiritual harvest must always be the way of the Cross. She set her face to her one objective of rescuing girls and boys from a terrible life of sin. She did not want the blood of Christ in a basin, she wanted to pour it out. Souls around her were dying, dying, dying without a Saviour. Many pastors in the Indian Church in the district – workers for Christ – were too much engaged in routine work, much of it irrelevant, or even did not do their work in a faithful way. And the reward? ‘We do not look for gratitude in this work; who does?’1762 In dark times, when difficulties arose Amy knew that ‘the love of God sufficed for any disappointment, for any defeat. In that love was the energy of faith and the very sap of hope’.1763

Sometimes it came; the grateful love of a child was a real bonus for her. In Dohnavur, in every nursery, this text was on the wall: ‘Love never faileth’.1764 Amy was fully aware of the statement she herself cited once: ‘Not where I breathe but where I love I live’.1765 When talking about living in the East, she could say ‘Let those who cannot learn to love it, stay away’.1766 Sometimes she found it difficult to understand the feelings of the people. What was behind their deeds and words? She said in such cases, ‘but love India, and you will find somewhere a smile even in such a story’.1767 Never was a night so long for Amy as when she nurtured a sick child; never was any work so hard but she persevered and never were people so difficult, but that love outlasted all. Her passionate devotion to Jesus Christ was the mainspring of her passion for the girls and boys under her care. This consuming passion of love flowed through her along with a yearning to draw the children to her and their Saviour. She focused on a living right with God, on living a holy life in private and in public, to live for God, whom had put a wall of fire around her and the DF.

It was essential for Amy that love is not a gush of feeling and emotion. It never was a mere feeling; it was a principle, a royal law. Love was the principle by which she gave God preference over everything else in the world: if any man’s work abide! It was her leading principle by which she gave everyone else, and anything else preference over herself, in sacrificing herself for the larger interests of India’s children in danger. It was a love that always turned to Jesus Christ; He was the centre of her soul. Really, this was ‘that in all things He shall have the pre-eminence’! That is love! Love for her was the sovereign preference of her person for another person, and as a Christian that sovereign preference was for Jesus. Her whole personality was passionately devoted to Jesus.

The DF proved to be a community where all lived in an atmosphere of love. This was as Amy wished, but sometimes this reality was absent. In reading Temple’s Readings  in  St. Joh’s Gospel, she underlined this sentence:

But love must make its uttermost appeal, as very soon now it will. The Lord knows that it must fail; and He knows the terrible strain that this failure and its consequences will put upon the loyalty of the other disciples, they shall be scattered every man to his own and shall leave me alone.

1762. Lotus Buds, 67.

1763. Gold Cord, 268.

1764. Lotus Buds, 241.

1765. From the Forest, 116.

1766. This One Thing, 150.

1767. Windows, 60.

It is here that she wrote in the margin:

Just as in a community. The failure of one hurts the loyalty of all. Thank God when there is not a scattering – but that is what the devil is not to grant! (Prayed) 1925, 1937 and thanked in another way in 1946-7.1768 Amy also quoted Westcott whose Bible translation she valued much. His definition of love indicated it as a persistent loyalty:

The love of Christ is, as it were, the atmosphere in which the disciple lives. It is not something realized at a momentary crisis, but enjoyed continuously. And this enjoyment depends, on the human side, upon the will of man. It can be made the subject of a command.1769 Mission service is a costly service and missionaries are the chosen sowers whose sowing is to bear fruit unto life eternal for the people for whose sake they have given their all. It is that life of love giving all, following him who gave all. His precious blood that tells for God. He is not a God who calls us to impress the people, but to love them, and to share his treasure with them.1770 Amy was fully aware that the crown was promised after the battle and that Christ gave the example in humbling himself to the death on the cross and – here Amy quotes and underlines Traherne’s words – we should remember that:

The most tempestuous weather is the best seedtime. A Christian is an oak tree flourishing in winter. […] I beseech Thee let my love unto all be regular like Thine, and pure, and infinite […] And so make me to love all, that I may be a blessing to all; and well pleasing to Thee in all. […] This and the other life are made of a piece, but this is the time of trial, that of rewards. The greatest disadvantages of love are its highest advantages. In the greatest hazards, it achieves to itself the greatest glory. It is seldom considered; but a love to others stronger than what we bear to ourselves, is the mother of all the heroic actions that have made histories pleasant, and beautified the world.1771