The Missionary: ‘I was sent, so speak’ (1) (part 2 of 3)

1882. The whole story is in Windows, 236–239.

1883. M. Weber, ‘Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism,’ in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1958), 155–183.

1884. In N.F. Cantor, Medieval History (New York, NY: Macmillan Co., 1963), 182.

1885. Cf. Mark 18:34; Matthew 10:38; 16, 24; In 13:13. Also ‘put off the old self’, in Ephesians 4:22–25; Colossians 3:8–10.

1886. Whispers of His Power, 21 February, 45.

1887. See Gold Cord, 329.

1888. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 46:10.

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From very early childhood Amy had been told about God. The God revealed to her in the Scriptures is sovereign. He is ‘supreme’ and ‘He works all things after the counsel of His own will’.1889 The final cause of all God’s purposes is the manifestation of his own glory. Amy, knowing the truth that glorified God, was convinced that a right understanding of this truth about God stemmed from the right relationship between the sinner and the Saviour. For her it produced deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship and a concern for those who did not know him. In actual life, in all her work and writing, she lived from this source of God’s sovereign rule and this, too, was the ground for her confidence. She believed the Lord Jesus was keeping his promise never to leave nor forsake her. The consciousness of his presence was her salvation. By resting in the Faithful One it was for her looking unto Jesus daily. In this way she reinterpreted the threefold monastic vow, requiring unconditional obedience to the ‘call’ of Christ, for one must be willing to forsake family and country, leave all, and follow him. Amy’s spiritual experiences of visions of God and of mysticism were tested in the day-to-day reality in Dohnavur, where she was often confronted with the demon-possessed world around her.

Never did she play the ostrich mentally and ignore the dark, evil things with which she was confronted, banking in confidence on God’s organisation of what she did not see. Her true life she found in things that corresponded with her inner life. This kept her on the right track. For her the real energy of life lay in her right relation to God, and therein she found peace and joy. Her whole life in relation to God was a sacrament for God.

In Dohnavur, education, daily life, the building activity, everything had a Biblical component. In everything, she sought to return to the Biblical foundation and due to her strong belief in the authority of the Scriptures, she sought to purify and strengthen all around her. Before she went to the mission field Amy had already learnt, that ‘the grace of God is given us for real life’.1890 She was influenced by the teaching of her childhood, in which in an evangelical way both Pietism and Puritanism stressed the necessity of new birth, the experience of the heart, and the reality of regeneration, which served as the natural outcome of justification; this heritage added a strong ethical dimension. Brown1891 showed that Puritans, Methodists and Evangelicals shared a ‘serious’ approach to life and agreed on the importance of emotions and will, as well as reason as conscience. Nearly all who endorsed non-denominational mission enterprise, like LMS, accepted the Puritan theological principles. In 1943 almost all the first generation of LMS missionaries had no difficulty whatever in signing the full Westminster Confession,1892 so one can say that the doctrines of grace provided a common platform for the best missionary action. Murray concluded that the evangelicalism of the age of modern missions, which began with Carey in essence, was that of Puritan Christianity.1893 Amy, steeped in many of their writings, together with Quaker and Keswick influence, weaved all these influences into her trust in the living God, wishing to live for his glory in word and deed. As far as we see and know her thoughts and deeds, it appears right to conclude that Amy was ground in a non-dualistic spirituality that reflected the experience of her communion with God. He was in charge of the reality. There was a profound correlation between her deep sense of the reality of God

1889. Ephesians 1:11.

1890. Whispers of His Power, 24 February, 47.

1891. F.K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 169.

1892. In The Congregational Quarterly, 1943, 223–236. Quotation in Murray, The Puritan Hope, 147.

1893. In The Puritan Hope, 149. Speaking of the men needed in missionary work, Carey writes: ‘The Missionaries must be men of great piety, prudence, courage, forbearance; of undoubted orthodoxy in their sentiments […] and, above all, must be instant in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge’ (in Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, 75–76). and the world around her. Rooted in this faith she laid the foundation of the DF. The mystical experience of the fellowship with her God can be seen as the reason for her freedom to act prophetically against the evil she had discovered in Hindu temple worship. The more she became aware of God, the more the notion of love dominated her whole work, because God is love! There is a constant double and circular movement of practice: between the inward practice of worship, prayer and meditation and the outward practice of running the DF.

Between 1925 and 1930 the Webb-Peploe brothers and Amy had some controversies about their views and links with Buchmanism and this brought them some stress. Frank Buchman started this movement, known as the Oxford Group.1894 Murray, having been in England, was positive about this man and his teaching.1895 Coming back in Dohnavur Amy and Godfrey were anxious that Murray’s involvement with Buchman and his doctrines would go too far. Buchman had visited Amy in 1925 and he admired her work. At that time, Amy saw no harm in what he stood for. ‘Let no one judge this man by anything written about him. Frank Buchman is out for one thing only, to win men for Jesus Christ.’1896 Six years later Amy’s mind had changed and she saw a threat for the whole community. She was afraid that Christians would be alienated from the Dohnavur family. Amy, Godfrey and also Murray’s fiancée Oda van Boetzelaer were now against Murray and in him against Frank Buchman, to whom Murray owed so much.1897

The internal controversy was solved when Murray signed a statement in which Dohnavur dissociated itself from the Oxford Group. The whole affair had a great impact upon Murray. He was exhausted and needed a rest. He went for some weeks to the Forest House where his friend Hugh Evan Hopkins kept him company. Of their stay there, Hopkins writes:

I did not know what to do with him. He had nothing to say, most unusual for Murray. He used to read a bit, but could not concentrate. He was not happy – just trying to be happy. It was a strange sort of forgotten month out of one’s life. Looking back it seem to me that he was suffering from a severe depressive disturbance caused by a combination of exhaustion, driving himself too hard, and he had conflict in his mind over the Oxford Group. I do not think he had the theological insight to see that the movement was drifting from the central truths of the

1894. The Oxford Group was a Christian organisation founded by the American Christian missionary Dr Frank Buchman. Buchman was an American Lutheran minister of Swiss descent who in 1908 had a conversion experience in a chapel in Keswick. As a result of that experience he would later found a movement called A First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921, which eventually became known as the Oxford Group by 1931. The Oxford Group enjoyed wide popularity and success, particularly in the 1930s. In 1932 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, in summing up a discussion of the Oxford Group with his diocesan bishops, said, ‘There is a gift here of which the church is manifestly in need.’ Two years later William Temple, Archbishop of York, paid tribute to the Oxford Group which is ‘being used to demonstrate the power of God to change lives and give to personal witness its place in true discipleship’. In 1938, Buchman proclaimed a need for ‘moral re-armament’ and that phrase became the movement’s new name. Buchman headed MRA for 23 years until his death in 1961. In 2001 the movement was renamed Initiatives of Chance.

1895. Cf. what Norman Grubb wrote in April 1983 to C.U.M.B: ‘I am glad a biography of Murray is being written [Grubb refers to K. Makower, Follow My Leader], and I have been able to include a few reminiscences, as we were in prep school together, and then our Trinity days and many close contacts since then. I touched a bit on the impact of Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group on him and some of us in its early days, when I personally had a vital challenge through its Four Absolutes, with forgiveness at the Cross, listening to God, and open sharing, before it slipped off its Christ-centred moorings and became MRA’ in (Winter, ed., My Dear C.U.M.B, 206–207).

1896. See K. Makower, Follow My Leader, 129.

1897. Murray had been in long contact with Buchman. In P. Boobbyer, The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2013), note 54 of Chapter 4, is a reference to a letter Buchman wrote to Murray Webb- Peploe, 24 August 1921.

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Christian faith; he thought of it still as he had experienced it, and he had put his own truth and knowledge in it. Not being accepted by Amma and Godfrey – this conflict must have caused depression, I would think.1898 Eventually Murray and Oda were married by Hopkins on 23 April 1933, after which the young couple left for Australia. Here Murray could get full rest and stay in a cooler climate to recuperate completely.

The DF has no official association with any church denomination. The Holy Communion in the House of Prayer was done either in an Anglican or in a Brethren way. In Amy’s spirituality we see that in the day-to-day business in Dohnavur and in the way of education Brethren influences can easily be seen. Quaker spirituality has two components, an inward and an outward one. In Quaker (Friends) religious doctrine there is a profound ethical dimension. ‘Their pattern of worship is contemplative yet corporate, blossoming into experiences of deep communion and community.’1899 Integrity in life, word and deed is also stressed. In the Friends’ vocabulary ‘truth’ is one of the basic principles. All individuals are addressed by the singular second-person pronoun ‘thou’ or ‘thee’, rather than the formal and plural form ‘you’. All are equal, and so all people are treated in this way. ‘Simplicity’ of life has to do with trust and with focus. A simple life is based in the confidence in God’s faithful providence; it enables life to keep God at the centre. In Dohnavur, in God’s Garden we see no markers or tombstones. Only a little stone shows the place of a grave. The simplicity stretches back to a code of plainness that applied to dress, language, home furniture and the small markings in the graveyard. As we have seen, the premillennial view was dominant in Keswick, and also in Quaker circles. I think the DF has an eschatological dimension. In Quaker spirituality the home is at the heart of life,1900 ‘one small plot of heaven’,1901 and in Dohnavur Amy articulated a family spirituality. As a laboratory for Christian worship and testimony, it was close to what she had experienced in Millisle, Keswick, Broughton Grange and India – with a blend of Indian taste. In Amy’s life, we see that she did not like to stay at the centre of interest, and she did not fan her own flames in an effort to heighten her spiritual experiences.

Very special for Amy was the 200-foot long Path of Quietness in Dohnavur, at the end of which was the tamarind tree with the stone cross under it. Here she liked to sit and meditate, especially when so many things had to be done or when a pandemonium of voices sounded, or when there were so many questions, cares, etc. In listening to the stillness there near that cross, she listened to God’s voice and God’s answer to all her questions:

1898. In Makower, Follow My Leader, 130.

1899. In M.L. Birkel, Silence and Witness, The Quaker Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004), 105. Cf. J. Woolman’s remarks on simplicity: ‘Our gracious Creator cares and provides for all His creatures. His tender mercies are over all His works; and so far as His love influences our minds, so far we become interested in his workmanship and feel a desire to take hold of every opportunity to lessen the distresses of the afflicted and increase the happiness of the creation. Here we have a prospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable – that to turn all the treasures we possess into the channel of universal love becomes the business of our lives’ (in Birkel, Silence and Witness, 113–114).

1900. Rufus Jones describes the spiritual life in the family of his boyhood: ‘When I was too young to have any religion of my own, I had come to a home where religion kept its fires always burning. We had very few “things,” but we were rich in invisible wealth. I was not “christened” in a church, but I was sprinkled from morning until night with the dew of religion. We never ate a meal which did not begin with a hush of thanksgiving: we never began a day without “a family gathering” at which mother read a chapter of the Bible, after there would follow a weighty silence. These silences, during which all the children of our family were hushed with a kind of awe, were very important features of my spiritual development. […] When I first began to think of God I did not think of Him as very far off […] He seemed to be there with us in living silence’ (in Birkel, Silence and Witness, 119–120).

1901. Birkel, Silence and Witness, 119.

It requires much courage to be alone with God, to elect to retire for a time, and even for long times, and to listen to His voice only. […] We of the Fellowship have found that this stillness is not a spiritual luxury but sheer necessity. We cannot live without it. We may work without it, but there is no breath of life in the work. […] And yet we perish if we let our Quiet go. And we believe that our Lord can command a stillness within us and about us, which neither noise of words can break nor press of duties shatter. And we believe that He can teach us how to meet each duty with a welcome, and we ask Him wholly to free us from the snare of fuss, and from that kind of occupation which leads to spiritual deafness and throws the dust of earth in our eyes so that we cannot see His face in clearness. Keep us from these hindering things, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.1902 Next to her Bible she profoundly read Biblical, exegetical works and biographies of men of state, church leaders and missionaries. She nourished from the same sources as Gerhard Tersteegen did. She never had an academic theological education; she was an autodidact and required tremendous theological insight in the field of spirituality and missiology.

Purposely she went through the lives and works of evangelical mystics from the Middle Ages and their works were studied thoroughly. Through them, she found what she was after, and they gave her everything to shape the DF. Next to her Bible the Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis, was her almost daily source of inspiration and through him she learned of Geert Grote, the founder of the religious community ‘Brothers of the Common Life’.

Bee Trehane characterised Amy as ‘a down-to-earth mystic’.1903 Amy believed in a simplified Gospel Christianity and found this in the 14th century contemplatives and their successors in the pietistic movement known as the devotio moderna, whose best-known monument is The Imitation of Christ attributed to Thomas à Kempis. His teachings and that of others in those days did in effect point towards an interior and non-institutional Christianity. Thomas à Kempis’s ideas did not lose their connection to real life led by ordinary people. The great mystical literature of the 14th century – Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Rolle – expressed itself in the not-so-cloistered quietism, best illustrated by the Brethren of the Common Life. The adherents renounced private property and led regulated lives in community, yet without taking irrevocable vows. They put the stress on practical piety and character rather than upon ritualism or theological analysis. These ideas are also in the 16th century mystical writings. The emphasis is that without the love of God nothing can be done, but that by the love of God the humble husbandman who serves the Lord is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, labours to understand the movements of heavens. Thomas à Kempis set this tone for the movement. The accent was on an interior religion based on the communion of the humble and receptive soul with God. Its theology is Christ centric. With the Reformers, particularly Luther, it was replaced by a theologia crucis, involving a profound anguish both for Christ and for each man chosen to follow him along the way of the Cross.

The mystics she read

Amy liked to read books about mystics and the way they lived. Of Scudder’s Brother John she wrote on the first page: ‘One of the dearest of all dear books’. Even long before that, in 1893 she had read F.

1902. Meal in a Barrel, 140, 143 and 145.

1903. In the prologue of Fragments that Remain, IX.

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Bevan’s Hymns of Tersteegen,1904 Suso and Others. She wrote, ‘Read first, on board ship. March 1893’, and then ‘these men suffered for Christ’s sake; their words are not chaff’.

Amy was a real Bible student and the books she read apart from the Bible were books through which she knew the Lord had revealed himself. That drew her to the English, French, Dutch and German mystics. She was excellent in expressing mystical Christian insight, also due to her knowledge of the way the mystics expressed themselves. She had no other affiliation with any contemporary religious group, having always been in Keswick lines since 1893, but most of her interest was in medieval writers and Roman Catholic saints of the 16th and 17th century. Margaret Wilkinson writes that Amy had read the mediaeval mystics and ‘felt a spiritual kinship with them’.1905 Writing of a time early in the Fellowship’s history, Amy says: ‘These were ignorant years, but the thoughts which came coloured that which was to be and so they belong to the story of our “gold cord”’. Then she quotes Traherne:

His earnest love, His infinite desires, ’Tis death, my soul, to be indifferent;
His living, endless, and devouring fires, Set forth thyself unto thy whole extent,
Do rage in thirst, and fervently require And all the glory of His passion prize,
A love ‘tis strange it should desire. Who for thee lives, who for thee dies.1906

In 1916, Amy, in one of her rare visits outside Dohnavur, met Dr Eleonor McDougall in Madras1907; this first meeting Amy labelled as ‘an unforgettable hour’. In Houghton’s biography, we read of this meeting:

All the time I was with her I seemed to see a field under the plough, and to hear one of the finest of our Tamil proverbs, ‘Better is it to plough deep than to plough wide’. She is going to plough a deep furrow.1908 Amy had met now a woman with whom she could really have fellowship. Their friendship was based on mutual appreciation and on common intellectual interests. Amy, deeply rooted in the Scriptures, who knew that the way of the Cross is a narrow one, had none of the small-mindedness that mars the testimony of some whose basis of belief is identical to hers. With her new friend she could talk about God’s work in India and about literature. Both women were fond of reading and Eleonor introduced the mystics, like Saint Teresa and others, to Amy. She admired in Amy her faculty to distinguish the essentials from the externals. Sometimes they crossed swords on certain issues but they

1904. On 12 June 1896, in a letter from Kotagiri, she asks for a new copy of this book for lending it to someone (PRONI D/406/1/1-D; D4060/6/8, p. 14).

1905. Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 32.

1906. Thomas Traherne (1636–1674), British poet and prose writer. In Gold Cord, 10.

1907. She is the founder and first Principal of the Women’s Christian College (WCC) in Madras. The college was founded on 07 July 1915 as a joint venture of 12 missionary societies from England and America. Eleanor McDougall was born in Manchester in 1873 and educated at Manchester High School and at a Moravian School in the Black Forest in Germany. ‘The mission of the WCC in Madras, as it was stated by the founder-Principal Dr Eleonor McDougall is specific and contextual. […] We can do no better service to India, than to liberate the energies of wisdom and devotion which are latent in her women and to infuse into them the vital ideals of Christianity. […] The mission was reinterpreted from time to time to suit the changing aspirations and needs of its wards, and of women in general. […] While the mission is still couched in its original ideal of liberation of women for uninhabited total development, it is made comprehensive to include the objective of offering and education that can create generations of intellectually excellent, morally upright, spiritually inspired and professionally sound young women to illuminate their own homes and their home land. Within the first week of its start, it was decided, that the College motto would be “Lighted to lighten”; the College flower, the sunflower (flower of light) was chosen; the College crest was designed and the College song, “Alma Mater” was set to the tune of Finlandia composed by Sibelius’ (from ‘Founders’, Women’s Christian College, accessed 09 October 2014, wcc.edu.in/about-us/founders). respected each other deeply. It was good for Amy, too, to have someone who was more or less her equal though, due to Eleanor’s academic study, Amy sometimes had to acknowledge her superiority. For both it was good and refreshing that someone from outside could give an opinion. From 1921 onwards Dr McDougall annually came to Dohnavur and spent some weeks with Amy in the Forest House.

One wonders why Amy could recommend authors whose doctrine she could not follow, but she thought the Fellowship members could well discern what was gold and what was chaff. Missionaries who intended to come to Dohnavur got the advice to read The Spiritual Letters of Père Didon as well as the second volume of the Life of Hudson Taylor. In them, she found the ‘joy of sacrificial living’, often to be found more ‘amongst those whom we cannot follow in doctrine’. As Protestants:

[W]e have had some who have gone back to the early ideal, and lived it out. But they have had to press through the solid weight of modern Christianity, a sort of piled up decorousness, comfortableness, utter negation of the Cross lived, shocked surprise at the bare thought of that. […] My most longing prayer is that as a Fellowship we may go on there, and not become mere talkers or singers about it.

Amy read the work of several mystics. She, with her Reformed background, nourished herself with pious Roman Catholic believers and those representing the contra-Reformation. She integrated them as if they were evangelical Christians.

Throughout history, men and women have arisen to call upon the Church to return to the narrow way of Christ. In times of growing wealth and prosperity for the Church, Christians of deep thought renounced these things, took a vow of poverty and lived away from bustling everyday life. Some retreated behind monastic walls, others sought to follow the via apostolica and became itinerants, preaching and caring for the poor and sick among the common people. Others became well known for the Orders they established with their specific rules while the adherents vowed to renounce marriage, living a simple life and giving themselves to a life in complete devotion and obedience to God.

Mysticism was an alternative to the scholasticism of the schools and theology of the monasteries, ‘an alternative especially available to women’.1909 Amy often turned to prayer and books of devotion written by mystics. Amy had the books and biographies of several of these mystics in her bookcases1910: men and women like Thomas à Kempis, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the anchoress Julian of Norwich, Vincent de Paul (1576–1660), Sainte Chantal (1572–1641), Angelique of Port Royal (1591–1661), Madame de La Motte Guyon (1648–1717), François Fénelon (1651–1715) and Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515–1582).

Amy read many books from these mystics as we can see in the annotations (Figure 32) she made in many of them. In Tauler she read:

1909. Severance, Feminine Threads, 121. ‘Mysticism may be defined as a human mind’s effort to merge indescribable thoughts with transitory feelings in an effort to seek joyful communion or oneness with God’ (p. 121).

1910. C. Winkworth, The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler with Twenty-Five of His Sermons (London: Smith, Elder, Company, 1867); H.A. Reinhold (ed.), The Spear of God. Revelations of the Mystics (London: Burns Oates, 1947); E.A. Peers, Mother of Carmel. A Portrait of St. Theresa of Jesus (London: S.C.M. Press Ltd, 1946); Sainte Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle or The Mansions (London: Sands & Co, 1944); Moorhead (ed.), The Spiritual Letters of Madame Guyon; H.E. Govan, The Life of Gerhard Tersteegen (London: James Nisbet & Co, 1898); Ramón Lull, The Tree Of Love, ed. E. Allison Peers (London: SPCK, 1926); V.D. Scudder, Brother John. A Tale of the First Franciscans. (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938 [1931]); E. Underhill, The Mystic Way (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1929); A. Whyte, Santa Teresa (London, Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1900); T. Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, ed. B. Dobell (London: Dobell, 1927); E.K. Sanders, Fénelon. His Friends and His Enemies (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co, 1901) – Amy wrote on the first paper of this book: ‘Except for the chapter on Madame Guyon, a book to enjoy’; Amy got this book as a present on Christmas Day 1942: Fénelon’s Conversations with M. de Ramsai. The Truth of Religion (1869) and wrote of it ‘To understand this book read life of Fénelon by Sander’; J. Newton, CARDIPHONIA or, The Utterance of the Heart (London: Morgan & Scott Ltd, 1911).

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Source: © The Donavon Fellowship. Photographer J. (Hans) Kommers.

FIGURE 32: One of Amy’s annotations in E.K. Sanders, Sainte Chantal, 1572–1641.

Moreover, our Lord has so ordained it for our good, that the Evil Angel, Satan, has power to transform himself before the inward eye of the mind into an Angel of Light; and he does it most of all at those times when a man gathers up all his powers to enter into communion with God.1911 Then Tauler spoke of the fact that John divided sin of the world into three kinds: ‘the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life’.

Children, I commend you from the bottom of my heart into the captivity of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; that it may be in you, over you, behind you, and before you, lying heavy on you, and yet received by you with free and full acquiescence to the will of God, whatever it may please Him to do with you.1912 Amy wrote on the front page of this book ‘The captivity of the Cross’, marking this as very important for her. When God withheld his love, she underlined:

The reason of His thus withholding sensible delight is that our spiritual fruitfulness and highest blessedness do not lie therein, but in our inward trusting and clinging to God, in our not seeking ourselves either in sorrow or joy, but through joy and sorrow devoting ourselves to God. […] When a man seeks himself too much, and with eager desire strives after warmth and sensible devoutness, to the end that he may always be in a state of contentment. […] When such a one has none of these sweet emotions, he is quite troubled and becomes peevish and very impatient in the trifling mishaps that befall him, though they are really of no importance whatever.1913 In The Spear of God she underlined the words of Catharine of Sienna who wrote about the ‘wounded heart’ and about her communion with God. Her life is consumed and shed for this sweet Bride (Christ’s redeemed) and then talked about ‘such sweet physical tortures’. In the margin, Amy wrote, ‘Can physical tortures be “sweet”?’ After having read Angélique of Port Royal1914 she wrote in the book, ‘There is much here for the DF. […] There are many dear things in this book’.

On the front page in Govan’s The Life of Gerhard Tersteegen, she wrote: ‘The writer is now with the Lord – he lived to bring others to Him’. In March 1893 she read, on board a ship to Japan for the first time, the Hymns of Tersteegen, Suso and Others.1915 ‘First sung for Christ so their words are not chaff.’ These words Amy wrote on the title page. On the journey to Japan, she marked the following song:

We follow in His footsteps
What if our feet be torn?
Where He has marked the pathway
All hail the briar and thorn!1916

Amy had read a lot of books and her library was and still is really a mère à boire, indicating where her interests laid. Here you can find a little book in which Amy had written: ‘This is the dearest book I ever

1911. In Winkworth, The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler, 318. The book is in the Dohnavur library. John Tauler (1300–1361) was a German Dominican mystic. He is known as one of the Friends of God, an informal group of Catholic mystics who strove to deepen both their communal relationship as well as their spirituality. Tauler was the leader of this group. His sermons demonstrated his mastery of combining the mystical with the concrete. He desired to be detached from earthly things.

1912. Winkworth, The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler, 375.

1913. Winkworth, The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler, 419.

1914. E.K. Sanders, Angélique of Port Royal (London: SPCK, 1908), 1591–1661. This book is in the Dohnavur library.

1915. F. Bevans, Hymns of Ter Steegen, Suso and Others (London: James Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1894).

1916. In Hymns of Ter Steegen, Suso and Others, 6, 100, 48 and 142.

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read’. It is The Chronicles of Brother Wolf,1917 a book that must have attracted Amy because in it she read the way Francis of Assisi, who saw animals as his brothers and sisters because they were God’s creatures, treated the animals, not hurting them. And even stronger: how to be of service to them wherever they required it. Just like Francis (born about 1181 in Assisi, Italy), who had lived during a period of transition when the world was moving out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, Amy’s world and society were in a transition which culminated in the independence of India in 1947.

In Sainte Chantal, she found the devout life she herself wanted to live in Dohnavur. For Chantal, the secret of spiritual life was to keep close to God and to constantly maintain the realisation of his presence, but this presence had to be known by faith and not by feeling. This you could reach ‘by a firm resolve to surrender to God, and an unswerving purpose of self-discipline and renunciation of all things without reserve’.1918 E.K. Sanders’ Sainte Chantal was for her ‘a living book and a dear book too. But I am glad that I can depend on our DF to hold fast to the pattern’. She also wrote, ‘Sorrows are not mine, blessed be God, 1943’. And in 1945 she read the book again and wrote ‘O God, Father of all of us, keep us true to Thy purpose at all costs’. This book is of interest for us because every time she sees herself in Sainte Chantal. As in this verse:

She was a traveller who, starting on her journey with a clearly-marked and time-worn route before her, she found herself checked by the Touch that was not human and turned to a way, very difficult and hard to find, that led to a destination which she had not desired.

Next to this sentence, she wrote in the margin, ‘March 3. 1893 and March 6. 1901’. Reading about Chantal’s service to Jesus crucified, she wrote: ‘But He spent His life in helping others’. When a congregation was needed, she reads ‘the Spirit of Perfection’. She wrote in the margin, ‘Or was it compromise?’1919

In St Francis of Assisi, Amy saw an example of simplicity of faith in action. His simple, straightforward way of dealing with the established Church and with civil authorities appealed to her. Just like St Francis, Amy wanted to live as an imitator of Christ, to live her life closely to what she believed the Gospel taught her. Francis’s example inspired her to the possibility of a life totally centred in the teachings of Christ. Like St Francis she was an enormously free and spontaneous person, faithfully giving credit to the Church, while living her live in Dohnavur to Biblical principles.

In 1813 A Guide to True Peace, or The Excellency of Inward and Spiritual Prayer, was published.1920 This manual on prayer was drawn from the works of Madame Jeanne-Marie Guyon (née Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte), François Fénelon and Miguel de Molinos. Their influence among Friends dated back to before 1813. Some Friends, a century earlier, had especially learned French in order to read Guyon and Fénelon in the original.1921 The little manual speaks of union of the soul with God through ‘death of self’, ‘resignation’, ‘surrender of your will to the divine will’, ‘submission to the cross’, and ‘annihilation’.

1917. By Tertius, least of the Brethren of the order of Friars Minor and servant of Francis: Tertius, The Chronicles of Brother Wolf (London: Mowbray & Co, 1939).

1918. E.K. Sanders, Sainte Chantal, A Study in Vocation (London: SPCK, 1918), 306. The book is in the Dohnavur library.

1919. In Sanders, Sainte Chantal, the quotation is in the introduction and on page 79.

1920. Edited by the Friends William Backhouse and James Janson. The chief source of this manual was the Short and Simple Method of Prayer (Le moyen court et très facile de faire oraison) by Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon.

1921. See Birkel, Silence and Witness, 77. About prayer, the manual says: In order to be suitable to all sorts, it must be a form of prayer not ‘of the head, but of the heart’. It is a prayer of ‘inward silence, wherein the soul, abstracted from all outward things, in holy stillness, humble reverence, and lively faith, waits patiently to feel the Divine presence, and to receive the precious influence of the Holy Spirit’ (Birkel, Silence and Witness, 77).

Many times Amy quoted1922 Madame Guyon, who like Amy, ‘suffered in every sensitive fibre of her being’. For her it was a real help to understand the way the Lord was dealing with her own life. In her eyes Madame Guyon was ‘His faithful servant’1923 and an example of true holiness. In questions about God’s guidance and understanding God’s way, she once quoted Madam Guyon:

Through the dark and silent night
On Thy radiant smiles I dwelt;
And to see the dawning light
Was the keenest pain I felt.1924

In reading the mystics, Amy was no exception. Other evangelical leaders, like John Wesley had studied Madame Guyon’s 20-volume commentary on the Bible and at the Keswick Conventions her word was mentioned.1925 Also Adoniram Judson (1788–1850), a missionary to Burma, had read her books and imitated her steadfastness and acceptance during his two years in a Bangkok prison. William Cowper translated one of her songs, written in 1681, into English. The song is known as ‘O Lord, How Full of Sweet Content’.

Amy highly valued the Scottish Presbyterian pastor Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) and loved to read his letters and sermons. She often quoted him and once she wrote: ‘As old dear Rutherford has it’.1926 In Gold Cord she cited him: ‘It cost Christ and all His followers sharp showers and hot sweats ere they win to the top of the mountain’. These words Amy wrote after having written about the obedience to the call and then the practice to continue ‘when the sharp storm blows that takes the hide of our faces’.1927

In choosing new workers, Amy made clear that the sole sufficient reason for their coming to Dohnavur was that they had to learn ‘how to bear the Cross of our Lord by denial of themselves, surrender of their wishes, mortification of all desires’. Also that she was the leader and that they should follow her directions ‘with the humility, sincerity, and simplicity which our Lord requires’.1928 From Saint Teresa de Jesus she underlined an important sentence. It must have given her the reason for her own book If:

This love of one another is so important, that I never wish it to be forgotten. If you go about remarking in others little nothings, which often are not even imperfections, but perhaps, in our ignorance you take them amiss, you will lose your own peace of mind, and trouble that of others.1929 Also for Teresa de Jesus, Christian life was a fight; she wrote – and Amy agreed with these words, which she marked in red:

1922. Gold Cord, 178, 180.

1923. Gold Cord, 180.

1924. In Gold by Moonlight, 38.

1925. See TKW (1955): 174.

1926. In Dohnavur letter, no. 1, 1923, 11 (PRONI D/4031/24/1A).

1927. Gold Cord, 182.

1928. Sanders, Sainte Chantal, 98.

1929. In Saint Teresa de Jesus, The Interior Castle, 15.

Chapter 16

All hell will combine to force her to leave the castle. […] But she (the child of God) should make up her mind that she is about to fight against all the demons, and that there are no better arms than those of the Cross.1930 Amy combined elements of character which are very rare in our superficial and worldly age. Hers was a life that was holy, humble, and that seemed to keep the ‘unstained spirit of a little child’. She had a heart and mind pure as the heart of a flame. She desired a life dedicated to God and through these mystics she found a paradigm of what she had in mind with DF, and the tools to interpret and create the fundamentals of the Fellowship. Even in the establishment of the formal institutional pattern, she followed the design of these Roman Catholic institutions. The personal religion provided by mysticism attracted Amy. She was devoted to the Eucharist and the desire of the mystical union of the soul with Christ and was looking for the sacred in her and the Fellowship family’s own lives, going beyond the creeds, dogmas, and ideas of faith in an effort to actually experience of God.

She sought to live close with God but she did not fizzle off into mere abstractions. Holiness in the Lord meant for her an unsullied walk with the feet, unsullied talk with the tongue, unsullied thinking of the mind, unsullied transactions of the bodily organs, and unsullied life of the heart. The holiness of the son of God is actually manifested in our ordinary bodily lives. This is the actual experience of sanctification working out in each detail. In this sanctified life, she was led through the Cross for a life of outpouring service to God. She had moments in which she was lost in wonder, love, praise and adoration of her Saviour. But her daily life with God was in the valley encountered by the power of the devil, fighting against the bad deeds in a demon-possessed environment, with eyes fixed on the Lord who for her had always been the God rescuing his people out of dark Egypt. Through self-concentration and inner contemplation, she sought to bring herself into absolute subjection to God.

Her spiritual communion can be explained as the devotion of her heart where she could be alone with God and as a penitent observe the passion and the suffering of Christ. Her body, soul and mind lost in God. For her the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ were not only historical, redemptive facts, but also the experience of having the ‘inner Christ’ in the heart. When in 1902 Julian’s Reflections on Divine Love came from the press, it found in Amy a welcome reader. Disagreeing with many of Julian’s statements, Amy valued the way Julian understood the greatness of God and the importance of his love.

All the great mystics orientated their range of thought on the early Church fathers, of whom Augustine (354–430) was the most important. We see in Amy’s work that she, too, quoted Augustine several times. The brides’ mysticism and the stylising in their books attracted Amy who with deep thought entered into the thought of the mystics. In the mystics of the Middle Ages the focus was on the Christ in the flesh, the suffering Christ; a concentration on the life and suffering of Jesus on earth, in all his human aspects. We see that the theology of the Cross, as we find it in Paul’s letters, bears deep marks in the work of the mystics. Christ’s sufferings were for our salvation. This soteriological aspect we see in his life, death and resurrection. As mediator he saved us and his life shows how we have to follow him.

The mystics emphasised the practical benefit: what Christ did for us, and what he does in us. In this way we can speak of a practical Christology. In his great compassion, Christ gave himself for others and those who love him, out of love, serve others. In full devotion and continuous concentration on the wounds of Christ, and in a practical way, the believer will serve others. All hope and strength of the Christian is anchored in the crucified Christ. Those who love Christ are on this earth in the meditation on what Christ had once done for them and they long for what in the future he will be for them. They walk from memory to presence. In him the victory is present:

Before the winds that blow to cease, Teach me to dwell within Thy calm:

1930. In Saint Teresa de Jesus, The Interior Castle, 15.

Before the pain has passed in peace,
Give me my God, to sing a psalm.
Let me not lose the chance to prove
The fullness of enabling love.
O Love of God, do this for me:
Maintain a constant victory.1931

Some of the mystics, like Geert Grote and Thomas à Kempis, formed a community of Brothers of the Common Life, but also for women communities were formed in the Middle Ages. Often they were called mulieres religiosae, communities open to lay people, to serve the Lord and live a life in reading, meditation, lent, periods of silence and in total love serving the Lord and others. Amy’s Starry Cluster was a modern variant of a very old medieval practice. Amy wanted to bear the Cross in a practical imitation. She strongly believed what she heard and saw, was what the Lord told and showed her. Usually it was a Bible word and so the Lord was talking directly to her. Therefore, according to Davies:

[T]he way Scripture was interpreted owed almost everything to her own blend of mysticism and practicality. […] She felt she probably belonged to an uncommon band of Christians who lived on a higher plane of spirituality.1932 She had a narrow focus, the Bible only, but a wide-open heart for all who needed help. In India, a country with the ‘mysterious aloofness of asceticism’1933, Amy’s mysticism and her knowledge of the ways of the East served her well in allowing her to be often on familiar terms with the people.