The Missionary: ‘I was sent, so speak’ (1) (part 3 of 3)
The desert sanctuary
The work in Dohnavur asked for strategic thinking. Taking care of hundreds of children, protecting them, educating them, feeding them and preparing them for servanthood, marriage or profession, required prayer, planning and good coordination. This kept Amy busy from early morning until late night. Along with the strategic aspect was the consecrated part, the focus on the one whom she followed. Utilised in her capacity and calling as a real lover of God, she was in south India on the front line of missionary work. She showed in her work the love of Christ and a life of full consecration as a life of a contemplative in action.
She embraced the Cross and not the retreat: sacrificial life in ordinary daily work in a special setting, working with others and led by God. Not bound to any institutional church she had formed a Fellowship – the Sisters of the Common Life – knowing:
[T]hat victory can be won in no other way than Thou, O Lord Christ, with Thy apostles didst seek to win it, by love and prayer, by shedding of tears and blood, by self-sacrifice, by spiritual not by carnal weapons.1934 The road she followed was filled with ‘landmines’, but she followed ‘The Gleam’, obeying the call ‘let us go forth to Him outside the camp, and bear the abuse He endured’, seeking ‘the city which is to come’.1935 The focus on this ‘exile motive’ in Amy’s life and work reveals her deepest intentions and explains us how the DF got its shape during the first half of the 20th century:
1931. In Rose from Brier, 16.
1932. In Genius and Grace, 207 and 210.
1933. In Ragland, 71.
1934. Here Amy quotes Raymond Lull (Gold Cord, 160–161).
1935. Hebrews 13:13–14.
Chapter 16
When a soul sets out to find God it does not know whether it will come and by what path it will be led; but those who catch the vision are ready to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goes, regardless of what that following may involve for them. And it is as they follow, obedient to what they have seen, in this spirit of joyful adventure, that their path becomes clear before them, and they are given the power, to fulfil their high calling. They are those who have the courage to break through conventionalities, who care not at all, what the world thinks of them, because they are entirely taken up with the tremendous realities of the soul and God.1936 I gave the full quotation because Amy must have recognised what Bardsley had written. She, too, broke through conventionalities, she wanted to be led by God, she was an independent missionary, and did not look to others, but upwards to God alone, the ultimate reality. To know Christ and the power of his resurrection was always with her. The one thing necessary! She fully agreed with Bardsley and immediately after the quotation she wrote: ‘The Cross is the attraction’. ‘This was one of our words from the first.’1937 Like the mystics, Amy experienced personal visions. Her writings show that she was consumed with the suffering of Christ and she was willing to share in that suffering in service for others. In one vision, she saw Christ kneeling in the garden, praying for the children in danger. And she knelt next to him. Like the abbesses of their respective institutions sought to reform the orders, so she established the DF in a strict way, with clear rules on the overarched principle of love.
Amy’s life of inward-looking, contemplative mysticism, however, contrasted greatly with the lives and thinking of those who belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. Nourished in the Protestant Reformation with its strong emphasis on the Sola Fide, Sola Gratia and Sola Scriptura, she lived up to her personal life and experience and she knew God from his revelation of himself in the Scriptures, not through visions or mysticism. She lived her Christian life in daily communion with others, and not in an austere isolation. She came to know God in a deeper way by a greater knowledge of the Scriptures and obedience to the Word of God, not through a self-imposed abnegation of the body and extra Biblical meditative techniques. The influence of the Quaker home in which she lived in the years before she went to the mission field is felt in the way she was sensitive to listen to the voice of God, but she never went beyond the Scripture as the ultimate authority. She might have thrown away all denominational labels, but never left what she had already heard at home in Millisle, where she grew up with the concept of the faithfulness of God and the authority of the Bible. She never boasted of her Quaker credentials.
Of the medieval authors Amy read, all represented a monastic spirituality. This spirituality was characteristic of the way of life of these medieval missionaries. In the history of Christian missions, we often see the merging of the monastic vocation and the missionary vocation. The DF is completely different from the medieval monastery, but in the whole setup, we see a tendency to withdraw from the natural environment and create a Fellowship that is closely knit. Besides the deep personal commitment of those who belonged to it, the Fellowship members had their own rules and behaviour, and at the same time undertook missionary activities. The typical vocational mission as the Irish formerly carried out,1938 we see again many centuries later in Amy, this other Irish missionary in the south Indian setting of the first half of the 20th century in a life desirous of personal holiness and concern for reaching out to others.
1936. Here Amy quotes Bishop Bardsley (Gold Cord, 161).
1937. Gold Cord, 161.
1938. See J. Schmidlin, Catholic Mission History (Techny, IL: Mission Press, 1933), 182. The Irish missionaries highly valued scholarship; they had a passion to preach the Gospel and were uncompromising, keeping a strict religious discipline. They made long pilgrimages (perigrinatio pro Christo) for the sake of Christ and in imitation of Christ. Schmidlin distinguishes in his study two divisions of mission and missionary methods of the early Middle Ages in Europe: the vocational mission and the Frankish imperial mission (pp. 181–182).
Amy remained in the love of Christ by surrender, faith and obedience and she knew that what she was, she was by the grace of God. In one way we can say that she had nothing to do but live in union with Christ and all else followed. However, with her this union with Christ was a union in dynamics. Her passivity and her receptivity transmitted a mighty activity.1939 She was a mystic full of common sense, with a mind that grasped truth clearly, and she had the power of expressing it simply. Beyond all doubt, it was the constant presence and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who dwelt so fully in her, who clothed her word with such a power and made the results so permanent. To us, her sane mysticism, instead of being an excuse for effort, was the very mainspring of her ceaseless activity, and those whom she could not reach or who lived far away, she inspired by her anointed pen. Like Madame Guyon in her itinerating work, she taught the importance of seeking and knowing Christ and started to help others (the children rescued from moral danger), establishing an educational institution and building a hospital.
Her piety never denied natural life. You can shine in the sun, but Jesus wants us to shine where there is no sun, where it is dark with the press of the practical things. Amy learned from the Holy Spirit to take the words of Jesus out of their spiritual setting and put them into the setting of her personal life. Such a life has its message for our day. I see her as a practical mystic: she both combined fellowship and service, the fullest use of human means with the most complete dependence upon God in prayer, the absolute loyalty to Christ, yet with a tender heart for others with whom she differed in minor convictions. She went for ‘this one thing I have desired’!
A holy, loving, lowly life
Missionary candidates, accepted for Dohnavur, received letters from Amy in which she wrote what they could expect in missionary life:
Above all my prayer for you is that you may be a good soldier, ready to do anything, and suffering, any misunderstanding, any blame, anything for Jesus’ sake. The life of a missionary can be as easy and as pleasant as any life at home. Crossing the sea does not make any woman a missionary in spirit, nor does it turn soft iron into steel. Spend much time at Calvary before you come. Look at that love, look and look till you can say to Him, ‘Yes, Lord, anything’. […] I long to have you out tomorrow and to pour the language into you, and send you out to fight the powers of evil with the Powers of Love. Do not fear - the mudthrowing will not be over when you come. You will get thoroughly splashed. I am so glad you don’t mind the prospect. […] If her soul leaps to hardship for the sake of the Crucified all will be well. It is those who for His sake choose to follow Him in this way who make the valiant warriors. […] We shall begin to perish if we do. (lower the standard). That is, the deepest in us will do so. We shall get bigger, but gradually we shall slip into soft iron, not tempered steel. What a mix-up of simile, but I leave it. God keep us true to the heavenly vision. […] I delighted in your action and decision, and when I heard of your parents’ response – their soldierly response – I just sang for joy […] The soldierly choices of the soul – it is those that are assaulted, and with one voice most Christian parents and friends join in the assault […] I can see no reason for the creation of our D.F. if we are to be satisfied with the usual.1940
1939. Cf. the remark of E. Stanley Jones in his In Christ (p. 85): ‘The quietism in Christ is the same kind of quietism which is at the centre of a cyclone – a place of rest, but the place where the power of the cyclone resides’.
1940. Letter in the office of the DF.
Chapter 16
In all her thoughts and deeds Amy drew from the Bible her ideas and initiatives. When she read Luke 1:19:
And the angel answering said unto him, ‘I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak unto thee, and to bring thee these good tidings’.
Amy wrote in the margin ‘Ideal Missionary. I stand… I was sent… So speak… Unto thee… to bring these good tidings…’.1941 When Amy was together with other missionaries, she always tried to know what their missionary motives were. Were they driven by a passion for Christ and his honour? Would people not be stirred to go and tell the Good News when they would know that in India alone, 28 000 people a day – this 3 is as it was in 1903 – go to their death without Christ? She could write very strongly about missionaries seeking an easy life:
Surely we should not deliberately leave so many to starve to death, because those who have the Bread of Life have strong desire for sweets. Oh, the spiritual confectionary consumed every year in England! She even wondered why there was so much earnest Church life in England with so many evangelistic campaigns and conventions, and yet so poor an output as far as the lands abroad. Can it be that so many are meant to stay at home?1942 ‘God open our eyes to see if we are doing what he meant, and what He means should continue.’1943 She often prayed for parents who would not:
[C]all their children back from going to the last extremity of the jewel mine. It is just there that the richest jewels lie. […] It is the utter earnestness of purpose to be wholly on the altar of our Lord that speaks to me, the earnestness in ‘downing’ the ‘I’.1944 During a convention week in a hill station in India, Amy was confronted with an Indian woman whose words led Amy to think about the essence of mission work. Was it true that so many missionaries were not ‘warm and loving and keen to win souls’? And did they not lead ‘specially holy lives’? The Indians observe missionaries. They observed them when they work but they also are observed when they are off work. Concerning missionaries, an Indian girl said to Amy, ‘We look to you to show us patterns and you are showing us crooked pattern’.1945
These words scorched Amy. The picture painted thus might not wholly be true, ‘there was enough truth left to lay at least the one who listened low down in the dust’. This narrated conversation led Amy to think further of her own functioning and that of her colleagues as missionaries. In short, she related her missionary beliefs and Christian stance in the little book called God’s Missionary.
God’s Missionary is for ‘younger fellow-missionaries who have not made up their minds’. We will follow here Amy’s arguments, because they are so fundamental and give us her key thoughts about mission and missionaries. The overall thought is that ‘all had to be done for the sake of our Master’s glory’. She urges:
1941. In Stevens and De Witt Burton, A Harmony of the Gospels, 22.
1942. Cf. Lotus Buds, 340.
1943. Things As They Are, 295–296.
1944. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 342.
1945. God’s Missionary, 14.
Comrades in this solemn fight – this awful conflict with awful powers – let us settle it as something that cannot be shaken: We are here to live holy, loving, lowly lives. We cannot do this unless we walk very, very close to our Lord Jesus. […] For the sake of the souls that may stumble if we turn even ever so little aside, for the sake of our Master’s glory – dearer surely to us than all else – let us ask Him now to show us whether in anywise we have been showing ‘crooked patterns’.1946 Missionaries, after being trained, go to the mission field and very soon, many are disappointed. They feel ‘befogged’ due to the many traditions in the stations. Many things crowd into their lives and no room is left to separate oneself for the Lord. Others are wrecked on ‘the rock of compromise’. So many things are rather hindrances than aids to the deeper life in the mission house.
What will help them? Only to know nothing among any save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. ‘Give yourself wholly to this office whereunto it has pleased God to call you.’ Paul gives us the answer in Acts 27:23 ‘God, whose I am, and whom I serve’.
‘A missionary should not be entangled in the affairs of this life.’ There can be social entanglement. What is expected from us is not always what is required. Let your windows be open towards Jerusalem and not towards any earthly city. Talk can be another entanglement. Make it a law of the house that those who are absent are not to be discussed to their detriment:
Talk can pull down as well as build up, and it can entrap and weaken in a very curious way. But the talk that is the kind Christ would enjoy – frank and simple and sincere and happy as the song of the birds – this kind of talk lifts up and helps. […] How would our talk sound to Him? All we need, all we want, is to have His un-grieved Presence with us always.
Overwork is another entanglement. Don’t put unreached weights upon your hearts. Ambition, that love of the praise of the man that brings a snare.
The outcome is that the Lord is farther from us than he used to be and then comes the thought – with shame and sorrow: ‘If I had spent more time with God for souls I should have had more power with souls for God’. Today it is just as in Paul’s time. The fight with the spirits of evil is just as desperate now as it was then. ‘We cannot go in for entanglements of any sort and expect spiritual power at the same time.’ What we need is a life of ‘consecration and faith’. Avoid the ‘spiritual malaria’, the fever of a restless soul, which has a power to enervate the very fibre of our being and so unnerve us for the fight.
God’s missionary is a Nazarite; he has made a special vow: to separate himself unto the Lord. He ‘narrows down’ his life. She quotes Arnot of Central Africa, ‘I do not think there is anything as essential to real service for God as an entire separation and devotion to the work’.1947 In full dedication a missionary, who loves will not ask ‘How little’, but ‘How much’:
We are bound to look upon the world, with all its delights and all its attractions, with suspicion and with reserve. It is not for us, not for us. We are called in the higher Kingdom, we are touched with a diviner Spirit. Here she quotes the mystic Tauler: ‘A pure heart is one to which all that is not of God is strange and jarring’. We all are in the searchlight of the Cross. The best recreation is ‘the re-creating of the holy fire’. And if you go out for a short while? ‘All depends upon where you go when you get away.’ Try to become more and more one with the people where you work. Mission work has something of a sacrifice. ‘Be on the spot if we are needed.’ This came from the pen of one who had been in India for 56 years uninterruptedly. In defence of that, she once said:
1946. Here and further I quote the main points in God’s Missionary, 21, 53, 23, 27 etc.
1947. God’s Missionary, 34, 40, 43, 44 etc.
Chapter 16
A mother does not leave her children.1948 Our life is a life with the people and for them. We can never know the Eastern people while we find our chief recreation to be an escape from their companionship into the society of our fellow-Europeans. The people of the land are keenly observant: they mark our preferences in the choice of our friends, as in everything else. […] In this way there will always be a reserve in their confidence. Think of this: ‘You cannot be a good missionary if you cannot be happy among them’. This even Ragland advised! First things first. What is the missionary’s first thing? It is ‘always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh’. ‘Separation unto God in its true sense does not mean narrowness.’ In quoting Conybeare and Howson’s translation of 2 Corinthians 6:12, Paul advises the Corinthians ‘to come out from the unclean ways of the world’. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ Liberty for what? ‘Liberty to reflect as in a mirror the glory of the Lord. Here is a positive corollary of the “negativeness” of separation.’
In what way can a missionary most effectively touch our world for Christ? When in all our work there is no room for the Lord Jesus Christ then the hardened people will never be won. Use the opportunities when they pass by, ‘to speak for the Lord, then, is not to write on sand’. Use the very Cross of shame, to attract the wandering souls of men! ‘God’s true missionary is an anointed Priest, and as a result of his consecration, he is crowned.’ Amy refers here to Leviticus 21:12. The crown of God is enough for the missionary. He also will receive ‘the crown of rejoicing’. And he will also receive ‘the crown of converts won for Him, when we stand in the presence of the Lord’. It is here we have to talk about Amy in her deep fellowship with Christ and in her complete acceptance of what he was doing with her and through her. In her library is a copy of Evelyn Underhill’s Immanence.1949 She got this book in January 1932 from Mary, who added the poem:
I come in the little things
Saith the Lord……
Amidst the delights of bladed wheat
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod.
There do I dwell, in weakness and in power.
In her own writing in the margin on pages 18–19 we read: ‘Oct.24, 1931 and Oct.24, 1943’. On these pages is the poem ‘STIGMATA’. I give here the whole poem because these words reflect Amy’s closest intimacy with God.
Must I be wounded in the untiring feet
That hasted all the way
My Dear to greet?
Shall errant love endure this hard delay,
Limping and slow
On its ascents to go?
Chorus Yea, this must be
If thou would’st come with Me:
Thus only can
My seal be set on man.
Must I be wounded in the busy hands That labour to fulfil
1948. Nesaruthina Carunia, in an interview with the author, 16 November 2013 in Dohnavur.
1949. Evelyn Underhill, Immanence (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1931).
Industrious love’s demands
Within the circle of thy sovereign will?
And can it fall within that will to let
Thy child from all repayment of its debt?
Chorus
And is it thus? then gladly I go lame,
Bring nought within my hands save this thy sign:
See, I exult! all bliss is in the flame
That mars, yet brands me thine
Thine are my members: strike again and give
A deeper, sweeter hurt, that dying I may live.
Chorus
Make thou thy blazon perfect; let my heart
The piercing wound of thy swift love receive,
That only cunning lance which hath the art
Man’s sickness to relieve.
Make the place deep and wide,
That thou may’st find a nook, therein to hide.
Chorus.
In Rose from Brier1950 she refers to Underhill’s poem ‘STIGMATA’, ‘of which one verse spoke with a special tenderness’. She mentions verse one:
So there could be nothing but a peaceful acceptance, and when one accepts, all that is included in the thing accepted too – the helplessness, the limitations, the disappointments of hope deferred, the suffering. […] But if we refuse that wisp of cloud and look up and meet the love of the Lord that shines don on us, and say to Him about that particular detail of trial, ‘Dear Lord, yes’ (for it was not included in the first act of acceptance?), then in one bright moment our sky is blue again.
Also on 23 September 1943 she read this poem and wrote: ‘Read in Neyyoor first in October 1931. STIGMATA spoken then though only six weeks of lamed life was expected. Often and often since’. She often reread this poem. In 1947 she wrote under it, ‘Sept. 23. 1947. STIGMATA’. That she too wanted to experience a deep fellowship with the Lord, as she read in some of the mystics, will not amaze us.
In life and work she longed to be completely transparent with the Lord. The whole truth had to be explained:
May the Lord save each one of us from shipwreck on the rock of compromise. He will make all things right if only we follow and obey. [Be honest] are we ‘other-worldly’ in the secret center of our soul? Is there no failure in this direction, or leakage of spiritual strength? Are we often in His presence, [because there is so much] outward whirl? May God search us, and try us, and show us if we are living on lower levels than He intends for us ... Lord instruct me by all holy discipline.
Free me from evil passions and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly healed and thoroughly cleansed, I may become fit to love, strong to suffer, constant to persevere.1951
1950. Rose from Brier, 26–27.
1951. See God’s Missionary, 53 etc.
Chapter 16
Love carries a burden without being burdened; and it makes all that which is bitter sweet and savory. Love desires to have its abode above, and not to be kept back by things below.
Love desires to be at liberty and estranged from all worldly affection.
Love knows no measure.
Love feels no burden, regard no labours.
Love is able, therefore to do all things.
Love watches.
Love is not tired, not constrained.
Whosoever loves knows the cry of this voice.1952 Love is the answer to all things: love ends all questions. Lord, ever more give us this love. Only His voice may speak the ‘Go!’ which sends. Only in the power of His Spirit may one obey.1953 With these words, we notice the divine authority in sending his servants and Amy was aware that God himself had called her. The call of God to do mission work irradiates with the awe of the presence of God:
It is such a solemn thing to work with God – our holy God. Who shall not fear, O Lord, and glorify Thy Name for Thou only are holy! The more one realizes that unspeakable holiness, the more utterly one abhors and ‘retracts’ oneself.1954 True Mission Work is not play. It is tremendous earnest. It is not a thing, which can be lightly taken up and laid as lightly down again. ‘The Vows of God are on me’, and for life.1955 The emphasis on the last three words indicates the full surrender and obedience to God’s call upon sacrifice and service. To see and to use the opportunities the Lord gives to his servants to reach others with the Gospel, the servants themselves ‘need to live close to their Master, and in the full stream of the Holy Ghost Power’.1956 The missionary is called and ‘never should one be urged to come, unless he felt the burden of souls and the Master’s call’.1957 Once in Japan it overwhelmed Amy: England has so many well-educated people. Why don’t some of the leaders come? Why does she not give more of her very best? Cultured minds are wanted, simple workers are wanted’. God’s plea comes:
[W]ith the chorus of pitiful waiting. It comes with the plea, which is strong and prevailing. For Christ’s sake to me, for Christ’s sake to thee. Oh what, oh what, shall the answer be.1958 Together with those ‘who hold the ropes for us’ – here she used the words of William Carey – she urged everyone to be involved, pray that ‘the one soon follows the other’.1959 It burned in Amy’s heart as she thought of India:
1952. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, III, Chapter 5.
1953. From Sunrise Land, 10.
1954. From Sunrise Land, 104.
1955. From the Fight, 60–61.
1956. From Sunrise Land, 2.
1957. From Sunrise Land, 18.
It is incredible that He wants all these lands to remain as they are in the very depths of the darkness of death, and the question now to be faced is this – Am I where He means me to be? If not I am missing my lifework. And I may be keeping back blessing from those for whose sake I am staying, by staying with them.1960 Three basic Biblical themes were leading for her: a missionary is: Disentangled, 2 Timothy 2:4; Separated, Numbers 6:2–4; Crowned, Leviticus 21:12.1961
In the third edition of God’s Missionary, Amy was surprised that so soon after the appearance of this book a new edition was necessary, despite the sharp criticisms. The book was tossed in the fire, torn into fragments and thrown into wastepaper baskets, dissected, misquoted, used as a foil in at least one missionary college. ‘Yet it refuses to die.’1962
A leading word of the Leonine Sacramentary,1963 gave her the direction. Those who follow ‘that Thou may grant them rather to cleave to eternal things’1964 instead of being attracted by bodily pleasures. Amy was nothing if not serious. Working in the light of God, she wanted to be transparent, thoroughly earnest and steadfast. In all her doing, she did nothing lightly or casually. She had an amazing concern for sinners, but no pity for sin.
1960. From Sunrise Land, 61.
1961. Note to the first edition of God’s Missionary, 5–6.
1962. Note to third reprint of God’s Missionary, 7.
1963. Named after Pope Leo the Great (440–461).
1964. God’s Missionary, 13.
Look at the millions without Christ, and you will find an
Altar. And may God help you to be a sacrifice!
Bishop Hill (in From the Fight, 36).
The love of God must shine through us unhindered if we would live to Him here. Surely, whatever makes for holiness of life, for the clearing of the glass through which the light shines, this is for us and nothing else. […] Take St. Paul as our example. He stood forth in the midst of his
shipmates and said, ‘God, whose I am,
and whom I worship’ (Acts 27:23).
God’s Missionary, 20–21.