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

Chapter 16

The Missionary: ‘I was sent, so speak’ (1)

‘Grace to help in time of need’

Amy Carmichael was a missionary in south India, initially working – from 1895 – with the CEZMS and from 1926 as an independent; she was also the founder of the un-denominational Dohnavur Fellowship in Tinnevelly district. She realised that the Indians in the Tinnevelly district not only would receive the Gospel through the traditionally proved evangelism tools of itinerant proclamation and persuasion, but she also employed a combination of direct evangelism with deeds of love, and literature, all undergirded by a lifestyle of nearness, love and encouragement. As illustrated throughout the book she continuously crossed the by then settled boundaries. Raised in a Victorian environment, her active mission work continued several years after the Edwardian era, yet she kept high several Victorian ideals, while also pushing Victorian boundaries. She absorbed the conviction that a life in service to God and to womanhood was more valuable than fulfilling the Victorian ideals of marriage, motherhood, and domestic bliss.

As she felt to be called by God she claimed her religious authority directly from God rather than any earthly authority. Many times in her life, as we have seen, she took decisions after having consulted the Word of God. So she was not afraid of crossing and challenging national and ethnic boundaries to indulge herself in a complete acculturation to a non-Western society. She brought things meant to be kept secret in a religious sphere out into the public world and by her pen, she brought the life and the culture of south India into the fashionable British and other countries’ homes. She did not run away from situations that were very hard. She not only saw things happening without lamenting over it, but she was one who stepped into the gap and tried to change the situation.

She did this in the starting of the Welcome in Belfast, the work in the slums of Manchester and in south India where she could not bear children to go on perishing:

How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘The Missionary: “I was sent, so speak” (1)’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 415–446, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.16

O God, forgive us if we are too hot, too sore at heart, for easy pleasantness! And, God, raise up in India Christian statesmen who will inquire into this matter, and refuse to be blindfolded and deceived. His laws and ours clash somewhere; the question is, where?1841 Her drive, which she had in common with many other missionaries, to spread Christian faith ultimately had an impact on mission thinking in the first half of the 20th century. She is remembered as the founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship and this Fellowship was a real pioneering idea of saving little children in danger. In her time, this was a radical idea and the implementation would have far-reaching consequences for the social and religious order. She had to do it, commissioned, as she believed, by God. But it is one thing to hatch a plan after many years of research, and quite another to carry it out. And carry it out Amy did! Amy, with a grand independence of soul, was a woman of strong convictions, but not a doctrinaire missiologist obsessed with academic considerations:

Her burden for the lost was too great to permit her such intellectual luxuries. In the spirit of the One Who came to seek and to save the lost, she gave her life unhesitatingly in His great service.1842 During her 56 years in the south of India, she pioneered means and methods to reach the south Indian people, which, in retrospect will be considered to be 100 years ahead of her time. Day by day, decade upon decade, through the seasons of her life, Amy ‘looked’ with ‘heart sight’ as well as ‘eye sight’ in words and in the Dohnavur Fellowship, her observations filtered through her communion with her heavenly Father: God working out his purposes on a land and in a people.

I trust we are all sufficiently aware of our missionary debts to her. Her footprints are visible all over her mission work and mission theory. Amy’s creative achievements were the books she wrote and the Fellowship she started in Dohnavur. Books and the Fellowship are complementary. In the one, her mission ideas are scattered all over; in the other it is systematically applied. The modern-day reader will note how, repeatedly, Amy stresses that the aim of mission is to restore humankind to God and to exalt Christ in the lives of those who first were under the dominion of the evil one. Her intent is always pastoral, arising out of a concern for the well-being of men and women, eager to see that men and women would see the secret of eternal happiness:

Soon we had a crowd of men at one side of the large well; the other side they left open for the women who came with their water-vessels, let down their palm-leaf baskets, drew up the water, poured into their vessels and moved off without taking much notice of us. The splash of the water hardly seemed to matter in that wide open air. It did not distract our hearers, so it did not disturb us. And we searched the faces before us to find the face of a seeker. […] We had prayed to be led to souls prepared; we had not, so far as we knew, found one yet. It mattered tremendously that these people who were so near us now, and yet so far away, should know the true God and Jesus Christ whom He had sent. Nothing else really mattered. And thoughts of India’s millions who are though the Saviour of the world had never died on Calvary, had never risen, was never to return, swept over me.1843 Most profoundly emerges before our eyes a spiritual reality of hers: a vision of the invisible. Frances Bacon wrote, ‘God has two textbooks – Scripture and Creation – we would do well to listen to both’. Amy ‘listened’ to both. In the early hours of each day, she studied Scripture. The many annotations in her Bible and in commentaries from her hand are proof of this. Daily Light was also a true companion and many devotional works were read by her to hear God’s voice. In reading God’s Word, the Creator nourished her beauty-loving spirit as well as her God-loving soul. From the Bible she drew lessons for

1841. ‘She couldn’t ignore the issue, believing that with knowledge comes responsibility’ (in Williamson, Amy Carmichael, 53).

1842. In F.S. Leahy, Great Conversions (Belfast: Ambassador, 1998), 110.

1843. Ploughed Under, 25 and 27.

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her personally as well as for design and processes of the DF. Her books and poems are filled with lessons learned from the natural world, and her language is laced with such expressions as ‘the daisies have been reading me’.

Stamped on every page of her books and letters we see a woman fully immersed in the practical realities of strenuous everyday Fellowship life even as she is totally engaged in assimilating these realities through an eternal perspective. It is from the tension of these two realities, the seen and the unseen, that hard spiritual truths and lessons are hammered out, which in one or another way appeared in her life and work. Everything is organised under the great unifying themes of her life: Light, Life and Love. She continually integrated the world around her with the verities of the unseen, as is seen in the following text:

The holy beauty of moonlight in India is such that the heart is carried away to the moonlit garden where, very early in the morning, the women came bringing the spices which they had prepared, and found the Lord of Life had risen. After Calvary, after that strange visit to the spirits in prison, did our dear Lord find (as we so often do) thoughts of peace in the pure moonlight? That same holy peace, that air of purity, was about us then. […] And yet how sweet and simple it was: The soul breaks away to its own, with the natural flight of a bird from its Autumn nest, and the call of an unseen Spring, to the far-off land that is nearer still than its nest, because it is in its heart. […] I am told by one, wise in the way of birds, that young birds do fly alone. The old birds do not show them the way to the land across the sea. How do they find it, then? How did the bird of this story1844 find the land of her heart’s desire? God helps us to reckon with a more courageous confidence on the infinite power of Love to direct the flight of His birds. For the call does not come from nowhere. It is the pledge to the bird that across the sea lies the Summer (for if there were no Summer, there would be no call) and it flies in a sure faith. This is the mystery of the call of Christ to a human soul, even though it be only the soul of a child. […] There is a power that is not of earth about these stories. For searching or for strengthening they find the soul just where it is, and do their mighty work. They are far more than stories, just as the words of our Scripture are far more than words. That is why we do at times find something, perhaps quite simple and familiar, shine forth as though illuminated in gold and precious colours. For so are we given, by the mercy of the Lord, grace to help in time of need.1845 She personally felt responsible for the salvation of the people. In meeting the people you have:

[T]o yearn over them, and pray for them as souls who must live eternally somewhere, and for whom each of us, in our measure, is responsible to God. […] Are we coming, giving, praying till it hurts? […] Let us be still for a moment and think. Christ counted souls worth Calvary. What do we count them worth’?1846 With her long missionary experience she could give young recruits good advice and she quoted from one of the letters of an Indian missionary, Louise Benedict Pierson. It is a warrior’s message to a brother, a comrade-to-be:

I write words for you to ponder and pray over. Do not go to any foreign field until you know beyond a doubt that God has Himself sent you to that particular field at that particular time. There is a romance or halo about being a missionary, which disappears when you get on the field, I assure you. And, believe me, from the first moment you step upon shipboard upon your way to the field, the devil and all his agents will attack, and entice, and ensnare you, or try to do all these, in order to defeat the purpose for which you cut loose and

1844. The child here is the little lover Arulai Tara, Star of Grace. Her story is in Ploughed Under.

1845. Ploughed Under, 89, 90 and 91. Interesting here is her quotation of Wilson of the Antarctic, Scott’s companion: ‘A happy life is not built up of tours abroad and pleasant holidays, but of little clumps of violets by the roadside, hidden away almost, so that only those can see them who have God’s peace and love in their hearts; in one long continuous chain of little joys; little whispers from the spiritual world; little gleams of sunshine on our daily work’ (in Ploughed Under, 82–83).

1846. In Things As They Are, 271, 272. launched out. Nothing but the fullness of the Holy Spirit will carry anyone through; and if you do not know that you have received this, do not fail to obey the command to ‘tarry until you be endued with power from on high’. Believe me, the foreign field is already full enough of prophets that have run, and He did not send them. If you know beyond a doubt and you may that God is empowering and sending you there, and now, go and fear not; and when, through the days, months, and years of suffering, that are sure to be in this crossbearing life, the question arises again and again, ‘Why is this? Am I in God’s plan and path?’ The rock to which you will hold in this sea of questions and distresses is, ‘God sent me here, I know beyond a doubt; therefore I may go on fearing nothing, for He is responsible, and He alone’. But if you have to admit, ‘I do not know whether He sent me or not’, you will be thrown into an awful distress of mind by the attacks of the great adversary, not knowing what will be the outcome, and you will find yourself crying out, ‘Oh that it were time to go home. What a fool I was to run ahead of the Lord’. Do not think, my brother, that God sends us to the field sweetly to tell the story of Jesus, and that is all. He sends us there to do what Jesus came into the world to do to bear the cross. But we will be able to trudge on, though bowed under the weight of that cross of suffering, and even of shame, if our hearts are full of Him, and our eyes are ever looking upon the One who is invisible, the One who sent us forth, and therefore will carry us through. Forgive me for writing so plainly. I pray that this message may shake in you all that can be shaken, that that which cannot be shaken may remain firm as the Rock of Ages.1847 And when on the field a lack of diligence was felt, she gave this advice:

The besetting sin of Evangelistic work is slackness. […] If you want to see Duty spelt with a capital letter, go to a well-worked mission school. Such a visit is a tonic. Another tonic is to be found in another wing, the Medical. There you can study the opposite of your own defect, for a medical mission is nothing if it is not thorough. […] Only the thorough succeeds. In our Evangelistic work, it is somewhat different. The result of a slack hour does not show at once. The stain it leaves on the conscience, the absence of something that might have been wrought in another soul, these are symptoms of decline often invisible to our eyes. Only God and the sorrowful Angels read them aright from the first.1848

The interposition of God

To get an indication of Amy’s thoughts about mission we have to see that her missiology is woven through her books and letters. This means that her mission thoughts were always wrapped around with the greetings and thanksgivings, the prayers and the praise, personal explanations and day-to-day happenings in Dohnavur. She connected her mission thoughts with the practicalities and all kinds of little things of human relationships. Never were her thoughts about mission complex and high-flown. It was from first to last an attempt to make sense of the Gospel as she understood it. It was the key to everyday life and in Dohnavur it made practical daily living possible, which was Christian through and through.

Amy’s book that most seized her readers and had such a tremendous impact is Lotus Buds. It is in this book that she expresses her deepest motivation for mission. The question of the last chapter, also for her personally when she wrote the book, asks for an answer. What if she misses her chance?1849 She portrays herself at the fireside in a country house. No doubt she sees herself in Broughton Grange, where ‘curled up in a roomy arm-chair by the fire sits a girl with a kitten asleep on her lap. She is

1847. Overweights of Joy, 57–59.

1848. Overweights of Joy, 60–61.

1849. Chapter XXXVI of Lotus Buds, 335–341.

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reading a missionary book’.1850 In this autographic chapter, she reveals her thoughts while she is thinking for many of her contemporaries who may think the Lord needs them in his service. Questions such as ‘Where does the Master need me?’, ‘What is the cost?’, ‘How far out of its selfish track does it move a life into ways of sacrifice?’ Did not Calvary cost? For that girl it is important that if there is a readiness for God, ‘a pure passion of love that knows nothing of hesitation and grudging, and measuring, nothing of compromise. […] Let us have done with limitations, let us be simply sincere’.1851 At the time when the first children arrived in Dohnavur Amy was more and more aware that ‘some Power beyond our own guided our footsteps’.1852 When in dark days, when everything seemed to be against her and against her work to rescue the children, others, in England and in India were praying for her. She learned the great lesson, even in the bitterness of defeat: to wait upon God. He alone, ‘Divine interposition can save’.1853 The worker who would come to India needed to be one whom no disappointment could discourage, a woman to whom the word had been spoken, ‘Go, love, according to the love of the Lord’.1854 Yet, What if she misses her chance? Amy stresses, that one cannot glorify in the work one has:

It will not lead to anything great, […] but if the Call is a true Call from heaven, it will change to a song as she obeys. […] And she will be sure – with the sureness that is just pure peace – that she is where her Master meant her to be.1855 The Spirit of God in her gave her a worldwide outlook. Amy did not develop any explicit theory of mission. Only one small booklet, God’s Missionary, written in 1939, systematically deals with mission and, however small, it straightforwardly seems to set an utterly impossible standard, explained in Jesus’ own words: ‘If you want to be My disciple, you must give up your right to yourself, take up the Cross, and follow Me’. Several chapters in Overweights of Joy1856 also explicitly deal with mission strategy. Three years before she went to India, we see her in Japan and Ceylon. A record of her work in Japan is found in the many letters sent home, which were compiled in 1895 and eventually published under the title From Sunrise Land.1857 In this book, we find valuable insight into how mission theory and practice are combined.

Amy’s missiology is strongly related to the church work in south India and both Keswick and several evangelical church and mission leaders influenced her views. During her itinerary work with Thomas Walker in Tinnevelly the preaching went along the Keswick lines. ‘For nearly two years we have been preaching full salvation’, the team writes from Pannaivilai where they were stationed at that time. Or in preaching to the people in Travancore it is ‘that the people might be not only evangelized but perfected’

1850. Lotus Buds, 335. In one of the rare photos of Amy she sits in a chair with a kitten on her lap. The photo is taken in the garden of Broughton Grange.

1851. Lotus Buds, 336 and 337. ‘To be filled with the Spirit means readiness for Him to take us out of our present sphere and put us anywhere away from our own choice into His choice for us’ (p. 336).

1852. Lotus Buds, 307.

1853. Lotus Buds, 330.

1854. Lotus Buds, 338.

1855. Lotus Buds, 340.

1856. I here use the third edition (1908; first ed. 1906).

1857. I here use the first edition of 1895. This book from Stanford University library (California) was presented by Amy on 13 July 1895 to Mrs Hopkins, ‘with Amy’s love’. And on the front page she wrote, ‘Ye also helping’. and ‘then for about one-and-a-half hours they listened in silence in the heat to a message about the Second Coming’.1858 Before World War II, the behaviour of Christian missionaries in India was predominantly paternalistic. Almost unconsciously, mission work in India was regarded as part of the British Raj. The influence of Indian Christians in church work was practically nothing at all and Indian Christians were not allowed to be involved in decisions concerning church and missionary work. This prevented them from maturing in leadership and decision-making.

Just as in Japan and Ceylon, from the very beginning Amy worked closely together with her Indian sisters during her itinerary work. Her clothes were like theirs, and she ate and slept with them.

In Dohnavur she was the absolute leader, but she did it in close cooperation with Indian staff members, for example with Ponnamal, Kohila and Mimosa. She also emphasised that after her death the leadership of the DF should be entirely Indian.1859 She was patient and offered help without condescension. In an environment hostile to the Christian faith Amy developed a Christian lifestyle and culture in harmony within an Indian setting and yet throughout Christian. She never forgot the purpose of the creation of the DF as a family: ‘not to be ministered unto, but to minister’.1860 With her whole heart, she had to be in Dohnavur for the children, ‘those happy little-sunbirds’.1861 After she had been away for some days, on seeing the children again there:

[W]ere kisses and embraces so eager and so loving that we might have been parted for weeks. […] We all went up to the house, and my tiredness fell from me in the happiness of being with the children again. It was one of those earthly pictures of heavenly things that cannot be forgotten. How many mothers every evening must cross the last stream, and be met by their own dear children who reached Home first.1862 We can also readily discern the contours of her vision of mission from her practices and from the reports that are available. She clearly believed that a Christian has a calling in this world. She knew what she wanted. It would go too far to call her an obsessive-compulsive woman. An authoritarian personality a psychologist would say and reckoned with an unhealthy character to whose influence people trace a good deal of religious psychopathology.1863 This Irish woman had a magnetic attitude: she could relax and she could be cheerful, but she was a fundamentally serious person, always having a Puritanical and stern side. She set high standards for herself, and she expected others to do likewise. Twenty-four hours a day committed to her work in Dohnavur, she could be critical of any not fully committed workers in God’s vineyard.

We have to get past the hagiography and the appropriate praise and start coming to terms with the stark realities that lie at the core of Amy’s thinking on mission. The salutary fact to notice at the very outset is this: it is a mission vision that Amy – as a child of her time – practised in Japan, Ceylon and India, and which saw a drastic decline in the second half of the 20th century.

She fathomed the native hostility in the human heart due to sin and believed the blood of Christ to be the only appropriate way to redeem those lost. It is the utter imperative to find the lost sheep and introduce them to the green pastures of the Gospel, and see to it that they are given the initial formation

1858. See This One Thing, 101, 111 and 114.

1859. Nesaruthina Carunia, in an interview with the author, 16 November 2013 in Dohnavur.

1860. Gold Cord, 326.

1861. Ploughed Under, 21.

1862. Gold Cord, 188.

1863. Cf. Curtis, ‘Amy Carmichael’.

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that will enable them to both survive in and make a real difference to the world. All over the world, the hearts of the people are the same and all need the Saviour. While reading Psalm 33:15, ‘He who fashions the hearts of them all (alike), and observes all their deeds’, she wrote in the margin: ‘Alike. Noticed in Japan same types of heart as in England, same here in India’.1864 Her ideas came from a world that was explicitly Christian and confessional; how much more must we face this challenge in our world today? We are living from the capital of the past, more so now ‘the bank is running out of reserves’.

Amy in her time saw the need for proper grounding in the Christian faith as vital for any viable practice of mission. In 1893 she wrote, ‘truth in the inward parts, and fearless truth-speaking – that is our need today!’1865

Today, many feel feeble on their legs with this vision. They opt for a solution of translation; the goal today is that of making the core available in the idiom and conceptuality of contemporary culture, not knowing that when perfume is poured out from one bottle into another you always lose something! This strategy is a recipe for decline and death. It offers a woolly Christianisation of contemporary highbrow cultural commitments in the name of faith. Be sure that the contemporary norms of thought will swallow up the content of Christian faith. The Christian Gospel and faith with the claims of repentance and forgiveness of sin become hostage to our present world culture. Communication of the Gospel ends up for outsiders being the echo of our own interests, of personally interesting ideas, but not an issue for modern man. Amy was very protective of her mission enterprise and she tried to keep worldly ideas out of her compound.1866

Her spirituality: Intimacy with solidarity

To capture Amy’s spirituality, one enters immediately into sky-high thoughts and deep human thinking. Spirituality is a container idea, and when writing about spirituality of missionaries, it is possible to write about certain facets of their life:

Their motivation, their style of life and their attitudes towards their task, and that each of these should be affected by the Bible, the theological understandings of their tradition and contemporary events.1867 Born and raised in Ireland, Amy knew the history of the early Christian Church in England. Celtic spirituality was in her veins. In her foreword to Gold Cord she quotes, in translation, an old Gaelic prayer:

Jesu, Son of the Virgin pure
Be thou my pilgrim staff,
Throughout the lands,
Throughout the lands,
Thy love in all my thoughts,
Thy likeness in my face,
May I heartwarm to others
And they heartwarm to me,
For love of the love of Thee,
For love of love of Thee.1868

1864. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 33:15.

1865. From Sunrise Land, 48.

1866. Daughrity writes that in this she ‘went to extremes’ (Bishop Stephen Neill, 102),

1867. Here I follow L. Nemer, ‘Spirituality and the Missionary Vocation’, Missiology XI(4) (October 1983): 421.

1868. Gold Cord, IV.

I feel an uneasiness to write about Amy’s spiritual life because of the difficulty of entering into the realm of her intimate walk with God. But one can speak of things going beyond her prayer life, her attitudes towards her work in Dohnavur and towards others working with her. It was due to the Bible and her theological understandings that she found her approach to mission, but certainly the events during the first half of the 20th century in India, and the things she discovered, must have shaped her spirituality. All this she needed to face ‘the battle’ to save the children in danger.1869

Amy’s spiritual receptivity was already quickened when she was very young, in her teens and in her early twenties during the deeper-life conferences in Keswick and other places. Quaker influence can be noticed as she gave great weight to the ‘inner light’ of the Spirit, but a distinction between her and the Quakers was that for her the Scripture had the last word. ‘Inner light’ and Scripture are not on the same level. She also did not give up going to church and in Dohnavur the sacraments were administered. Quakers would often call the clergy ‘hirelings’, but Amy always honoured the clergy of the Anglican church who lived next to the Dohnavur compound. Many pastors were her personal friends.1870 The DF does not have committees and here the influence of the Quakers can be seen. When a decision is made for a building project or a decision made to accept a new worker, all will kneel down and ask for guidance:

And prayer passed into silence of which I have spoken. […] And still we waited. When at last we rose from our knees we all knew we had received the thing that we had desired from the Lord.1871 Amy had her moments of doubt and anxiety. After the Lord had given her comfort and strength and the assurance he would never leave her and that she would never be alone – this in times when someone had proposed to marry her – she strengthened herself in the Lord. She was alone in the garden and ‘the Lord drew near to her and showed her His hands and His feet’. What does any showing matter after that? This faint far away following after him in showing something was kept private all those years.1872 Her vigorous nature was under the obedience of Christ. Always hungry for nourishment that would draw her closer to her heavenly Father, she found her understanding of Christian faith and practice clarified and solidified.

The Biblical teaching and lessons taught by many Christian mystics echoed in her heart: tout par amour, rien par force. Her nature was capable of the full appreciation of all the deeper forms of joy, beauty and peace God’s creation had to offer her, and from its richness and by his grace developed the capacity for supreme sacrifice.

I see in the life and writings of Amy a representative and expression of the best elements of late Victorian evangelicalism. Beneath all the activities of her full life, which can be chronicled, her life was devoted to serve the Lord. The practice of intimacy with God and the cultivation of his presence she dealt with in the more intimate of her prayers and letters. She was always apprehensive of offending her Master. In England as well as in India Amy experienced nominal Christianity, i.e. Christianity without a passionate edge, which did not actually care for personal and intimate contact with God and never thought of evangelism.

1869. Cf. P. Parshall’s remark: ‘The spiritual Christian does not ghettoize his faith in a harbour of like-minded believers where all is safe and calm – but rather, courageously puts forth his ship into the sea of life where danger, difficulty and distress abound. Such is what “spiritual ships” are built for’. In P. Parshall ‘Applied Spirituality in Ministry Among Muslims’, Missiology XI(4) (October 1983): 446–447.

1870. Cf. Nor Scrip, 101: ‘Finally we had the help of our oldest friend in India, Rev. John Stewart, secretary of the United Free Church of Scotland Mission’.

1871. Nor Scrip, 72. See page 71.

1872. In a printed document written by Amy, ‘Taken Out Of The Autobiography’, in the Dohnavur library.

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The simple grace of continuance is in danger of withering when all help of every sort is absolutely cut off, and the soul is, to begin with, not deeply rooted in God. Plants, even when they have life, need water and sunshine and air. Babes need milk. You find it hard to grow, if one may judge from the constant wails about ‘leanness’, and yet you are surrounded by every possible help to growth. You have a whole Bible, not just a scrap of it; and you can read it all, and understand at least most of it. You have endless good books, hymnbooks, and spiritual papers; you have sermons every week, numerous meetings for edification, and perhaps an annual Convention.1873 Often Amy was asked to tell converts’ stories, but she saw so many other things:

But we who live in the Terrible’s lair, and know how he fights to get back his prey, even after it has escaped from him, are afraid to tell these stories too much, and feel that silence is safest, and strange as it may seem to some, for the present most glorifies God. For a certain connection has been observed between publicity and peril and we have learned by experience to fear any attempt to photograph spiritual fruit.1874 As we have seen, in Bangalore, she so dearly missed the fellowship and the understanding of those for whom the Cross was above everything. In her walk with God she felt alone. Many things happened on the mission field that were alien to her spirit:

I began to feel like a fish out of the water and such a fish is a discouraged creature. One day, when this feeling was upon me, a letter came from a Keswick friend at home. She wrote of the prayers that were round me, of the sure and certain faith she had that the Lord Jesus Christ had a special purpose in sending me to India. ‘Do not cool. Look to Him to keep you burning and shining’. That letter was like a drink of cold water on a hot day. I can never be grateful enough for the tender mercy that brought it then.1875 Her life was not always easy, but she was allowed to share in the experience of the very few in a close and heavenly walk with God. The Cross was the attraction for her; she kept her mind and inmost heart in constant aspiration towards him, desiring to receive nothing that did not come from him. Her whole life she saw in one sentence: ‘Didn’t you know I had to be in My Father’s house?’1876 Surely, she was a child of her times, and she certainly struggled with the limitations placed on single women during that era. But all this resulted in a deeper dependence upon God, and her transparent radiance of testimony speaks as freshly to us today as it did 100 years ago. Consecration never becomes outdated!

Amy rose to greatness in Dohnavur, set apart since her youth for that vocation. We may not always be able to follow her into the hidden places of her spiritual life, but we know that the depth and the reality of its existence was in no way contradicted by the day-to-day works and words of service in the DF. The life she led made several demands on her in many directions; however, her eyes focused on ‘one thing I have desired’. In her youth her freshly kindled faith was stretched and applied to volunteer mission work with the then fledgling YWCA in Belfast and with the mill girls meetings in the Welcome, offering them practical training and introducing them to the Good Shepherd, a work some time later to be continued in Manchester. ‘Christian spirituality deals with faith and the lived-out experience of becoming fully human in Jesus Christ.’1877 Parallel to her zeal for evangelism and practical Christian service was a passion and talent for expression born of an innate sensitivity to beauty, matched by an exceptional God-given artistic writing talent. She was awed and affected by the exquisite grandeur and beauty of the mountains,

1873. Things As They Are, 37–38.

1874. Things As They Are, 38–39.

1875. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 89.

1876. Of this verse in Luke 2:49 (NIV), Amy said: ‘Whole life in a sentence’. Comment in Stevens & De Witt Burton, A Harmony Of The Gospels, 29, in the Dohnavur library.

1877. G. Capaque, ‘Spirituality for Asian Contexts – the Philippines and Beyond’, Mission Round Table, OMF Mission Research 6(2) (February 2011): 19–23. the stars, the clouds and all the walking, creeping and flying creatures of God. Her love for flowers, even the tiniest ones, lasted throughout her life. This love for nature was a constant factor throughout her life, and the transcendent power of its beauty must have stirred her heart toward thinking of him, the Creator of all these beauties. She had the rare talent of nicely writing down her communion with God.

As a little child Amy longed to be close to the Lord and inherent to that she wanted to help others: people in need and animals. She knew she would drift apart if she were not in the love of God. For her it came first to love the Lord and be in his love, then, as his love re-kindled her, to love one another. She gave the advice that when one felt as though the love that we should have if we are to help anyone was beginning to ‘run dry’, to ‘think of the Fountain’. We see this clearly in her next poem:

Love through me, Love of God;
There is no love in me.
O Fire of love, light Thou the love
That burns perpetually.
Flow through me, Peace of God;
Calm River, flow until
No wind can blow, no current stir
A ripple of self-will.
Shine through me, Joy of God;
Make me like Thy clear air
That Thou dost pour Thy colours through,
As though it were not there.
O blessed Love of God,
That all may taste and see
How good Thou art, once more I pray:
Love through me – even me.1878
This verse is a desire for ministry:

[T]o be a channel of God’s transforming power, moved by the belief that if love would flood the world, it would bring healing and joy to all that it covered.

This verse is the same in thought and pattern as E. Hatch’s ‘Breathe on Me, Breath of God’ (1878). The words appeared in Wings, in the section entitled ‘Prayers of humble access’. The same with Amy’s ‘Think Through Me, Thoughts of God’. To be filled with the thoughts of God is to occupy a state of stillness and peace away from busy day-to-day life. One must take time to rest and spend time with him. This thought will not surprise us, for we know Amy’s close contacts with the Keswick Convention and the holiness movement. She had a deep desire to depend on and trust in God:

As John upon His dear Lord’s breast,
So would I lean, so would I rest;
As empty shell in depths of sea,
So would I sink, be filled with Thee.

1878. Mountain Breezes, 248; Edges of His Ways, 01 August and 05 August, 110 and 112. Amy got the idea for this poem from the German pietist Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) who wrote ‘Oh, let the glow of Thy great love, through my whole being shine’ (quoted in Edges of His Ways, 110). In Toward Jerusalem, 19, there is another poem with the same title but different verses: Love through me, Love of God; | Make me like Thy clear air | Through which, unhindered, colours pass | As though it were not there. | Powers of the love of God | Depths of the heart Divine, | O Love that fails not, break fort | And flood this world of Thine.

Chapter 16

John was ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ (Jn 21:7). She claimed that she would like to have a similar identity. She saw herself as a vessel immersed in God’s love, being one with the Beloved, which may be likened to the Bible’s teachings about marriage, as being a mystical state where two become one. God abides in peace as well as in love with the soul fulfilled. This she described in the next verse – like a still and beautiful water lily:

As water-lily in her pool
Through long, hot hours is still and cool,
A thought of peace, so I would be,
Thy water-flower, Lord, close by Thee.

The water lily is the icon for contemplation as seen in the tradition of the East. In many Indian religions, the lotus flower is held sacred. Here she uses Indian symbolism. Also in Victorian language, the water lily denoted ‘purity of heart’ and within Western Christianity the lily stands for purity. Christ saw the loveliness of the lily.1879 Here in Amy, Western thinking was combined with Indian circumstances. In Amy’s thinking, there was an abundance of Indian thought and she enculturated it in her hymns and in her books. Growing in spirituality depended for Amy on ‘study, concentration and determination. […] Every written record, inspired by God is also helpful for teaching’.1880 Like meditating for a moment on God’s way of dealing with her and the Fellowship.1881 Spirituality encompasses the ‘lived-life’ or the experiential aspect of faith, although it has a certain inherent resistance being defined.

We come close when we say that in talking about Amy’s spirituality, we see her interior life as it relates to and informs her external life. In what way are her motivation, foundation, values and worldview related to what we see in the Dohnavur Fellowship, so what is the connection between one’s interior and outward life? Here the image of a tree can be helpful. What we can see are the parts of the tree that are above the earth. Yet, from what we see we can draw conclusions about the roots, the parts underneath the earth, which are instrumental in sustaining the tree.

An overall tendency in her life was her intimate relation with her God. Like Enoch and Abraham in the old days, she walked and talked with God. One day, being alone – in her own words ‘a girl sat alone with earth and sky’ – she remembered John Wesley’s words: ‘I remembered there was an eternity’. Why did this thought came to her at that moment? She saw no reason and settled again to her language study. Sitting there under:

[A] wide-spreading tree with all about her the little sounds of bird and insect. […] There were rustlings, and soft murmurings of wind among leaves […] till through the multitudinous voices another Voice began to speak. Of this vivid, unforgettable encounter with her God on a lower slope of a hillside near Ooty, her thoughts went as follows:

First and chiefly there was an enfolding sense of a Presence, a Listener. He was listening to the voice of our brother’s blood crying unto Him from the ground. That voice was crying to Him everywhere. And He looked for some to listen with Him, Wilt thou listen with Me? He said: ‘Canst thou not watch with Me one hour? For a life of hours – with Me’? But to write is to fumble among things of the spirit and yet some words were clear. ‘Many follow Jesus unto the breaking of bread, but few unto the drinking of the cup of the passion’. ‘Art thou willing to drink of that cup, and to drink it to the end? Art thou willing to refuse all that would interrupt the

1879. See Matthew 6:28.

1880. Whispers of His Power, 25 July, 160.

1881. About the caves near the Forest House, see From the Forest, chapter X, 60–66. drinking of that cup? Art thou willing to turn from all that would dull thine ear to the voice of thy brother’s blood that crieth unto Me from the ground’? That day under the tree on the hillside in South India coloured the years that were to follow and gave depth to them all.1882 It is an interesting insight Weber gives, when he recognises the specifically religious character of the Protestant vocation, in the use of the label ‘ascetic’,1883 alluding to the otherworldly and possibly monastic associations of Protestant movements. In the Protestant Puritan ethics, he notes an ascetic detachment from worldly pursuits, which is deeply influenced by a sense of the religious calling and which no longer is restricted to a religious elite. This Protestant missionary movement is like a laicisation of the Roman Catholic monastic movement. Does not the modern missionary movement have its roots in the revivalist or holiness movements of the 18th and 19th centuries? In Puritanism, renunciation is ‘the severe control of social life so as to make the environment suitable for the ascetic to continue to live in the world’.1884 The ascetic is no longer locked up in a monastery, distracted from society and its corrupting temptations and distractions. In this case Wesley’s ‘holy club’ may, therefore, rightly be seen as laicised monasticism. It is possible to find an adaption of the threefold monastic vow of poverty, chastity and obedience in the holiness movement, and to see these vows contributing to the development of a lay ascetic tradition, which communally affirmed the ideals of the priesthood of all believers. Under certain conditions and priorities, they are allowed the retention of family and marriage, primarily by declaring that the loyalty must be to Christ and his kingdom, because the union with Christ transcends any earthly relationships. It is found in the New Testament injunction that the disciple must ‘deny’ (or renounce) self and take up his cross to follow his master.1885

In exploring her inner life, we can understand her way of operating in Dohnavur. She had ‘another side’. As a missionary, she had a deep spiritual side, and followed the track which she saw as God’s vocation. The experience at the fountain in Belfast changed her life’s values: ‘nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal’ was her outlook until the end of her life.

How she loved her Bible. This was for her the fountain of life. From early childhood, she heard God speaking to her, and during her whole life she acted like Samuel: ‘speak Lord, and I your servant listen’. Faith was for her ‘trusting God’, not only when we understand his ways, but ‘faith is trusting when nothing is explained. Faith rests under the Unexplained’.1886 In Amy’s own words God always dealt in a tender way with her and the DF. It was his intimate way with her before she took action, always his Word alone was her warrant. He who has felt the touch of God can go on in quietness and the heart is refreshed in the multitude of peace.1887 One gets the impression that there was a direct line between her and God. The lure of stillness was always intense. Often Amy sought the stillness or for some days stayed in the Forest House to be filled with the great brooding stillness of nature and through everything she felt the presence of God. She knew that the ‘deepest knowledge comes in stillness. Be still and know. Stand still and see. Sit still and wait’.1888