A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

Also by Elisabeth Elliot

Through Gates of Splendor

Shadow of the Almighty

Let Me Be a Woman

Discipline: The Glad Surrender

God’s Guidance

On Asking God Why

The Shaping of a Christian Family

Keep a Quiet Heart

The Mark of a Man

Faith That Does Not Falter

Passion and Purity

Quest for Love

Be Still My Soul

The Journals of Jim Elliot

The Music of His Promises

No Graven Image

The Path of Loneliness

Secure in the Everlasting Arms

To all who loved Amma

© 1987 by Elisabeth Elliot

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.revellbooks.com

Paperback edition published 2005

Ebook edition created 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3445-9

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture marked NEB is taken from The New English Bible. Copyright © 1961,1970 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture marked PHILLIPS is taken from Th e New Testament in Modern English, revised edition J. B. Phillips, translator. © J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture marked TLB is taken from The Living Bible, copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture verses identified AV are from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible.

Copyright material from Gold Cord and Toward Jerusalem by Amy Carmichael used by permission of Christian Literature Crusade, Ft. Washington, PA.

Excerpts from Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, copyright © 1975 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Reprinted by permission of Simon 8c Schuster, Inc.

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

  1. Tide Pools, Pink Powder, and Prayers

  2. The Hope of Holiness

  3. Mutton Chops Don’t Matter

  4. The Tin Tabernacle

  5. The Inescapable Calling

  6. Small Shall Seem All Sacrifice

  7. The Rending

  8. The Romance of Missions

  9. The Unrepealed Commission

10. The School of Prayer

11. Japanese Head

12. Not Much of a Halo in Ceylon

13. To the India of the Raj

14. Fashionable Christianity

15. Company, Church, Crown, and Hindu

16. Straight Against the Dead Wall

17. Blissful Work

18. The Cost of Obedience

19. The Uninteresting, Unromantic Truth

20. A Small and Desolate Mite

21. Children Tie the Mother’s Feet

22. The Vault Beneath the Meadow

23. The Impress of the Signet Ring

24. Strife of Tongues

25. Place of Dragons

26. Love Is Not a Sentiment

27. The Lesson of the Weaned Child

28. Across the Will of Nature

29. Grey Jungle, Crystal Pool

30. A Life Without Fences

31. Where Are the Men?

32. Damascus Blades

33. Rendezvous With Robin Hood

34. The Sword Smites Sharp

35. The DF Is Born

36. A Secret Discipline

37. Place of Healing and House of Prayer

38. The Road Less Traveled

39. No Milk Biscuits

40. Scrub-Land

41. The Toad Beneath the Harrow

42. The Servant as Writer

43. Saint, Fishwife, Vegetable Marrow

44. Broken by the Waves

45. I Hold Me Fast by Thee

46. The Voice From the Sanctum

47. The Razor Edge

48. Maintain a Constant Victory

49. The River Breaks Out

50. Fettered and Yet Free

51. One Thing Have I Desired

Epilogue

The Dohnavur Fellowship

About the author

Back Cover

Illustrations

The Carmichael house in Millisle

Amy, about five, with mother, Eva, Norman, and Ernest

Flyleaf of Amy’s Bible

Amy at Broughton Grange, about twenty-four

Portion of a letter from Japan written on rice paper

Misaki San and Amy

The Band and the bandy

Camp scene with the Walkers

Amy, age forty-two, with Lola and Leela

The Cottage Nursery

Scenery near the compound

Amy with Lullitha, one of her Lotus Buds

Ponnammal, with Preetha and Tara.

At Madras Beach

Amy, at fifty-seven, in 1925

The House of Prayer

The Room of Peace

Bird table marking Amy’s grave

Acknowledgments

Members of the large Dohnavur Family in India, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have made it possible for me to write this book. They don’t go in much for credit lines, they told me, so I do not give their names. I have tried in personal letters to tell them how grateful I am. I say it again here—thank you, from my heart, for:

Your prayers, first of all. I have been upheld.

Your hospitality;

Your generous sharing of all extant data, including your own private correspondence from Amy Carmichael.

Your time—for patient answering of sometimes rude questions, both in interviews and by letter; for your willingness to read the manuscript, make corrections, offer suggestions. Some of your suggestions I have not followed. You bear no responsibility for the final result.

A special thank you to Dr. Eric Frykenberg of the University of Wisconsin for information on the early history of Christianity in South India for chapters 14 and 20.

Be earnest, earnest, earnest—

Mad if thou wilt;

Do what thou dost as if the

stake were Heaven,

And that thy last deed before

the Judgment Day.

Charles Kingsley

Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. How often I think of that ought. No sugary sentiment there. Just the stern, glorious trumpet call, OUGHT. But can words tell the joy buried deep within? Mine cannot. It laughs at words.

Amy Carmichael, letter written in the Old Forest House, 1922

Every day we experience something of the death of Jesus, so that we may also know the power of the life of Jesus in these bodies of ours.

2 Corinthians 4:10 (PHILLIPS)

Preface

To Amy Carmichael I owe what C. S. Lewis said he owed to George MacDonald: as great a debt as one can owe another.

I cannot pay it. But it is my hope that this biography will introduce its subject to a generation which has not had the privilege that was mine. I met her when I was fourteen. Mrs. P. W. DuBose, headmistress of a small boarding school in Florida, used to quote often in school vespers from Carmichael books. I was captivated, and told her so. She lent me the books.

Dohnavur became a familiar place. I knew its bungalows, its paths, its people; I breathed its air. Amy Carmichael became for me what some now call a role model. She was far more than that. She was my first spiritual mother. She showed me the shape of godliness. For a time, I suppose, I thought she must have been perfect, and that was good enough for me. As I grew up I knew she could not have been perfect, and that was better, for it meant that I might possibly walk in her footprints. If we demand perfect models we will have, except for the Son of man Himself, none at all.

The first of her books that I read was, I think, If, which became her best-seller. It was not written for teenagers, but for seasoned Christians with the solemn charge of caring for the souls of others. It was from the pages of this thin blue book that I, a teenager, began to understand the great message of the Cross, of what the author called Calvary love. I saw that the chance to die, to be crucified with Christ, was not a morbid thing, but the very gateway to Life. I was drawn—slowly, fitfully (my response was fitful), but inexorably.

In a far more secular and self-preoccupied time Amy Carmichael’s vision of the unseen and her ardent effort to dwell in its light, making any sacrifice for its sake, seems hardly believable, let alone worth trying to imitate. Will we be put off by her awesome discipline, her steadfastness, or perhaps by the cultural shift or the difference in vocabulary (saturated as it was by the English of the King James Bible and the mystics of centuries ago)? She spoke often of the country whose forces move unseen among us. That country is our country. We are its citizens as she was, if we call ourselves Christians. If its forces moved in Dohnavur, they move unabated here, too, where we live. If we are unaware, perhaps we have not listened, have not taken time to observe. Have we been deafened by noise, some of the worst of which passes for music? Has our vision, spiritual as well as physical, perhaps been impaired by the glittering images of the ubiquitous screen?

In spite of much that militates against quietness there are people who still read books. They are the people who keep me going. I write especially for those who bring to their reading a mind not hidebound by the sensibilities of our own time, but prepared to contemplate the Eternally Relevant; to seek in this book specifically the truth and the hidden meaning of a single life.

We read biographies to get out of ourselves and into another’s skin, to understand the convulsive drama that shapes, motivates, and issues from that other life. Our current vocabulary includes such terms as identity, role models, self-image, self-actualization, liberation, upward mobility, and fulfillment, worries that never crossed Amy Carmichael’s mind. How shall we, accustomed to popular seminars on rights and how to feel comfortable, receive and transmit a faith that prized what the world despises (the Cross) and despised what the world prizes (all that dims the Cross)?

The Christian life comes down to two simple things: trust and obedience. What does that mean, exactly? We could hold a seminar and talk about it. Visual aids are better. Look at a life. Amy Carmichael set her face toward that other Country. Her education, experience, and environment were incidentals, a mere framework within which she lived for eighty-three years, loved, feared, trusted, suffered, celebrated, failed, triumphed, and died. Through all the lights, poses, moods, and disguises we discern the common human elements that make up all of our lives.

I offer the testament of one whose loyal answering of her Lord’s Come follow has made an incalculable difference to me. May it make a difference to my readers.

ELISABETH ELLIOT

Magnolia, Massachusetts

Chapter 1

TidePools, Pink Powder, and Prayers

She managed to stuff her two little brothers up through the skylight and then squeezed herself onto the slate roof. Glorious freedom. They stood up triumphant in the fresh wind that swept across the Irish Sea. The water was blue today, which to the girl (perhaps seven or eight years old) meant that it was happy. On some days it was green and angry, on others gray and anxious. Over the rooftops of the village they could see the stony beach and, far off across the water, the great rock called Ailsa Craig, and two rounded hills, the Paps of Jura. Now for the rest of the adventure. Gleefully the three children slid down the slates and paraded triumphantly around the lead gutters—until they saw, gazing up at them, the astonished faces of their parents.

The girl was Amy Beatrice Carmichael, great-great-granddaughter of one Jane Dalziel. It was said that King Kenneth II of Scotland (A.D. 971-995) had offered a reward to any of his subjects who would dare to remove from the gallows the body of the king’s friend and kinsman who had been hanged. One stepped forth and said in Gaelic, Dal ziel, I dare. So Dalziel became his name. That spirit was not much diluted in the child on the roof.

The parents on the ground were David Carmichael, descendant of Scottish Covenanters, and Catherine Jane Filson, descendant of Dalziel. Years later Amy found spiritual significance in this union, as she found spiritual significance in almost everything. Because her mother’s ancestors were friendly with certain persecutors of the Covenanters, it was as though persecutor and persecuted were at last united. So you see, she wrote, after all, cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.

The Carmichael house in Millisle.

Amy Carmichael was born December 16, 1867 in the gray stone house, one of three large houses in the village of Millisle on the north coast of Ireland. Below the Carmichael house, close by the seashore to this day, stands a row of old stone cottages with low doors, thick walls, and small-paned windows. In the street that runs along by those cottages are the water pumps and the iron rings set into the stones to which horses were tied. It is not hard for a visitor in the late twentieth century to imagine a little girl, wrapped in a woolen shawl, trying to hurry along that street with her little brother while carrying a pot of soup sent by their mother for one of the poor cottagers.

The rocky beach was her favorite playground, where she would lie prone beside its tide pools and gaze and gaze. There were live things in those pools, things which held endless fascination for the child. Her powers of observation were exquisite, her sympathy boundless—even, as we shall see later, for creatures the rest of the world thinks worthy of nothing but death.

The house was surrounded by a garden where there were roses, ivy, apple trees, yellow whins, and heartsease. There was a high wall with a large gate opening onto the principal street of the village. Not far away stand today the ruins of an old flour mill, its windows bricked up, the roof disintegrating. On the seashore can be seen what is left of the quay where grain was unloaded. Amy’s great-grandfather had leased the mill a hundred years before she was born, and her father and uncle William, whose house was just down the road, managed it together. Coming from the lowlands of Scotland, the family joined the Presbyterian church built by the Anti-Burgher Seceders, a group who, because of doctrinal disagreements, had separated themselves from the Church of Scotland. Convinced of their obligation to live for the good of others, the two brothers supported the church with their generous tithes, bought a pony carriage for the minister, and were benefactors of the Millisle National School which was used not only for the three R’s but for Sunday school and evangelistic services.

The love which formed the climate of the Carmichael home was a sinewy one, without the least trace of sentimentality, holding not only the conviction of her father’s side of the family, and the courage of her mother’s, but the toughness of Irish Presbyterians, the ruggedness bred by winters on that cold sea, and no-nonsense principles of child rearing.

There was no question in the minds of the Carmichael children as to what was expected of them. Black was black. White was white. Their parents’ word could be trusted absolutely, and when it was not obeyed there were consequences. Five kinds of punishment were used: being stood in a corner with face to the wall, forbidden to go out to play, slapped, pandied, and (worst of all) given Gregory powder. A pandy was a stroke with a thin flat ebony ruler. The child was required to stand still, to hold out his hand at once and not pull it away, to make no fuss, and finally to say politely, Thank you, Mother. He knew that the worst was coming when he found a tray set up in the dining room with a pitcher of hot water, a small pitcher of cold milk, a teacup, a teaspoon, and a bottle of pink powder. It was too late for apologies. The mother mixed the potion, the child received it, thanked her for it, and drank it down.

One day Amy and two of her brothers were swinging on the garden gate when an idea struck her. They had been told that the seeds of the nearby laburnum tree were poisonous. Let’s count how many we can eat before we die! said Amy. It was not long before they began to feel uncomfortable, and wondered what would happen next. Gregory, of course, was what happened next, and they were sent to bed to meditate on their sins. Some notion of the mother’s strong determination can be gathered from Amy’s report of one occasion when she cried, Oh, Mother, I’ve such a pain! The calm reply, Have you, dear? I hope it will do you good. "But Mother, I can’t bear it! It’s a dreadful pain. Is it, dear? I’m afraid you will have to bear it."

A nursemaid attempted to frighten the children out of their habit of swallowing plum stones by telling them that a plum tree would grow out of their heads for each stone they swallowed. Amy was charmed by the idea of having an orchard of her very own, within such easy access. Deciding that twelve trees would provide her with plenty of plums to eat and to give away, she gulped down twelve stones.

When told how exceedingly naughty she was, Amy used to think, If only you knew how much naughtier I could be, you wouldn’t think I’m naughty at all.

The seven children—Amy, Norman, Ernest, Eva, Ethel, Walter, and Alfred—were called daily to family prayers by the sound of a bell. Probably the servants also were required to attend. Amy remembered the sound of her father’s voice reading the Scripture, a solemn sound, like the rise and fall of the waves on the shore. Her ear was trained in this way, from those earliest years when a child’s powers of memorization by hearing are nearly miraculous. For the rest of her life the majestic cadences of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible shaped her thinking and every phrase she wrote. A child, even when apparently distracted, learns far more than adults dream he can learn. Amy did not by any means always attend perfectly to the reading. Once she found a mouse drowning in a pail of water just at the moment when the prayer bell rang. She fished it out, hid it in her pinafore, took her place at prayers, and hoped it would not squeak. It did.

Amy, about five, with mother, Eva, Norman, and Ernest.

Whenever there was a meeting at the little whitewashed church in Balleycopeland, the Carmichael family was there. Amy envied the farmers’ children, whose station in life was clearly very different from hers. The farmers’ wives, on their part, may have pitied the mill owner’s children, and sometimes offered them peppermints as they went into church. They v/ere instructed to refuse politely—to smile and say, Thank you very much, but my mother would rather I didn’t. It was one thing to go to church with village folk. It was something else to do all the things village folk did. Their children snuggled down during the long service (never less than two hours) and sucked on pink and white lozenges. The smell reached the Carmichael pew—but such solace was denied us.

Only psalms were permitted to be sung on Sundays, but hymns might be used in the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. Once when the theme of the prayer meeting was Our Departure from this World, Amy amused herself by counting up all the various things hymn writers said you were supposed to do at the precise moment of departure. How a dying person could manage them all she was at a loss to know, but was pleased with the prospect of shouting, while passing through the air, ‘Farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer!’ What else could it mean but that very prayer meeting?

Amy had an extreme sensitivity to others’ pain. When her mother told her the story of Calvary for the first time, she rushed out into the garden to try to forget thoughts too dreadful to be borne, for how could anybody hurt another so, specially One who was so good? And there on the lawn stood a boy cousin, and he had fastened a frog to a monkey-puzzle tree. It looked like a crucified thing . . . I was frantic. In a passion of pity I tried to get it off the horrid spikes, but I could not reach up to it. So I tore into the house to call someone, and as I ran, suddenly the thought came, Now all the frogs will go to heaven.’

A lesson in the mysteries of prayer—a tough one for any adult—came when Amy was three years old. Taught by her mother that God was a hearer and an answerer of prayer, One who could change water into wine, she determined to test His powers. Kneeling by her bed that night she asked for the one thing she most passionately longed for: blue eyes. Surely there would be no difficulty for the Lord in this. The little girl went to bed with perfect confidence. She jumped out of bed at dawn, pushed a chair to the chest of drawers, climbed up and looked in the mirror—into the same brown eyes. She never forgot the bewilderment she felt until, somehow, an explanation was given (did the Lord Himself speak to her, or did someone else?): Isn’t NO an answer? So prayer was not magic. Like her earthly father who loved her, her heavenly Father might also say no.

Given a dollhouse complete with lovely furniture and properly dressed dolls, Amy displeased her old nurse, Bessie, by emptying the house and filling it instead with moss, stones, beetles, and earwigs—things she found far more interesting than the toys nice children were supposed to like.

Their father took them for walks even on Sundays (Sunday walks were frowned on by Presbyterians in those days), through fields of pink clover or blue flax, to the ponds to see swans and, on weekdays, to watch the great black dripping wheel of the scutch mill where the woody fiber was beaten from the flax to make linen.

They had books—all the children’s books that could be had then—and toys, which included a toy telephone soon after the telephone was invented. There were always pets—Daisy, the yellow and white cat, Gildo, the collie, Fanny and Charlie, the ponies. David and Catherine Carmichael loved beauty and tried to surround their children with beautiful things, keeping far from them, when possible, all that was not beautiful. They gave them a microscope and lenses to encourage them to study and observe, taught them capillary action by pointing out how water climbed from grain to grain in a lump of sugar, demonstrated electricity by rubbing a piece of amber on a coat sleeve till tiny scraps of paper flew up to it.

Amy’s grandmother lived in a small house close to Strangford Lough (Gaelic for lake or sea), in a place called Portaferry. The tide there was said to be the second strongest in the world. The children were allowed to go rowing within certain limits. One evening Amy and her brothers passed the limits, were caught in a swift current, and swept toward the bar. "I was steering, my brothers were rowing hard, but they were powerless against the current. ‘Sing!’ they shouted to me, and I sang at the top of my voice the first thing that came into my head:

‘He leadeth me, O blessed thought,

O words with heavenly comfort fraught;

Whate’er I do, where’er I be,

Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.’"

J.H. GILMORE