Lotus Buds

“He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and will gently lead those that have their young.”

— Isaiah 40:11, ASV

The Elf

Before there were nurseries at Dohnavur, there was one small girl who would not keep still. In Things as They Are Amy Carmichael gave a whole chapter to Pearl-eyes, whom she nicknamed the Elf, “because it exactly describes her.” It is the happiest chapter in the book, and it shows a side of Amy that her more solemn admirers have sometimes missed.

The Elf, she wrote, was “a very wilful, truthful, exasperating, fascinating little Oriental.” She hated her share of the housework, which was ten minutes’ polishing of brass water-pots, until she made a discovery: “Satan doesn’t come very close to me if I sing all the time I’m rubbing the brasses. He runs away when he hears me sing, so I sing very loud, and that keeps him away. Satan doesn’t like hymns.” She liked to be first, and to choose the game, and when the other children would not play it her way she walked off. And every evening she said her prayers in Amy’s room, counting her sins on the fingers of one hand and her blessings on the other.

Amy recorded one of those prayers in full. The Elf confessed that she had been cross with another girl, but added that the other girl had been wrong too, “so it was only half a sin.” She confessed a quarrel with some smaller children, but noted that they had asked her forgiveness and she had forgiven them, “so that is three bad things and two good things to-day.” She thanked God for a cardboard box, some sweets, some rags from the waste-paper basket for her dolls’ clothes, and a piece of soap the size of a walnut. And she asked, as she always did, to be kept safe through the night from “the bites of snakes and scorpions, and all other noxious creatures.” Some time afterwards, Amy noted dryly, a nest of scorpions was discovered within six yards of the Elf’s sleeping mat, and none of them had disturbed her.

There were two other small girls in the household at the time, whom Amy called the Imp and Tangles, and the three of them argued theology with the energy of children who had just discovered it. Amy reported one of their conclusions, which, she said, “would shock the orthodox.” Obedience, the children had decided, was not so important as love. Orpah had obeyed her mother-in-law when Naomi told her to go home, and she went. Ruth had been told four times to go, and would not. Yet God blessed Ruth more than Orpah, because she loved her mother-in-law. “So obedience is not so important as love.” Amy had spent the previous day, she confessed, labouring to explain to them the necessity of obedience. It is a lovely picture of a missionary being taught by her pupils, and of a teacher who was humble enough, and amused enough, to write it down.

The Elf also brought Amy questions that were not childish at all. One morning she had prayed earnestly to be kept from being naughty, and within an hour she had been naughty again; she had looked at the clock and seen. “How was it I was naughty when I wanted to be good?” she asked. “So what is the use of praying?” Amy recognised the question. It was Paul’s question in the seventh chapter of Romans, and it was her own question at the Glasgow convention years before. She did not pretend it was easy to answer.

These pages matter because they show how Amy saw the children. They were not cases, or trophies, or victims to be pitied. They were persons, with their own wills and their own humour, their own theology and their own sins. She delighted in them, and she let her readers delight in them too.

Babies

In the years after Preena came, the household at Dohnavur began to change in a way that Amy had not foreseen. At first the children who came were girls old enough to walk and talk, like Preena herself. But Amy learned that the girls most at risk were often very young, and that the time to save a child from dedication was before it happened, sometimes in infancy. From about 1904 babies began to come. Some were brought by mothers or relatives who could not keep them and who preferred that they should go to the Christians rather than to a temple. Some came through Indian Christian helpers who learned of children in danger. Some came by ways that Amy never fully described, for the safety of everyone involved.

Babies were a different matter from older children. They needed milk, and in a world without safe infant formula that meant wet nurses, Indian women who were paid to nurse them. They needed constant care. And they died. Infant mortality in South India at the beginning of the twentieth century was very high, and babies who had been separated from their mothers, often after neglect or a hard journey, were especially vulnerable. Many of the babies who came to Dohnavur in its early years did not survive. Amy grieved over every one of them, and she learned, through bitter experience, how much skill and care it took to keep a newborn alive in that climate.

She learned too that babies could not be cared for in a corner of a missionary bungalow. Over the following years nurseries were built: simple buildings, open to the air, each with a group of small children and the women who cared for them. The compound grew, and with it the need for workers, for money, for food and for medicine. A household of converts was turning into something much larger.

Lotus Buds

In 1909 Amy published a book about the babies and small girls of Dohnavur. She called it Lotus Buds. The lotus grows in muddy water and opens into a flower of great beauty, and in Indian religious imagery it is a symbol of purity rising out of the mire. Amy used the image for the children, who had come, many of them, out of a dark place, and whom she hoped to see open into lives of beauty.

The book was handsomely produced, with fifty photographs of the children taken at Dohnavur, and it was the most carefully illustrated of her early books. In a chapter about the photographs she admitted, with some amusement, that they did not do the children justice; the babies were wary of the photographer, and their lively faces stiffened as soon as the camera appeared. The book also returned to the subject of temple dedication, drawing on official figures to show how many girls might be involved, but it did so with restraint. Its main purpose was to make readers love the children, and to pray for them and for the many others who were not safe.

Three years earlier she had published Overweights of Joy, a sequel to Things as They Are, which told of the joys of the work as frankly as the first book had told of its sorrows. The two books together give a picture of the years between 1901 and 1909 that is neither triumphant nor despairing. There were many losses: converts who went back, babies who died, children who could not be saved. There were also great joys: children who grew, converts who stood firm, and a household that was beginning to feel like a family.

Gentle Leading

The verse at the head of this chapter is one of the most tender in the Old Testament. Isaiah, comforting a people in exile, describes God as a shepherd who “will gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and will gently lead those that have their young.” The picture is of strength used gently: a shepherd strong enough to carry the lambs, and wise enough not to drive the ewes too hard.

Amy Carmichael loved that verse, and she tried to live it. She was a strong woman, and she ran Dohnavur with a firm hand. But she wanted the children to know, above all, that they were carried. She held the babies, played with the toddlers, made up games and songs, and gave each child a name that meant something. The names were Tamil, chosen with care, and they often expressed a hope or a prayer for the child’s life. She insisted that every child be treated as an individual, known and loved, not as one of a crowd.

It was not always possible. As the numbers grew, from a handful to dozens and then to more than a hundred, she could no longer know every child as she had known Preena and the Elf. She came to depend on the women who worked with her, Indian and British, and she gave great thought to how the children could be cared for in small groups, each with its own “mother.” But the ideal remained: a family, not an institution, and a family that reflected the gentleness of the Good Shepherd.

A Growing Family

By 1913 there were about a hundred and thirty children at Dohnavur. That was a remarkable growth from the single child who had climbed onto Amy’s knee twelve years before. It was also, by any standard, a large household to run, and it raised questions that Amy had not had to face before. How would the children be educated? What would happen to them when they grew up? Who would care for them if Amy fell ill or died? How would the work be paid for?

The last question had a clear answer, at least in principle. Amy had decided, following Hudson Taylor and George Müller, that Dohnavur would not appeal for money. Its needs would be made known to God in prayer, and the household would trust him to supply them. Gifts came, from friends in Britain and elsewhere, often unsolicited and sometimes at the very moment of need. Amy kept records of these answers to prayer, and they became an important part of the story she told about Dohnavur. She believed that the work was God’s, and that he would provide for it as long as he wanted it to continue.

The other questions were harder, and they would occupy her for the rest of her life. But in the years around 1909, when Lotus Buds was published, the main feeling at Dohnavur seems to have been one of joy. The children were growing. The nurseries were full of noise. And Amy, who had once thought her work would be preaching in the villages, had found herself the mother of a family she could never have imagined.