The Sorrowful Years

“Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter.”

— John 13:7, ASV

The Dear Old Man

The first of the great losses had come some years earlier. Robert Wilson, the Quaker who had taken Amy into his home and given her his name, died in 1905. She had not seen him since she sailed for India ten years before. They had written to each other faithfully, and he had supported the work with his gifts and his prayers, but she had not been able to go home to him, and she was not with him when he died. Her early books had been published under the name Amy Wilson-Carmichael, and she went on using it for some years afterwards. It was her way of keeping faith with the old man who had been a father to her.

His death was a sorrow, but it was the kind of sorrow that missionaries far from home learned to expect. He was an old man, and he had lived a full life. The sorrows of the years between 1912 and 1915 were of a different kind. They came close together, and they took from Amy the people on whom she most depended.

Thomas Walker

In August 1912 Thomas Walker died. He had gone away from Dohnavur on a journey, and he fell ill and died within a short time, far from home. Sources give slightly different dates for his death, but all place it in the second half of August 1912.

For Amy it was a devastating blow. Walker had been her teacher, her colleague and her counsellor since 1896. He had taught her Tamil, guided her in the work, stood beside her when Preena came, and helped her to build the household at Dohnavur. He had been, in a sense, its head, the ordained missionary under whose authority the whole work went on. His scholarly mind and his steady judgement had balanced her intensity. Now he was gone, and she was left with the full responsibility for a growing family and its many workers, without the one man whose advice she trusted above all others.

Walker’s own voice can still be heard in a few places. When Amy chose quotations from missionaries to head the chapters of Things as They Are, she included one from him, about the girls of caste families who wanted to follow Christ. “In India the bitter cry is far more bitter,” he had written, “but it is stifled and smothered by the cruel gag of Caste.” It is the sentence of a man who had spent many years listening, and who did not use strong words lightly. He had been in Tinnevelly since the 1880s, and he knew its churches, its villages and its language as few foreigners did. He was, by every account, a man of prayer, and his addresses at conventions for the deepening of spiritual life had been valued all over South India. When such a man said that something was terrible, people listened. Amy had relied on that authority more than she perhaps knew, and now she would have to stand without it.

Mrs. Walker, whom Amy loved deeply, was left a widow, and the partnership of three that had carried the work since the Pannaivilai days was broken.

She grieved, and she also wrote. Four years later she published Walker of Tinnevelly, a memoir of his life and work. It is a portrait of a man she admired without reserve, written with love and with the restraint he would have wanted. She did not make him a plaster saint. She showed a disciplined, scholarly, sometimes severe man who had given his life to the Tamil church, and whose influence ran far beyond the few places where he had lived.

A Wall and a Lawyer

The troubles did not come singly. Soon after Walker’s death, while the household was still in mourning, a lawyer wrote to demand that the building of a wall around part of the compound should stop at once. The claim was that the land on which the wall was being built did not legally belong to the mission. It was the kind of dispute that could drag on for years, and it came at a time when Amy had no one with Walker’s standing to deal with it.

It was not the only legal threat of these years. The work of sheltering children who were claimed by others was always exposed to the law, and there were families and communities who had every reason to try to use it. Amy’s biographers record a case, about 1914, in which a charge of kidnapping was brought in connection with a girl named Muttammal whom the Fellowship was protecting, and in which Amy herself faced the possibility of arrest. The case was eventually dropped. The details are known chiefly from the later biographies, and this book has not been able to check them against court records. But the general picture is clear enough. To shelter children at Dohnavur was to live under the shadow of the courts.

Her Mother

On 14 July 1913 Amy’s mother died in England. Catherine Carmichael had given her daughter up twice, first to Robert Wilson and then to the mission field, and Amy had not been able to go home to her. She had followed the work with love and prayer, and she had supported it in every way she could.

We know little of how Amy received the news, beyond the fact of her grief. She had always been close to her mother, and her mother’s letter of 1892, giving her freely to God, had been one of the treasures of her life. Now the woman who had taught her to pray, and who had let her go, was gone. Amy was forty-five. Her father had been dead for nearly thirty years, the Dear Old Man for eight. She had become, in the fullest sense, an orphan herself.

Ponnammal

The last of the great losses of these years was the hardest. Ponnammal, the young widow who had led the band in the 1890s and had become one of the pillars of Dohnavur, fell ill with a long and painful illness, which the biographies describe as cancer. Amy cared for her and watched her suffer. She died in 1915.

Ponnammal had been Amy’s closest Indian friend. She had shared the early journeys, the hardships of village work, the joys and sorrows of the first converts, and the building of the household. She had cared for children, trained younger women, and given wisdom and steadiness to the whole community. Amy admired her deeply, and in later years she wrote her life, under the title Ponnammal: Her Story. Ponnammal left a daughter, whom Amy took into her own care.

Amy found Ponnammal’s suffering harder to bear than her death. She had prayed for her healing, and the prayer had not been answered. She had watched a woman she loved endure great pain, and had been unable to relieve it. It was the kind of experience that tests faith to its foundations, and Amy did not pretend that it was easy. But she came through it, as she came through so much, by holding on to the conviction that God knew what he was doing, even when she did not.

The War Years

In August 1914, between the death of her mother and the death of Ponnammal, war broke out in Europe. It was far from Dohnavur, but its effects reached even there. The cost of living rose sharply. Communications with Britain became slower and less certain. Gifts from home, on which the work depended, might have been expected to dry up, as friends faced their own hardships and anxieties. Amy and her household continued to live by prayer, making their needs known to God and not to people, and they later testified that through all those years they had never lacked what they needed.

It would be easy to make too much of that testimony, and Amy herself was careful not to suggest that God’s provision meant there was never any anxiety, or that other faithful Christians who did go without were less faithful. But it was a real part of her experience, and it strengthened her conviction that the work was God’s and not hers.

Understanding Hereafter

The words of Jesus at the head of this chapter were spoken to Peter at the Last Supper, when Jesus knelt to wash the disciples’ feet and Peter protested. “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter.” They are words that Christians have clung to in times of loss, because they promise understanding without demanding it now.

Amy Carmichael did not understand why Walker had to die when the work needed him most, why her mother had to die without seeing her again, or why Ponnammal had to suffer so much. She did not pretend to understand. She wrote later about the danger of offering easy explanations to people in pain, and about the need simply to trust. In one of her poems from these years she wrote of acceptance as the place where peace is found, and many readers have found in that phrase the key to her life after 1912. She did not mean resignation, or a dull submission to fate. She meant a deliberate choice to receive from God’s hand what she could not understand, and to go on.

The years from 1912 to 1915 took from her almost everyone who had been with her at the beginning. They also left her, for the first time, fully in charge of the work she had built. What she did with that responsibility is the subject of the chapters that follow.