The Pit at Kalakadu

“But he knoweth the way that I take; When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”

— Job 23:10, ASV

Sixty-Three

By 1931 Amy Carmichael was sixty-three years old. She had been in India for thirty-six years, without once going home. The household that had begun with one runaway child had become a Fellowship of several hundred people, with nurseries, schools, workshops, a boys’ compound and a hospital. She was still its leader, and she was still active: walking the compound, visiting the nurseries, teaching, writing, counselling, praying, and making decisions large and small. Her neuralgia still troubled her, and she was no longer young, but she was far from an invalid.

She was also thinking about the future. The Fellowship was growing, and new work was opening. Her biographers record that in the autumn of 1931 she prayed, as she had often prayed before, that God would do with her whatever would best fit her for his service. It was the kind of prayer that the Keswick tradition encouraged, a prayer of full surrender, and she meant it. She had no way of knowing how it would be answered.

India in 1931

The India around Dohnavur was changing fast. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi had led the Salt March to the sea, and the movement for independence had become a mass movement that no British government could ignore. Round Table conferences were meeting in London to discuss India’s constitutional future. In the Madras Legislative Council, Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy’s bill to end the dedication of girls to temples had been introduced, but she had resigned her seat in 1930 in protest at Gandhi’s arrest, and the bill lay dormant for years. The old world of the Raj, in which Amy had lived her whole Indian life, was beginning to pass away.

Amy was not a political person, and she said little in public about these great events. She was a British subject who had lived her whole working life under British rule, and she shared many of the assumptions of her generation about it. But she had also spent thirty-six years building a community that was meant to be Indian, in which Indian men and women held real responsibility. Whatever she thought of the politics, the future of the Fellowship would lie in Indian hands, and she knew it.

24 October 1931

On 24 October 1931 Amy went to look at a building that was being prepared for the Fellowship’s work, in the town of Kalakadu, a few miles from Dohnavur according to her biographers. It was dusk, and the light was poor. Workmen had dug a pit in the floor of one of the rooms, for a latrine, in a place where it should not have been, and it had not been covered or marked. Amy, walking through the building in the half-dark, stepped into it and fell.

The injuries were severe. She broke her leg, dislocated her ankle, and injured her spine. She was carried back to Dohnavur in great pain. At first it was expected that she would recover in a matter of weeks or months, as people do from broken legs, and that she would soon be walking the compound again. That did not happen. The fractures healed badly, the spinal injury left lasting damage, and arthritis set in. Combined with the old neuralgia, the effects of the fall left her largely confined to her room for the rest of her life. She lived for almost twenty more years, and for most of that time she could walk only a little, with help, and was often in pain.

Some popular accounts place the fall at Dohnavur itself, at a building site for the new hospital or for a house in the compound. The details vary, and they do not much matter. What matters is that a woman who had been the active centre of a large community for thirty years was suddenly, and as it turned out permanently, laid aside.

She was settled in a room in her own bungalow at Dohnavur, with a window onto a small garden. Outside it, in time, a bird-bath was placed, so that she could watch the birds that came to drink and bathe. She had always loved birds, and they became one of the pleasures of her confinement. The children came to see her, and the members of the Fellowship came for counsel and prayer. The room became, in a sense, the heart of Dohnavur. But it was a heart that could no longer go out to the rest of the body.

An Answer to Prayer?

It is natural to connect the fall with the prayer she had prayed, and many of those who have told her story have done so. She had asked God to do whatever would fit her for his service, and within a short time she was crippled. Was this the answer?

Amy herself came to believe that it was, in the sense that God had allowed it and would use it. She did not believe that God had pushed her into the pit, or that suffering was good in itself. But she believed that nothing came to her except through his hands, and that what came through his hands could be received as a gift, however hard. In the years that followed she wrote a great deal about suffering, about acceptance, and about the hidden purposes of God in pain, and much of it grew directly out of her own experience in that room.

It is worth being careful here, as she was. There is a kind of Christian talk about suffering that makes it too easy: that treats every disaster as a lesson, every illness as a blessing in disguise, and every unanswered prayer as part of a neat plan. Amy did not talk like that, at least not in her better moments. She admitted that she did not understand. She admitted that the pain was real and that it wore her down. She admitted that she longed to be up and about, and that the confinement was hard to bear. What she affirmed was not that she understood, but that she trusted. The verse from Job at the head of this chapter says, “he knoweth the way that I take.” It does not say that Job knew it. Job’s comfort was not understanding but being known.

The Fellowship prayed for her healing, and so did friends all over the world. The prayer was not answered in the way they asked. Amy had prayed many such prayers herself, for Ponnammal, for babies in the nurseries, for converts in danger, and she knew that “no” is also an answer. The child who had stood at a mirror in Millisle, disappointed to find her eyes still brown, now lay in a room in Dohnavur and learned the same lesson again, at much greater cost.

Losing Control

For a woman like Amy Carmichael, the hardest part of the fall may have been not the pain but the loss of control. She had always been the one who acted, who decided, who went to the nursery when a baby was ill, who walked down to the boys’ compound to settle a problem, who saw everything with her own eyes. Now she could see almost nothing except her own room and the garden outside its window. She had to depend on others to tell her what was happening, and to carry out her decisions.

That forced a change in the way the Fellowship was led. Others took on more and more of the daily work of leadership: the senior Indian and British members, among them Godfrey Webb-Peploe in the boys’ work and the doctors in the hospital. Amy remained the head of the Fellowship, consulted on everything and deciding the most important matters, and her authority was not diminished. But she could no longer be everywhere, and the Fellowship had to learn to work without her constant presence.

In the long run that was good for it. A work that depends entirely on one person is fragile, and Dohnavur would have to survive her death. The twenty years of her confinement gave others the experience and the authority they would need. Whether Amy saw it that way at the time is less clear. She found it hard to let go, and those around her sometimes found it hard to act without her.

Gold

Job’s words at the head of this chapter end with a promise: “When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.” The image is of a refiner’s fire, in which gold is heated until the impurities rise to the surface and can be skimmed away. The fire does not destroy the gold; it purifies it.

It is the same image that had confronted Amy as a girl beside the fountain in Belfast, when the words about gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay and stubble came to her, and she learned that the fire would test what she had built. Now, at sixty-three, she was in the fire herself. What would come out of it?

The answer, as the next chapter will show, was a great deal. Out of the room to which she was confined came many of her most enduring books, a stream of letters to people all over the world, and a ministry of prayer and counsel that reached far beyond Dohnavur. Those who knew her in her last years spoke of a gentleness and a tenderness that had not always been so evident in the active years. The fire had done its work. But it would be wrong to pretend that it was easy, or that she did not feel it. Gold does not choose the furnace.