A Room at Dohnavur

“And he hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:9, ASV

Twenty Years in a Room

For the last twenty years of her life, Amy Carmichael lived mostly in one room. It was not a sickroom in the gloomy Victorian sense. It had a window onto a garden, a bird-bath outside where she could watch the birds, books, flowers, and a constant coming and going of children and members of the Fellowship. But it was a room she could rarely leave. She was often in pain. She slept badly. There were long periods when she was too ill to do much at all. And she was aware, all the time, of the life of the Fellowship going on outside, in places she could no longer reach.

She did not waste those years. Out of that room came a stream of writing that has outlasted almost everything else she did, at least in the knowledge of the wider Christian world. And out of it came also a ministry of prayer, counsel and encouragement that held the Fellowship together and reached thousands of people far beyond it.

Gold Cord

The first major book she wrote after her fall was Gold Cord, published in 1932. It was her own history of the Dohnavur Fellowship, from Preena’s coming to the early 1930s. The title came from an image she loved: a cord of gold that bound the members of the Fellowship to God and to one another, made of many strands twisted together. The book is not a full or impartial history. It leaves out much, including, as we have seen, the episode with Stephen Neill, and it tells the story as Amy saw it, as an unfolding of God’s faithfulness. But it is the single most important source for the inner life of Dohnavur, and it shows the Fellowship as its founder wanted it to be seen.

It also shows how much she had come to depend on the community. The book is full of other people: the accals, the Sisters, the doctors and nurses, the boys’ workers, the children themselves. Amy was its narrator, but she was not its hero. She wanted the reader to see a family, held together by a golden cord, and not a missionary surrounded by admirers.

Books for the Suffering

In 1933 she published Rose from Brier, a book of letters and meditations for people who were ill or in pain. It grew out of notes she had written to patients in the Dohnavur hospital and to others who were suffering, and out of her own experience in the years since her fall. She had noticed, she said, that most books of comfort for the sick were written by people who were well, and that they often missed their mark. She wanted to write as one sufferer to another, honestly, without pretending that pain was easy or that faith made it painless.

The book was widely read, and it brought her letters from all over the world from people in hospitals and sickrooms who felt that she understood. She answered many of them. In the years that followed she wrote other books of meditation, verse and counsel, some drawn from the notes she wrote almost daily to members of the Fellowship. Many of these were collected and published after her death.

Notes and Letters

Much of what Amy wrote in these years was never meant for publication at all. Unable to walk the compound, she kept in touch with the members of the Fellowship by writing to them: short notes, often daily, sent across the compound by hand, offering a verse, a word of encouragement, a gentle rebuke, or simply a greeting. Members kept these notes, sometimes for decades, and many of them were later gathered into books. They show a leader who knew her people well and cared about the smallest details of their lives, and who could be tender and funny as well as searching.

She also wrote to friends and strangers outside the Fellowship, many of whom had written to her because of her books. Some were missionaries in difficulty; some were ill; some were young people trying to discern a call. She could not answer them all, but she answered many, and those letters carried her influence far beyond Dohnavur. A whole generation of evangelical missionaries, especially women, grew up reading her, and some of them went to the field because of her. Among her readers was a schoolgirl in America named Elisabeth Howard, who would later, as Elisabeth Elliot, write her life.

All of this was done from a bed or a chair, often through pain, and often on days when she could manage only a few lines. It was not the work she would have chosen. But it was work, and she did it faithfully.

If

The best known of all her books is a small one, published in 1938, with a one-word title: If. It grew, by the usual account, out of a conversation with a fellow worker about a difficulty in the Fellowship, and about what it means to love as Christ loved. Amy went away and wrote down, one after another, a series of short sentences, each beginning with the word “if,” each describing some small failure of love, and each ending with the same refrain, which measures that failure against the love of Calvary.

The sentences are searching, and they are meant to be. They do not deal with great sins but with small ones: irritation, sarcasm, self-pity, the wish to be noticed, the readiness to talk about another person’s faults, the reluctance to forgive. They hold up each of these against the love shown on the cross, and they leave the reader, as they left the writer, with nowhere to hide. Amy wrote them first for herself and her Fellowship, and she was aware that they condemned her as much as anyone. Their power lies partly in that. They are not the words of a saint looking down on sinners, but of a woman who knew her own temper, pride and impatience, and who had learned in the furnace of pain how much she still had to learn about love.

The book is still in print and still widely read, and it is, for many Christians, the only thing of Amy Carmichael’s they know. Its sentences are not quoted here, out of respect for the rights that may still attach to them; readers should find them in her own words.

Arulai

The years in the room brought further losses. The members of the first generation, those who had been with Amy from the Pannaivilai days, were growing old and dying. The hardest of these losses was Arulai, the girl convert who had grown into one of the leaders of the Fellowship, and on whom Amy had come to rely more than on almost anyone. Arulai died, after a long illness, in 1939. Amy grieved for her as she had grieved for Ponnammal, and she felt the loss of an Indian leader whom she had hoped would carry the Fellowship into the future.

The Second World War followed. India was drawn into it, and in 1942 Japanese forces advanced through Burma towards India’s eastern frontier, and Japanese ships and aircraft raided the eastern coast. For a time there was real fear in South India. Supplies were short, prices rose, and contact with friends in Britain was disrupted. The Fellowship carried on, as it had through the First World War, trusting God for its needs. Amy, in her room, prayed and wrote and led.

Independence and the Act

In August 1947 India became independent. Amy Carmichael had lived her whole Indian life under British rule, and now she saw it end. She did not leave, as many British people did. Dohnavur was her home, and the Fellowship had long been preparing for a future in which Indians would lead it. In the years that followed, Indian members took on more and more responsibility, and the Fellowship, like the Indian churches around it, adjusted to life in a new nation.

Two months later, in October 1947, the Madras Legislature passed the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, which made it illegal to dedicate girls to temples in the Madras Presidency. It was the culmination of decades of campaigning by Indian reformers, above all Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, and it was passed by an Indian government in the first weeks of independence. Amy had spent nearly half a century working to protect children from the practice it outlawed. She lived to see it ended in law, though she knew that law alone would not end it in practice everywhere. Some popular accounts give the date of the act as 1948, and some give Amy the credit for it. Neither is quite right. The act was passed in 1947, and it was the work of Indian legislators. But it is not wrong to see her long witness as one of the many streams that fed it.

Power Made Perfect in Weakness

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s account of what he learned when he asked three times to be freed from what he called a thorn in the flesh, and was refused. “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul’s response was not resignation but a strange kind of boasting: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Amy Carmichael knew that verse, and in her last twenty years she lived it. She had asked for healing, and she had not been healed. She had been an active, strong-willed leader, and she had been made weak. But out of that weakness came the books by which most of the world now knows her, a deepened gentleness that those around her noticed, and a Fellowship that learned to stand on its own. She did not pretend that weakness was pleasant. But she found, as Paul had found, that it was a place where the power of Christ could rest.