God’s Garden

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.”

— John 12:24, ASV

18 January 1951

Amy Carmichael died at Dohnavur on 18 January 1951. She was eighty-three years old. She had lived in India for fifty-five years, and for the last nineteen of them she had been largely confined to her room. Her final illness was long, and in her last months she was very weak and often not fully conscious. Those who cared for her were members of the family she had built: Indian and British women and men who had grown up at Dohnavur or come to join it, and who had learned from her what it meant to give their lives for others.

She had left instructions about her funeral and her grave. She did not want a monument. She did not want a stone with her name and dates and a list of her achievements. She was buried in the Fellowship’s own burial ground, which was known as God’s Garden, among the children and workers who had gone before her. Over the grave the Fellowship placed a bird-bath, like the one she had watched from her window for twenty years, and on it they inscribed a single word: Amma.

It was exactly right. She had been called many things in her life: Miss Carmichael, Miss Wilson-Carmichael, the Missie Ammal, the child-stealing Ammal, the founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship. But the name that mattered to her, and to the people who loved her, was the one the children had given her. She had been their mother.

The Fellowship After Her

The great test of any work built around a strong founder is what happens when the founder dies. Many such works decline or collapse, because no one can take the founder’s place and the community cannot agree on how to go on without her. Amy had thought about this for many years, and the twenty years of her confinement had given others the experience they needed to lead. The Dohnavur Fellowship survived her death, and it continues today.

It has changed, as it was bound to. Indian leadership, which Amy had long intended, became complete. The temple dedication that first brought children to Dohnavur was outlawed, and the needs of the children and families it serves have changed with the times. The Fellowship today works in Tamil Nadu with children and families, offering care, education and medical help in a Christian setting, on the land at the foot of the mountains where Amy lived. The hospital still serves the villages around. The work is smaller in some respects and different in many, but it is recognisably the same family.

The Books

Amy Carmichael’s books have also outlived her. Many of them are still in print, and they continue to be read by Christians all over the world, especially those drawn to her teaching on prayer, suffering, obedience and love. If remains the best known. Gold Cord and Rose from Brier are still read. The early books, Things as They Are and Lotus Buds among them, are now in the public domain, and they are read today both as Christian classics and as historical documents of missionary life in South India at the turn of the twentieth century.

Her influence on later missionaries has been considerable. A generation of women missionaries, in particular, found in her an example of a single woman who did serious and lasting work, who refused to be confined to the roles that missionary societies expected of women, and who wrote about the cost of discipleship without sentimentality. Elisabeth Elliot, whose life is told in the previous volume of this series, was one of them, and her biography of Amy Carmichael introduced her to a new generation of readers in the 1980s.

Remembered at Home

She never went back to Ireland, but Ireland has not forgotten her. In Belfast the congregation that grew from the Welcome Hall still meets off the Shankill Road, and it has opened a centre in her name where visitors can learn her story. The Ulster History Circle, which marks the places associated with notable people from the north of Ireland, has honoured her with one of its blue plaques. In Millisle, the village by the sea where she was born, her name is known and her story is told. It is a modest kind of fame, and she would probably have disliked it. But it is a reminder that the woman who became Amma to the children of a Tamil village began as the eldest daughter of a miller in County Down, and that the faith she carried to India was first given to her there.

She is remembered in other places too, often in small ways: in the names of schools and mission houses, in hymnbooks that include her verses, and in the private libraries of Christians who keep her books by their beds. The memory that would have mattered most to her, though, is the one kept at Dohnavur, among the people who still call that place home.

Weighing the Life

A biography that has tried to be honest throughout should try to be honest at the end. How should Amy Carmichael’s life be weighed?

On one side, the achievements are great. She gave half a century to the care of children whom almost nobody else would take, and she gave them not only food and shelter but a home, a family, an education and a faith. Hundreds of children, perhaps more than a thousand in all over the years, grew up at Dohnavur who might otherwise have faced lives of exploitation, neglect or early death. She did it without salary, without appeals, and without ever going home. She built a community that has outlasted her by more than seventy years. And she wrote books that have helped many thousands of Christians to pray, to endure suffering, and to love more truly.

On the other side, there are shadows, and this book has tried not to hide them. Her writing about Hinduism was often harsh and sometimes unfair, and it contributed to a picture of Indian religion and of the women of the temple communities that did harm. She ran Dohnavur with an authority that some found overbearing, and she did not easily share power or tolerate disagreement, as the episode with Stephen Neill shows. The protective walls of Dohnavur, necessary in the early years, may have stayed high longer than they needed to, and some of the children who grew up there found it hard to make their way in the world outside. She was a woman of her time and her empire, and she shared some of its blind spots.

Those shadows are real, and they should not be explained away. But they do not cancel the light. Every human life, including every Christian life, is a mixture of faithfulness and failure, insight and blindness, love and self-will. The question is not whether Amy Carmichael was perfect, but whether she was faithful, and whether God worked through her. On both counts the answer seems clear.

A Grain of Wheat

The verse at the head of this chapter was spoken by Jesus in the last week of his life, when some Greeks came asking to see him. He answered with a saying about a grain of wheat: unless it falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He was speaking first of himself, and of the death he was about to die. But he went on at once to speak of his followers: “He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12:25, ASV).

Amy Carmichael took that saying as a pattern for her life. The phrase most often associated with her, that missionary life is simply a chance to die, is an echo of it. She did not mean that missionaries should seek death, or despise life. She meant that the missionary’s calling is to let go of self: of comfort, of home, of reputation, of control, of the life one would have chosen. She let go of a great deal. She let go of Belfast and the Welcome Hall, of Robert Wilson and Broughton Grange, of Japan and the village work she loved, of her mother, of her health, and finally of her active leadership. Each time, something died. And each time, she believed, something grew.

Amma

This book began with a verse about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to look for one that is lost, and with the words of Jesus: “it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” It is fitting to end there.

Amy Carmichael’s great work began with one child. Preena did not come to Dohnavur as part of a programme or a strategy. She came because she had heard that there was a woman who took children in, and she walked through the dark to find her. Amy took her in, at some risk, because she believed that this one child mattered to God. Everything else followed from that: the nurseries, the boys’ compound, the hospital, the Fellowship, the books. But it began with one.

The bird-bath over her grave in God’s Garden bears one word, and it is not her name. It is the name that one runaway child, and hundreds after her, gave to the woman who opened the door. Amy Carmichael would not have wanted to be remembered as a heroine, a saint, or a legend. She would have wanted to be remembered, if at all, as a mother, and as a witness to the Father who does not will that one of these little ones should perish. That is how she is remembered at Dohnavur still.