Brown Eyes

“For thou didst form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy works; And that my soul knoweth right well.”

— Psalm 139:13-14, ASV

A Village by the Sea

Millisle is a small village on the eastern shore of the Ards peninsula in County Down, in the north of Ireland. It looks out across the Irish Sea, and on a clear day the hills of Galloway in Scotland can be seen on the horizon. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was a place of farms, fishing boats and mills, where the wind and the tide set the rhythm of the day. Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born there on 16 December 1867.

Her father, David Carmichael, was a miller, and so were the men of his family before him. The Carmichaels were of Scottish descent, like many of the Presbyterian families of County Down, whose ancestors had crossed the narrow sea in the seventeenth century. They ran flour mills, and in Amy’s childhood the business was prosperous. Her mother, Catherine Jane Filson, came from a family of similar background, and she was by every account a woman of warm and steady faith. Amy was the first of their seven children. Brothers and sisters followed in quick succession, and the house was full and noisy.

The family belonged to the Presbyterian church, and their faith was the faith of the Ulster Presbyterians of their day: serious, scriptural, and rooted in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which children learned by heart. Sunday was kept with care. Family prayers were a fixed part of the day. The great Ulster revival of 1859 had swept through the province less than a decade before Amy was born, and it had left behind it a strong evangelical piety, with an expectation that faith would be personal, that conversion was real, and that the Bible spoke directly to the soul. It was in that atmosphere that Amy grew up.

The Shorter Catechism begins with a question that every Presbyterian child in Ulster could answer by heart: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.” It is a sentence that holds together two things that later piety often pulled apart, duty and delight. Amy Carmichael would spend her life on the first half of it, in obedience that sometimes looked severe to those around her. But those who knew her best always spoke of the second half too: of the joy she found in God, in children, in birds and flowers and mountain streams, and of the gaiety that never quite left her even in pain. The catechism had given her both halves before she could understand either.

A Strong-Willed Child

She was, by all accounts, a lively and wilful little girl. The stories told of her childhood, most of which come from her own memory and from her family, show a child who was quick, imaginative, and not easily controlled. She loved the sea, the shore, the boats in the harbour and the open air. She was the eldest, and she led her brothers into adventures. She was also, from very early, a child who took prayer seriously, and who expected that God would answer it.

The discipline in the Carmichael house was firm, in the way of Victorian families, and Amy seems to have known it well. Later she would speak with gratitude of parents who were strict and loving at once, who expected obedience and also made the children feel deeply secure. She was not a meek child, and she was never a meek woman. But she learned at home that love and authority belong together, and that lesson, for good and for ill, shaped the way she would one day lead a household of her own.

The Prayer for Blue Eyes

The best-known story of her childhood is one she told herself, many years later. Her own eyes were brown, and she wished they were blue. Her mother had taught her that God hears and answers prayer, and so one night she asked him to change the colour of her eyes. In the morning she ran to the mirror, fully expecting to see blue eyes looking back at her. They were still brown. In the versions of the story that she told and that her biographers repeat, she was disappointed, but she also learned something that she never forgot: that no is an answer too. God had heard her; he had simply said no.

The ages given for the story vary, from about three to about five, and it is the kind of memory that grows in the telling. But it has lasted because of what came after. Decades later, in South India, Amy Carmichael wore Indian dress and, on some of her journeys, darkened her skin, so that she could move among people who would have closed their doors to a European. A woman with blue eyes would have been noticed at once. Brown eyes could pass. Whether she herself drew that connection at the time, or whether it was drawn later by those who told her story, it became one of the most loved parables of her life: a child’s prayer refused because God had a better answer in mind.

It is worth pausing over the parable, because it is easy to make it too neat. Not every unanswered prayer turns out, years later, to have a clear explanation. Amy Carmichael herself would pray many prayers in India that were not answered as she asked, for children who died, for friends who were not healed, for converts who went back. She learned to live without explanations. But the child at the mirror in Millisle had learned the first lesson of a long school: that God is not a vending machine, that he is free, and that his refusals can be trusted. The psalmist says that God formed us in our mother’s womb, and that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” The child who wanted different eyes was being taught, before she understood it, that she had been made as she was for a purpose.

Home and Its Shelter

The Carmichael home in Millisle was a comfortable one, at least in Amy’s early years, and the children would later be sent away to school. She remembered her childhood as a happy one, and she remembered both her parents with deep affection.

Two things about that home matter for the rest of her story. The first is that it was a home in which children were taken seriously as persons who could know God. Prayer was not something adults did on their behalf; it was something they did themselves. When Amy later insisted, against the habits of many missionaries of her day, that small Indian children could truly know and love Christ, and should be taught to pray in their own words, she was passing on what she had been given.

The second is that it was a home that would not last. Within a few years the business that supported it would decline, the family would move to Belfast, and David Carmichael would die young, leaving his widow with seven children and much less money. Amy’s childhood security was real, but it was brief. Perhaps that is one reason why, for the rest of her life, she poured so much of herself into giving security to children who had none.

The Sea

She never forgot the sea at Millisle. Many years later, in the hot plains of South India, she spent a short holiday by the sea with the young converts of her band, and in Things as They Are she described one of the boys standing on a rock in the surf, “the wind in his hair and his face wet with spray, rejoicing in it all.” The joy she took in that picture is the joy of a child who had grown up beside the water. A grown woman who had spent her early years running on the shore of the Irish Sea knew exactly what that boy was feeling.

She also learned, by the sea, the feeling of smallness that it gives, and the sense of a God whose works are wonderful. The mountains of the Western Ghats, under which she spent most of her life, would give her something similar, and she loved them. But the first great things she knew were the sky and the sea of County Down.

What Was Given

It would be wrong to read too much of the later woman back into the little girl. Most of what is told of Amy Carmichael’s childhood comes from her own memories, written or spoken long afterwards, when she knew how the story had turned out, and from relatives who told it in the light of what she became. Childhood memories are selected, and the ones we keep are the ones that fit.

But some things seem clear. She was born into a family of faith, and she never had to discover the Bible as a stranger. She was the eldest of a large family, used to leading and used to responsibility. She was strong-willed, imaginative, and quick to feel. She had been taught that God hears prayer, and she had learned, at a mirror one morning, that hearing is not the same as granting. And she had been formed, as the psalm says, by a God who did not make mistakes about the colour of a child’s eyes.

Many years later, those who knew her at Dohnavur remembered her laughter as much as her seriousness. She liked fun, she liked games, and she liked to tease. The wilful girl from Millisle had not disappeared; she had been brought under a stronger will. The next step in that process would come at a boarding school in Yorkshire, when she was fifteen.