They were not so isolated in Dohnavur as to make them oblivious of the world’s suffering. Amy ‘s letters during the war years make frequent mention of her heartbreak for the ravaged countries. In 1939 to John Risk, an officer of the British navy who was now a DF, she wrote of Poland, “A thousand killed in one city, many while at prayer, many ill and wounded, and little helpless children—and those beautiful Polish horses and dogs and pigeons.” She felt sure that the Lord “has something” for the suffering animals.
Many of the letters include news of Amy’s Scottish terrier, Scamp. He lived on her bed and made life dangerous for any who approached it. She tried to discipline him, but he was so adorable, so sinless, “poor dear little man.” At last for the sake of Scamp’s enemies, her nurses, she had to banish him. There was also a puppy named Tess. “Tess was delicious today,” but posed another kind of threat, this time to Amy’s own spiritual well-being. In her copy of Conybeare’s New Testament, beside Colossians 3:22 she wrote, “not a puppy?” She longed for Bee, who loved dogs, to enjoy Tess, “but the War is the War,” she wrote (no reference, of course, to the World War). “It doesn’t leave much time for anything but itself.” Stick to business, the King’s Business. That was the message.
One day Bee was called to go at once to Amma. She found her sobbing almost uncontrollably. It was the thought of London’s maimed dogs that undid her. Who else could possibly understand her agony—for mere animals?
War stories she read eagerly and shared with the Family when she found in them something spiritually applicable. There was the “gallant lad,” a young airman, who guided his burning plane to his death, refusing to use his parachute in order to prevent a crash into a town.
When a comrade in the Fellowship learned that her brother whom she had helped to bring up was missing, believed killed, Amy wrote, “What noble news. How little you knew you were training a young knight for the courts of heaven. You are honored, but—but—God comfort you tonight.”
In 1942, with the imminent threat of Japanese invasion from Singapore, a plan was drawn up for evacuation of the accals and children between the ages of seven and thirty-five, of whom there were 316. They began quietly to send supplies up to the Forest but the plan never had to be implemented. Between 1939 and 1943 the price of flour increased nine-fold. When the work began in Dohnavur two hundred pounds per year supplied their needs. It was now costing between seven hundred pounds and eight hundred pounds per week.
It was a potentially frightening time for the Family. News of the war reached the children’s ears, albeit in perhaps small doses, things for which their prayers were asked. Their Amma, whom some of them had hardly laid eyes on, but whom others still knew as mother, was apparently hopelessly ill. Prayer had not changed things in the Room of Peace, so far as the children could see. And prices—rising and rising, though rice and curry still filled their bowls. They joined in the prayers for God’s supply.
There were many in the Family who were conscious, as Amy was, of being held by the One who controlled not only the price of rice, the health of each of His children, and incomprehensible matters like wars, but even the stupendous and mysterious celestial structures known as nebulae. She expressed her trust in that God:
Lover of all, I hold me fast by Thee,
Ruler of time, King of eternity.
There is no great with Thee, there is no small,
For Thou art all, and fillest all in all.
The new-born world swings forth at Thy command,
The falling dew-drop falls into Thy hand.
God of the firmament’s mysterious powers,
I see Thee thread the minutes of my hours.
I see Thee guide the frail, the fading moon
That walks alone through empty skies at noon.
Was ever wayworn, lonely traveler
But had Thee by him, blessed Comforter?
Out of my vision swims the untracked star,
Thy counsels too are high and very far,
Only I know, God of the nebulae,
It is enough to hold me fast by Thee.
1. Luke 22:36.
2. “Set your heart on things above, not on things earthly.”
Chapter 46
The Voice From the Sanctum
To the burning spirit and the forceful spirit anywhere is easier than the rear. We always want to be in the van.” The spirit Amy Carmichael thus described was her own—burning, forceful—from her enthusiastic guidance of her own little brothers and sisters and her earnest evangelism in the slums of Belfast and Manchester, to her ardent work with the Starry Cluster, leading to the Dohnavur Fellowship. She whose highest aim was to be a simple follower of her Master who made Himself nothing, who took the form of the lowest slave in an Eastern household—she had become, inevitably, it seems, a powerful matriarch of a very large and dependent family. She was no longer in a position to whisk everyone off suddenly to the Forest or the seashore when the fancy took her. Her control was of another kind. The accident, far from diminishing her matriarchal power, enhanced it to the level of a mystique. She was a commanding figure, as the figure of Beatrice seemed to Dante, “commanding as a mother.”
The system—the Pattern Shewn in the Mount—was crystallized, not to say frozen, when she disappeared from view. She was not quite invisible. People saw her, of course. Many waited on her, children were brought to her room for Coming Days and other occasions, accals and sitties and annachies had access, but it
