When she wrote that note she believed she would soon be either healed or dead. Fifteen years later, neither having occurred, she wrote another note, spelling out for May Powell, who was coleader with Godfrey, qualities to be looked for in a new leader: She must be just, a woman of character, able to make decisions, possessing the kind of love that is never tired out of loving, the power to ride the waves instead of being submerged by them, and a deep conviction about DF principles.
The fact that Amy addressed this note to May rather than to Godfrey or to Godfrey and May can hardly be ignored. She took it for granted that the leader must be a woman. A man could not be considered to make decisions which would bind the community.
Nowhere does David Carmichael, Amy’s father, find more than passing mention in her writings. Her mother, in contrast to the vague figure of her father, is strongly portrayed. Amy was the oldest of the children and therefore the natural leader. Her brothers were cherished and adored, but they were her little brothers. Her relationship with the D.O.M. was certainly the most intimate she ever experienced with a man. Their mutual love and respect was of the deepest and tenderest, but there was little or nothing of male leadership and female response. She was probably by far the stronger of the two. Barclay Buxton was her “chief.” She said so often. Thomas Walker, though not her superior in the same sense as Buxton, was a leader whom she gladly followed. They were gone. It was to her that the vision for this work had been vouchsafed. It was she who must bear the responsibility.
Amy had studied the New Testament passages on the ministry of women. To Conybeare’s note on 1 Corinthians 14:34, “The women must not officiate publicly in the congregation,” she added, “compare chapter 11:2 where they are told to be veiled if they pray or prophesy. Some muddle here?” and in the margin of 15:1-6 she puts, “Mary was the first messenger to men.” She loved the Revised Version of Psalms 68:11, “The Lord gave the word: great was the company of the women that published it.”
She believed that the apostle Paul’s injunctions about the silence of women must have been meant for a certain group at a certain time. He was not articulating a doctrine of total silence, any more than he was commanding women, as Amy put it, “to go to church with their hair hanging down their backs,” a horror of indecency for a lady of Amy’s breeding.
Having explained the above convictions, she added, “Well, that’s that. All the same I think men were as a rule meant for leadership and publicity and so on—not women, and the very day Godfrey knew enough Tamil for it—and even before—I pushed him into the pool and left him to swim. In other words asked him to take Prayers, the worship in the House of Prayer, and so on. And gladly, oh so gladly, I used to repeat John the Baptist’s words to myself, He must increase and (I did not say but for I was very, very glad) I must decrease.’”
Chapter 47
The Razor Edge
The supreme gift of the soldier is the power to simplify amid confusion, to make a simple syllogism, which once it is made seems . . . unquestionable, but which before it is made is in the power only of genius.”
This, from John Buchan’s Cromwell, is quoted in one of Amy’s notes to the Fellowship.
Instead of ‘genius’ read ‘faith,’” she added, ‘‘and you will understand why anything like careless sureness was always far from the one on whom the final responsibility of decisions lay, and who would be, if the decision proved to be caused by a mistaken reading of the will of God, blameworthy.”
She tells how, when a major purchase of land was to be made, she used to sign the checks kneeling by her desk, “so deeply did I fear.” It was the razor edge between faith and presumption, so exceedingly fine that she had to walk. I know we never moved forward without sureness, and yet there was always this prayer at the root of action. I won’t attempt to explain the apparent contradiction except by this true saying, ‘From the circumference even opposite lines run to the centre.’”
Sureness but not careless sureness. Fear and faith. Middle-of-the night misgivings and dawn’s renewed determination to take God at His word. The power to simplify amid confusion. Amy had all of the above. She was still a woman, a fallible creature like the psalmist: “When I said, ‘my foot slippeth’ like Paul: “the good that I would I do not”; like John: “yet if any man sin. . . .” Nothing exempted the Dohnavur crowd from being “miserable offenders,” like the rest of the world. The whole lot was daily in need of that amazing grace which had brought them safe thus far, and would finally lead them home.
“All the conflicts were between what Amma thought God wanted and what others thought God wanted” was the diagnosis of one of the Family. “We all thought we had the mind of Christ.”
Ronald Proctor, a practical man who confessed that he often saw mud where Amma saw stars, informed her that the old Ford needed to be replaced. It was a simple matter of what was going on in its insides. To Amy it was a spiritual matter, one for prayer and pondering. She told him she really did not “feel” it right to buy a new car. On the next trip the brakes gave out and the old Ford rolled straight for the water. “We were very nearly, feelings and all, at the bottom of the tank,” Ronald reported. That was guidance. The car was replaced.
Then there was the shattering disagreement
