Dohnavur became a familiar place. I knew its bungalows, its paths, its people; I breathed its air. Amy Carmichael became for me what some now call a role model. She was far more than that. She was my first spiritual mother. She showed me the shape of godliness. For a time, I suppose, I thought she must have been perfect, and that was good enough for me. As I grew up I knew she could not have been perfect, and that was better, for it meant that I might possibly walk in her footprints. If we demand perfect models we will have, except for the Son of man Himself, none at all.
The first of her books that I read was, I think, If, which became her best-seller. It was not written for teenagers, but for seasoned Christians with the solemn charge of caring for the souls of others. It was from the pages of this thin blue book that I, a teenager, began to understand the great message of the Cross, of what the author called “Calvary love.” I saw that the chance to die, to be crucified with Christ, was not a morbid thing, but the very gateway to Life. I was drawn—slowly, fitfully (my response was fitful), but inexorably.
In a far more secular and self-preoccupied time Amy Carmichael’s vision of the unseen and her ardent effort to dwell in its light, making any sacrifice for its sake, seems hardly believable, let alone worth trying to imitate. Will we be put off by her awesome discipline, her steadfastness, or perhaps by the cultural shift or the difference in vocabulary (saturated as it was by the English of the King James Bible and the mystics of centuries ago)? She spoke often of the “country whose forces move unseen among us.” That country is our country. We are its citizens as she was, if we call ourselves Christians. If its forces moved in Dohnavur, they move unabated here, too, where we live. If we are unaware, perhaps we have not listened, have not taken time to observe. Have we been deafened by noise, some of the worst of which passes for music? Has our vision, spiritual as well as physical, perhaps been impaired by the glittering images of the ubiquitous screen?
In spite of much that militates against quietness there are people who still read books. They are the people who keep me going. I write especially for those who bring to their reading a mind not hidebound by the sensibilities of our own time, but prepared to contemplate the Eternally Relevant; to seek in this book specifically the truth and the hidden meaning of a single life.
We read biographies to get out of ourselves and into another’s skin, to understand the convulsive drama that shapes, motivates, and issues from that other life. Our current vocabulary includes such terms as identity, role models, self-image, self-actualization, liberation, upward mobility, and fulfillment, worries that never crossed Amy Carmichael’s mind. How shall we, accustomed to popular seminars on rights and how to feel comfortable, receive and transmit a faith that prized what the world despises (the Cross) and despised what the world prizes (all that dims the Cross)?
The Christian life comes down to two simple things: trust and obedience. What does that mean, exactly? We could hold a seminar and talk about it. Visual aids are better. Look at a life. Amy Carmichael set her face toward that other Country. Her education, experience, and environment were incidentals, a mere framework within which she lived for eighty-three years, loved, feared, trusted, suffered, celebrated, failed, triumphed, and died. Through all the lights, poses, moods, and disguises we discern the common human elements that make up all of our lives.
I offer the testament of one whose loyal answering of her Lord’s Come follow has made an incalculable difference to me. May it make a difference to my readers.
ELISABETH ELLIOT
Magnolia, Massachusetts
Chapter 1
TidePools, Pink Powder, and Prayers
She managed to stuff her two little brothers up through the skylight and then squeezed herself onto the slate roof. Glorious freedom. They stood up triumphant in the fresh wind that swept across the Irish Sea. The water was blue today, which to the girl (perhaps seven or eight years old) meant that it was happy. On some days it was green and angry, on others gray and anxious. Over the rooftops of the village they could see the stony beach and, far off across the water, the great rock called Ailsa Craig, and two rounded hills, the Paps of Jura. Now for the rest of the adventure. Gleefully the three children slid down the slates and paraded triumphantly around the lead gutters—until they saw, gazing up at them, the astonished faces of their parents.
The girl was Amy Beatrice Carmichael, great-great-granddaughter of one Jane Dalziel. It was said that King Kenneth II of Scotland (A.D. 971-995) had offered a reward to any of his subjects who would dare to remove from the gallows the body of the king’s friend and kinsman who had been hanged. One stepped forth and said in Gaelic, “Dal ziel,” I dare. So Dalziel became his name. That spirit was not much diluted in the child on the roof.
The parents on the ground were David Carmichael, descendant of Scottish Covenanters, and Catherine Jane Filson, descendant of Dalziel. Years later Amy found spiritual significance in this union, as she found spiritual significance in almost everything. Because her mother’s ancestors were friendly with certain persecutors of the Covenanters, it was as though persecutor and persecuted were at last united. “So you see,” she wrote, “after all, cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.”
The Carmichael house in Millisle.
Amy Carmichael was born December 16, 1867 in the gray stone house, one of three large houses in the village of Millisle on the north coast of Ireland. Below the Carmichael house, close by the seashore to
