Visit to Dohnavur
Because I have been invited to write a new biography of Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, Lars and I visited the work she founded in South India. We arrived on their monthly prayer day in time to attend the evening meeting. The House of Prayer is a lovely terra cotta-colored building with red tile roof and a tower which holds the chimes that play a hymn at 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. There is no furniture inside except a few chairs for older ones and decrepit foreigners such as we who aren’t used to sitting on the floor. Everyone filed in in perfect silence, bare feet moving noiselessly over polished red tiled floors, and sat in rows according to age, the tiny ones up front, dressed in brightly colored cotton dresses. Behind them sat the next age group, girls in skirts and blouses; then came those in skirts, blouses, and half-saris; finally the accals (older ones who look after the younger) in blue or purple or green saris. All had smoothly combed and oiled black hair, many of them with flowers in it. An Indian man played the pump organ while they sang several traditional hymns in English, as well as songs written by “Amma” (the Tamil term of respect, used for Amy Carmichael). There was scripture reading, then a prayer of thanksgiving for the child who had just come, a little girl of two whose mother cannot keep her. Her new mother, an accal, carried her to the platform and stood holding her while they prayed and sang “Jesus Loves Me.”
At another service in the house of prayer, Lars and I sat in the balcony which leads up to the tower. We looked down on the lovely scene, made even brighter this time because the smallest children had been given colored flags to wave in time with the music of certain songs, a custom instituted by Amma which I think should be adopted by every Sunday School and church, for it enables the tiny ones to participate by doing something even when they are too young to know the words by heart. Older ones played tambourines, triangle, and bells, while one drummed softly with a leather flap on the mouth of a clay pot.
I was allowed to use Amma’s room for my reading and writing. Called the Room of Peace, it is spacious, had high ceilings and tiled floors, many doors and windows opening onto a verandah on three sides where there is a walk in bird cage. A brick runway leads from the verandah to a platform under the trees where, following the accident which disabled her for the rest of her life, Amy Carmichael used to be taken to sit in the cool evening. Glass-doored book cases, filled with her beloved books, stood around the walls of the room. Above them hung paintings of snowcaps by her friend, Dr.Howard Somervell of Everest fame. There were hand-carved and painted wooden texts, “Good and acceptable and perfect” (referring to the lesson she found so hard to learn after the accident, of acceptance of the will of God), “A Very Present Help,” “By one who loveth is another kindled” (from St. Augustine), and, the largest of all, blue letters on teak, “God hath not given us the spirit of fear.” Also on the walls are a mounted tiger head, a pendulum clock, and one of the very few photos taken of Amma.
In that Room of Peace I was glad not to be wearing shoes (nobody wears shoes in the houses of Dohnavur) - it seemed holy ground as I studied the marginal notes and underlinings of her favorite books, read the handwritten notebooks in which she explained for members of the Dohnavur Fellowship the “pattern shewn,” the principles and practices which the Lord had given her at the inception of her work. I thumbed through worm-eaten ledgers, clippings, photographs- priceless documents that trace the day-by-day history of a task accepted for the Lord, the rescuing of little girls from the temple prostitution and little boys from dramatic societies in which they were used for evil purposes. In later years the work included children in other kinds of need.
The most powerful witness to the quality of the service Amma rendered is to be seen in the Indian men and women who were reared there and who have remained to lay down their lives for others. Pungaja, for example, lives in the compound called Loving Place, where some of the mentally handicapped are cared for.
“I have no professional training,” she told me. “The Holy Spirit gives me new wisdom each day to deal with them. Some are like wild animals, but the Lord Himself is my helper. I can’t see on one side, but even in my weakness He has helped me. 1 Corinthians says that God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, that no flesh should glory in His presence.
“One day I went to Amma with a burdened heart, but when she hugged me all my sorrow went.
‘’What are you doing?’ Amma asked me. I told her.
“’Do you find it difficult?’ I said yes.
“’These are soldiership years, ‘she said.
“Now it is my joy to serve these very difficult people.”
She spoke quietly, looking out into the courtyard where some of them went back and forth. She had lost an eye as a child, and her face revealed suffering, but I saw the joy spoken of written there, the joy of a laid-down life. I saw it in very many faces in Dohnavur. They do not mention that there are no diversions, no place to go, no time off (except two weeks- I asked about that). They do their work for Him who came not to be ministered unto.
We came away smitten, thinking of Amma’s own words form her little book If , “then I know nothing of Calvary love.” The meaning of the living sacrifice, the corn of wheat, the crucified life, had been shown to us in twentieth century flesh and blood. Please pray that we may never be the same again. Pray, too, for help as I try to write the book. If I try to do it alone, I shall most certainly fail. It is divine help of the sort of Pangaja draws on that I need.
