THE missionary and spiritual writer Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) was born into a Presbyterian family in County Down, Northern Ireland. The Carmichaels were of Scottish Covenanting stock, and had settled in Ulster in 1705. Amy grew up in a devout, God-fearing home, in which family prayers and the Bible were supplemented by a reading each Sunday of Charles Spurgeon’s weekly sermon.
As a teenager, she organised Bible classes for mill-girls in Belfast. Later, under the influence of Robert Wilson, the co-founder of the Keswick Convention, she devoted her life to mission work in South India, where she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship. The Church commemorates her on 18 January, the date of her death in 1951.
“IT WAS a dull Sunday morning in a street in Belfast. . .” So begins Amy Carmichael’s account of her first call. Returning from church with her mother, she and her brothers had stopped to help an elderly woman who was carrying a heavy bundle.
“This meant”, she wrote, “facing all the respectable people who were, like us, on their way home. It was a horrid moment. We were only two boys and a girl, and not at all exalted Christians. We hated doing it. Crimson all over, we plodded on, a wet wind blowing us about, and blowing, too, the rags of that poor old woman, till she seemed like a bundle of feathers, and we unhappily mixed up with them.”
As they passed a drinking fountain, Carmichael heard the words from 1 Corinthians 3: “If any man build upon this foundation [Jesus Christ] using gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man’s workshall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it will be revealed by fire.”
Turning to see where the voice had come from, she saw only “the fountain, the muddy street, the people with their politely surprised faces. The blinding flash had come and gone; the ordinary was all about us. We went on. I said nothing to anyone, but I knew that something had happened that had changed life’s values. Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal.”
One of her brothers later reported that “She shut herself in her room that afternoon, talked to God, and settled once and for all the pattern of her future life.”
Carmichael had a vigour and certainty that must, at times, have been a trial to her colleagues. Typical, for example, was her attitude to fund-raising, which she summed up with the text “The Lord will provide” (Genesis 22). It gave her a seemingly unconquerable confidence that was not always shared by others.
When her work among the mill-girls (“shawlies”) in Belfast was being hindered by a lack of accommodation, she saw advertised a pre-fabricated iron hall, which would hold 500 people. The cost was £500 — a very large sum in the 1880s. Carmichael was not daunted; nor was she at all surprised when the Lord provided. A wealthy benefactor gave the money, and a mill owner gave the land.
The iron hall, which became known as “The Welcome”, was the venue for a daily programme of activities led by Carmichael and her band of volunteers. Besides Bible classes and prayer meetings, there were girls’ meetings, band practice, mothers’ meetings, and social events for the community.
In 1893, Carmichael set off for her first posting overseas, in Japan. Later, she travelled to India.
Her single-mindedness was not without a sense of fun, which, as a young missionary, earned her the nickname “Madcap” among her colleagues in Bangalore. She had a pony that she delighted in chasing round the race-course against the Resident of Mysore’s carriage. Some of the English expatriate community were shocked: one simply did not treat the carriage of Her Majesty’s representative with such irreverent jocularity.
Even her use of biblical texts could sometimes stray into unseemly levity. About her early efforts to speak Tamil, she quoted Numbers 22.28: “The Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she spake.”
It was while she was sitting beneath a tree studying a Tamil grammar and dictionary, that, she related, God put into her mind the words he spoke to Cain: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4.10).
Carmichael wrote later: “Time ceased for the girl under the tree. . . That day on the hillside coloured the years that were to follow, and gave depth to them all.”
One of the greatest causes of that suffering in south India was the custom, which used to prevail but became illegal in 1947, of selling young girls into temple prostitution. The chief purpose of Carmichael’s Dohnavur Fellowship, which she established in the Tirunelveli (“Tinnevelly”) district, was to save these children and provide them with a safe community in which to grow up.
The Fellowship became a surrogate family, at first for girls, and later for boys, and gave them an education and training for adult life. Within 40 years, the Dohnavur community had grown to more than 600. It continues to this day.
She was a prolific author, and, during her lifetime, published 38 books. Things As They Are (1903) and Lotus Buds (1909) were fearless accounts of the extent of child abuse in southern India. By these and other publications, Carmichael strove to change public attitudes.
She also wrote many slim volumes of devotional work, both prose and poetry, and it is in thesethat readers to this day find spiritual inspiration. A selection of these can be found in I Come Quietly to Meet You (2005) and Mountain Breezes: Collected poems (1999).
Her poetry shows an intensity of personal devotion, as well as a sharp edge reminiscent at times of George Herbert. “No Scar?”and “Rose Of My Heart” are two examples available online.
Carmichael settled in Dohnavur in about 1901, and stayed there for the rest of her long life, dying, aged 83, in 1951. At her funeral, words from Matthew 25.21 were read: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
dohnavurfellowship.org.in
The Revd Adrian Leak is an Hon. Assistant Priest at Holy Trinity, Bramley, in the diocese of Guildford.