A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

For a while the Band continued their work as before, but when they returned to the bungalow in the evenings, there was a child to welcome them. “I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled; and I remember, too, thanking God that it was not wrong to be comforted by the love of a child,” Amy said. She was soon nicknamed the Elf. One morning the Elf asked Amy, “Can you be good without God’s grace?”

Amy replied that she certainly could not.

“Well, I can!” said the Elf. “I want to pray now!”

“Now? It is eight o’clock now. Haven’t you had prayer long ago?” Six o’clock was rising time.

“No. That’s just what I meant. I skipped my prayer this morning, and so of course I got no grace; but I have been helping the elder Sisters. Wasn’t that right?”

“Yes, quite right.”

“And yet I hadn’t got any grace! But I suppose,” she added after a moment’s thought, “it was the grace over from yesterday that did it.”

Amy Carmichael learned things from this child that “darkened the sunlight.” She heard firsthand of the secret traffic in the souls and bodies of little children, things unthinkable, impossible at that time to write about. Rumors which had reached Amy from time to time during their travels she had tried to dismiss as utterly preposterous. When she had (in the most delicate and circuitous terms, no doubt) tried to broach the subject to missionaries who might know the truth, she was squelched with remarks about her vivid imagination, “more ardent than informed.” The rumors could not be true. They could not possibly be true.

There is some question as to whether the most elementary facts of life had ever been explained to Amy Carmichael. The word sex was unmentionable earlier in this century. A missionary who worked with her many years later insisted that Amy not only did not then know the truth about sex, but never learned. Whether her ignorance can be said to have been quite so abysmal is doubtful, but it is clear enough that her Victorian mind refused to admit thoughts which were so unpleasant and certainly unnecessary. Did she understand just what she was saving little girls from? “She did not know,” said the above-mentioned missionary. “She only knew it was horrible.”

Just how horrible it was she did her best to put into words. Things as They Are has a picture of a half-naked holy man. “This photo is from death in life,” she writes, “a carcass, moving, breathing, sinning. . . . I knew something about the man. His life is simply unthinkable. Talk of beasts in human shape! It is slandering good animals to compare bad men to beasts. Safer far in a tiger’s den than that man’s monastery. But he is a temple saint—earthly, sensual, devilish. Now put beside him a little girl—your own little girl—and leave her there—yes, leave her there in his hand”

The evidence for emotional and physical cruelty within sex, in India, whether marital or extramarital, has always been strong. The high rate of suicide among young women today supports this. Amy needed only to imagine the details. The overwhelming desire to save the children became a fire in her bones. “Sometimes the broad smooth levels of life are crossed by a black-edged jagged crack, rent, as it seems, by an outburst of the fiery force below. We find ourselves suddenly close upon it; it opens right at our very feet,”3 wrote Amy, and Walker corroborated it, “We are skirting the abyss, an abyss which is deep and foul beyond description, and yet is glorified, to Hindu eyes, by the sanctions of religion.”4

But how were they to track down these children? “The helpless little things seemed to slip between our fingers as we stretched out our hands to grasp them, or it was as though a great wave swept up and carried them out to sea. In a kind of desperation, we sought for a way. But we found that we must know more before we could hope to find it. To graze upon the tips (of herbage) is the Tamil synonym for superficial knowledge. If we were to do anything for these children it was vain to graze on the tips of facts; it took years to do more than that.”5

1. Swami Harshananda, All About Hindu Temples (Mysore, India: Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education, 1979).

2. Things as They Are, p. 160ff.

3. Things as They Are, p. 188.

4. Amy Carmichael, Overweights of Joy, p. 35.

5. Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord, p. 22.

Chapter 21

Children Tie the Mother’s Feet

Patiently they went on with their itineration, camping, seeking an entrance into homes, holding “Open Airs,” with the usual disruptions—“a bullock cart rumbles round . . . a herd of cows, perhaps fifty strong, with their calves, and as many buffaloes, each bent on making its way straight to its own habitation regardless of obstruction, tramples through the throng. One evening I was sitting on the doorstep of a house, with a dozen women round me, when suddenly a beast appeared, and without a moment’s hesitation, walked straight over me and in.”1

The Scrap letter for June of 1901 lists the members of the Band as Ponnammal, a widow, delicate, sensitive, highly strung, “a harp—God plays upon her and she responds to His touch”; Marial, “a dear, good, sturdy little soul with far more independence than any of the others”; Pearl, the one-armed, the only unmarried woman among them, tall, angular, thoroughly good and trustworthy; and Blessing, “a grand old muddler with a brave singleness of soul.” Blessing had a singular habit of shaking down her hair and twisting it up again as she talked. Forty years later Amy laughed as old Blessing described Amy’s singular habit, her manner of moving—not walking or even running, but “flying,” always looking at her watch “lest