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

would be with Muttammal if the mother had her way. Amy would not give up the fight.

Life in Dohnavur was not “put on hold” while Muttammal’s case dragged on. Day and night the babies were there. In Amy’s Bible, on a card pasted inside the front cover, are these words:

“These children are dear to Me. Be a mother to them, and more than a mother. Watch over them tenderly, be just and kind. If thy heart is not large enough to embrace them, I will enlarge it after a pattern of My own. If these young children are docile and obedient, bless Me for it; if they are froward, call upon Me for help; if they weary thee, I will be thy consolation; if thou sink under thy burden, I will be thy Reward.” The words are followed by a picture of the Shepherd, reaching for a lamb while a vulture hovers overhead.

Amy’s children were growing, inquiring, needing to be taught. She must be more than a mother. As she walked the paths of the compound, worked in the nurseries and kitchens, lay on her grass mat at night and thought and planned and prayed, she was forming what might be called a philosophy of education. To name it as such would not have occurred to her, but certain principles began to emerge. Two things, both central to her character, her work, her writing, forbade the use of fiction in any form, including fairy tales. These were her concepts of truth and of soldierhood. She quoted from Plato’s Republic: “‘War implies soldiers, and soldiers must be carefully trained to their profession. They must be strong, swift, and brave; high-spirited, but gentle.’

“But how must they be educated? In the first place we must be very scrupulous about the substance of the stories which they are taught in their childhood. . . . Truth, courage, and self-control must be inculcated by all the stories that are employed in their education.”

She saw fiction, not as a powerful vehicle for Truth with a capital T, but as a waste of time and, much worse, a threat to the foundations of character. When “true fairy tales,” far more magical than any of man’s devising, were “happening” every day in field and garden, why lead the children into make-believe? What God made was Reality to her. Anything men made was a poor substitute.

“I do not think our little lovables lost anything of the silvery glamour that should make the first years of childhood like moonlit water to look back upon, or the golden sparkle either, that is sunlight on that same water.”2 It is possible, however, as one member observed years later, that they had lost something necessary: the capacity to discriminate between fact and fancy. The exercise of the child’s imagination was limited to personifying the flora and fauna, but was not free to roam through castles and caves, the throne-rooms of kings or the workshops of elves. Perhaps Amy feared that the children might be drawn toward Hindu mythology or “wisdom” writing, stories with a sometimes dubious moral, thought to be the source of Aesop’s fables and other similar literature.

“We never suggested questions and never answered any that they did not ask (we had as much as we could do to find answers to those they did ask) but we, as it were, ran to meet their minds in welcome. It was a merry kind of schooling, and left many gaps, but it had some uses.’’ They learned about color, and examined the chlorophyll in leaf cells through a microscope. They collected shells, abandoned birds’ nests, stones, flowers. They went on a field trip to watch a refiner of gold at work. One especially bright girl began to study Greek while recovering from illness, so that she might read the New Testament in the original. The children were allowed to have pets, and were taught to treat them with gentle sympathy or at least with respect, even the termites, who were “trying to be good’’ by doing their job industriously, and the cobra and bandicoot, who had not “asked” to be a cobra and a bandicoot.

Besides hymns and songs of faith, Amy wrote hundreds of songs especially for the children, from the simplest little game songs (“Rabbit dear, do come here, we want to play with you”) to songs embodying science lessons about the potter wasp, the rotifer and the animalcula, or a work song taken from words of the Apocrypha, “Hate not laborious work, joy, joy is in it.”

Muttammal had been claimed again by her mother, but in December of 1909 she was once again released to Amy’s care. The January Scrap letter tells of the journey home together, “in a dream.”

At last the red roofs of the bungalow and nurseries appeared through the trees. Slowly the bandy crawled along the rutty lane leading up to the gate. Then there was a delirious rout, a rush and a shout and a sense of everyone everywhere—Muttammafs monkey, Tumbie, was tossed in upon us, a rolled-up ball of fur. . . . But that welcome, like some other best things, has to be left undescribecl. It was an hour of perfectly unshadowed joy. My birthday had been spent in Palamcottah where the dear sisters made it as birthday-like as such a battle day could be, but now came the proper jubilations. After a welcome afternoon tea I was established on a stool in the compound. My room had been decorated during tea time, though as no one knew we were coming I could not imagine how the palm branches and other glories had been produced.

Then in a long line from the nurseries and Rooms of Love and Joy came the babies in blue and the children in white and yellow, all carrying flowers, such a pretty, pretty picture in the softened evening light. Nearly all the bigger people had a tiny packet wrapped in tissue paper. Each contained a pocket handkerchief worked in drawn thread by the giver.

Amy Carmichael loved celebration.