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

were made in a body, all poetry received by simultaneous inspiration, all feelings harmoniously orchestrated. That, of course, was how she earnestly wanted things to be. She had no desire to be the chief. She saw herself as under orders, along with all the rest. But the confession of love was her work, given to the Sisters, and heartily accepted by every woman who wanted to be one of them:

My vow.

Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, by Thy grace I will do it.

My constraint.

Thy love, O Christ, my Lord.

My Confidence.

Thou art able to keep that which I have committed unto Thee.

My Joy.

To do Thy will, O God.

My Discipline.

That which I would not choose, but which Thy love appoints.

My Prayer.

Conform my will to Thine.

My Motto.

Love to live, live to love.

My Portion.

The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance.

Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do Thy will, O Lord our God.

1. 1 Peter 5:5.

2. Matthew 11:28, 29.

3. Frank Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1953).

Chapter 31

Where Are the Men?

One of the features of village life in South India was the Car festival. The Car, or juggernaut, was a towering wooden structure on wheels which bore the Hindu idol. Its dark, carved surfaces, representing various aspects of worship, were covered with streamers, tinsel, and garlands of flowers. One day in 1909 Amy was standing in the blinding heat and smothering dust when, “with shoutings and flingings of arms in the air, the brown flood swept past.” Thousands of men, stripped to the waist in honor of the god, strained and sweated at the ropes. “The flood grew denser, the shouts were frenzied, the Car moved round the corner, rocked for a dizzy moment, and stopped.” There were policemen about, lest any devotee attempt to fling himself under the huge wheels. But it was not the Car or the crowd or the heat or any other aspect of the festival that riveted the attention of the missionary—it was little boys, acolytes, attending the god, one of them on the upper tier of the Car, wreathed in pink flowers.

Amy could not bear it. She believed that the gods of India, as depicted by their aggressive or seductive images, were satanic, and they who made them were “like unto them.” The things she had learned about the character of Hindu worship, through years of study of the language and the mind of the Hindu, were for her quite literally both unutterable and nearly unthinkable. It was “slime, filth, sin,” she wrote, but “books that whitewash Hinduism are turned out by the dozen now, and it’s terribly unfashionable to feel as we do.”

These things shaped and colored all Indian thinking. There were exceptions. “India has men to whom these evil things carry no appeal. The ‘light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ has lighted the mind and soul of some who have never heard of the Light of the World. They have not blown out that Light, and surely the Powers of Calvary have reached even unto them,” she wrote. “But never has one ray of light come from the idols of the people, only a darkness which has defiled the mind of millions of India.”

She could not bear the sight of those lovely little boys captured by that system. Neither could she forget it.

John Donne wrote, “Ignorance is not only the drousinesse, the sillinesse, but the wickednesse of the soule.” She would vastly have preferred to remain in ignorance of this sort of thing. The vexation to her Victorian soul was nothing compared to the outrage to her Christian conscience. It blackened the sun. She refused to sit blindfolded. She began to investigate.

As before, she met with bland indifference and denial. But there were Indians who knew and deplored as she did this traffic in little boys, similar to that in little girls. Many were sold or given to temple houses where they became musicians and teachers of dancing and poetry to the girls. Others were adopted by Hindus or Muslims, sometimes for purposes she could only describe as “infamous,” meaning homosexual. Others became the property of dramatic societies connected with the temples, and learned to act in plays which were “wholly unclean, soul-destroying.”

She received a telegram from Simla urging her to provide the government with facts. She did so, asking that the information and its source be kept confidential lest her own work be hindered by publicity. The result was “much earnest movement” among both Indians and English to end this “black iniquity towards innocence.” At last laws were passed, “thank God, which at least mean to help, but India knows how to evade laws. . . . So we go on.”

Once an Indian friend, acquainted with the ways of the underworld, took her to a house with barred windows and verandahs and a heavy, bolted door. It was not different from the other houses in the street, but he knew what went on inside. In answer to their knock an old hag opened the door a crack. After the usual polite preliminaries the Indian asked if the children were well.

“What children? There are no children here.”

“The boys, O elder sister, the boys who learn here.”

“No boys learn here,” and the door all but shut.

“Oh, say not so, sister. Do they not learn songs?”

“No boys learn songs here.” And the door shut.1

Later Amy succeeded in walking straight into a house where the boys were taught. A white woman in topee and European dress would never have managed it. The boys swarmed around the lady in the sari, taking her hands, begging her to sit down, “friendly and lovable and keen to make the most of this welcome interruption to an apparently