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

while living in a tiny village house, had “invited a man” into it, and that he had “undone his veshti.” The truth was that he needed surgery on a finger. Although there was a dusty wind blowing, she took the tattered sacking which served for a curtain off the window so that the crowd of villagers might see the whole show. She had him lie on the floor and, with the help of her Indian nurse, operated. Not for a moment were the three of them hidden from the eagle eyes of the spectators.

So there was always “the men’s side” and “the women’s side,” “the boys’ side,” and “the girls’ side,” with walls and gates between. Members of the Fellowship (often called DFs) were expected to maintain what seemed to European outsiders unnecessarily strict segregation between the sexes. It was not as strict as sometimes reported. DFs had meals together and there was consultation and discussion on matters concerning the work—always, of course, “in public,” in and around the bungalow.

While maintaining that members of the Family were to follow the leading of their Lord, Amy took responsibility for approving and often for arranging their marriages. When Murray Webb-Peploe began to take an interest in a new missionary from Holland, Oda Van Boetzelaer, every conversation had to be chaperoned—“In Dohnavur you don’t speak to a woman unless she’s your wife,” he said, so they chose “the blindest and deafest old lady in our family and parked her at the end of a long verandah.”2 The courtship, slowed not only by rules but by illness, was strung out over many long months. It was Amma who suddenly decided on the wedding date. Murray needed a long rest in Australia. Who could accompany him if not OdaP So, at Amma’s behest, they were promptly married and off they went.

Amy’s description of the wedding gives no hint that she was conscious of any ambivalence. The blessing of God was on the couple. “In the quiet light of the Unseen Presence standing very still in reverence are Murray and Oda, he in his Indian white, she in her mauve sari, a single rose in her dark hair. . . . There is a sense of shining.” Everyone sang “O Splendor of God’s Will,” and “it was all solemn and sweet beyond words, and real” But Amy had strong private reservations which she did not admit until years later when subsequent events seemed to vindicate them.

Because the work of the DF could not be carried on at all without a number of single helpers free from family responsibility, there was criticism that Amy Carmichael was opposed to marriage. She did her best, as did the apostle Paul, not to oppose it in principle, though Paul made it crystal clear that singleness was, in his opinion, the better way.

It is a good principle for a man to have no physical contact with women. . . . I wish that all men were like myself, but I realise that everyone has his own particular gift from God. . . . each man should live his life with the gifts that God has given him and in the condition in which God has called him. . . . as far as young unmarried women are concerned, I must confess that I have no direct commands from the Lord. Nevertheless, I give you my considered opinion. . . . amid all the difficulties of the present time you would do best to remain just as you are. . . . those who take this step [of marriage] are hound to find the married state an extra burden in these critical days, and I should like you to be as unencumbered as possible. . . . The unmarried [woman] concerns herself with the Lord’s affairs, and her aim is to make herself holy in body and in spirit. . . . I am not putting difficulties in your path, but setting before you an ideal, so that your service of God may be as far as possible free from worldly distractions.3

This states exactly the ideal that Amy had held since before she left England, and it was the ideal set before the Sisters of the Common Life. The old women still living who grew up in Dohnavur say that it was the crème de la crème who were especially encouraged to remain single. For those less gifted Amma was not so reluctant to arrange marriages.

Psychology would find more than one explanation for the silence Amy herself kept as regarded her own love life. If we choose to accept the psychologists’ rather than her own explanation, we know nothing which would distinguish her from the rest of the race—she was human, she was a woman. But a woman who purposes to live for God may be distinguishable from others in at least some ways. Her own explanation of her silence is more interesting (and possibly more important) than the psychologists’.

“There is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others,” she wrote in the story of Kohila. “No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence.”

She broke her silence a little when, late in life, one of the Indian women who worked and lived most intimately with her asked why she had not chosen “the other life.”

She told Neela then that a letter had come on the eve of her sailing for Japan. She did not say who wrote it. She did not say it was a proposal. She said merely that it “looked towards what you call ‘the other life.’” She waited quietly. Deep down in me a voice seemed to be saying, ‘No, no, no, I have something different