A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

The visitor today is awed by the hush and order of what takes place in the House of Prayer. The children file in silently and sit crosslegged in rows according to age, the youngest nearest the platform, wearing bright flowered dresses. The next age group wears skirts and blouses, the next, skirts, blouses, and half-saris, the oldest, saris—crimson and cardinal, blue, purple, mauve. In their oiled hair they wear flowers which match the colors of their dresses.

Amy did not believe in keeping little children “stretched out like a rubber band.” It was hard for them to sit still with nothing to do, especially if they were too young to know the words to hymns and prayers. So she gave them colored flags, and during the singing of certain songs, to this day, they stand and wave their flags while older ones accompany the singing with maracas, bells, cymbals, tambourines, brass bowls struck with a knitting needle, and drums (big narrow-necked clay pots with a leather flap which is thumped over the mouth). When they pray they kneel.

Sometimes the sick are carried into the House. Amy wrote of one little boy whose wounds had been mishandled at home. He lay in the services for many Sundays fastened to a frame on a cot. “He used to watch eagerly for the moment when a psalm or lyric set to an Indian tune was given out, and the band played and there was a flutter of flags all over the House; for in the flutter he would join with a happy triumph. In his hand, clasped tight all through the service, was his own blue flag.”5

On Sundays there were three services, one English and two Tamil, led by the annachies, Indian and English. There were special services, New Year’s, for example, when toys for sick children in the hospital were collected in baskets. Today there are often special thanksgivings in the House of Prayer—a pause when the leader thanks God for the birds, so that the “dear birds’’ may be heard; thanksgiving when a girl “graduates” from the skirt and half-sari to the full sari; thanksgiving for needs met, people brought home safely, children saved (the child is carried by its accal to the platform so that all can see it).

The communion service is “an hour full of silence, broken only by the voice of our Tamil pastor, and by versicles of adoration and worship, sung kneeling. The House is white then, and the whiteness of the Indian garments and the stillness, and the very gentle movement and the singing, have a ministry of their own, and often there is a sense of a Presence manifest and all but visible.” This service closed always with the same hymn, “Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts,” followed only by the soft whisper of the bare feet as they left the House.

1. 1 John 5:14, 15.

2. Toward Jerusalem, p. 94.

3. Amy Carmichael, Meal in a Barrel, p. 40.

4. Ibid, pp. 47, 48.

5. Gold Cord, p. 297.

Chapter 38

The Road Less Traveled

Great-grandmothers are said to have pursed their lips a century ago at the sight of an exposed table leg. Queen Victoria once remarked to a maid-of-honor that when she came to the throne young ladies did not have legs. They still hadn’t, so far as Amy Carmichael was concerned. Amy was offended by the English word leg but not by the Tamil word kaal, so even the doctors found themselves inserting kaal into an English sentence when it was necessary to refer to the unspeakable limb.

Amy was appalled at the idea of missionaries playing tennis, and it seems that at one time games for the older Dohnavur girls were absolutely forbidden. Admittedly a sari makes less than satisfactory sportswear, but the possibility that an ankle might be glimpsed was probably the primary reason for the prohibition. While nothing in Indian culture forbade the showing of an ankle, Amy’s idea of a lady’s modesty did. The custom has been conscientiously perpetuated as the Dohnavur women walk around the compound. Even in the rain it is rare to see the hem of a sari lifted.

Games have been part of life in Dohnavur for many years now. Older girls play rounders, netball, and a species of hockey. All swim and dive. Those so inclined climb trees. With Amma’s approval they began country dancing, “most energetically.” In all of these activities plenty of ankle is revealed.

Amy usually wore beautiful voile saris—creamy yellow, white, lavender—with blouses of coordinating colors. While Indian widows and the poorest women wore only the sari without a blouse, the women of the Dohnavur Family wore not only blouses (with a prescribed sleeve length) with their saris, but underneath them tight breast-binders and petticoats. Amma would have nothing loose and transparent on her girls. When four visitors came dressed in Western style in the mid-twenties—“short-frocked Paganism”—Godfrey and Alec refused to allow them into the boys’ compound. Amma borrowed some clothes, dressed them up decently, and prepared herself for a “whole new crop of stories” to be told about what a strange place Dohnavur was.

Amy earnestly tried to eliminate anything which might stir up sexual desire. While village boys wore only shorts, Dohnavur boys wore shorts and shirts, as Amma believed it helped toward purity. The men of the Family wore veshtis, the standard long Indian skirt which could be tucked up for greater mobility, and shirts of Indian design, collarless because of the heat. Amy, of course, found a Scripture verse to corroborate the shirt style: “There shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst thereof: it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of it.”1 Colors were always significant to Amy—blue for love, purple for service, so the doctors were decked out (“can you imagine it!” one of them said) in violet veshtis with mauve tops. Dohnavur people could hardly be anonymous in a crowd. This,