Who Was Amy Carmichael?
Amy Carmichael was born in 1867 in Millisle, a small town in what is today Northern Ireland, the eldest of seven children. As a young woman she committed her life to missionary service, and in 1893 she left for Japan. Ill health forced her return, but in 1895, at the age of twenty-seven, she sailed for India. She never went home again.
Carmichael settled in Dohnavur, in South India, where in 1901 she received the first of many children rescued from temple prostitution and the practice of dedicating young girls to temple service, a practice that often amounted to ritualized sexual exploitation. Around this rescue work she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, which grew over decades into a community caring for hundreds of children. Her early book Things As They Are (1905) described mission conditions in India with a frankness that unsettled many of its English readers, who were accustomed to more triumphant missionary narratives.
In 1931 Carmichael suffered a serious fall that left her largely bedridden for the last twenty years of her life. From her bed she continued to write, producing most of her best-known books during this period, including If (1953), a series of reflections on the nature of Calvary love framed almost entirely as conditional statements – if such-and-such describes me, then I know nothing yet of the love the cross demands. Carmichael died at Dohnavur in 1951. At her request, no stone marks her grave; the children she had cared for placed over it a birdbath inscribed with a single word – Amma, Tamil for “mother.”
Carmichael is significant for TLA because If is structured almost entirely around a series of diagnostic conditionals about the self – small, ordinary failures of love that, taken individually, seem unremarkable, but that Carmichael reads as evidence of exactly the rupture this site identifies as the human condition. If does not argue for this reading; it simply assumes it, line after line, as the lens through which an entire life can be examined.
In Their Own Words
“If the praise of others elates me and their blame depresses me, if I cannot rest under misunderstanding without defending myself – I know nothing of Calvary love.”
– If, 1953“Ours should be the love that asks not ‘How little’ but ‘How much’; the love that pours out its all.”
– God's Missionary, 1957“Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind.”
– attributedSelected Bibliography
- Things As They Are: Mission Work in Southern India – 1905
- From Sunrise Land – letters from Japan
- If – 1953
- His Thoughts Said…His Father Said – 1951
- Edges of His Ways – 1955