As Close As It Gets
Books That Have Shaped Me – Part Thirteen
Bob Rakestraw
August 1, 2012
“The Benediction
Project”
15. Rose from
Briar, by Amy Carmichael (Christian Literature Crusade, 1973), 200 pp.
First Published 1933.
The final book in the series is Rose from Briar by Amy Carmichael. The title may sound familiar to you because in the five years I have been writing this blog I have considered Carmichael’s remarkable little book twice before (April 30, 2010 and February 26, 2011).
I wrote in my posting
of April 30, 2010, that this has to be one of the top five books in my entire
life, from the standpoint of helping me live well. It was written over 75 years
ago, but I read it only within the past several years while I was experiencing
an extended, intense period of suffering. It is not an easy work to read, not
only because of the tight, sometimes turgid English (British) but because of
the depth—true profundity—of the author’s understanding of suffering. If I had
read this book in my earlier or middle years, even though I have suffered
frequent piercing headache pain all through those years, I suspect I would not
have benefited from it very much. But with the chronic health trials since my
heart transplant in 2003, and with the growing realization that I was getting
steadily worse, not better, I developed a much deeper need and longing to be
understood and guided by one who had traveled this way before me.
Amy Carmichael lived from 1867 to 1951, most of her adult
life (55 years) as a missionary to the Donhavur region of South India. In 1901 she began a home for little girls who
were taken and trained as dancing-girls for the Hindu temples, which meant a
life of evil for them. Boys were also rescued from moral danger and taken into
the home.
In 1931 Amy Carmichael had a serious fall and ended up as an
invalid for the last 20 years of her life. She came to know God intimately
through her sufferings, and she expresses the most helpful thoughts about
physical, emotional and spiritual suffering I have ever read. Ruth Bell Graham,
deceased wife of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, said, “By far the best I
have found” on the subject of living with serious illness. Many books and
tracts written to the ill are written by the well. This work is written to the
ill by one who understands by personal experience the depths of illness. I keep
this book close by my bedside.
The most powerful impact Rose
from Briar has had on me (and thus has shaped me) is twofold. First, the
author’s descriptions and analyses of her sufferings, both physical and
(especially) mental-spiritual, are closer to those concerning my own sufferings
of recent years than anything I have ever read. This is the basis for the title
of this posting. I knew (and know) that someone actually understood the way I
feel, and, to a person living with a serious chronic illness, this (other than
immediate relief for excruciating pain) is the sufferer’s greatest need. At
least in my case it has been, and continues to be. I deeply long to be
understood, even though I know that no one but God can fully understand me.
Carmichael “gets it,” however, and I am held captive by every page of her book.
The second way this work has impacted me flows directly from
the first. Not only does the author describe and analyze her suffering (and
mine) with greater depth than I have ever seen, but she offers—gently and by
way of her own experiences—the most helpful thoughts about how to live with
one’s sufferings. And not only live, but live triumphantly. I have no doubt
that I will read Rose from Briar for
the rest of my life, over and over as long as God allows me to read. I will do
as I have been doing, reading one page or one brief chapter at a time,
regularly but not necessarily every day, until I come to the end of the book,
at which point I will start over. And so on, and so on.
I will close with one of many selections from the book that
has strengthened me greatly.
“Those who have had that peculiarly piercing pain which is
as though a nail were driven through the palm know how close it can draw the
heart into a tender fellowship with Him whose two hands were pierced, not ‘as
though,’ but in awful fact, by very nails of iron. There is a kind of solemn
joy in coming in the flesh anywhere near the suffering flesh of our Lord. As a
child I remember the thought of His Divinity so far overwhelmed the thought of
His humanity that it was impossible to realize that He suffered being tempted.
… The holy, pure and beautiful spirit of our Saviour suffered so much more than
we can understand that words fall off, afraid to touch so profound a mystery;
but there was also the sensitive flesh born of a woman. There cannot be a pang
in our flesh that was not, and sharper far, in that sacred Body on the Tree.
And so in a new way, as we newly understand even only a little more of what He
bore for us, we draw near to Him.
“Sometimes in Donhavur we, who dearly love the little children
about us (and the older ones too), have looked up from some engrossing work to
see a child beside us, waiting quietly. And when, with a welcoming hand held
out, to the Tamil ‘I have come,’ we have asked ‘For what?’ thinking, perhaps,
of something to be confessed, or wanted, the answer has come back, ‘Just to
love you.’ So do we come, Lord Jesus; we have no service to offer now; we do
not come to ask for anything, not even for guidance. We come just to love You”
(pp. 118-119).
