Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden

In India a woman alone does not go and live alone – not, at any rate, far from her own kind, not unless she is a saint or a great sinner.  Sophie was not a saint, or a sinner, but she was undeniably a woman.

So begins the novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, by British author Rummer Godden (1907-1998).  Godden grew up in India and used her experiences as a background for this novel. Kingfishers is the story of Sophie Barrington Ward who takes her two children to live in Kashmir.  Her husband, a British officer stationed in India, has passed away and she refuses to return to England to live a conventional life. 

Instead she moves to a remote Indian village and rents a small house, hoping to live simply on her husband’s pension.  But what passes for simplicity to an English woman is luxurious extravagance to the villagers.  From the beginning the people question the strangeness of her ways and her motives for coming.  There are two rival clans in the town, but Sophie is completely oblivious to their quarrels.   She seems strangely unaware of cultural differences between the villagers and herself, assuming that common sense will win out in every disagreement. She wants to help them, but her western ideas of justice and fairness fall on bewildered ears.  Eventually her disregard for the villagers’ beliefs leads to tragedy for herself and her children.  

Two men are put in prison, but although they have caused trouble for Sophie, she knows that they are not guilty of the accusations leveled against them.  She expresses her concern to Dr. Glenister, the missionary doctor who says, “But, dearie, they hurt you terribly.” Sophie asked herself, Have you a duty to those who hurt you?  Surprisingly the answer seemed to be that you had.  If Sophie shrank from that answer, that could not take the duty away… (p. 232) 

In the end, Sophie does what she can to make amends.  Some issues are resolved and others are not. When I finished the book I was left scratching my head over what exactly she had accomplished with her self-imposed exile in Kashmir.  Reading Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem from which the book takes its title, cleared up the mystery to some degree.  In the poem Hopkins writes that just as kingfishers and dragonflies reflect glorious color as the sun hits their wings, so mortal men reflect God’s glory when they are expressing grace and justice to their fellow men.  When they do that, they are “being Christ in a thousand places”.   

A very interesting book!

A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

Amy Carmichael was an Irish missionary in southern India for the first half of the 20th Century. Through the years her books and poems have been quoted to me as examples of a life totally surrendered to Christ. Although attracted to the themes of her writings, I considered myself too practical to want to become acquainted with a Christian of such mystical leanings. Then I hurt my foot badly on a trip and was stuck in a strange apartment with only one remotely interesting book on the shelf, the biography of Carmichael written by Elisabeth Elliot.

A Chance to Die  is a fascinating look at a complex woman. Amy had to have incredible faith and character to go against the cultural norms for missionaries and Indian nationals as she began her ministry of rescuing little girls from becoming temple prostitutes. She was often misunderstood and called “dictatorial” by her critics. But those who knew and loved her used much kinder words. Certainly she was strong-willed, but the overpowering emotion that her “family” felt from her was love. Her standards of holiness and purity were so high that many a missionary recruit was dismissed without much ado, yet her thousands of letters to friends and supporters are filled with absolute kindness and tenderness. She refused to go on missionary furloughs “because the work was too important”, yet she had a rustic cabin built in the hills where she and her workers and orphans could get away to rest. She loved poetry and nature yet eschewed the “untruthfulness” of fairy tales. Her love for truth caused her to write prayer letters which emphasized the hardships of India much more than the victories.

As I read I couldn’t help but think that just as Amy Carmichael took pains to be “nobody”, never allowing anyone to glorify her, only Elliot could have succeeded in writing a book that neither deified nor vilified her. Elliot, in her own book Through Gates of Splendor, shocked me with her adamance that she'd made no difference among the Auca Indians with whom she had worked. She seemed to share Amy's philosophy of life: "Let’s serve the Lord no matter what it costs while never letting anyone know how we’ve suffered. All the victory and the glory belong to Him.”

Quite a motto!