For the past few months I’ve been hosting conversations about my most recent project, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, which is the first full-length single-volume biography of that remarkable and complex woman. We started at the end of September with a one-time conversation covering the whole book, since not everyone has time for an ongoing conversation. Now, for those who have time and interest for more detail, I’m posting once a month for six months—sharing a reading schedule, information about the current section, and questions to start a conversation. This is Part Five.
Welcome
Sometimes my library requests (whether holds, purchase requests, or interlibrary loan) arrive in a gradual trickle, giving me time to read one and return it before another arrives, and sometimes they arrive in a deluge, with requests from weeks or even months ago all showing up at once. I’m currently in flood stage, and my library stack alone includes Christine Rawlins’ biography of Elizabeth Goudge, Stephen Prothero’s biography of Eugene Exman (neither of which I’ve started yet), D. L. Mayfield’s Dorothy Day biography, Unruly Saint, Nadya Williams’ Cultural Christians in the Early Church (both of which I’ve finished), and the complete set of John Buchan’s WWI detective/spy novels (which I’m halfway through).
One of the great things about reading is that books talk to each other even when you weren’t expecting them to. All of these books—even the spy novels!—are bubbling away in the stewpot of my mind, along with the online conversation around Elisabeth Elliot’s third marriage from the beginning of this month. I can’t keep up with my kids and the pace of The Discourse at the same time, but I’m hoping to write about it all after it’s had a little longer to simmer. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to talking with you about the next two chapters of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here.
If you’re just joining the discussion, last month we covered Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
The Schedule
For the month of March, we’ll read and discuss:
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Below I’ll share a few thoughts on this section. If you’ve already read this portion of the book or if you don’t mind possible spoilers, dive right in! If you want to stick a virtual bookmark here and go read this section of the book and come back, that’s great too. Either way I hope you’ll join the conversation in the comments section. At the end of March I’ll send the final post for this series, Part Six, which will cover the final chapters and epilogue.
The Section
Chapter Eight
This chapter begins with Elisabeth Elliot’s move to Tæwano in the fall of 1958 and ends not-quite-five years later with her decision to leave Ecuador in the spring of 1963. It was a time of almost ceaseless movement and change for her, both externally and internally. While she and Valerie were moving in and out and back and forth between Tæwano, Arajuno, Quito, Peru, the US, Shandia, and elsewhere, Elliot was also moving around in her reading, her relationship with the Bible and with her family members, her thoughts on human culture and on missions, and much more.
One constant, sadly, was the trouble between Elliot and Saint. The relationship between the two women and its role in Elliot’s decision to leave first the Waorani and then Ecuador was one the mysteries that I hoped to tease out when I embarked on this project in 2012. In her published work, Elliot barely referred to the subject, and when she did, usually attributed it to her desire to put Valerie in school in the US. Elliot was apparently somewhat more open to discussing Saint publicly in the late 1970s, but by the 2000s, her third husband, Lars Gren, was actively discouraging writing that addressed the Elliot-Saint story. When I asked questions about the subject during interviews, the answers were pretty sparse—or were off the record. I was thankful to find that much of the story can be traced through letters and journals held in the Billy Graham Center Archives and the William Cameron Townsend Archives.
As the book shows, Saint and Elliot’s relationship was rocky from the beginning, and reading the tea leaves backwards, it’s not surprising that it didn’t work. It’s almost more surprising that Elliot hung on as long as she did, especially when you realize that she was questioning her presence there (and Saint was questioning Elliot’s faith) virtually from the beginning. However, from the standpoint of the theological environment in which Elliot was raised, the failure of their relationship poses serious questions about the will and guidance of God, the efficacy of prayer, and more. So it’s also unsurprising that it contributed to the continued stripping away of Elliot’s certainties.
I thought a lot about the theological conundrums posed by their relationship and Elliot’s departure from the Waorani and from Ecuador while researching and writing this chapter. For the past few months I’ve also been thinking about it in light of this moving piece by Liz Charlotte Grant, “When Other People Wreck God’s Plan for Your Life,” particularly the line, “Humans have much more autonomy than we feel comfortable admitting.” I don’t feel comfortable tying these stories up with a neat bow. I don’t even know that I could say without qualification, as Grant does, that “God moved” any of these people in these painful and destructive ways.
But since in their human autonomy they and others made the choices they did, I do think the Bible supports the understanding that God has worked good things in and through their lives, despite and even in the painful and destructive things. And with Elliot, “I have to hope, without any evidence seen, that things will come right in the end—not merely that we shall receive compensation, but that we and all creation will be redeemed.” How this redemption can possibly be worked out practically is a mystery—perhaps one of the hidden things that belong to God (Deuteronomy 29)—but nevertheless we trust that it “means infinitely more than that the good will eventually outweigh the evil.”1
Chapter Eight also sees Elliot first living and then writing the events of her book The Savage My Kinsman. This was another really interesting research trail for me. I got to read Elliot’s journal from the events she describes in the book, her letters to her family from that time, her article in Life magazine, and the book itself, and compare the way her personal notes for herself were shaped in different ways as she shared them with different audiences. It was also fascinating to compare the published book with the traditions it sits in—the adventure story, the missionary story, and the coffee-table documentary book—and see the way it both fits into and spills over the boundaries of each of those genres.
I said in Part One that I would go back and talk more about Elisabeth Elliot and Jane Dolinger. Reading Dolinger’s biography and her books really makes it clear how popular the “true” adventure story was at the time and how that likely contributed to the popularity of Elliot’s early books about the mission field. At the same time it highlights how strikingly different Kinsman is. (The initial newspaper reports around the disappearance and death of the five men were more in line with Dolinger, playing up a dramatic, “Green Hell” view of the Amazon and the people who live there, and Life magazine’s coverage of the ongoing mission to the Waorani tried to add a similar gloss. You can also see the “pioneer” framing in Through Gates of Splendor.) If you’re at all interested in learning more about the adventure genre and Dolinger in particular or in comparing Elliot with the popular genre she might have been considered to be writing within, I’d recommend Lawrence Abbott’s little biography, Jane Dolinger: The Adventurous Life of an American Travel Writer. It’s about a millionty dollars on Amazon right now but I was able to get ahold of it through interlibrary loan. Kathryn T. Long’s article “Cameras ‘never lie’: The Role of Photography in Telling the Story of American Evangelical Missions” is another interesting examination of how Elliot fits into and departs from the conventions of her genre.
Chapter Nine
This chapter, which takes us from Elliot’s move to the US through the announcement of her engagement to her second husband, was a delight to research and write. It covers a period of time for which there was essentially no accessible information when I first started looking into the life of Elisabeth Elliot in 2009, so finding out what she was up to, and especially what was happening in her thinking and reading and writing during this period, was really satisfying. It was also fun, after spending so much time immersed in her sadness, to see her enjoyment of the process of designing and decorating a house, buying furniture she liked, and doing fun things with Valerie and Van.
Among my many research rabbit trails: I chased down information about the company that built Elliot’s house, so I could roughly estimate its cost and, even before I found photographs, could visualize what style it must have been. I dug out an obscure essay by Elliot that links events in her writing to events in her life in a way I hadn’t known about before, and did a lot of digging into whether her assessment of the situation was likely to be accurate according to our current medical understanding. And I refreshed my memory on the history of Israel and the Six Day War well enough to write an entire section on it (which later got cut—you’re welcome or I’m sorry, depending on whether or not the book already seemed too long to you!)
Elliot’s letters and the journal excerpts from this time, along with her published work and copies or recordings of her speeches give us a good picture of what she was doing, reading, and thinking. I see this as a time of contrasts—openness and constraint, friendship and loneliness, finding a place to call home but spending so much time away from that home on speaking or research trips. During this time Elliot wrote her only published novel, No Graven Image (and I was fascinated to learn that Virginia Ramey Mollenkott played such a role in its revision), and her biography of missionary Ken Strachan, Who Shall Ascend—books that, taken together, give us Elliot’s considered perspective on missions at this time. This period also saw the writing of Furnace of the Lord: Reflections on the Redemption of the Holy City.
Each of these books shows the continued movement in her thinking. She saw and wrote of her loss of certainty and her openness to considering a wide range of ideas and perspectives as getting down to the bedrock of faith, but a good number of people didn’t see it that away, including prominent voices such Harold Lindsell. Both positive reviews and sales declined, in comparison to the massive success of Through Gates of Splendor. And although Elliot had close and intellectually satisfying friendships during this time, the feeling that many people were unsympathetic at best—including not only vocal strangers and acquaintances but also friends and family—contributed to her feeling of loneliness.
Discussion
As always, there is more to talk about than I can fit in a post, and that might be particularly true this month since I’m well over 2,000 words already. But here are some things I’m curious about:
In Chapter Eight, Elliot’s attitude toward both Catholicism and SIL seems to undergo some change, as evidenced by her decision to work with SIL and let the chips fall where they may despite their cooperation with priests. The question of whether and to what extent to associate with people with whom we may be in disagreement is as pertinent now as it was then, and perhaps more urgent in our minds given the speed at which we’re expected to make decisions about it in the Internet era. Are there takeaways (pro or con) from her approach here?
We also see changes in her attitude toward money as she moves from trying to avoid making any financial provision for the future as an act of faith to purchasing land as an investment, and her latter attitude is certainly more common than the former. What are your thoughts on her various arguments?
In researching this chapter I learned a lot about the mission effort among the Waorani. I hadn’t realized just how little Wao tededo Elliot and Saint were really speaking both when they went in to Tæwano and by the end of Elliot’s stay there. I hadn’t realized how different Waorani culture was in many ways from what the missionaries originally guessed or assumed. I hadn’t realized how fast things changed after missionary contact, so that in many ways the situation described in Kinsman was over before the book was in readers hands. What about you? Was it as you expected? Did you learn new things?
It was also interesting to me to see that in some ways Elliot got along better with the Waorani than with many of her fellow missionaries. It made me wonder how much of that was because both she and the Waorani were primed to expect difference and strangeness from each other, where differences with those with whom we expect to share more stand out more glaringly. What else might have been going on there?
I asked last month about the relationship between Elliot and Saint as they were going into Tæwano for the first time, but I’ll ask again now that Elliot has come out the other side. How does it strike you at this point? What do you make of Elliot’s persistence in trying to make it work? Of her decision to leave? Of the way she handled it?
What do you think about Elliot’s decision to leave Ecuador and her understanding of the guidance of God at this time?
In Chapter Nine, we see Elliot’s changing views in more detail. What do you think of her critique of the American evangelical church of her day? Are there takeaways for our day?
Have you read No Graven Image? What do you make of it?
Have you read Who Shall Ascend? I found Elliot’s assessment that “saving the world while letting the family go to hell” was a theme of the book so poignant in light of Jim’s death, particularly. Again, are there takeaways for us today?
What did you think of the Elliot of Chapter Nine? Were you surprised by anything? Did you already know her from reading her work?
What are your questions or comments about this section? Do you have any feedback for me?
As usual, no need to feel like you have to respond to everything (or anything!) here, but I hope you’ll chime in in the comments about whatever catches your interest, even if it doesn’t appear in these questions. And finally, we’re all coming from different backgrounds and experiences and may see things very differently. Feel free to be real, but let’s try to avoid having the comments section become a “don’t read the comments” section. :)
Page 353 in hardback.
I've read No Graven Image, and appreciated the honest portrayal of "missionary life." I thought it aligned well with her description of the day to day frustrations and distractions in These Strange Ashes.
I've always been sort of amused by Elisabeth's silence around Rachel Saint. And it was mutual! I've heard recordings of Rachel talking about Dayuma and her days with the Aucas and she always sounds as if she worked alone. I suppose they're practicing the "if you can't say something nice..." rule they were taught as children. Having homeschooled a litter of children, I certainly sympathize with Elisabeth's need for civilization and infrastructure for Valerie's schooling, and it would have been wonderful if that were the only reason she left the mission field. Sadly, interpersonal conflict often sends missionaries packing for home.
I'm glad to hear you're planning to read NGI and would love for you to share your thoughts when you do! I appreciate that refusal of tidy endings, too--it doesn't always feel good but it's true to life and, I think, to the Bible.
And yes, while I do wonder what might have been if she had done things differently, my hat is off to her for being remarkably gracious in a very, very difficult situation.