Elisabeth Elliot: a Ghost Story

I live eight miles as the crow flies from Salem, MA, perhaps the city most self-invested in being spooky. The energy radiates outward, and door posts and porches are adorned throughout my town with all measure of dark delights- giant spiders, witches riding brooms, and giant posed skeletons- doing gymnastics, having a Dunkin’, walking a skeleton dog.

         The decorations are fun and not all that scary. I grew up being warned about such pleasures; any sort of spooky decoration might gesture toward a greater darkness that lurked just beneath. In my youth fervent committed Protestants (or anxious ones, though the two often coincide) would throw “Harvest parties” or emphasize All Saint’s Day, which comes on November 1. By moving our emphasis from the spooky dead to the saintly departed, we’d be sure to focus on the right ones in the grave.

         But contemplating the dead, the just and unjust alike, can’t help but provoke a bit of a dark mood. My daughter once told me she’d heard “tradition” defined as “peer pressure from dead guys”; though I shudder a bit at this definition, it has something to it. For all of us religious people are taking cues from those who are no longer with us, behaving as though unconsciously influenced by those who’ve come before. And it can really feel like peer pressure, like being poked and prodded to behave in ways that don’t quite fit. It is easy enough to fall into the deep grooves of “we’ve always done it this way”, but when it comes to explaining why the knife goes on the left, it's anyone’s guess, really.

         Finishing Lucy R. Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot, I felt spooked. It turns out that much of the unspoken pressure I’d felt in relation to my role as a woman, wife, and writer might have been coming from Elliot and her contemporaries. The past decade of my life especially has been haunted by this woman from the grave. If tradition is peer pressure from the dead, it is enforced by the living, their hands holding tight to the graves of the ones who’ve gone before. It turns out you can’t keep a good man down unless he tries to put the knife on the right. Then they’ll find you.

         Though I didn’t know it at the time, I’ve been haunted by Elisabeth Elliot for much of my adult life. After finishing Austen’s biography, I’ve come to think that Elliot as a figure defines evangelicalism as much as any other modern figure.¹ But it is not just the way her story explains evangelicalism that startled me. You see, she’s my own ghost. I live right down the street from where she’s buried and in the same town as she lived for years. You can see the cemetery where she is buried from the window of the church I attended for years. And we both taught as adjuncts at the same seminary, her beginning in 1974, me in 2014. One generation is not time enough for customs and mores to disappear. There were still annual women’s teas and women’s councils at the seminary, and still unwritten rules about what it meant to be a good wife.

It wasn’t uncommon to be reminded that I was better off at home with my children than teaching, anyway- so it is really alright that there wasn’t enough work to go around. It wasn’t uncommon to be told that I didn’t need a salary because my husband was well paid. It wasn’t uncommon to find that I’d been judged wanting, not due to my intellect but due to something else, something more difficult to define. I am a devoted mother of three who prioritizes my children’s education and family dinners and church attendance and everything else. I dressed like a female professional and always smiled more than was strictly required. And yet I was not immune from the Evaluation, from the judgment regarding whether I was a good enough woman, or a good enough wife. It was spooky, and I could never quite place it. But I wonder now if it was Elliot’s ghost, reinforcing what women were good for.

Eliot’s life can be divided into three stages; early years and Ecuador, Writing Life, and Marriage(s).  

In her early years Elliot’s early voice is preening and sanguine. She moves from an idyllic childhood with deeply pious and respectable parents to a boarding school in Florida that she attends beginning at age 14. She is an easy, airy letter writer, reporting on school functions and the dinner menu. Austen notes that she sounds at times like a society columnist. I found her tone grating because she talked about her faith and the Bible in this “society” tone, and in fact she mostly collapses the social expectations of genteel Mrs. Dubose with the training in biblical values she is also expecting to receive. When she spends nearly a week preparing for and cleaning up from the Valentine’s Day party (including “spending three-and-a-half hours whipping thirteen quarts of cream” (62), is responsible for the wedding festivities of the Dubose family’s daughter, or is up for nearly 48 hours straight preparing for Christmas, she reports these grueling rhythms as simply part of what was expected of her. She reports these demanding duties in her letters home and peppers them with spiritual observations about this overwork: “I’m sort of tired- kitchen for four consecutive hours sort of wears on you, but I love it! The joy of the Lord is my strength!” (51).

The boarding school might as well have been a finishing school, judging by the curriculum. Elliot spends much of her time providing domestic support for Mrs. Dubose and the elaborate dinner parties she throws on campus. Evening dress was listed under “definite attire” that Betty would have needed to purchase before she arrived on campus, as the students dressed for dinner every night. Such things were worth the cost, as the school promised to deliver “culture” and “refinement” in addition to missionary teaching. All of this occurred under the stern fist of Mrs. DuBose.

         Mrs. DuBose was a demanding boss, but Eliot seems to have easily accepted that discipline and obedience were a necessary part of her spiritual formation. Here I think we have an early clue of Elliot’s views of womanhood, which will only develop forty years later. It is not simply obedience, but propriety, genteel manners, and even excellent housekeeping that were deemed appropriate “roles” and behavior for women.

         Elliot next heads to Wheaton College. Austen’s account of this period in her life is masterful. She parses the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in one paragraph, and engages the question of the “will of God” that recurred for so many American college students during this time. The role of the war in the lives of this generation of missionaries cannot be understated. Put simply, it seems possible that the heroic energy and commitment of the wartime generation needed somewhere to go. In the case of Jim Elliot, it went to Ecuador.

         The notable thing about Elliot during the Wheaton and missionary period is that she is working primarily as a very talented linguist. She is working to develop a grammar of Wao-te-do and regularly makes long trips to the tribe to work. Once Jim dies, she displays an interesting lack of outward emotion. Her devotion is transferred from the missionary work to recounting Jim’s life as the paragon of missionary greatness. It is here that her lifelong desire to write something great and her deep discipline and commitment coincide. She writes Through Gates of Splendor, a hagiographic account of Jim’s missionary activity and death, in 1957. While Jim was alive, Elisabeth bound herself to him and his missionary ambitions, even as her own were equal to his. But in death, it was Jim who became the emblem of American religiosity, thanks in part to her hidden authorial voice.  

         Elisabeth holds on to one aphorism during this time that, combined with her devotion to Jim, becomes a life long pattern. The saying is that “When faced with two acceptable paths, the follower of Jesus is obligated to choose the more difficult”.² What this means is not that good things are hard but that hard things are good—it is not simply encouragement to endure through suffering, but when faced with the decision, to choose it.

         During these early years Elliot writes frequently in her journals and correspondence of the difficulty of knowing “the will of God”. It’s clear that this concept weighed on her heavily. In a letter to her mother Katharine she wrote; “I desire nothing save his own complete will. But how do I know that that is all I desire? How can I know a heart that is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked?” (4:06). As Austen deftly notes, Elliot felt both that God’s will was “minutely specific”, and that it would be possible for an earnest follower of God to miss it due to the heart’s deceitfulness. This put Elliot in a deep existential bind. On the most important matters in life- who she should marry, how she might work or minister- she could not trust herself. It was this deep existential insecurity that led her to attach herself, throughout her life, to men who would help her cast her vision for her life. And this, by my reading, becomes a mark of Elliot’s life, a narrative fragment that becomes significant only when looking backward. For Elliot did not know her own mind. She was a voracious reader and enjoyed conversation and thinking, but when it came to holding the courage of her convictions, it was either courage or the convictions themselves that she often lacked. For these she’d look to the men in her life to provide.

         And provide they did.

         With Jim both during and after his death, Elliot became the missionary wife. A skilled linguist and courageous traveler, Elliot seems to have handled these years with ease, though not without hardship. But she tags her own story onto Jim’s grander story, allow herself to ride his coattails (and the cultural interest in adventure stories) all the way to the bestseller list.

         Once Cornell Capa came to photograph the Waorani after Jim’s death, Elliot too found direction from Capa. Photographs Capa took in the aftermath of the men’s deaths appeared in the January 30, 1956 edition of Life magazine. Capa and Elliot then worked together on The savage my kinsman, a combined adventure story and coffee-table photography book. At this point Elliot transitioned from ministry in Ecuador to the States. She bought land in New Hampshire and built a cozy house that she enjoyed for the better part of a decade with her daughter Valerie and committed friend, Eleanor Vandevort, who she calls “Van”. Van cared for Valerie while Elliot traveled to speak, went to New York to meet with her agents, took extensive time to write, and even took a two week trip to Jerusalem (in 1967).

         This period of Elliot’s life has a freshness and a freedom to it. Elliot reads widely- from Paul Tillich to Flannery O’Connor to William Faulkner. She travels to see plays in New York and visits with other artists and writers, and she enjoys the beauty of nature and time introducing her daughter to the fun of an American childhood, with things like sledding and ballet lessons. Her friend Van provides the quiet presence and support that allows her to work as a writer. She works to maintain the house and cares for Valerie while Elliot travels. Van is one of the presences in the book that I wish Austen had spent more time with. It is clear throughout these chapters that Elisabeth relied heavily on Van’s presence and that their shared household allowed Elliot the time to travel and write while being the sole parent to a young daughter.

         During this time, from 1963-1969, Elliot took some creative risks. She wrote No Graven Image (1966), her only novel, and Who Shall Ascend, a missionary biography that gave an honest depiction of Ken Strachan and the complicated legacy of his missionary work. She also wrote Furnace of the Lord (1969) after visiting Jerusalem and advocated on behalf of Arab Christians, a minority position at the time.

         We can see during this period a flexibility in Elliot’s thought. For years she had a desire to get to the heart of her questions. Elliot often did this by engaging the Bible directly, but she also relied on guides. Many of her earlier influences were “quite fundamental” in her words (what I’d call fundamentalist), though Wheaton provided a broader view. But in those years in New Hampshire, Elliot was without training wheels. She was applying her experience of life as a missionary and the complicated nuance this contributed to her thinking, and she made real attempts at critically engaging the world around her.

         Additionally, though Elliot corresponded regularly with Capa and others in New York, there wasn’t a man around. Without making too much of this, these years in addition to the few with Rachel Saint in Ecuador are Elliot’s only period unaccompanied by “her head”, or male partner. And we can see her both thrive and struggle without this security. She makes attempts at thinking for herself but feels desperately adrift when these attempts are criticized. Harold Lindsell’s review of her novel in Christianity Today (1966), entitled “One Doesn’t Tell God”, feels like a spanking. Lindsell is a figure in his own right, as the author of the massively influential and divisive The Battle for the Bible (1976). The ripple effects of this book are still felt among evangelical institutions.

         One can only speculate about these years for Elliot, but as a reader it feels like watching a fawn take its first steps, and then falter under the control of a larger herd. You cannot read Elliot’s correspondence from this time without feeling that she was disciplined by the evangelical institutions she wrote for. For some women, this sort of treatment is impossible to tolerate. They have to find protection in order to survive, or they simply have to stop thinking altogether. It is too painful, and too scary, to do otherwise.

         Elliot’s season of freedom is abruptly interrupted by her sudden engagement to Addison Leitch in 1968. Leitch, a seminary professor 18 years her senior, proposed mere weeks after the death of his first wife from cancer. They marry in January of 1969. She sells the house in Franconia and moves to Hamilton, the home of Gordon Conwell Seminary, where she lives for the remainder of her life.³

         Elliot seems to have dearly loved Leitch, who she was married to for four and half years until his death in 1973. But this marriage radically changed her lifestyle. As Austen tells it, during this period Elliot became absorbed with being a professor’s wife.

Her marriage to Leitch also seemed to move her back “inside the fold”, as Jim’s sister wrote in a letter (650). Leitch was an established conservative Presbyterian who “tended to argue for tradition, authority, and absolutes, and against questioning, existentialism, and modern behavioral standards” (651). It appears that Elliot’s days of being a free thinker were over.

Elliot’s speaking requests increased after her marriage to Leitch. So, too, did her commitment to institutions and her adherence to traditional gender roles. She entered “a world of silver and china, fur coats and new cars, country clubs and lavish entertaining” (658). Over the course of 11 weeks, Elliot had served over two hundred company meals to guests- and they had been out of town for two of them (659). Elliot is clearly both burdened and enraptured by this new life. She repeatedly regrets how it has interrupted her writing. She has moved from a free-thinking, creative woman to a seminary wife who can find time to write only in the margins of her husband’s social expectations. It seems to me that she may have adopted her more restrictive views on women during this period as a way to integrate her own experience, an experience of a life that had become increasingly restricted and confined. Insofar as it was the life she’d chosen, the harder life, it must be what God intended. So she began to theologize about it.

In 1977, she writes Let me Be a Woman, where she explains her opinions about how “woman was made for man”. Her views find a sympathetic audience in a culture that is reckoning with second wave feminism. She offered a more religious version of Phyllis Schafly’s social opinions that was ready made for Christian communities. As with her time at Hamden-Dubose Academy, Elliot assumed that social conventions and religious training were two sides of the same coin. It was clear to her that the Bible’s teaching might reinforce norms of gentility and upper-class respectability.

It seems that with Leitch she found security that was both physical and intellectual. By nestling her own thinking within his established lineage, she could speak her mind with proper defense. The problem was she had to change her mind in the process.

For years Elliot had traveled away from her family, spoken in front of large assemblies, led a household and questioned everything. Now she made a name for herself arguing that women should do no such things.

If it is in fact true that “woman was made for man”, it makes it near impossible for a woman to know her own mind. It makes anyone a threat who tries. Better to nestle yourself within the trappings of your husband’s home, setting yourself to making it tidy and beautiful. You’ll have to spend a lot of time there, if you accept this trade, so it might as well be comfortable.

I have no idea why Elliot marries Lars Gren in 1977. She tells several close friends that she knew immediately it was a mistake. One can only speculate that she could not figure out how to be a woman without a man. Gren was horribly controlling throughout their thirty five year marriage. He determined how often she would speak and when she could visit friends, even checking the odometer to ensure she hadn’t deviated from her stated plans. These chapters in Austen’s biography are deeply painful. I’d like to think that the Elliot we know earlier in the book would not have settled for such an arrangement, but truly I don’t know if that’s the case. Elliot’s ability to deny her emotions in order to submit to the “will of God” allowed her both to bear up under suffering and to bring it on herself. She seems not to have trusted herself to tell the difference. She perfected a form of propriety that corresponded with the emotional suppression that her practice of submission to the will of God required. This remains a hallmark of some forms of evangelical religiosity.

I no longer teach at the seminary Elliot once taught at. She, too, had misgivings during her time there. Both of us, it seems, struggled to figure out how to stand as women who knew their own minds. Theological education often demands that its adherents check the right boxes and sign on the dotted line in the right way. Those who don’t are called dangerous, or criticized in print. But we need these free thinkers, the ones who are willing to think their own thoughts and stand on their own two feet. It may have saved Elliot from thirty five years of a miserable marriage, if she’d dared.

Yesterday I went to visit Elliot’s grave. Austen’s book records that it is under a rough hewn piece of granite, but it took me awhile to find it. Eventually I saw a rough granite stone, inscribed with Addison Leitch’s name. There was a small bouquet of wild flowers atop, tipped toward the back. When I walked behind the stone, there was Elisabeth. She’d been buried with Addison, her second husband, hidden in his shadow. The flowers were for her.

You won’t believe me, but I also dreamed of Elliot last night. She was sitting on the porch of her Franconia home. The dappled light of autumn came through the trees and she lifted her hand to wave to me. She looked happy and at peace. I’d like to remember her that way, free, smiling, her face bathed with light. If I’m going to be haunted by Elisabeth Elliot, I want it to be of the woman who wrestled with God, and who stood on her own two feet.

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[1] Austen 48.

1. It may be a tie with Billy Graham, I’ll report back.

2. 14:33:37, from the audio ediiton.

3. Elliot also owned a home in Magnolia, MA, a few miles away, which is where she lived in the years before her death.