MacDonald & Me
Discovering George MacDonald
My brother was perusing my grandmother’s bookshelves, the same ones that we’d glanced at hundreds of times during our intense games of hide-and-go seek tag in her house. But the difference was that he kept looking. And one day, he just picked up one of George MacDonald’s books, edited by Michael Philips, and started reading it. He was intrigued – enough to read another one, and another one after that. After The Highlander’s Last Song (What’s Mine’s Mine), he was so fascinated with George MacDonald that he tried to introduce me to him.
I was a little skeptical at first. After all, what could a centuries-old, rather-obscure author have to say that I hadn’t read a hundred times before?
As I type this, my wife Megan and I have just passed the 1-year anniversary mark in our marriage and now have a brand-new baby girl named Ruth, who is two-and-a-half months old. As my new family has grown, sadly, so has the distance, relationally, from my parents, my brother, and my sister. Between these two strangely opposing realities of my budding life, a quote of MacDonald’s stood out immediately upon reading it and has continued so since…
I will forever remember 2019 as the year I fell in love with George MacDonald. I stumbled on a recording of The Elect Lady on my podcast app. I knew who George MacDonald was, but I did not really begin to know him until I met Andrew Ingram. This brilliant, rebellious, faithful, simple, obedient character so enamored me and reflected back to me the hopes I held for my own discipleship that I had to have more of his creator…
How many times had my heart risen – swelled – towards a grand ideal of God, only to fall again, due to some traditional argument or bible verse. MacDonald was not perturbed by old doctrine or ancient thinkers. Nothing but a God too good must be true, nothing but a God absolutely lovely, without any spot of darkness, would satisfy him…
Ever since our honeymoon, spent surrounded by forested hills in northern Pennsylvania, back a two-mile lane, Karen and I have continually had a book we’re reading aloud to each other. At first we took turns reading, but soon settled into a pattern of me reading while Karen cross-stitched or quilted or, for a period in our life, nursed a baby or two. The first books that we read were by George MacDonald, a Scottish author writing in the last half of the 1800’s with an uncommonly robust imagination and singular commitment to live out the vision he saw in the Gospels. In fact, the first two dozen books that we read were all by MacDonald…
Midway through my life, I lost my faith. The denomination I was in didn’t help. Eventually, after a dark time, I had a dramatic conversion experience/encounter with the Lord. He picked me up and basically changed not only my religious believing but my life. I started searching for similar experiences in others and encountered CS Lewis. I found that I agreed with him most of the time. And he attributed where he was to George MacDonald’s Phantastes…
I began reading George MacDonald soon after my conversion through the influence of C.S.Lewis, who I discovered through the rock band from San Diego, California named Switchfoot. In MacDonald's sermons, fairy tales, novels, and fantasy works, I found myself having a deeper understanding of the fatherhood of God...
