Musing on MacDonald
Thoughts from Onesimus and guest bloggers
One of the ways I seek spiritual sustenance is through listening to edifying works on long drives. I discovered a set of audio CDs on eBay with the promising title The Hope of the Gospel, by someone I had never heard of named George MacDonald…
The poet George MacDonald would have intuitively understood Hegel’s “othering.” Even though these two men never knew each other, there is a strange likeness between Hegel and MacDonald, a shared tendency to start small and increase. Hegel never stopped expanding. By the time of his death, Hegel’s philosophy included everything; he was the last of the great systematisers – he even claimed that his philosophy was the culmination of logic, nature and spirit! Though MacDonald’s creativity is not as unbounded (or egoistic) as that of Hegel, MacDonald has a similar expansive creativity…
There is every reason to read MacDonald. Some of his works of fantasy, written in the tradition of Dante, Spenser, Milton and Blake, are among the most moving and profound we have. Compared to his Lilith (1895), the fantastic work of MacDonald’s disciple C. S. Lewis can sometimes seem like play. MacDonald’s unorthodox Christian views, which center on love between man and God, and repudiate much dogma and theology since the Gospels, make his faith available to all times and conditions of men.
It wasn’t long after becoming a Christian that I started losing things. My job. My fairy-tale home in the mountains. My horses. A marriage. My health. The losses just kept coming. At a certain point, I got mad. What the heck, God? I thought you were going to make everything better, instead you’re taking my life apart, making a heaps of ashes out of every one of my ideals...
In the summer of 1990, my husband and I traveled to Romania, and with the help of a Romanian Believer, returned home with our new son, Samuel. Abandoned at birth, he had lived in an orphanage in Iasi, in Northeastern Romania. There were about one hundred children in the orphanage, and, sadly, there were only three women to care for all of them...
“God is good. ” “Everything happens for a reason.” These are things we often hear and say ourselves when tragedy is averted, when a venture appeared to fail, but is pulled from the flames at the last moment to become a success--when darkness threatened but did not consume us. But what about when the church youth group bus does go over a cliff with no survivors? What do we say when the innocent suffer in place of the guilty? When we find, in place of our dreams, a pile of ashes that cannot be reformed? Do we say God is good, or do we say nothing at all?
For those who have received and believe the words of the Gospel, one of the greatest sources of regular self-disappointment is the frustration of losing perspective. Alas: we hear the words, we feel the spirit, we commit our minds and hearts to following His will - and then, some time later, we come to our senses and realize we have been drifting about in reaction to our worldly cares, our bodily desires, and the actions of our neighbors. Again.
Eventually we will come to the edge of everything we perceive. Relationships, health, finances, even life itself, all have edges. Edges are where thunderstorms form--turbulent places where change forces its way into being. At an edge, one state of being ends and another takes its place. It's a romance with fear, a position for great loss or great gain...
In his sermon The Way, MacDonald states that “if by salvation [Christians] mean something less than absolute oneness with God, I count it no salvation…” In Justice, he went on to explain that “[t]he salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and choice of the heart to be pure.”
During a recent missionary trip to Havana, Cuba, I was robbed of several hundred dollars, the money taken from my luggage while I was asleep or else out about; it was monies I had taken to give away, to use in helping my brothers and sisters. When I discovered the theft a prayer immediately arose within me, that God would bless the thief and his use of the money, that somehow it would be a help to him, fall out to his salvation, would be the tool God would use to gather a thief-child unto Himself and make that poor child into a true son...
