George McDonald:
(There is a series of eight YouTube offerings on McDonald. This is #2. They all are worth watching in order to understand McDonald and his appeal.)
I began reading McDonald about a year ago. So many authors found him inspirational. Those writers include: Lewis Carroll, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter de la Mare, E. Nesbit, Madeleine L’Engle, G. K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Yates, Oswald Chambers, Mark Twain and others. So I had to know why he inspired so many.
To this date I have read many of his works. All of them lure me in as I begin to read. Some are too deep and will need to be revisited. Most capture my imagination and beg me back to continue further into his worlds. Some of his worlds are fantasy while others’ stark reality that become vivid images.
McDonald sees life as it really is which sometimes seems dream-like or mystical…George McDonald always includes in his fantasies, poems or novels a character (he or she) who is ‘Christ-Like’ especially in how the character relates and treats others…We are called to put on Christ, to be His hands and feet…
Of McDonald CS Lewis writes:
“The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christlike union of tenderness and severity.” Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. The title “Inexorable Love” which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability—but never the inexorability of anything less than love—runs through it like a refrain; “escape is hopeless”—“agree quickly with your adversary”—“compulsion waits behind”—“the uttermost farthing will be exacted.” Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) “He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.”
Excerpt From George MacDonald by C. S. Lewis
What’s Mine’s Mine
This book I read last and liked the most so far. The characters struggle to find God’s Will not happiness in the material world, that is to become God’s Children. For the Macrudadh clan that ultimately meant not loving and idolizing the land of the ancestors…At this point in the story (near the end) they all must leave Scotland’s highlands.
The Macruadh clan left the Highlands in solemn procession with pipes playing:
“When evening came, with a half-moon hanging faint in the limpid blue, and the stars looking large through the mist of ungathered tears—those of nature, not the lovers; with a wind like the breath of a sleeping child, sweet and soft, and full of dreams of summer; the mountains and hills asleep around them like a flock of day- wearied things, and haunted by the angels of Rob’s visions—the lovers, taking leave only of the mother, stole away to walk through the heavenly sapphire of the still night, up the hills and over the rushing streams of the spring, to the cave of their rest—no ill omen but lovely symbol to such as could see in the tomb the porch of paradise. Where should true lovers make their bed but on the threshold of eternity!”
…“When they came to the corner which would hide from them their native strath, the march changed to a lament, and with the opening wail, all stopped and turned for a farewell look. Men and women, the chief alone excepted, burst into weeping, and the sound of their lamentation went wandering through the hills with an adieu to every loved spot. And this was what the pipes said:
We shall never see you more, Never more, never more! Till the sea be dry, and the world be bare, And the dews have ceased to fall, And the rivers have ceased to run, We shall never see you more, Never more, never more!”
“They stood and gazed, and the pipes went on lamenting, and the women went on weeping.
“This is heathenish!” said Alister to himself, and stopped the piper.
“My friends,” he cried, in Gaelic of course, “look at me: my eyes are dry! Where Jesus, the Son of God, is—there is my home! He is here, and he is over the sea, and my home is everywhere! I have lost my land and my country, but I take with me my people, and make no moan over my exile! Hearts are more than hills. Farewell Strathruadh of my childhood! Place of my dreams, I shall visit you again in my sleep! And again I shall see you in happier times, please God, with my friends around me!”
And they prospered in their new world, Canada:
“But the Macruadh yet dreams of the time when those of the clan then left in the world, accompanied, he hopes, by some of those that went out before them, shall go back to repeople the old waste places, and from a wilderness of white sheep and red deer, make the mountain land a nursery of honest, unambitious, brave men and strong-hearted women, loving God and their neighbour; where no man will think of himself at his brother’s cost, no man grow rich by his neighbour’s ruin, no man lay field to field, to treasure up for himself wrath against the day of wrath.”
Excerpt From
What’s Mine’s Mine (Complete)
George MacDonald
Since McDonald was such a prolific writer I still have much more of him to read…
More on McDonald…
(a contemporary take on McDonald…)
DKS