Growing With My Garden

      Much of the reading for this week depicts people helping people and illustrates the role which helping others plays in spiritual growth, both in those who extend help, and those who receive it.  MacDonald explains that when the “love-heart” of a person is active in helping others, then “his mind is one with the mind of his Maker; God and man are one.” Polwarth meets Juliet on the grounds of the Drake properties and subtly attempts to be a help to her.  When torrential rains come, Juliet flees and finds shelter in the Polwarth’s gate house.  In their whole-hearted and gentle ministration to her needs she begins to experience peace of heart.  Houses throughout Glaston are flooded.  Wingfold and Helen use a boat to bring help to stranded people, as does Faber.  The Wingfolds do it happily; to Faber it is a difficult and arduous task.  Drake and Dorothy heartily take people into their home.  In a incident in which Amanda alm...

There is considerable rhetoric in our reading for this week, contained in the conversations between Wingfold and Faber, and in Wingfold’s sermonizing. MacDonald fills his novels with his own convictions as to the nature of Christian truth and prescriptions for Christian living, but I don’t think any are as replete in these regards as this novel.  In all the authors I have read, I have not encountered any whose insights seem so penetratingly true (and I have greatly profited from the works of so many).  It is why I keep returning to his works.  Below is a sampling of quotations that strike me: “Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent . . . . Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. . . . Peace is for those who do the truth, not those who opine it.”   “But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never percei...

 .   One way to view this novel is to see it as a profound study in the centrality of love to life.  The first and second commandments affirm that the most important thing in life is to learn how properly to love God and others, and this may be seen as MacDonald’s primary purpose in writing this novel.  He gives his readers profound meditations on the nature of God’s love, and he proceeds to depict a variety of love relationships:  Wingfold  and Helen, Drake and his daughter, Faber and Juliet  All love relationships in this life are imperfect; the essence of heaven is that of perfect love, in which the redeemed community are perfectly bound together in love with God and with each other.  Scripture depicts it as marriage between Christ and his church.   The relationship between Drake and his daughter, strong as it is, illustrates some severe shortcomings.  Dorothy’s love for her father is admirable but inadequate because o...

In his writings MacDonald never misses an opportunity to underscore his deep convictions as to the nature of God, and Chapter 17, beginning with a portrait of Faber’s atheistic thinking, includes yet another excellent statement as to the nature of God that, sadly, so many theologians, who feel a need to have an abstract system of thought that excludes paradoxes, distort.  And his analysis of the atheist’s thinking is quite perceptive and helpful.   Juliet was raised under the tutelage of the type of narrow thinking MacDonald wants to expose and, when she opposes Faber’s common sense with it, it seems inadequate. When he pleads his love for her, she sternly rejects him; nevertheless, he persists, and she begins to capitulate. Chapter XVIII begins by observing that Bevis is growing spiritually under the teachings of Wingfold.  MacDonald observes that Christians grow through various phases, and the more they grow, they more they acquire a more accurate ...