Growing With My Garden

  In recounting his own spiritual odyssey, Lewis tells how he was strongly driven by a sensation of desire which, in his autobiography, he terms joy and sometimes uses the German term Sehnsucht.  It is a yearning for something more, something which occasional experiences arouse, but which no experience in this world fully satisfies.  It is a yearning which can only be satisfied by a union with God.  One of the primary effects of reading LWW is to arouse and nourish  in the reader that longing.  As you read, note in how many ways images have this effect.  Lewis presents Narnia (which suggests the realm of the imagination, or something more?) to be a very attractive and inviting realm, but also one fraught with great peril. It is a place of moral values shaped by Christian truths which require careful attention.  The amiable faun right away identifies Lucy as a daughter of Eve and, of course, this suggests her fallen condition. He kindly invites...

  There is a fascinating paradox involved when one considers the nature of the Narnia Chronicles.  As one reads, one can see a great many Christian truths and attitudes shadowed forth in the imagery.  But, in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis sternly denies that he began with a listing of Christian truths, asked himself how he could communicate them to children, and proceeded to shape the Narnia stories accordingly.  Rather, he began with some images that compellingly presented themselves to his imagination and proceeded to let them shape their own stories in the realm of Faerie.  And he insists that he was not writing exclusively for children, but for adults as well; good fairy tales appeal to all ages.   But, as I say, a fascinating paradox is involved.  While Lewis insists he was not writing to communicate Christian truths, the Narnia stories are powerfully shaped by a Christian view of reality and co...

Aug 29: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Chapters 1 - 6 Sept 5: 7 - 12 12:13 - end 19: The Last Battle: Chapters 1 - 5 26: 6 - 10 October 3: 11- end I intend to make a post by August 29.  

   Paul Faber: Surgeon.  Chapters 48 - End. Our reading for his week begins with meticulous descriptions of the spiritual states of several of the characters, showing them at various stages according to their separate personalities and experiences.  Drake is shown sharing the intense inner doubts and struggles of his soul with Drew, struggles which show him growing in his spiritual life.  MacDonald affirms such struggles for the sincere Christian are inevitable.  Addressing God, MacDonald explains: If Thou wast One whom created mind could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small for those whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infinite creatures that seek their God, a Being to love and know infinitely.  For the created to know perfectly would be to be damned forever in the nutshell of the infinite. Thus, as a properly growing Christian, Drake quietly passes into eternity.   Faber, on the other hand, is just beginning his spiritual awaken...

      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...