Many Radix readers will be familiar with George MacDonald. For those not, here is a very brief introduction. George MacDonald was a nineteenth century writer of multiple genres, and for forty years a professor and lecturer of English literature. He was also in high demand throughout his career as a guest preacher, a service for which he refused payment. A father of eleven children, he and his wife Louisa were very involved in their communities at all levels of social strata, enticing a mix of folk into games and story and song, hosting picnics, theatre, and dances. Their shared concern for social justice issues (education regardless of gender, class, or creed; affordable housing; support of minorities, etc.) was woven throughout these ventures as well as into the fabric of every book MacDonald wrote. The fact that story – the Christ-story above all – can evoke change was an essential aspect of his creed.
This is Christmas-time, you know, and that is just the time for story-telling…
– George MacDonald
George MacDonald (mentor of C.S. Lewis; inspiration of G.K. Chesterton, Madeleine L’Engle, and so many more) loved to celebrate Christmas – and necessarily for him part of that celebration was to pull others into the celebrating. He did this in person by feasting and festivities, charades and theater, story and song; by decorating his children’s walls and caroling with them through the streets; by inviting strangers into his home for all of the above, sometimes in groups of a hundred or more!
But he also did this on paper. He did not just invite those he knew into a celebration of Christ’s birth: he repeatedly calls his unknown readers – then in the nineteenth century, and all readers since, including us – to join in. His invitations can be found in sermons and essays and poems. They pervade numerous short stories of many genres. Sometimes whole novel chapters are invitingly given over to seasonal celebration: a full Scottish clan dancing and feasting in What’s Mine’s Mine; the minister throwing a parish party (far beyond the reaches of his congregation) in Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, with not just dancing and feasting, but singing and poetry too (before sending everyone home with copies of Christmas hymns by Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, Jeremy Taylor, and John Mason). Celebration of the Nativity is clearly, for MacDonald, essential.
So when I was recently asked, “What is your favourite Christmas piece by George MacDonald?” I was a bit overwhelmed by the choices. MacDonald wrote a Christmas poem each year for much of his adult life – they are many and varied, and several repeatedly call me back: some are humorous, some serious; some explicitly theological, some attuned to current affairs (such as the poem that references the American Civil War); some evidence that recent deaths of loved ones weigh heavily, whilst others are endearing in their mirth. Hope laces through them all. Then there are his Christmas hymns, a few still sung in Britain; “That Holy Thing” always reminds me of Christmases in Scotland. And then his Christmas short stories – again, quite strikingly diverse – some of which have haunted the recesses of my brain as much as Ebenezer’s ghosts. But if forced to choose, I’d have to name Adela Cathcart, a novel that takes place almost entirely over Christmastide (as MacDonald taught me to call it). Despite being a novel, it contains within it some of those aforementioned short stories and poems, and also proffers translations of poems by luminaries such as Martin Luther and Goethe. It is a story of stories that seeks to show how, even when the desire for life is diminished and despair has the upper hand, stories can nourish and fortify and help us to hunger and hope for the Life More Abundant that is promised in the Greatest Story, which MacDonald purports all these others herald.
Adela Cathcart (the title was not MacDonald’s choice) begins, “It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve….” And in that first chapter – itself titled “Christmas Eve” – the narrator is full of festive anticipation as he tells of how much he loves this time of year, of how “Every year, as Christmas approaches, I begin to grow young again….”
He continues:
At least I judge so from the fact that a strange, mysterious pleasure, well known to me by this time, though little understood and very varied, begins to glow in my mind with the first hint, come from what quarter it may, whether from the church service, or a bookseller’s window, that the day of all the year is at hand – is climbing up from the under-world. I enjoy it like a child. I buy the Christmas number of every periodical I can lay my hands on, especially those that have pictures in them; and although I am not very fond of plum-pudding, I anticipate with satisfaction the roast beef and the old port that ought always to accompany it. And above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.
Reflecting further on the joviality of the season he adds: “Is it vulgar, this feasting at Christmas? No. It is the Christmas feast that justifies all feasts, as the bread and wine of the Communion are the essence of all bread and wine, of all strength and rejoicing.” Indeed, he adds, rejoicing sustains that which is needed to combat the evil that exists in our world.
And yet (minor spoiler), this Christmastide will prove to be different from the norm. Our narrator – an unobtrusive Everyman named John Smith – is prepared to participate in the usual Christmas cheer at the house in which he is a guest, but upon arrival this anticipation regresses into foreboding: “This is likely to be as uncomfortable a Christmastide, as [I] … have ever had the opportunity of passing.” His host actually informs him: “You will have anything but a merry Christmas, this year.” And despite all his earlier jocularity, Smith is soon forced to concur: “It was the dreariest Christmas Eve I had ever spent.” The long-anticipated festivities are tainted with an all-pervasive presence of illness and dis-ease. There is an infirmity in the house at which he has arrived: a spirit of ennui and disillusionment, a disenchantment with and weariness of life, a wretched waiting for death. This poisons the entire atmosphere, all anticipation and expectation of communal celebration subsumed. Says the hostess and title character, Adela, “I began to see the bad in everything – wrong motives, and self-love – and pretence, and everything mean and low.” Smith is nearly pulled down and into this malaise, for the Christmas he had hoped for and expected clearly was not to be. But then, on Christmas morning, he hears a sermon which calls him (and others) up short, a sermon that captures their imagination:
…The winter is the childhood of the year. Into this childhood of the year came the child Jesus; and into this childhood of the year must we all descend. It is as if God spoke to each of us according to our need: My son, my daughter, you are growing old and cunning; you must grow a child again, with my son, this blessed birth-time. You are growing old and selfish; you must become a child. You are growing old and careful; you must become a child. You are growing old and distrustful; you must become a child. You are growing old and petty, and weak, and foolish; you must become a child – my child, like the baby there, that strong sunrise of faith and hope and love, lying in his mother’s arms in the stable.
… my friends, let us be children this Christmas…. Take the child Jesus to your bosoms, into your very souls, and let him grow there till he is one with your every thought, and purpose, and hope….Then be happy this Christmas Day; for to you a child is born. Childless women, this infant is yours – wives or maidens. Fathers and mothers, he is your first-born, and he will save his brethren. Eat and drink, and be merry and kind, for the love of God is the source of all joy and all good things, and this love is present in the child Jesus.
Smith is quite moved – and fortified – by this sermon and its call to childlikeness. Not so his disillusioned hostess though: “The baby he spoke about was nothing to me. I didn’t love him, or want to hear about him.” But rather than argue with her or try to point out what she is missing, Smith listens and pays close attention. He is, we already know, an attentive people-watcher. He notices that occasionally Adela’s myopic malaise is interrupted when caught unawares by someone recounting a vignette. Remembering the vivre that stories once kindled in her as a child, he shapes a plan. He invites a small group of family and neighbors (people who love Adela) to share stories – fictional or fact in the genre of their choice. Arguing that Christmastide is “just the time for story-telling,” he hopes that in quickening Adela’s interest, the vitality that is innate will be quickened too. And from thence, that even an interest in the crucial natal Story might be kindled. As the aforementioned minister of Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood had explained:
For I thought with myself, if I could get them to like poetry and beautiful things in words, it would not only do them good, but help them to see what is in the Bible, and therefore to love it more. For I never could believe that a man who did not find God in other places as well as in the Bible ever found Him there at all. And I always thought, that to find God in other books enabled us to see clearly that he was MORE in the Bible than in any other book, or all other books put together.
MacDonald believed that humans are made for story; and that – called as we all are to become childlike (Matthew 18; Mark 10) – delight in story is part of our truest nature, yet also a choice required for spiritual maturity. And so, with childlike determination to be merry and find fun, Smith employs his imagination to employ the imagination of others in the biblically modelled art of storytelling. His doing so weaves together a new community out of which new bonds are formed and through the efforts of which new life is cultivated. In listening to the resulting series of tales, the afflicted Adela begins to heal; as her spirit is lifted, the light and goodness in each story helps “prepareth the way” for the Christ-tale she had not earlier been able to receive. Amongst the tales told are some of MacDonald’s best-known, including the witty fairytale, “The Light Princess;” a dark Gothic romance called “The Cruel Painter;” a sentimental, realistic piece called “My Uncle Peter;” the modern parable, “The Castle;” and the historic, “Wow O’ Rivven,” which contains a real figure from MacDonald’s childhood community. Another tale, “Davy’s story,” was actually experienced by MacDonald’s wife, Louisa. No style is elevated over another, and the novel discusses prejudices against different genres (holding an undoubtedly intentional resonance with Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry). The sanctimonious aunt who joins the storytelling is displeased with the lack of clear religiosity, as evidenced in a most delightful exchange:
“So you approve of fairy tales for children, Mr. Smith?”
“Oh, not for children alone, madam; for everybody that can relish them.”
“But not at a sacred time like this?”
And again she smiled an insinuating smile.
“If I thought God did not approve of fairy-tales, I would never read, not to say write one, Sunday or Saturday. Would you, madam?”
“I never do.”
“I feared not.”
And with that, Smith plunges forth into the first rollicking saga of healing, “The Light Princess.”
Adela Cathcart is a Christmas story about a Christmastide very different from the one that the Christmas-loving narrator had been anticipating. Yet, with childlike and Christ-wise imagination, what began in disappointment was transformed into hope, goodness, and even joy. And out of these was evoked new life. Just as for MacDonald’s Everyman, Christmas will be very different for many of us this year. Perhaps you have heard, or felt, the grumble that it will be “anything but merry.” How will we tap into that childlike expectation – into that determination – to choose joy and playful delight despite the situation? Where and how might we find and share story, to quicken life? How should we exercise our God-given imaginations to invent novel ways of inviting others into celebration? Christ’s very natal tale is one of expectations being turned on their head, of some anticipations not being met whilst even greater ones are passed beyond comprehension. That first quiet Christ-mas made way for all Christmases yet to come; itself a feast that justifies all feasts. This year’s no less than any other. Grow young; choose joy; be inventive in hospitable play. This is Christmas-time you know….
***
Far across the desert floor,
Come, slow-drawing nigher,
Sages deep in starry lore,
Priests of burning Fire.
In the sky they read his story.
And, through starlight cool,
They come riding to the Glory,
To the Wonderful.
Babe and mother, coming Mage,
Shepherd, ass, and cow!
Angels watching the new age,
Time’s intensest Now!
Heaven down-brooding, Earth upstraining,
Far ends closing in!
Sure the eternal tide is gaining
On the strand of sin!
See! but see! Heaven’s chapel-master
Signs with lifted hand;
Winds divine blow fast and faster,
Swelling bosoms grand.
Hark the torrent-joy let slip!
Hark the great throats ring!
Glory! Peace! Good-fellowship!
And a Child for king!
(from ‘An Old Story’)
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson is a George MacDonald scholar based in the Ottawa Valley, Canada, where she co-stewards a piece of ‘farmland-&-wilderness.’ She is on various Inklings-related boards, and the director of Linlathen – an Arts & Faith conference in part inspired by MacDonald. Links to much of her writing can be found at www.kirstinjeffreyjohnson.com
Image By William Jeffrey (1826-1877) – http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw04113/George-MacDonald, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35400888