Curved space, Lent, and Faith

“Looking at Stars,” by Jane Kenyon

The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.

This poem prefaces Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. Though I’m not planning to delve much into the book [...]

Double-edged sword*

In his sermon on the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, George MacDonald makes the point that Jesus and Satan use scripture in different ways. In the second temptation, when Satan urges Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle by quoting, “It is written, ‘He will give his angels charge over Thee,’” Jesus replies, “You [...]

The Week in Words: Regions Unknown

Monday brings The Week in Words at Breath of Life. Though I fear I’ve already over-quoted from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons this week, I can’t resist offering these wise words from “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”:

Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary to its arrival. To give us [...]

Saints and Spiders: Dueling Sermons

Recently, my husband read Neil Anderson’s Victory Over the Darkness. It’s about our identity in Christ, and it’s been an extremely influential book for him.

I read it a few years ago, and somewhere — I think at our former church — I picked up a bookmark that lists the various lies we believe about who [...]

MacDonald on prayer: Windmills, hungry children, and communion

I find George MacDonald’s “Word of Jesus on Prayer,” from Unspoken Sermons, very encouraging. The text he’s starting from is the parable of the persistent widow. Here are a few morsels:

If, instead of speculation, we gave ourselves to obedience, what a difference would soon be seen in the world! Oh, the multitude of so-called religious [...]

Diary of an Old Soul

I’ve been revisiting George MacDonald lately. I knew him first as the one whose Phantastes C.S. Lewis credited with “baptizing his imagination.” Then I explored some of his children’s books, and more recently a Gothic romance. Slowly I’ve been accumulating impressions and experiences of this writer.

I didn’t realize that he was also [...]

The Portent

The Portent (William James Linton, 1860)

…[We] began to find that we doubted a great deal of what seemed to have happened to us. It was as if the gates of the unseen world were closing against us, because we had shut ourselves up in the world of the present. But we let it go [...]

TSS: Phantastes

This is the book that C.S. Lewis read one day on a train and felt his imagination had been “baptized.” I read it back when I was in college and it didn’t capture me. But recently, after reading more of George MacDonald’s books and being intrigued, I decided to try again.

I thought I didn’t [...]

At the Back of the North Wind

Any story always tells me itself what I’m to think about it… I never can tell what they call clever from what they call silly, but I always know whether I like a story nor not.

So says Diamond, the angelic little boy at the center of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind. [...]

The Golden Key

These days I use the library as much as possible, but every once in awhile I come across a book I simply must have. George MacDonald’s The Golden Key is such a book. It’s an allegory, written for children and only 78 pages long. But it’s compact and mystical enough that I know I’ll want [...]