These words by George MacDonald in the novel Phantastes always challenge me: “Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love” (ch. 10).
Sorrows’ Doors—the portal to deepest truth, deepest joy? What thresholds must I overcome to agree with MacDonald? Suffering, sorrow—this we try to avoid, at all cost, do we not? But that Sorrow is the very doorway I must pass through in order to enter Joy? And therefore should I succeed in avoiding it, or rather ignoring it, I would miss what I most long for? Is the Victorian author right to insist, “As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows”?
This past week I visited my university campus for the first time since its closure mid-March to retrieve some needed books from my office. My day’s experiences brought me closer to this sweet sadness, to this “linger[ing] with Sorrow for very love” that MacDonald speaks of. I lingered over the moments for the love of times past, present blessings, and future hopes. These are some of the snapshots.
Under grey skies I spot a lone colleague walking under the Japanese cherry tree lane, no longer in bloom. This spring is the first that I didn’t see the blossomy extravaganza in person; in other springs my students would act out scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream under their pink canopy, sometimes climbing into the lower branches, laughing with Shakespeare. I wait as my colleague approaches and we speak of the heaviness that we and the whole world shares, even the sheer emotional toll of uncertainty as countries begin to navigate emerging from lockdown after this first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our smiles don’t lessen the enormity of things but perhaps make them just that much easier to bear. A little lightening of the load can go a long way. Then he unlocks the doors to our building with his key (I haven’t missed not having one until today) and we part to our separate offices. I call Campus Security to let them know that they don’t need to come to help me out.
As I walk the empty halls tears rise, close to spilling. The weight of grief over the near vacant campus is tangible—our collective memories of life “Before” are here, everywhere, where we are not. The only footsteps I hear are my own. I peer through the window into the classroom where I taught my last face-to-face class on March 12th. There is a half-full bottle of Pepsi in our department fridge. Outside my office door is our beautiful poster for the event that didn’t happen on March 30th: “Celebrating Creative Writing in Community: An Inklings Institute Coffee House event.”
I stop before another dear colleague’s closed door. Her carefully chosen words on her Sabbatical poster remind me of her dedication to the Lord, to her calling, and to us:
rest · research · write · pray · travel · grow
∼ a seventh year of rest ∼
Her colour postcard of an aisle in the Bodleian Library draws me into the realm of soft daylight streaming over old world bookshelves and quiet study spaces. Ah, the Bodleian—Oxford, itself. I was there; I am here; I may be there again; and the longings that all these memories and desires stir will be ever with me. In sweet sadness, I am filled with gratitude.
In the outer foyer to my office area I pause before the poster of our Theatre Department, as I always do, and mourn a little more about their last play that we couldn’t see: The Tempest, March 17 – 28. The image is of a girl on a headland looking out over a sinking ship. I reread the caption: “Lost on a mystical island, revenge lurks in the shadows. Nothing is quite what it seems.” Those words strike me with prophetic force. Words composed Before; words so poignant Now. We, this tempest, these shadows … revenge? Mystical things? Indeed, “Nothing is quite what it seems.” We’re in a cloud of much unknowing. (The Tempest is one of my favourite plays. I recall seeing 85-year-old Canadian actor William Hutt’s farewell performance as Prospero in Stratford, Ontario in 2005. Marvelous! Later, at home, in my copy of the play I find a golden bookmark with these words: “God is the King of all the earth; sing to Him a psalm of praise. Ps. 47:7.”)
I meet with many local colleagues over a Zoom chat where we learn more about what further technology we might use in the coming semesters. We are greatly helped; we are not lone rangers.
After some time in my office, footsteps down the hall. A live person! Which colleague?! Three doors over from me, kitty-corner, we greet each other. “Brother!” I call out, as I’d hardly do on so-called ordinary days. But these are not so-called ordinary days, as we are all very much more aware. Without missing a beat we extend arms for a potential hug, at least six feet apart, of course. Later, when I’m stumped on a computer question, I hesitate, then knock on his door. Smiling broadly, with characteristic cheer, he comes, and moments later, the technical question is clear. And soon I’m on my Zoom call with about 75 colleagues all over North America.
Here, all at once, in all the time zones, we gather. I see friends. I see and hear folks I’ve only met through email. We’re together, we’re a community—we’re part of the Body of Christ that is forever and ever. Nothing, nothing, can change that. We begin with a Scripture reading, and as I gaze at the many faces from many places in their offices and homes—Indiana, Texas, Arizona, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and more—tears of glad joy rise, close to spilling. Our key organizer comments, “The best work happens in collaboration.” Oh yes, yes, and yes. And what drew us and draws us together? It’s no surprise, is it, that it’s C. S. Lewis, his writings, his faith vision, and ultimately, the Lord Christ? (If you want to learn about this group, contact the CS Lewis Center)
Lingering at Sorrow’s doors has its place. There we might discover how well-connected and supported we are by our many fellow pilgrims. There we might discover old things that we took for granted and have not lost. There we might remember the new things that we want to participate in. There we might renew the gratitude that is perhaps the one threshold we need to cross, the one which leads us into the deepest truth that is always deepest joy.
May it be so for us in the days ahead: Sorrows’ Doors opening to deepest Joy.
Take good care, friends.
My faculty administrative coordinator cheerfully helps me via email even late at night and first thing in the morning.
My first online classes worked beautifully. Maybe not quite technologically perfectly but beautifully. I was pretty much dancing with delight! Why did they work so well? The reason: I had a lot of help from my university community and from my son. So much patience and kindness were shown to me. Who knew that so many people could pull together so quickly, so expertly, so cheerfully? And my classes were fun and inspiring. Now my students could see me at home in my study surrounded by my favourite books, even my wooden giraffe from Kenya (a gift from my daughter) reading a book from where he is perched on the bookcase behind my shoulder. I could feel the wonderful presence of my students as they “zoomed in” from various locations in British Columbia and the United States—and our love, yes—as we talked about wonderful literature that has inspired millions, stories that give us so much of what we need to know.
In the fairy tales my mother read to me, the line was “Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute.” Which in English is, “And if they haven’t died, they’re still alive today.” Not exactly the health-wealth gospel fueled by the beauty myth, is it. Do they still have to take out the garbage? Obviously, right? (I once read a critic who actually thought it meant they didn’t.) Do they never fight? Really? Whoever heard of couples who never got annoyed with each other, never disagreed, never fought? I like how Aravis and Cor in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia story The Horse and his Boy are “so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”
Yes, this is my cave with a view. From this cave I see the first ten to twenty feet or so of these backyard sentinels, depending on perspective. It is enough. The new deck railing and the old rooftop carrier suspended upside down from the upper deck rafters obscuring a small part of the scene, a legacy from past family camping trips, don’t impede my quiet enjoyment in the least. The vista I cannot see only enhances what I can see. Hold that thought, I say to myself. Why ask for more? There is more, unending more, but does demanding greater vision increase it?
And here in my cave I take refuge. Refuge: the place of shelter from danger and trouble. The place where we can escape to, find comfort, aid, sanctuary. Like a traffic island, for example, as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us. And people that seek refuge are refugees. I remember that my family members were once refugees fleeing their native Poland at the end of the Second World War. They escaped, finding refuge here, next to the Pacific, where I find myself. Here, in my cave with a view, selecting words to type on my laptop, or scribble in a notebook, I too am a refugee in a haven.
Here, treasuring the Narnia moment, I recall the photo the same daughter took of me this past Christmas Eve in the magically transformed foyer of our church, Walnut Grove Lutheran. “Sit,” she commands, and I obey, smiling up at her from the bench nestled in amidst the red poinsettias, the brightly lit fir trees planted on the snowy fabric—an annual scene crowned with the shining old-fashioned lamppost. Satisfied with her picture, she declares, “Mom, you’re Lucy Pevensie!” My laughter, me as Lucy, entering and reentering Narnia—how delightful. Me, this aging Lucy, but then again, older and younger all at once, rejoicing in the One Lion King Who ever was and shall be. Therefore who I am and will be is timeless, He says.
The red poppy has transcended the political lines of division that it began with; it belongs to all—a symbol of our common humanity, frail and wondrous. The poppy aids us in recalling that the year is waning and so our own lives. What are we doing, and why? What is worth remembering about the millions and millions of people in the past? How have they gifted us? Then, again, what about our own lives might be worth remembering by the young and those yet to be born?
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared in Gulag Archipelago, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” It would be so simple to separate good and evil by states, classes, and political parties, he said, but instead we need to face the truth: become willing to examine ourselves and uproot the evil within. This is a daily ongoing task. An arduous task. C.S. Lewis also spoke to this in “The Weight of Glory.” There are but two possible eternal destinations for each human soul—eternal glory or damnation—and at every moment of every day our choices move us closer to one or the other. Moreover, “All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.” So we need to be vigilant about how we “conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.” The stakes can’t be higher, and like soldiers we need to be on ready alert.
C.S. Lewis, yes, he’s number one. He’s been my mentor the longest. I grew up on German fairy tales and the Bible; I knew both were true but in different ways, which I later discovered was a fairly special start in life. And so when after a considerable dosage of modernist, depressive literature I at last stumbled into Narnia and then travelled into the cosmic trilogy, the heavens opened for me, set my feet a’ dancing. Lewis’s theological, apologetic, and literary criticism writings taught me much about how to think and write and eventually teach. One of his favourite quotes from Dunbar became mine:
George MacDonald, Lewis’s primary mentor. The more I read this Scotsman—such a pleasure!—the more I realize that Lewis wasn’t exaggerating when he said he’s always quoting him. When I first read The Princess and the Goblin in a university class, the sweet clarity of childlike faith and wonder welled up in me. I felt the invisible thread in my life with greater sureness and followed it from the safety of the known, through dark tunnels, past goblins’ schemes, right up to solid rock blockades. And when I was then tempted to retreat, I recalled how Irene’s thread vanished when she tried the same, and like Irene I kept going, removing one rock at a time, until I discovered victory. A favourite quote: “The child is not meant to die, but to be forever freshborn” (The Princess and Curdie). A favourite book: The Princess and the Goblin
Madeleine L’Engle. The day I discovered that L’Engle and Lewis shared the same top mentor, George MacDonald, it made terrific sense to me because these writers so intimately informed much of my soul. When I came to do my Ph.D. I sat down to figure out why I loved these three so much and that became the focus of my doctoral work, “Educating the Moral Imagination.” I was fortunate to meet Madeleine a couple of times, to be in one of her creative writing classes, and to interview her on the telephone in 2000. I treasure the countless ways in which her writings have inspired me with love, passion, and hope. Madeleine’s chutzpah and her artistry play one beautiful song. A favourite quote: “Believing takes practice” (A Wind in the Door). A favourite book: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
L.M. Montgomery. This fellow Canadian lady’s writings have blessed my heart with a sense of home. As much as I love my native Pacific Coast and my family’s European origins, part of me belongs to the red soil, the windy shores, and the rural spaces of Prince Edward Island. I’m an islander as sure as Anne-girl, the newcomer, always will be. And with my students, who thrill to the short story “Each in His Own Tongue,” I wish to speak with my own voice, truly, freely, as I ought to speak—for the love of God and humanity. A favourite quote: “See to it that you never make your music the servant of the power of evil—never debase it to unworthy ends. For your responsibility is as your gift, and God will exact the accounting of it from you. Speak to the world in your own tongue through it, with truth and sincerity…” (“Each”). A favourite book: The Blue Castle
J.R.R. Tolkien. This author’s love of language, pilgrimage, and simple fare speaks to my longing for all things bright and beautiful, great and small, wise and wonderful (to echo the lovely children’s hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander). What British Columbia mountains have I climbed, green lakes canoed, tree mosses admired, waterfalls, rushing rivers, and deep pools prized, without thinking of Tolkien? He’s helped me to see more clearly, listen more closely, climb higher and longer, and sit by the campfire under starlight in yet deeper serenity. Here’s a favourite quote from one of my favourite sections of his epic, The Lord of the Rings: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (The Fellowship of the Ring). One more favourite quote: “Some who have read the book … have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar complaints of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer” (“Foreword to the Second Edition”). Such courage, such realism—our Tolkien. A favourite short story: “Leaf by Niggle”
Monika Hilder 