My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am.
Like weary waves thought follows upon thought,
But the still depth beneath is all thine own,
And there thou mov’st in paths to us unknown.
Out of strange strife thy peace is strangely wrought;
If the lion in us pray – thou answerest the lamb.
George MacDonald, 1880.
George MacDonald is one of Scotland’s negelcted treasures. His Scottish novels are written in dialect, often rooted in rural village life. But he was also a Christian of refined and sensitive theological perception. It was his imaginative writings that captured the imagination of C S Lewis. Indeed he was one of several Scottish preacher theologians in process of rediscovering the imagination as an important route for the leading of the Spirit of God. (A B Bruce and Alexander Whyte for example). Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons, his Diary of an Old Soul, and Collected Poems were important expressions of that growing uneasiness with Westminster Calvinism that seeped through the hardened walls of 19th century Scottish theology. Indeed his resistance to what he saw as hard edged Calvinism eventually led him to ‘the wider hope’, that generous understanding of the Gospel that is often dubbed ‘universalism’. That of course, got him into trouble with the deacons at the church he served in Arundel – they reduced his salary to persuade him to leave!
The prayer quoted above is an important corrective to that self-confident blurting out of what we want God to do. Macdonald recognises the ambiguities of our asking, the mixed motivation in spiritual search, and the subterranean movements, even collisions, of self concern and divine grace.
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