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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
"Be thou the well by which I lie and rest; Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground; Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest, My book of wisdom, loved of all the best; Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found, As the eternal days and nights go round! Nay, nay—thou art my God, in whom all loves are bound!" In 1880, the prolific author George MacDonald self-published a long poem in book form as a gift for his friends. He called it, in full, A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. It contained a new seven-line stanza for each day of the calendar year, written as prayers expressing MacDonald's longings, struggles, and joys in everyday life. The Diary was originally printed with a blank page facing every page of poetry so that readers could supplement MacDonald's diary with their own. This feature in particular, along with the spiritual wisdom and literary artistry of the text itself, was beloved by C. S. Lewis, who gave a copy of the book to his future wife, Joy Davidman, as a Christmas gift in 1952. Now in this deluxe edition, MacDonald's classic devotional resource is again available with the blank pages he envisioned alongside the complete text. With a new introduction and explanatory notes by historian Timothy Larsen, the beloved writer's prayers find new life for enthusiasts and first-time readers alike. - Complete text of MacDonald's classic work—one poem for each day of the year - Thoughtful layout with a blank page for journaling opposite each poem - Introduction and annotations by historian Timothy Larsen - Deluxe features including cloth binding and bookmark ribbon
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FOR ALAN JACOBS
Alan is a highly valued friend who has also been—and continues to be—an incalculably great help to me both professionally and intellectually.
Sweet friend, receive my offering.
Contents
Introduction
Timothy Larsen
HAVING LONG and eagerly planned for the moment, you are now meandering pleasantly through a forest in an area of the country famed for its natural beauty. The leaves on the trees—each according to their own kind—fill you with a sense of well-being; you ponder contentedly what species of bird must be making that slightly comic sound. Your chosen path is the rocky bed of a stream that has temporarily gone dry. With each step you sweep past scores of stones—all of them ordinary, uninteresting, unworthy of your time. Then a particular one catches your eye. It is obviously made of the same materials as innumerable others behind and before you; it is not a gemstone nor marbled with precious metal. Yet there is something about its shape, or its color, or the pattern that it displays—or, in truth, some combination thereof—that pleases you. The very act of attending to it deepens your admiration for it. You will bring it home and put it on your dresser as a simple but beguiling memento of your trip. Many years later it will still delight you to pick it up and examine its features. After a good dinner in which some anecdote about your trip unexpectedly entered into the conversation, you will go and retrieve it and share its charms with your friends.
I once went to hear the poet Christian Wiman speak at a simple question-and-answer session on the campus of Wheaton College, where I work. It was mesmerizing. As the editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman had been reading improbably large stacks of poems in season and out of season for years on end. One of the things from the event that has always stayed with me is Wiman’s remarks about the “rareness” of poetry. It is a mistake to assume that we should find every poem we read deeply meaningful and that—if we do not—the fault must be either with the poem and its author or with ourselves as readers. Instead, we should not fret about the poems with which we do not feel a leap of connection, but rather rejoice over the rare and precious ones that somehow catch our eye. It is also true, however, that many more stones and poems would evoke wonder and delight in us if we only gave them the gift of our full, unhurried attention.
Some of the poems in George MacDonald’s A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880) immediately spoke to me: I have found a special stone and I want to share it with others so that they will take the time to see it truly, and so also delight in it.1 There are, however, some poems in this collection that I look at only to step over them without feeling any great urge to break my stride. This is not a failure. It is the rarity of poetry—it makes my finds true finds. Still, some poems in The Diary of an Old Soul that I once stepped over I have come to delight in when I have revisited them. All of them are certainly more likely to speak to us if we give them the gift of our attention. Poetry is designed to slow us down. In the way that I believe George MacDonald intended us to do, I have read these poems as part of my daily devotions. And my standard practice has been to read each one twice over. Entering a poem is like entering another world; it takes time for our eyes to adjust to the light.
These are devotional poems, and devotional exercises are also intended to slow us down. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Victorian Christians across the denominations widely believed that the best way to pursue a life of faith included daily devotions. It was surprisingly common for people from all walks of life, from full-time caregivers to business tycoons, from nurses and teachers to coal miners and factory workers, to engage in devotional exercises four times a day—alone in the morning and evening, and then again in both the morning and the evening as part of family or household devotions. As I began to study the spiritual lives of the Victorians, I was humbled by just how unremarkable and typical this pattern was to them.2 Given such widespread spiritual habits, there also developed a desire for books that would help structure and enrich them. One enormously popular volume was John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827).3 He, too, wrote a poem for every entry. Keble, however, was a founder of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement, a High-Church impulse in the Church of England that would give rise to Anglo-Catholicism. His volume therefore followed the liturgical calendar, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent, and giving an entry for every Sunday thereafter until the annual cycle came back to where it started, as well as additional entries for saints’ days and other holy days. In other words, it was not a daily devotional but a weekly one with some special, sacred days added in.
One of the greatest poets of nineteenth-century England, Christina Rossetti, was also a devout Christian who was deeply committed to the Oxford Movement. She wrote Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885).4 Many of its entries were in prose, although some were poems. It was a true daily devotional, following the calendar year. Still, its contents were also thoroughly tied to the liturgical year. The first entry, January 1, is announced to be a mediation for “The Feast of the Circumcision,” and the last one, December 31, is for the “Feast of St. Silvester.” Moreover, Rossetti was so determined to cover the entire church year that she also included an appendix with entries for “certain movable Holy Days,” beginning with Advent Sunday and ending with “Trinitytide: Ember Saturday.”
George MacDonald (1824–1905), however, was raised as a staunch, Low-Church Protestant in Scotland and had trained for the ministry in a Congregational college, a tradition that prided itself on being the heirs of the Puritans and the Separatists.5 In The Diary of an Old Soul, therefore, with the sole exception of Christmas Day, MacDonald ignores the liturgical calendar—and he even apologizes for that solitary departure from the general plan: Thou hast not made, or taught me, Lord, to care / For times and seasons (December 25).
In that poem, MacDonald is referring to liturgical times and seasons, but neither is The Diary of an Old Soul organized around nature’s times and seasons. Occasionally, one will glimpse a remark in which there is a mention of weather that seems apt for the time of year, but this is not a book for attending closely to nature’s annual rhythms. One must look elsewhere for a volume to use as a companion as one tracks the course of summer and winter and springtime and harvest.6 Nor is The Diary of an Old Soul a record of the outward circumstances of life that MacDonald faced during 1879, the year in which he wrote it. Life’s concrete happenings also occasionally can be glimpsed in these poems—his daughter’s engagement, the need to give up their family home, and so on—but the vast majority of these poems do not latch on to events in MacDonald’s exterior life in that way. These entries are not about the kind of events that many people would be inclined to record in an ordinary daily diary.
A resolutely Protestant alternative to a devotional book organized around the liturgical year is one organized around reading Scripture. The Baptist minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the most celebrated preacher of the Victorian age. His Metropolitan Tabernacle in London was the home of the largest congregation in the world.7 Spurgeon’s sermons and other writings were avidly read by numerous people in places all around the globe from Russia to Australia and beyond. Spurgeon sought to help meet the need for aids to devotion by writing various works, including Morning by Morning: Or, Daily Readings for the Family or the Closet (1865) and Evening by Evening: Or, Readings at Eventide for the Family or Closet (1868).8 The word closet is a reference to individual, private devotions drawn from the language of the King James Version of the Bible: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6).
A structure based around biblical passages, however, was not the way that MacDonald chose for his daily devotional either. For sure, the poems in The Diary of an Old Soul are replete with allusions to biblical texts—some of them even have direct quotations complete with quotation marks. (I have not made annotations identifying these scriptural connections in the text of this edition unless it seemed that not grasping the allusion would make what was being said incomprehensible to the reader.) Still, MacDonald did not choose to organize his devotional as reflections on scriptural passages. The reason for this, I think, is that MacDonald assumed that one’s daily devotions would include more Bible than such a practice would provide. Spurgeon’s entries for Morning by Morning and Evening by Evening are all based on texts of Scripture that are at most a sentence in length. The entry for the evening of May 18, for instance, has a text that is just one word: “Afterward”—Hebrews 12:11. MacDonald assumed (and Spurgeon at least hoped) that as part of their daily devotions people would be systematically reading through the Bible at the rate of, at minimum, a whole chapter at each sitting. The poems in The Diary of an Old Soul are therefore intended as an additional spiritual reflection—often in the form of a prayer—rather than as a substitute for daily Bible reading.
George MacDonald deeply admired the writings of the great medieval Christian poet Dante Alighieri. He prophesied that Dante’s “books will last as long as there are enough men in the world worthy of having them.”9 I fear that when I first acquired the three paperback volumes in the Penguin Classics edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (translated by Dorothy L. Sayers), I was not a person worthy of having them. I did not exactly step over them as uninteresting stones along my path. Still, as assigned reading in a required general education literature course as an undergraduate student, I experienced them more as a chore to complete than as a rare find to rejoice over. Years later, however, I felt a yearning to read them again—this time in an unforced and unhurried way for pleasure, instruction, and edification, rather than as an imposition with a looming deadline. On this second reading, I discovered an exquisite stone with the most elaborate and pleasing pattern—indeed, many of them. Joy!
Something mystical also happened. The Inferno begins:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.10
Dante is evoking the psalmist’s observation that an average human life span is around seventy years. (“The days of our years are threescore and ten,” Psalm 90:10.)11 By “midway this way of life,” in a poetic manner Dante is telling us how old he was when this adventure he is about to narrate happened. As Dorothy Sayers puts it, “at the age of 35, the middle point of man’s earthly pilgrimage of three-score and ten years.”12 Here was the mystical moment that caused me to feel vibrations from the realm of the spirit: I suddenly realized that, after having ignored Dante for fifteen years, I had serendipitously found my way back to him when I was thirty-five years old. Some deep, mysterious current of grace knew that midway through my life it was time for me to examine the trajectory it was on and to ponder whether it was the right road to take into eternity.
George MacDonald has often been called a mystic.13 And, strangely, with this book of his I have had a second such mystical moment. I read The Diary of an Old Soul once years ago—and enjoyed it. I had even picked up and stored away a few poems, or lines from them, like prized stones, forever mine to cherish and to share. Therefore, when Jon Boyd, an editor at InterVarsity Press, approached me about doing an annotated edition of the book, I eagerly agreed. As I began to think about The Diary of an Old Soul in a more scholarly way, however, it eventually occurred to me that I needed to know how old MacDonald had been when he wrote it. The answer turned out to be fifty-five—the exact same age that I am now that The Diary of an Old Soul has come back to me. Indeed, I have been fifty-five years old the whole time I have been rereading it, preparing these annotations, and writing this introduction. In my fifty-fifth year, quite serendipitously, I have found myself accompanying George MacDonald through his fifty-fifth year.
Which leads on to the secondary and more commonly used title that MacDonald gave to this book, The Diary of an Old Soul. MacDonald was, of course, playfully evoking a double meaning. An “old soul” is a phrase for someone who is wise beyond their years. MacDonald, however, is also using it literally to express the fact that he is—or at least feels—old. I am with MacDonald on this one. My mother-in-law and father-in-law are both active, independent, and able to take care of themselves (and each other), despite being in their nineties. So I know what people mean when they hear someone in his fifties complain that he is old, and they confidently retort, “You’re not old!” Yet, at the age of fifty-five, I have felt old in a substantially different way than I did just a few years ago. Perhaps if I wait patiently for the Lord, my youth will be renewed like the eagle’s (Psalm 103:5): “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31). Or, as MacDonald poetically puts it: Slowly travelling, his way through centuries winning—/ A child at length arrives at never ending birth (July 10). In these poems, George MacDonald lets breathe both his sense of aged weariness and his full confidence in the renewing power that comes to those who have faith in Jesus Christ. Here is the entry for October 16:
Now I grow old, and the soft-gathered years
Have calmed, yea dulled the heart’s swift fluttering beat;
But a quiet hope that keeps its household seat
Is better than recurrent glories fleet.
To know thee, Lord, is worth a many tears;
And when this mildew, age, has dried away,
My heart will beat again as young and strong and gay.
Like the biblical Psalms, one of the delights and strengths of these poems is the way that they give voice to the deflating emotions, feelings, experiences, and struggles that we all have sometimes. I lay last night and knew not why I was sad (December 6). One of the enduring strengths of this book is the way that MacDonald, generation after generation, continues to give voice to things that readers also feel.
Which leads on to MacDonald’s main title, A Book of Strife. Again, MacDonald does not mean the battle of life in the exterior, concrete way that we often think of it—the struggle to make a living, to get the roof repaired, to try to patch up a relationship with a prickly member of the extended family, to sort out some tiresome travel arrangements, and so on. The word strife appears eleven times in these poems, but it is meant to evoke a different kind of obstacle in the battle of life—destructive doubts, questions that perturb us, temptations, besetting sins. Already in the first month of the year, MacDonald is confessing: Sometimes, hard-trying, it seems I cannot pray—/ For doubt, and pain, and anger, and all strife (January 14). By the end, this strife could sometimes combine with the tiredness of feeling his age. Here is the poem for December 1:
I am a little weary of my life—
Not thy life, blessed Father! Or the blood
Too slowly laves [washes] the coral shores of thought,
Or I am weary of weariness and strife.
Open my soul-gates to thy living flood;
I ask not larger heart-throbs, vigour-fraught,
I pray thy presence, with strong patience rife.
That poem is addressed to God, and many of the poems in The Diary of an Old Soul are also prayers. Perhaps, like Augustine’s Confessions, the entire book is being spoken to the Almighty. Sometimes I found that I could not resist imagining titles for some of the poems that are readily identifiable as prayers: for instance, The Tempted Sinner’s Prayer (May 11), or A Prayer of Consecration (September 25; October 14 also fits that title well). More whimsically, I have imagined the entry for May 24 as The Introvert’s Prayer:
O God of man, my heart would worship all
My fellow men, the flashes from thy fire;
Them in good sooth my lofty kindred call,
Born of the same one heart, the perfect sire;
Love of my kind alone can set me free;
Help me to welcome all that come to me,
Not close my doors and dream solitude liberty!
And one poem (November 15) I even have come to think of as A Prayer for When We Feel We Cannot Pray:
My poor clay-sparrow seems turned to a stone,
And from my heart will neither fly nor run.
I cannot feel as thou and I both would,
But, Father, I am willing—make me good.
What art thou father for, but to help thy son?
Look deep, yet deeper, in my heart, and there,
Beyond where I can feel, read thou the prayer.
I have tried to make clear what MacDonald is not doing in The Diary of an Old Soul: he is not following the liturgical calendar, nor the seasons of nature, nor a cycle of scriptural readings. I have one last category to add to that list. Though The Diary of an Old Soul is in many ways a collection of prayers, it is not a book of the standard petitionary prayers that people are often apt to bring before the Lord. MacDonald is not
