Today’s Poem: A Prayer for the Past

George MacDonald and the timeless generosity of God

Anders Zorn, The Prayer, 1911 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Prayer for the Past

by George MacDonald

All sights and sounds of day and year, 
All groups and forms, each leaf and gem, 
Are thine, O God, nor will I fear 
To talk to Thee of them. 
 
Too great Thy heart is to despise, 
Whose day girds centuries about; 
From things which we name small, Thine eyes 
See great things looking out. 
 
Therefore the prayerful song I sing 
May come to Thee in ordered words: 
Though lowly born, it needs not cling 
In terror to its chords. 
 
I think that nothing made is lost; 
That not a moon has ever shone, 
That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed 
But to my soul is gone. 
 
That all the lost years garnered lie 
In this Thy casket, my dim soul; 
And Thou wilt, once, the key apply, 
And show the shining whole. 
 
But were they dead in me, they live 
In Thee, Whose Parable is — Time, 
And Worlds, and Forms — all things that give 
Me thoughts, and this my rime. 
 
Father, in joy our knees we bow: 
This earth is not a place of tombs: 
We are but in the nursery now; 
They in the upper rooms. 
 
For are we not at home in Thee, 
And all this world a visioned show; 
That, knowing what Abroad is, we 
What Home is too may know?
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We know the Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824–1905) as the author of realistic novels, such as Sir Gibbie, but especially of fairy tales and other works of fantasy: At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and Curdie, The Light Princess. We recognize him, too, as an influence on the writing of Lewis Carroll, whose “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” ran as our lighter poem for last Wednesday, as well as writings of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. It was Lewis, particularly, who named MacDonald a master of the Christian imagination. In the lineage of modern Christian imaginative writing, George MacDonald is the acknowledged patriarch.

In his own time, however, MacDonald (whose 200th birthday fell on Tuesday) was a figure of theological controversy. A Congregational minister in the Calvinist tradition — though his family was a religious mix which included Catholics, Presbyterians, a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and a moderator for the Free Kirk of Scotland — he made himself unpopular in a series of ministerial positions by his preaching. His assertion, for example, that Christ’s work of atonement was meant not to deflect the wrath of God from human beings, but to obviate the cosmic problem of sin, scandalized his hearers. Even the wrath of God, he argued, was not an end in itself, a fundamental attribute of the divine nature, but a force of mercy, ordered toward personal sanctification. This wrath, he wrote, “will consume” what people suppose are their “selves,” so that “the selves God made shall appear.”

George MacDonald, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem knits MacDonald’s theological considerations to literary ones. A sense of the generous mercy of God animates these abab quatrains, with their three tetrameter lines and their resolution in trimeter. Here, the crucial aspect of God’s generosity is that it is tied to his position in eternity, outside time — also a concern of Emily Dickinson, as we have just seen in Monday’s poem — occupying a “day” which “girds centuries about.” It’s not only not futile, but perfectly sensible, the poem argues, to pray for things in the past. The very act of praying means to step out of time, into that eternal day, that larger world for which our own is only a “nursery,” that great reality in which “nothing made is lost.”

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