Our Cosmic Vigil
George MacDonald's Understanding of the Meta-historical Human Fall Contrasted with that of Father John Behr
“Red in tooth and claw” describes a condition that is sadly familiar to my own grasping and demanding heart. In this heartlessly self-serving world of ours, we are all here together to learn to walk the new pathway of God’s self-emptying love. All of history as we know it—about 13.8 billion years of it according to the Lambda-CDM model recently reaffirmed by the Stony Brook and Atacama Cosmology Telescope international collaboration—is just one nighttime prayer for help and guidance. As “The Starlight Night” by Gerard Manley Hopkins teaches us, our hearts need continually to turn and to set out anew for the true prizes: “Prayer, patience, alms, vows.” These offer the only starlight within the dark night of our souls. George MacDonald writes in Lilith:
Every life is a vigil. . . .Your existence here is a long, patient watching for the morning. You call it a fallen world, and so it is, but its fallenness is the very laboratory of your creation.
A fellow reader, Amy Hunt, has recently been researching the meta-historical human fall with me. She pointed me to several passages in MacDonald’s fairy tale The Golden Key where a boy named Mossy and a girl called Tangle find themselves both “longing after the country whence the shadows fell.” Such visions from MacDonald connected profoundly with C. S. Lewis and inspired him in countless ways including within The Great Divorce. As Amy and I continued to share thoughts and readings, the extent of MacDonald’s understanding and exposition of a meta-historical human fall within multiple texts such as Lilith and “The Creation in Christ” (Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3) became more and more clear.
