Event Calendar

George MacDonald’s (1824-1905) influence as an author of looms so large in modern literature as can hardly be described. He was a mentor to Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), friend with Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. He is a noted influence of such varied authors as Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Madeleine L’Engle, W.H. Auden, G.K. Chesterton, Oswald Chambers, and Thomas Merton (and dozens more besides). A Scottish minister by trade, MacDonald himself wrote dozens of works of fiction, multiple compendiums of poetry, and several works of theology. But MacDonald is best known, even today, for his fairy tales.
Of course, to label his stories as ‘fairy tales’ is to risk their immediate dismissal by ‘serious’ adults. ‘Such silly stories are for children,’ they think, ‘surely there is no benefit to my reading them.’
“I do not write for children,” answers MacDonald, “but for the childlike, whether of five, fifty, or seventy-five.” True, his tales are full of whimsy and playfulness, of princesses and goblins and treasures and fairies. And true, many a child has found herself lost in the worlds he paints with his pen. Yet MacDonald’s work is equally marked with the severity, even the cutting edge of truth. A fairy tale takes place in a world with laws of nature quite different than our own- but a fairy tale is powerful, MacDonald argues, precisely because of what laws remain the same. Laws like truth and beauty. Laws of justice and of courage. The law of love- and indeed of sacrifice. These wondrous truths of our daily lives, and of the gospel, so often buried in the mundane, are encountered afresh in MacDonald’s work.
This is what fiction, and especially fantasy, does so well. It steals us away from ourselves and our preoccupations, and surprises us in a world we do not know, in order to reintroduce us to the world we do, with all its forgotten wonders reclaimed. The truth we stumble upon in fiction is like a rough diamond set high in a new setting: suddenly, for a moment, we have a chance to see what has always been before us.
This Lent we will be spending four weeks reading the shorter stories of George MacDonald and reflecting on the truths of the gospel found therein. Three of our favorite speakers from last year will be joining us again, along with several new voices. During our fifth session, we will hear from a pair of modern authors who are crafting new fairy tales for the sake of church, and hear their take on the role of fantasy in the formation of Christian faith. This will be an exceptional Lenten series, and we hope you will join us for it.