George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a Scottish preacher, poet, essayist, and writer of both realist and fantasy fiction. He was a great influence on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the latter of whom published, in 1946, a compilation of MacDonald’s theological writings excerpted from his sermons, novels, and other sources. “I know of hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself,” Lewis wrote in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology.
MacDonald is best known for his fairy tales, such as The Princess and the Goblin (my entrée to the author as a child, via a 1991 animated film adaptation from Wales) and Phantastes. But more recently I have been appreciating his devotional poetry.
While in his fifties, MacDonald published A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880), a collection of 366 short, original, untitled devotional poems, one for each day of the year. (Read it for free online.) Addressed to God, these poems voice discouragement, weariness, restlessness, desire, doubt, and trust. MacDonald asks God for healing and refreshment; for a vulnerable, stripped-down soul, clothed anew in Christ; for salvation from his stubbornness and folly; for guidance through his dark night of the soul; for rightly ordered loves; for Christian growth. He searches for God, confesses his sinful tendencies, praises God for God’s love and faithfulness, and prays for words when words fail him.
Below are my favorite selections—some full poems, some just single lines or excerpts—from MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul, which is in the public domain. The headings are my own, to aid in navigating more easily to different topics, and the trifold dividers mark separate entries.
When the book was printed privately in 1880, all the left-hand pages were left blank to encourage thoughtful reader responses; “Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,” MacDonald wrote in the dedication. I’d encourage you, too, to grab a journal and record your own prayers and reflections prompted by any of these verses, or simply to copy out the lines that resonate. And songwriters and composers: I can see potential for musical settings here!
A New Song
Barb thou my words with light, make my song new.
Seeing with the Inner Eye
That thou art nowhere to be found, agree Wise men, whose eyes are but for surfaces; Men with eyes opened by the second birth, To whom the seen, husk of the unseen is, Descry thee soul of everything on earth. Who know thy ends, thy means and motions see: Eyes made for glory soon discover thee.
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Lord, in the land of things that swell and seem, Help me to walk by the other light supreme, Which shows thy facts behind man’s vaguely hinting dream.
God Transcends All Imagining
What the heart’s dear imagination dares, Thou dost transcend in measureless majesty All prayers in one—my God, be unto me Thy own eternal self, absolutely.
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Oh, let me live in thy realities, Nor substitute my notions for thy facts, Notion with notion making leagues and pacts; They are to truth but as dream-deeds to acts, And questioned, make me doubt of everything.— “O Lord, my God,” my heart gets up and cries, “Come thy own self, and with thee my faith bring.”
Be My All
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 Him and by Him All Things Consist
Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll; Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea; My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul; I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee. Oh breathe, oh think,—O Love, live into me; Unworthy is my life till all divine, Till thou see in me only what is thine.
Practicing the Presence of God at Work
Two things at once, thou know’st I cannot think. When busy with the work thou givest me, I cannot consciously think then of thee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Therefore I make provision, ere I begin To do the thing thou givest me to do, Praying,—Lord, wake me oftener, lest I sin. Amidst my work, open thine eyes on me, That I may wake and laugh, and know and see, Then with healed heart afresh catch up the clue, And singing drop into my work anew.
“The life is more than meat, the body more than raiment”
Thy will be done. I yield up everything. “The life is more than meat”—then more than health; “The body more than raiment”—then than wealth; The hairs I made not, thou art numbering. Thou art my life—I the brook, thou the spring. Because thine eyes are open, I can see; Because thou art thyself, ’tis therefore I am me.
On Prayer
Sometimes, hard-trying, it seems I cannot pray—
For doubt, and pain, and anger, and all strife.
Yet some poor half-fledged prayer-bird from the nest
May fall, flit, fly, perch—crouch in the bowery breast
Of the large, nation-healing tree of life;—
Moveless there sit through all the burning day,
And on my heart at night a fresh leaf cooling lay.
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In my dead moments, master, stir the prayers.
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My prayer-bird was cold—would not away, Although I set it on the edge of the nest. Then I bethought me of the story old— Love-fact or loving fable, thou know’st best— How, when the children had made sparrows of clay, Thou mad’st them birds, with wings to flutter and fold: Take, Lord, my prayer in thy hand, and make it pray.
Prayers in Times of Spiritual Destitution
When I no more can stir my soul to move,
And life is but the ashes of a fire;
When I can but remember that my heart
Once used to live and love, long and aspire,—
Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
And in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.
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There is a misty twilight of the soul,
A sickly eclipse, low brooding o’er a man,
When the poor brain is as an empty bowl,
And the thought-spirit, weariful and wan,
Turning from that which yet it loves the best,
Sinks moveless, with life-poverty opprest:—
Watch then, O Lord, thy feebly glimmering coal.
A Prayer for Joy in All Circumstances
Do thou, my God, my spirit’s weather control; And as I do not gloom though the day be dun, Let me not gloom when earth-born vapours roll Across the infinite zenith of my soul. Should sudden brain-frost through the heart’s summer run, Cold, weary, joyless, waste of air and sun, Thou art my south, my summer-wind, my all, my one.
A Prayer for Victory over Temptation
Haste to me, Lord, when this fool-heart of mine Begins to gnaw itself with selfish craving; Or, like a foul thing scarcely worth the saving, Swoln up with wrath, desireth vengeance fine. Haste, Lord, to help, when reason favours wrong; Haste when thy soul, the high-born thing divine, Is torn by passion’s raving, maniac throng. Fair freshness of the God-breathed spirit air, Pass through my soul, and make it strong to love; Wither with gracious cold what demons dare Shoot from my hell into my world above; Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear, And flutter far into the inane and bare, Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, and clear.
A Prayer for Endurance through Trials
Thou wouldst not have thy man crushed back to clay; It must be, God, thou hast a strength to give To him that fain would do what thou dost say; Else how shall any soul repentant live, Old griefs and new fears hurrying on dismay? Let pain be what thou wilt, kind and degree, Only in pain calm thou my heart with thee.
A Prayer for Sanctification
Lord, in my silver is much metal base, Else should my being by this time have shown Thee thy own self therein. Therefore do I Wake in the furnace. I know thou sittest by, Refining—look, keep looking in to try Thy silver; master, look and see thy face, Else here I lie for ever, blank as any stone. But when in the dim silver thou dost look, I do behold thy face, though blurred and faint. Oh joy! no flaw in me thy grace will brook, But still refine: slow shall the silver pass From bright to brighter, till, sans spot or taint, Love, well content, shall see no speck of brass, And I his perfect face shall hold as in a glass.
A Prayer against Workaholism
Help me to yield my will, in labour even, Nor toil on toil, greedy of doing, heap.
“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light”
I cannot see, my God, a reason why From morn to night I go not gladsome, free; For, if thou art what my soul thinketh thee, There is no burden but should lightly lie, No duty but a joy at heart must be: Love’s perfect will can be nor sore nor small, For God is light—in him no darkness is at all.
God Our Mother
. . . Weary and worn, Why not to thee run straight, and be at rest? Motherward, with toy new, or garment torn, The child that late forsook her changeless breast, Runs to home’s heart, the heaven that’s heavenliest . . .
Faith and Doubt
Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind! My soul in storm is but a tattered sail, Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale; In calm, ’tis but a limp and flapping thing: Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing,— To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the wind Nor rest until in thee its haven it shall find.
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Ever above my coldness and my doubt Rises up something, reaching forth a hand: This thing I know, but cannot understand. Is it the God in me that rises out Beyond my self, trailing it up with him, Towards the spirit-home, the freedom-land, Beyond my conscious ken, my near horizon’s brim?
New Life
If thou hadst closed my life in seed and husk, And cast me into soft, warm, damp, dark mould, All unaware of light come through the dusk, I yet should feel the split of each shelly fold, Should feel the growing of my prisoned heart, And dully dream of being slow unrolled, And in some other vagueness taking part. And little as the world I should foreknow Up into which I was about to rise— Its rains, its radiance, airs, and warmth, and skies, How it would greet me, how its wind would blow— As little, it may be, I do know the good Which I for years half darkling have pursued— The second birth for which my nature cries.
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“Wake, thou that sleepest; rise up from the dead, And Christ will give thee light.” I do not know What sleep is, what is death, or what is light; But I am waked enough to feel a woe, To rise and leave death. Stumbling through the night, To my dim lattice, O calling Christ! I go, And out into the dark look for thy star-crowned head.
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Lord, wake me up; rend swift my coffin-planks; I pray thee, let me live—alive and free.
Rooted in Christ
Thou in my heart hast planted, gardener divine, A scion of the tree of life: it grows; But not in every wind or weather it blows; The leaves fall sometimes from the baby tree, And the life-power seems melting into pine; Yet still the sap keeps struggling to the shine, And the unseen root clings cramplike unto thee.
Dying to Self
Lord, I have fallen again—a human clod! Selfish I was, and heedless to offend; Stood on my rights. Thy own child would not send Away his shreds of nothing for the whole God! Wretched, to thee who savest, low I bend: Give me the power to let my rag-rights go In the great wind that from thy gulf doth blow.
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Lord of essential life, help me to die. To will to die is one with highest life, The mightiest act that to Will’s hand doth lie— Born of God’s essence, and of man’s hard strife: God, give me strength my evil self to kill, And die into the heaven of thy pure will.— Then shall this body’s death be very tolerable.
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With every morn my life afresh must break The crust of self, gathered about me fresh; That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh The spider-devils spin out of the flesh— Eager to net the soul before it wake, That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.
Lost Sheep
Things go not wrong when sudden I fall prone, But when I snatch my upheld hand from thine, And, proud or careless, think to walk alone. Then things go wrong, when I, poor, silly sheep, To shelves and pits from the good pasture creep; Not when the shepherd leaves the ninety and nine, And to the mountains goes, after the foolish one.
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”
Keep me from wrath, let it seem ever so right: My wrath will never work thy righteousness. Up, up the hill, to the whiter than snow-shine, Help me to climb, and dwell in pardon’s light. I must be pure as thou, or ever less Than thy design of me—therefore incline My heart to take men’s wrongs as thou tak’st mine.
Spiritual Riches
Lord, in thy spirit’s hurricane, I pray, Strip my soul naked—dress it then thy way. Change for me all my rags to cloth of gold. Who would not poverty for riches yield? A hovel sell to buy a treasure-field? Who would a mess of porridge careful hold Against the universe’s birthright old?
The Prodigal God
Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou! Sunset faints after sunset into the night, Splendorously dying from thy window-sill— For ever. Sad our poverty doth bow Before the riches of thy making might: Sweep from thy space thy systems at thy will— In thee the sun sets every sunset still.
God’s Stability
Father of me, thou art my bliss secure. Make of me, maker, whatsoe’er thou wilt. Let fancy’s wings hang moulting, hope grow poor, And doubt steam up from where a joy was spilt— I lose no time to reason it plain and clear, But fly to thee, my life’s perfection dear:— Not what I think, but what thou art, makes sure.
God’s Universality
Where should the unknown treasures of the truth Lie, but there whence the truth comes out the most— In the Son of man, folded in love and ruth? Fair shore we see, fair ocean; but behind Lie infinite reaches bathing many a coast— The human thought of the eternal mind, Pulsed by a living tide, blown by a living wind.
Searching for Pleasure
Ah, me, my God! in thee lies every bliss Whose shadow men go hunting wearily amiss.
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I see a little child whose eager hands Search the thick stream that drains the crowded street For possible things hid in its current slow. Near by, behind him, a great palace stands, Where kings might welcome nobles to their feet. Soft sounds, sweet scents, fair sights there only go— There the child’s father lives, but the child does not know.
Perfect Love
Thou dost demand our love, holy Lord Christ, And batest nothing of thy modesty;— Thou know’st no other way to bliss the highest Than loving thee, the loving, perfectly. Thou lovest perfectly—that is thy bliss: We must love like thee, or our being miss— So, to love perfectly, love perfect Love, love thee.
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Lord, with thy breath blow on my being’s fires, Until, even to the soul with self-love wan, I yield the primal love, that no return desires.
Surrender
O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. Take me and make a little Christ of me.
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O Master, my desires to work, to know, To be aware that I do live and grow— All restless wish for anything not thee I yield, and on thy altar offer me. Let me no more from out thy presence go, But keep me waiting watchful for thy will— Even while I do it, waiting watchful still.
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My Lord, I have no clothes to come to thee; My shoes are pierced and broken with the road; I am torn and weathered, wounded with the goad, And soiled with tugging at my weary load: The more I need thee! A very prodigal I stagger into thy presence, Lord of me: One look, my Christ, and at thy feet I fall!
Freedom
So bound in selfishness am I, so chained, I know it must be glorious to be free But know not what, full-fraught, the word doth mean. By loss on loss I have severely gained Wisdom enough my slavery to see; But liberty, pure, absolute, serene, No freest-visioned slave has ever seen.
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So shall abundant entrance me be given Into the truth, my life’s inheritance. Lo! as the sun shoots straight from out his tomb, God-floated, casting round a lordly glance Into the corners of his endless room, So, through the rent which thou, O Christ, hast riven, I enter liberty’s divine expanse.
Receptivity to the Spirit
Faith opens all the windows to God’s wind.
Aging
O Life, why dost thou close me up in death? O Health, why make me inhabit heaviness?— I ask, yet know: the sum of this distress, Pang-haunted body, sore-dismayed mind, Is but the egg that rounds the winged faith; When that its path into the air shall find, My heart will follow, high above cold, rain, and wind.
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Thou, healthful Father, art the Ancient of Days, And Jesus is the eternal youth of thee. Our old age is the scorching of the bush By life’s indwelling, incorruptible blaze. O Life, burn at this feeble shell of me, Till I the sore singed garment off shall push, Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.
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My harvest withers. Health, my means to live— All things seem rushing straight into the dark. But the dark still is God. I would not give The smallest silver-piece to turn the rush Backward or sideways. Am I not a spark Of him who is the light?—Fair hope doth flush My east.—Divine success—Oh, hush and hark!
Death
God, thou from death dost lift me. As I rise, Its Lethe from my garment drips and flows. Ere long I shall be safe in upper air, With thee, my life—with thee, my answered prayer, Where thou art God in every wind that blows, And self alone, and ever, softly dies, There shall my being blossom, and I know it fair.
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I was like Peter when he began to sink. To thee a new prayer therefore I have got— That, when Death comes in earnest to my door, Thou wouldst thyself go, when the latch doth clink, And lead him to my room, up to my cot; Then hold thy child’s hand, hold and leave him not, Till Death has done with him for evermore.
The Diary of an Old Soul represents only a fraction of the poetry George MacDonald wrote. To explore more, see The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, vols. 1 and 2 (1893). Seeing as next year is the bicentenary of his birth, I expect to be hearing his name a lot more!
Art & Theology 