George Macdonald was born December 10, 1824. He wrote At the Back of the North WInd, The Light Princess, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie, all fairy tale/fantasies for children. I’ve read all four of these, and I like best The Light Princess, the story of a princess who was cursed at birth with “no gravity,” both in the iteral and the figurative sense. I tried to read one of Macdonald’s romances a long time ago, but I don’t remember finishing it. C.S. Lewis was quite fond of Macdonald’s adult fantasies, Phantastes and Lilith. I think I also tried one of these long ago but didn’t understand it (which proves that I’m not C.S. Lewis’ intellectual equal, not that I ever thought I was). Macdonald also had a long and successful marriage which produced six sons and five daughters.
Some people think it is not proper for a clergyman to dance. I mean to assert my freedom from any such law. If our Lord chose to represent, in His parable of the Prodigal Son, the joy in Heaven over a repentant sinner by the figure of “music and dancing’, I will hearken to Him rather than to man, be they as good as they may.” For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.
I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God’s name; who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to His children… The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart.
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness – the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
What things are we Christians “making bad” by not participating in them? Should we not be involved in all the “indifferent” aspects of our culture in order to redeem them and bring them under the Lordship of Christ?
Engineer Husband and I had a good laughing time tonight; it was good to laugh together.
And why can’t we all just sit still and be sometimes? I wish Engineer Husband and I could try a little “sacred idleness.” Alas, we can laugh sometimes, but true idleness seems to be beyond our abilities.