“But we never can know/the delights of his love/until all on the altar we lay.” Therein lies the chief boon of total submission. To go out into deep waters is to go fishing with Jesus himself. And who could ask for more?

It’s no surprise that I love a good poem. Words have power. We Christians, of all people, should understand this. Strung together, words are not like a pane of glass that simply reveals things as they are in naked fact. A great sentence, or poem, or even novel, is much more like a painting. Words draw out to the surface aspects of reality that demand contemplation and response. George MacDonald, the writer C.S. Lewis called “his master”, went so far as to say that God created the world with certain metaphors in mind. To MacDonald, to compare the righteousness of God to the mountains is not an act of creative license. God made the mountains as He did so that we could have an alphabet by which to interpret the truth of divine righteousness. For MacDonald, the world was pregnant with the glory of God. To see a rock rightly was not to see a mere chunk of stone. A true vision of granite is a better vision of God. If God is the Rock of Ages, how could we not see through the stone into a deeper layer of reality?

I’m not sure that I would take things quite as far as MacDonald; nonetheless, I love the spirit of his thinking. Christians need more than a sanctified will and a sanctified intellect. They also need a sanctified imagination. Just as Lewis needed his own imagination to be baptised by MacDonald, we, too, need to find writers who can purify our minds until we appreciate the beauty of truth and the truth of beauty.

Read More