"We're all growing into our eyes"

Lanier writes an especially thought-provoking post this week. "Beyond Our Ken" is a reflection on the modern experience of the unexplainable. It made me want to pull out my old George MacDonald books and reread all of them.

Why is the average modern life so strangely insulated from the unexplained? 

Is it because we’re all inside watching TV? “Distracted from distraction by distraction”? Or have we grown too old and wise as a race to admit that there are things in this world—things Scripture is silent on and Science can’t explain—that we will never understand till we shake off this mortal coil? As Christians we are fortified by the promise that we’re peering through a glass on the eternal verities, that God in his grace has given us a view from a window the world can’t see. But it’s a dark glass, and things pass before it that our time-bound vision just can’t distinguish yet. Like a character in a George MacDonald fantasy, we’re all growing into our eyes and learning the meaning of a dual citizenship. We’re learning to see what’s at the end of our nose.

***

Over at The Rabbit Room, Andrew Peterson posted an excerpt from one of George MacDonald's sermons, which, I think, expresses beautifully what MacDonald says in all his other prose, poetry, and fantasy:

For a moment, imagine such a friend as you would like. Imagine the perfection of the ideal of your soul. I do not care, for a moment, how low you are. I know that a creature that God made must imagine an ideal. I say if you are the lowest and most sensual creature in the world, imagine honestly, what you think your ideal man to be. Then I say to the loftiest of you, dream your highest dream, your highest ideal, your loftiest dream, your most glorious fancy, if you will, of what a friend, a man, a hero, and a perfect human being might be, and he is standing at your door, and knocking to get into your heart, only he is a thousand times grander than it is possible for you to think. He is always knocking and always wanting to get in. It seems to me that we are surrounded on all sides by an infinite sea of truth and love, pressing on all sides of us, in order that we might be benefited thereby.

If you're new to MacDonald, I recommend starting with The Princess and the Goblin and The Wise Woman. (And if you're hesitant to start, it's worth noting that this was the man who inspired C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. You can't go wrong!)