In a world sinking in a malaise of consumerism, mass-production, digital fatigue and naturalistic materialism, there is a unique appeal to the ‘enchanted world’ that some people see so clearly, and have tried to share with the rest of us.
Admittedly, Sara Crewe and Anne Shirley did so thanks to the human authors who imagined them, but Crewe and Shirley are in good company with a very real human, G.K. Chesterton. These three share a light-footed, open-hearted and starry-eyed embrace of the unbelievable world that God created, and this author is persuaded that embracing it and loving it will bless your soul.
Let’s keep this brief, and hopefully sparkly! Sara Crewe is a young girl with outstanding manners who was raised carefree in India with her father Ralph Crewe. He sends her to England to boarding school, and her vivid imagination creates waves amongst the brow-beaten boarding school girls. It gets interesting when her father is alleged MIA, and she is treated not as a star pupil but as a poor beggar girl. It is at this point, when she has an absolute lack of physical wealth, that the quality of her character is tested, and the reliability of her imaginations and fancies are put to the test. Admittedly, it isn’t healthy to ignore or suppress the reality of something and comfort yourself with lies, but what makes Sara laudable and compelling is that she is not satisfied in mere things, or mere duties, or bare facts. She can’t be bought with money, she can’t be flattered with praise and she can’t be discouraged by scorn because her heart belongs to ‘another world’ (the name of one of the best songs from the musical adaptation of the book). This blesses the shy and teased girls around her with a good friend, and it frustrates the haughty students and cruel spinster headmistress because she can’t be moved with the conventional levers.
This kind of virtue does not ultimately belong to fiction, but ultimately it belongs to every single human being who has been given the immeasurable security of knowing that they are held in God’s hand. If you, dear reader, have peace with God through faith in Christ Jesus for your salvation, then you have every reason to be as self-assured, as joyful, as patient and as gracious as Sara.
Anne Shirley is an endearing mess. She is an orphaned young girl whose vigour and thirst for adventure and initiative often lands her in various scrapes and foils. At first, she’s a pain in the neck to her new carers, but not from any malice on her part. She can’t just go to school, she has to name each gravel track and each hedgeway and give it a fantastical name and think about magical characters that might live there. A lake can’t just be a lake, it has to be the ‘Lake of Shining Waters’. She can’t simply refer to the housekeeper as Rebecca or Becky, she would only use her full name (‘Rebecca Dew’) because it just sounds so delightful and quaint. It is just so fitting to her that it would be a crying shame not to use it. This author loved Shirley (and therefore the Anne of Green Gables book series from which she appears) from the first moment he encountered her, and it wasn’t until he finished the second or third book in the series that the similarity to Sara Crewe became obvious.
Some readers may say, ‘It is all well and good for you to enjoy the nostalgia of fanciful little fictional characters whose lives are entertaining to read about, but it isn’t appropriate for adults with responsibilities to get carried away in fairy-tales’. Well, O grinch, we beg to differ! After all, is it true or false that we live in a world in which water sometimes streaks down from the sky and everyone pretends that’s normal? Is it fact or fiction that we see green shoots spring out of the ground, and then without request or support or brush or paint produce multicoloured flowers, and then have those glorious flowers give off a delightful fragrance, and then see those flowers produce edible fruit? Yet you will tell us that the world we live in is not magical and gobsmacking?
Well, if you think that babies and infants are odd for having a permanent expression of wonder on for years, and you O adult are the normal one for being jaded at the chrysalis that produces a butterfly, then you are the fool, and the baby is the one responding correctly.
Finally, this author was greatly pleased to finally meet G.K. Chesterton in his own words when listening to Orthodoxy at work recently. There is this one paragraph from his book, and whilst you may have heard it before, since it is very widely quoted, we will not withhold it from that lucky reader who may not yet have heard it. So, here is Chesterton:
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
We’ll try to wrap this up. This author enjoys enjoying. There is such a richness to be found in simply recognising the unlikeliness and the fulness of the world that God made around you, friend. The sovereign God waves the tree branches as you walk past them, and he fluffs up the clouds like couch cushions when guests are coming over, and you can and should enjoy that and thank him for it. He loves your gratitude—but wait, he also loves your joy. So, hear it this way. All beauty in Heaven and on Earth belongs to Jesus. Therefore, go and make merriment in all places, seeing them and naming them with obstreperous adjectives, turning each one of them back to God in praise, and his Spirit of Joy will be with you, even to your old age. Amen.
Distilled Orthopraxy 