In this latest episode of his YouTube series, “A Spell in the Library,” Malcolm reads and muses upon “The Healing of Harms,” the final chapter of The Silver Chair. The passage includes a poignant scene where Jill and Eustace find themselves walking in Aslan’s country, after the aged King Caspian’s death: “Then they saw that they were once more on the Mountain of Aslan, high up above and beyond the end of that world in which Narnia lies. But the strange thing was that the funeral music for King Caspian still went on, though no one could tell where it came from.” The sorrow of the music brought tears to their eyes, even in the presence of the beauty of Aslan. Later they watched Caspian rise from the river into new life, at Aslan’s call, resurrected in a new creation.
In recent years, we have sorrowed and rejoiced in the passing of so many whose lives and homes have been centers of our common gatherings and joys throughout our lifetimes. On the Comstock side, Candace’s parents Junior and Phyllis Comstock, Aunt Bernidene, Uncle Charles, and many others, old and young (Emily, Lorie, Jeff). On the Magruder side, the five Magruder siblings and all their spouses except one, and several others. My parents Jack and Sue Magruder. Charles and Eileen Magruder, Steve, Charles III. Marjorie and Ernest Glass. Carolyn Baughman. Mitchell Magruder. Joe and Dorothy Potter. Charlie and Aleta Fountain. Dale and Joyce Brimer. And several from my own generation and younger still. Friends we have known from early in our lives are beginning to part from us also (Lee).
Time is precious. They loved us well. Their loss is as inexpressible as the joys remembered. The New Creation feels more like the home we long for now.
As we have carried these griefs and sorrows, I have found consolation in Malcolm Guite, Love Remembers: 40 Poems of Loss, Lament, and Hope. I prize all of Malcolm’s books, but this one is special — like David’s Crown, do not miss this. As with his superb anthologies on Advent and Easter, this book features poems by a variety of contributors: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Luci Shaw, Scott Cairns, George Herbert, Holly Ordway, Christina Rossetti, and N.T. Wright, among others. With a few pages of reflection, Malcolm opens our hearts to the meaning of each poem and each poet’s story. The poems and reflections are grouped into the categories of “before and beyond the threshold of death”; “the shock of loss”; “loving lament,” the “bitter-sweet experience of loving through sorrow”; “remembrance of things past,” when “everything reminds us, painfully or poignantly, of the beloved”; “letting go”; and finally “receiving,” when the “veil lifts, we glimpse the goodness of things deepened and sharpened by sorrow.”
Malcolm cautions that these are not phases of grief. And true, indeed, in my experience they are shuffled all about and I found myself reading them in any order, and repeatedly. In the first six months after my father died last fall, no matter how I was feeling, there was always one that matched what I needed… one short chapter that was not too burdensome for a weary evening. This is a book I will live with, returning to often amidst life’s sorrow and beauty, until I myself awake in Aslan’s Mountain.
“But if you believe that the Son of God died and rose again, your whole future is full of the dawn of an eternal morning, coming up beyond the hills of this life, and full of such hope as the highest imagination for the poet has not a glimmer of yet.” — George MacDonald, Proving the Unseen, p. 9.
Update: (The following paragraph is a composite of part of what I’ve written to two friends when sending them a copy of the book.)
Malcolm’s poetry has sustained me through the last 15 years to the degree that I consider him a pastor. All of his poetry books. Over the last year, this one has kept me going, after the loss of my parents in recent years. I hope the poems and reflections in it will be a consolation to you, too. I have lived with this book in hand this past year, and expect to do so again for a few years, if not perpetually, whenever I, too, feel existential grief or simply the gaping hole of their physical absence. I don’t think we get over grief; it just becomes interleaved with remembrances of joy, like one of those honey pastries from the Middle East — baklava. Or the coffee and deliciousness of tiramisu, my favorite desert. My phone rotates wallpapers of my Mom and Dad (and others of us, especially Candace and Ethan). But that is only one way of many that they are still with me. I depend on their affirmation and encouragement all the more, despite the poignant loss of the ability to sit beside them or give them a call. Several times a week I find myself instinctively thinking I want to call them, before a split-second later remembering that while they can hear me, I cannot hear them. Yet we are still together in the invisible yet real “communion of the saints.” I do believe they are with us and helping us and we are not left on our own in the family of God. I am so glad that they now understand our lives completely and (I believe) see the goodness we can’t imagine that lies ahead. We cannot wound them with our sorrows. To know that they can share our sorrows but with hope undiminished is better, in one way, than if they were still here.
