Tributes from Friends
October, 2003
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I had been an occasional correspondent of Kathryn's for many years, and later, always received her Christmas letter. So I felt that we were friends although we never met in the flesh; and she was of course on my prayer list. She did come to some of our Mythopoeic Society conferences before her illness made her less mobile; she was a scholar Guest of Honor in 1974 and one of several Special Guests in 1982.

LION OF JUDAH IN NEVER-NEVER LAND was one of the first books I ever read about my favorite author CS Lewis. I also thought that FINDING THE LANDLORD was an excellent guide to Lewis' rather difficult book, PILGRIM'S REGRESS.

May the Lord bless her deeply as she moves "further up and further in" and may he also comfort John and her sons.

Mary S

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Kathryn now has - or is experiencing moment by moment - her full reward. But it will ever become more and more full, and fullness in God cannot be measured. The universe may be ever expanding, how much more the joy of those enclosed by His Heart.

John Mitchell

From a letter written by George MacDonald to Eva Pym, 28 September 1889:

I loved and love your father and look forward to having many talks with him yet. He is out of our sight, but God sees him alive - and many who love him also see him alive; and when our time comes to go - not like the demons out into the void, but home, home, home! we also shall see and love him more than ever. For God goes on to be good. He never changes, nor cares less, for his children one time than another. We come into the world to learn to love, and have done with taking care of ourselves; and he whose one desire is to have his children love, cannot take them from each other after they have learned to love each other. The thing is not to be reasoned about; it does not need it.

From a letter written by George MacDonald to Adelaide Pym, 8 February 1890:

We are all just children in our Father's nursery. Some of us are taken before others away from it, and we are left without our playmates. But we know the father has them, and though we must miss them constantly, we must remember that we shall be sent for by and by, and must be patient waiting to be ready to go. You know all this as well as I do, but let us think it together.

What is all this life but a waiting? You who have suffered so much, must know that better than most! For myself, I have never been content with this world as a place to live in. I mean it has always, more and less, had the feel of a foreign land. The feeling has not been caused by much suffering, neither by any sense of outside failure. No doubt the world has been less satisfactory because of my own evil and great lack; but allowing for all that, there remains a something that indicates that it was never intended to be our home, and we were never intended to feel at home in it.

We must not then be unhappy when one of us goes to make the others happier who have gone before, and were waiting for them, and are now waiting for us to join them! The very notion of heaven is to have all we love with us, and God is just carrying out that notion for us, by gentle recurrent removals as we are ready to go. It seems so commonplace when said to a sore heart - missing heart - but surely what you and anyone like you, and in such sorrow, needs is to "have your pure mind stirred up by way of remembrance." But God has a marvelous bliss, and yet a very homely one, waiting for us. Be sure it will run in the old grooves, but the grooves will be of gold and gems, not of iron and clay.

I think we shall talk of all the old times with the hearts of divinely glad little ones - and sometimes wonder that we made such a work about certain things. We shall have everything, for the father who loves us, and is himself, as Dante calls him, "the glad creator," will see that his dear little ones are happy indeed, and have all they want. It will be safe then to give us all we want, for we shall not forget him, or forget that he gives us EVERYTHING. And then what a thing it will be to feel our bodies as free, as little held down and oppressed, as our better part!

Of course the great joy of heaven will be the same as that of this world - to know God and to be what he is; but we shall know him so much better then, and know how foolish it was of us to be troubled about anything when HE was looking after everything! There will be no question whether life is worth living to those who know what life means.

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''Sympathy''

Grief held me silent in my seat;
I neither moved nor smiled:
Joy held her silent at my feet,
My shining lily-child.

She raised her face and looked in mine;
She deemed herself denied;
The door was shut, there was no shine;
Poor she was left outside !

Once, twice, three times, with infant grace
Her lips my name did mould ;
Her face was pulling at my face - -
She was but ten months old.

I saw ; the sight rebuked my sighs ;
It made me think - - Does God
Need help from his poor children's eyes
To ease him of his load?

Ah, if he did, how seldom then
The Father would be glad !
If comfort lay in theÊeyes of men,
He little comfort had !

We cry to him in evil case,
When comfort sore we lack ;
And when we troubled seek his face,
Consoled he sends us back ;

Nor waits for prayer to rise and climb - -
He wakes the sleeping prayer ;
He is our father all the time,
And servant everywhere.

I looked not up ; foreboding hid
Kept down my heart the while ;
'Twas he looked up ; my Father did
Smile in my infant's smile.

''Sympathy''
from 'Organ Songs'
by George MacDonald as found in Poetical Works, volume one

Submitted by Richard Rowan