Wild Grows the Heather in Devon

by Michael Phillips

  “Ye’re more than welcome at our humble home as often as ye can come,” rejoined Bobby. “We’d be honored t’ have ye visit us oftener even than every month.”

  “Thank you!” laughed Diggorsfeld. “That is indeed a wonderful offer! Perhaps I shall move to Devon and see if I can find a small chapel down here in want of a pastor.”

  “But why do you get discouraged, Mr. Diggorsfeld?” asked Maggie.

  The pastor sighed. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. McFee,” he said. “I consider the pastorate the highest of possible callings. I am greatly blessed to be entrusted with such a lofty responsibility and privilege as conveying the Gospel into the lives of men and women.”

  “But you spoke of discouragement.”

  “My people, God bless them, are goodhearted souls for the most part. But they are incapable at times of seeing this simple truth that your husband has spoken—that a practical do must be associated with belief. Without this do, it is impossible to live from moment to moment in the reality of the goodness of the Father. Some, as Sir Charles knows, try to live that do by passing out leaflets. Occasionally I join them, as I told you before, Charles, to show my support for their enthusiasm. But to move their vision beyond such a superficial level has proved a great challenge—one I do not feel I have met with much success.”

  “But ye’re a shining light, Mr. Diggorsfeld,” said Bobby, “a man o’ uncommon insight and sensitivity.”

  “Thank you,” smiled the pastor. “I feel the same about you. But I daresay not everyone in your community might recognize you as such.”

  “Ye’re right there,” laughed McFee. “Most o’ the folks hereabouts think I’m a bit off my nut!”

  “Not surprising. It takes commonality of heart to apprehend the true depth of another man or woman. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Aye, I would.”

  “Hence the discouragement I spoke of. When people are not dwelling in that vital center—the center of the Father’s goodness—religion becomes a tedious affair. I’m afraid my words grow tedious in the ears of my parishioners as well. This is my fear and my heartache for my people—that many of them do not know that vital, pulsating foundation which is the mainstay of life—the center of the Father’s goodness.”

  “Ah . . . I see it now.”

  “So they go about living a religion rather than a reality, more afraid of the Father than abiding in his love. They fear hell to a greater extent than they are convinced of his power to give life. They yet exist more in their negative and largely erroneous perceptions of God’s nature than in the goodness and love which define his character.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “I must confess,” said Jocelyn at length, “that I struggle with how to do as you say. After what you say about the people of your congregation, I am hesitant to admit it. But it is very difficult for me to keep that goodness ever before me. The negative perceptions, as you call them, so easily intrude.”

  “Don’t feel awkward to say it, Lady Jocelyn,” said Maggie tenderly. “We all struggle with it.”

  “But you’ve been a Christian for years,” said Jocelyn, turning toward her hostess.

  “Yes. And the struggle to believe in God’s goodness remains the hardest part of living as a Christian from day to day—even after a lifetime. Would you agree, Mr. Diggorsfeld?”

  “It is a universal problem,” acknowledged the pastor. “The human constitution seems to incline itself naturally downward and toward low interpretations. This tendency results in Christians basing their theologies more on hell than on God’s redemptive power. It explains why his goodness is so quick to vanish from their considerations at the slightest bump in the road of life. It makes them believe so readily that God is responsible for cruelty, either to themselves or to others, though such a thing is a logical impossibility.”

  “You say it’s impossible for God to be the initiator of something that’s cruel?” repeated Maggie.

  “O’ course,” put in her husband. “Cruelty and God are opposites. ’Tis impossible for them t’ have dealings together.”

  “Well put, Mr. McFee!” rejoined Diggorsfeld.

  “But how can we know God has to be good?” asked Jocelyn. “After Charles explained his prayer of acceptance to me two years ago, I eventually realized that I too wanted to give my heart to the Lord. But I did so on faith, not because I suddenly saw everything differently. I know God is good. I have accepted it. But that too I accepted on faith. When doubts come, that is the first point where my faith is attacked.”

  “Such is natural,” replied the pastor, “exactly as Mrs. McFee has said. I face the struggle too.”

  “But I want to know that God must be good,” Jocelyn went on, “—that there is no alternative, that it is impossible for him to be evil no matter what happens. Is it possible to know that? Can we know he is good no matter how bad things may seem, no matter how much suffering I or anyone faces?”

  “I think you have said it most eloquently. I think it is indeed possible to know it.”

  “But I only expressed it as a point of puzzlement,” rejoined Jocelyn. “I don’t know if I could be victorious in the midst of a trial like Job’s.”

  “Not many can do that, Lady Jocelyn,” said Bobby.

  “Then my question for you remains: how can we know God is good?” persisted Jocelyn. She paused and took a deep breath as if preparing to plunge into cold waters.

  “Timothy, I know you must have noticed my face,” she went on after a moment, “although you are kind enough to pretend not to. How could you not notice? Well, this . . . disfigurement . . . remains a struggle for me to understand. Charles has convinced me that I must learn to thank God for it, and I try, but half the time I must do so only out of obedience. That this mark could be a sign of God’s goodness and trustworthiness . . . well, that still remains very difficult for me to grasp in a practical way.”

  Again she paused, then went on. “I do see his goodness around me,” she said. “That Charles loves me, that I have a home and family and friends, that the downs and the woods are so beautiful—all this, as you have said, tell me of God’s goodness. But I see things that confuse me too. Not just my birthmark, but the pain I have seen in the hospital where I worked, the poverty and sickness of the people in India, where I grew up. The cruelty one person shows to another.

  “So you say we can know that God is good, all the time, and in all things. But my question to you is still how?”

  “You’ve asked the question that has most puzzled both common men and women as well as theologians for millennia,” replied Diggorsfeld thoughtfully. “I don’t believe there are any easy answers.”

  “But you think there are answers?”

  “I believe that answers exist for every conundrum it is possible for the human brain to pose.”

  “If I came to you, then, as an unbeliever, and asked this—How can we know God is good? . . . what would you tell me?”

  53

  Life—A Good Thing

  Diggorsfeld considered Jocelyn’s question for several moments. No one else seemed inclined to speak. He knew this was no abstract point of theory for his friend’s wife, but something her new faith hungered passionately to understand.

  “That what is fundamentally evil cannot create out of nothing,” Timothy answered at length.

  “I’m sorry—I’m afraid I do not see the connection,” said Jocelyn.

  “Even atheists and pure chance evolutionists would generally agree that life is a good thing. Wouldn’t you say so, Charles?” he added, turning toward Jocelyn’s husband.

  Charles thought a moment. “I’m afraid I’ll have to reflect on that,” he said. “It’s not something I have really considered before now.”

  “Look at it this way, then,” Diggorsfeld continued. “Evil could not have brought about life, because life is good. Whatever creative power exists in the universe, somehow life came about from original nothingness. For that to have happened, good mus
t be at the root of it. Evil could not, by definition, have produced something as remarkable and inherently good as life itself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because evil has no life of its own. It is only corrupted good.”

  “Might not someone argue,” Charles asked carefully, “that life, rather than being inherently good, is simply random, good mixed with bad? I only raise the point because for so long I myself adhered to the theory of chance. So I pose the question to advocate for the devil, as it were.”

  “They could argue that,” replied Diggorsfeld, “but only illogically. If you thought in such fashion at one time, Charles, then I would say you did so having abandoned logical reason.”

  Charles laughed. “I would not contest your assertion.”

  “Creation produces beauty—that is good,” Diggorsfeld went on. “Life sustains and reproduces itself—that is good. Love and compassion and kindness exist—they are all good. No theory of randomness can explain them. Any thorough observation of what we see around us—even a nonspiritual one—resoundingly validates good as being far more in evidence than evil.”

  “But you would agree that evil is present in the midst of the good?”

  “Of course. But as a secondary thing. The good is foundational, the evil only a parasite living off the decaying fragments of its edges.”

  “What about death?” now asked Bobby.

  “Death all the more proves the point that good is the foundation of all things.”

  “I’m afraid I do not follow you at all,” laughed Charles. “Death seems to me the most compelling argument against a universal goodness.”

  “Quite the contrary,” rejoined Diggorsfeld. “Death proves a foundation of goodness in the universe.”

  “What—how so?”

  “Actually . . . I do not even believe in death.”

  “Because of eternal life, you mean?” said Maggie.

  “There is that. But I mean that even were I not a Christian, I would still say death as a thing in and of itself does not exist at all.”

  “You say death does not exist!” exclaimed Charles.

  “No—I said as a thing in and of itself, death does not exist.”

  “But death is all around us.”

  “I will respond to your perplexity by posing another question: What do you consider death to be?”

  The others all thought a moment.

  “Is it not merely the end o’ life as we know it?” suggested Bobby.

  The others thought and one by one nodded their heads.

  “Exactly,” said the pastor. “You see, death is not something that can exist on its own. To repeat my point from earlier—it is a parasite, a corruption. The very word signifies nothing as a thing you can isolate and look at. It only means the moment when life ends. Without life—which I still maintain is inherently a good thing—there is no death, no evil, no bad, no wickedness, nothing to go what we call wrong. Therefore, even death and evil and badness and wickedness all prove that a good foundation exists upholding the universe. Without that good foundation, none of the bad things could be there at all.”

  “More even than that,” put in the Irishman, “—’tis a mysterious doorway into yet more and better life t’ come. So what looks like a cruelty t’ us, in reality is the best part o’ life o’ all.”

  “Bravo, McFee!” exclaimed Diggorsfeld. “Yes—that is the triumphant reality. Another reason not even to believe in death!”

  “But if I may continue to ply the devil’s counterargument,” said Charles, “might I ask something further?”

  “Of course.”

  “I still am uncertain how you can maintain that because life exists, it is good. I think many would disagree with you there.”

  “You are right. Many would. And I suppose that at some point one does have to take one’s essential foundational beliefs on faith. And yet I believe that life itself must be seen by any rational, thinking, reasonable man or woman as essentially a good thing. Surely the existence of life implies—no, necessitates—a causative, foundational, creative Good at the back of it. People can say differently. Many modernists and humanists do say differently. But I contend that there is no evidence to back up their assertions. They have their conclusions formed and they express views based upon their backwards logic, without ever examining the real world in a truly rational manner. The evidence of life is all on my side of the argument—validating, everywhere you look, the existence of a good foundation in the universe.”

  “But what is that evidence?”

  “Care to answer that, Mr. McFee? I think I detect a twinkle in your eye.”

  The Irishman chuckled. “It seems t’ me,” he replied, “that nothing more nor less than our rich fellowship here, and the bonding o’ our hearts in brotherhood over tea and good talk together, offers the very proof we’re looking for. When ye look at the thing reasonably—like ye yerself say, Mr. Diggorsfeld, with the logic o’ the brain—wouldn’t ye all say that when individuals get t’ know one another in a right way, love is produced?”

  He glanced about. Heads nodded.

  “Are not our human hearts at this moment warm toward one another?” Bobby went on. “When we eat food, like my Maggie’s scones with clotted cream that we had with our tea, not only ’tis the experience pleasurable, the food sustains life and makes us strong. What can that be but good? Food, fellowship, strong bodies, pleasure, beauty—there’s the evidence o’ goodness in front o’ our eyes!”

  Again he was greeted with nods of agreement.

  “Ye see, food doesn’t make us sick and weak. It strengthens these bodies o’ ours. ’Tis a good thing.”

  “Exactly,” said Diggorsfeld. “The created world may contain pain—indeed, we know it does!—but is not the world still more intrinsically beautiful than it is ugly? All these things, and ten thousand more, argue constantly that good is behind it.”

  Since posing her initial queries, Jocelyn had listened to the rest of the discussion intrigued. This was no abstract philosophical discussion to her ears, but the very breath of life. This was the question she had wrestled with all the days of her existence, it seemed—the question of how Goodness could have produced a face like hers.

  If she could only get to the bottom of it, she thought, then all would be well. If she could only understand the mysterious relationship between good and evil and know beyond doubt that good was the supreme of the two—then truly could she give thanks for the fingerprint God had placed upon her, however much pain it brought with it. If she could but know that mark as coming from the hand of Good, she could rest and be grateful.

  This evening’s fellowship and discussion had begun to open the door into the revelation of that truth. It was one which would slowly and quietly change her life—even more than her conversion had. For as she began from this evening forward to take hold of the undeniable fact of the Father’s goodness in a new way, the eyes of her understanding would open to much she had been unable to see before.

  “But what about when something truly awful happens?” she now asked, “A child being taken in a cruel death, or an accident in a mine that kills hundreds of men . . . how does one believe in God’s goodness at such times?”

  “I think we may well ask why,” replied Diggorsfeld. “Asking God why things happen is, it seems to me, an integral part of what it means for a mortal to walk in faith, for we wouldn’t ask if we didn’t have faith that God knows the answer! But we do not see as God does. Much appears evil and unfair to our obscured sight. But we are nevertheless commanded to walk in faith, trusting in his sight more than we trust in our own. We can and perhaps should ask him why, as long as we trust him even when answers may be slow to come.”

  “But how, in the midst of that, do we keep sight of the fact that he is good?”

  “I do not think the question Why? necessitates doubting God’s goodness. We may ask why. I think it is even good and appropriate to ask why, as a necessary part of our prayer-dialogue with God. But we mus
t not doubt his goodness—that is, not without its eventually eroding our faith.

  “God’s goodness is and must remain the foundation. With the underpinnings of goodness and trustworthiness solid, any number of questions, even doubts, even crying angrily to God as Job did—all these are allowed.

  “Job cried out Why? to God in a hundred ways. Yet he retained the foundational belief in God’s sovereignty in the face of his whys and his doubts. His wife told him to curse God and die. Job replied, No, God is good, though I do not understand his ways. The two expressions of uncertainty are very different. Asking a good God why is a legitimate aspect of faith. We may question why to the depths of our beings, yet without questioning the Father’s goodness. The foundation of goodness remains, even amid a sea of unanswered whys.”

  While Mr. Diggorsfeld was speaking, Maggie had risen quietly to refill the kettle. Another round of tea and scones soon followed, and the discussion gradually drifted into other channels, though it continued to give all five much to think about.

  As Charles, Jocelyn, and Timothy Diggorsfeld made their way back to Heathersleigh Hall in the small carriage in the moonlight two hours later, Diggorsfeld remarked, “You have extraordinary friends in those two. You are most fortunate.”

  54

  Adventure in the Loft

  Young Catharine Rutherford enjoyed nothing more than an adventure with her older brother and sister. And for Catharine at five years of age, everything was an adventure.

  From her very earliest years, even though George was a boy and the oldest, Catharine had recognized that when both brother and sister were present, Amanda was the acknowledged leader. On the present afternoon, however, George led the way as all three young Rutherfords found themselves exploring together in the stables. Such exploring was not one of Amanda’s favorite pursuits. But on this day little in the house had amused her. So she and Catharine wandered out after lunch to join their brother.