First, briefly: my apologies for the long hiatus!
A general theme that I have noted throughout these poems since I started reading them back at the beginning of June is God’s work on us; God’s use of our lives and of events in our lives to mold us and shape us. My sense of the past few weeks is that in a broad sense, the poems have been more of the same. So also the poems for the past week (say we begin with the poem for last Saturday, July 12). The poems for this week seem more dire than ever: the July 13 poem, if I read it correctly, refers to suicide (“Some break rude exit from the house of life”), in response to the situation described on July 12 (in which a “rapid turn of thought/May throw the life-machine all out of gear”). July 14 is a prayer against this, and a declaration of confidence: “Thy child should never fear though hell should gape.” Where July 12 imagined God as an engineer, July 15 and 16 imagine God as a house-builder, rather beautifully: “Where I am most perplexed, it may be there/Thou mak’st a secret chamber, holy-dim,/Where thou wilt come to help my deepest prayer."
MacDonald expresses great confidence in God, related to his apparent belief in what a theologian would call “meticulous” providence. There are several different accounts of God’s providence, the way God orders the world and creates outcomes. “Meticulous” providence holds that God controls absolutely everything that happens, down to the smallest detail.
During my first year of seminary, my systematic theology prof had us each choose a doctrine about or attribute of God to study, and I chose God’s providence; my prof had me read the relevant sections of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (namely, chapters 16, 17, and 18 of part 1). Calvin found great comfort in the doctrine—the world is so full of dangers, but Christians may be confident that no ill will befall them besides what is from the good and gracious will of God. (See especially chapter 17, sections 10 and 11.)
This is the kind of attitude that MacDonald shows in the July 17 poem: “I cannot tell why this day I am ill;/But I am well because it is thy will.”
I am not, personally, a believer in meticulous providence. I do not believe, as Calvin did and as MacDonald seems to have, that (for example) each illness we suffer is from God. But I do believe that God works in us and on us and around us in ways that we cannot now see and may only later understand. God’s will for us is good, and God will bring about God’s will, and we need not fear—“though hell should gape."
