A New Year inspiration
Happy New Year to one and all! This is not really a new year post, but it is something I find rather inspirational to ponder as I do enter a new year. I am currently reading Elizabeth Goudge’s autobiography The Joy of the Snow, and I was rather taken with this description of her father from one of his friends.
Another friend, in later years Professor de Burgh, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, wrote for me after my father’s death a description of the young man he remembered.
What made the strongest impression on myself and on others, both at the time and afterwards, was his winning, radiant personality. Its influence spread around him without conscious effort on his part and largely without conscious appreciation on ours. It was not merely or mainly the brightness and vitality of youth, it was something less transient and more firmly rooted in his nature, something that sprang from constant communion with the supernatural spring of joy and hope, that reflected the light that was its source. He was so entirely free from any form of egoism, whether self-indulgence or self-assertion or self-righteousness … I never saw him show contempt for anyone or anything; though he could when occasion required express strong disapproval and even indignation. With his real modesty and simplicity of heart went a personal dignity that no one would lightly venture to offend. … Above all he was keenly interested in persons of all sorts and conditions and was ever ready to share wholeheartedly in their interest and activities. The easiness and optimism of his nature was never dimmed by his realisation of the evil and suffering of the world, for they sprang not from ignorance of the stern facts but from knowledge; from the vision that he had already seen in his youth of a city that hath foundations, of an abiding reality above and beyond the changes and chances of this earthly life.
This extract goes deeper than anything I could say and yet it is astonishing because even this close friend did not put his finger upon what was the keynote of my father’s character, and that was his courage. Because he was not an optimist. While my mother was always quite sure that everything would turn out all right he was privately very much afraid that it would not; yet he was able nevertheless to place disaster in Gods hands and leave it there; a condition of mind that he described as being ‘an optimistic pessimist’ …
And Elizabeth Goudge actually goes on to write of how he actually suffered privately from periods of darkness ...
With my introverted nature I am unlikely to be radiant personality any time soon, but I do particularly like the ‘something that sprang from constant communion with the supernatural spring of joy and hope, that reflected the light that was its source’. That is certainly something to aim for in 2020!