Enough to bear the sinking ships

Hello friends. Here I am again and it is well into 2025 already and I have nothing to say for myself but that life goes on. A recent reminder of a quote from George MacDonald has been enough to bring me back for a little post though. I came upon it in this substack, which you might want to read if a post called ‘Eternal Longings of the Human Soul’ reaches for you. I have long been under the spell of George MacDonald, and he is an author I turn to when I need to stoke my soul alive.

As well as what that substack post says about the ache we all feel and whether it points to any reality beyond what we experience, I found the quote below to say something also to the age old dilemma of human suffering also, which I have heard anew from several sources of late. The more I read and hear the more it seems that no theologian or philosopher has ever found an answer that satisfies all the questions people will go on asking, and there is many a sinking ship in the world around me at present, both in global affairs and in the personal lives of people I know. But to say that the whisper of that far off song, from somewhere that we sense to be infinitely beautiful, though we catch it only intermittently on the wind, is enough to be able to bear the cries from drowning ships, is something I find to be somehow true (while as yet having no explanation for and grieving the sinking ships). It probably won’t satisfy the philosophers, but the song has indeed been “quite enough” for those who have heard it.

I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.’

~ George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind