The Heart of the Family: Week 3
Memory, Work and Repentance with the Eliots
“Lately he had been trying to follow Lucilla’s advice in the matter of memory, and now he deliberately tries to remember those curtains.
Suddenly subterranean laughter filled his soul and he smiled…”
Elizabeth Goudge, The Heart of the Family, ch 13
Last time at the Herb of Grace
The end of David and Sebastian’s visit to the Herb of Grace in The Heart of the Family, the third Eliot book, is full of revelations for each character, but perhaps particularly for their guest, Sebastian. So many good things to talk about today - and an invitation to talk in person next week! See the end of this post for the Zoom link!
Revitalizing Work
“But it was the stout strength of the kitchen that had impressed Sebastian. This room had known for generations the meaning of hard work. Backs had ached here, carrying pails of water from the well, loads of wood, heavy baskets of apples and pumpkins. Women had worked early and late, washing and ironing, baking their bread and brewing their wines, worked until they had hardly had a leg to stand on.
Men had dropped asleep on the settle by the fire, worn out after a long day driving the plough or cutting the corn. He was aware of past labour much as Caroline was, only in her day-dream there were no backaches, no sense of the driving obstinate force that seemed to make this room a physical power house. How surprised those men and women would have been if they had known how the stored-up energy of their bodies revitalised his own now that theirs were dust.”
Elizabeth Goudge, The Heart of the Family, ch 13
Sebastian is telling us about the heart of the working kitchen at the Herb of Grace, but Goudge is telling us about the sacredness of ordinary life. We each have tasks just like these each day for the keeping of our bodies, and Goudge does remind us of their holiness, and that our energy today will go to strengthen the bodies and homes of the next generation, whether because they are our own children we raised on meal after meal, or people who will live in our homes which we care for, or who will someday read from our own books glean from our pencil notes when they pick them up at a garage sale. Goudge reminds us that it all matters, each vital moment is meaningful.
We see this in the flesh when Sally has a quiet moment with Mrs Wilkes while they are waiting for David and all to return home:
" Sit down, Mrs. Wilkes," said Sally, indicating the basket-chair that had been put ready beside her, waiting for David when he should come back again.
Mrs. Wilkes sat… a sigh escaped her, a sigh so small that it might have been breathed by Meg as she dropped off to sleep, so weary and yet so satisfied that it might have been that of a released soul escaping into paradise. It shocked Sally, and she dropped a stitch. Did Mrs. Wilkes never sit down?
To eat, of course, but that was no rest to a woman whose mind during the first course was with the pudding in the oven, and during the second course was already shrinking from the thought of washing up. Never like this, in a hidden garden with sun and shade playing about her, in a stillness with no sound to break it but the distant murmur of a quiet sea.”
The Heart of the Family, ch 14
It is as though Mrs Wilkes stands in for all of those who have gone before her—working each day at what needs doing, showing perseverance and endurance, making something out of nothing, and being exactly what history needs her to be.
Significantly, Sally starts in this moment to find what she needs as well—the steadiness of Mrs Wilkes to walk her through the fear and pain of childbirth. Sally, who has no mother, has found a woman upon whom she can depend.
Shame leading to repentance
“It was with compunction that he remembered how he had tried to avoid Jerry and Jose, and with horror that he remembered how a short while ago he had wanted to strike the mouth of a smiling child. Hilary had talked cheerfully about the last of the chaff. What would he have thought of such hatred of the innocent? Hatred of the haters was bad enough, a wind blowing upon flame, but hatred of the innocent was murder most foul. He had never felt so ashamed of himself.”
The Heart of the Family, ch 13
We see Sebastian beginning to unravel at the Herb of Grace. He is putting all that he has learned so far from Lucilla and Hilary into immediate practice. He finds joy by letting himself remember the curtains of his old home, and now he realizes that he had not right to hate healthy children. His grief is beginning to unravel before our eyes, and soon he will find his guide home…
“…And so we come to the symbolic figure of the White Deer... I possess a box from Germany with his picture painted upon it, and a little carved statue of him, no bigger than a walnut, that is one of my greatest treasures...”
Elizabeth Goudge for Wings, April 1948
Sebastian and the White Deer
One of the most profound spiritual breakthroughs of the book seems to come in chapter 13 not to an Eliot at all, but rather to their guest, Sebastian. He steps into the chapel at the Herb of Grace with the twins and is struck by the beauty of the frescos which remind him of all the beautiful things he has seen in the past:
“How Europe loved the story! Sebastian wondered how many representations of it had had seen, sublimely pictured in great churches at Canterbury, Abbeville and Paris, humbly pictured in the carvings and paintings of peasant craftsmen in Bavaria and Austria. He had had a wooden box on his study table in the house in the mountains, with a crude picture of the stag and the kneeling man painted upon it by a man in the village. Reading music, correcting a score, he had often picked it up and held it in his hands, amused by the crudity and yet touched by the devotion of the kneeling figure. The children had loved to play with the box, and he had told them the story a hundred times. Yet he had never seen it portrayed as movingly as here.
Or else he had not until now reached the point in his own journey through the wood when he heard the words spoken to himself. He did now. He saw every thought of hatred that had ever formed in his mind as an arrow in the body of that stag, and saw the body quivering. Yet the worse the pain the more brilliantly the light shone.
Though it was day in the wood, it was night behind the stag, and as with the flight of each arrow the darkness deepened, so the light increased. No wonder Saul of Tarsus had been blinded by it. Eustace the hunter had galloped all day in the wood, and when at last the chase was over and the creature turned at bay, it was seen to be one with the Creator and Redeemer of all creatures. Men defaced in the creatures the beauty and love they longed for and did not know what they were doing…”
Elizabeth Goudge, The Heart of the Family, ch 13
Interesting that Goudge wrote her own box into Sebastian’s story, and also that she gives him the right to tell us about Christ as the suffering deer. Goudge saw Sebastian, who has lost every worldly thing and experienced the torture of a concentration camp, as the best candidate for letting us know about God’s abundant love — a love which shines all the more brilliantly with each injuring arrow.
Love to hear your thoughts as we near the end of the Eliot trilogy!
Book Chat for the Eliots
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