Halfway through Lent, we heard the Gospel reading where Jesus tells his disciples twice, in fairly stark and violent terms: If you do not repent, you will perish.
Then he tells them a story: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For three years now, I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’
He said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilise it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not, you can cut it down.’”
If the fig tree (you and me) isn’t just failing to bear fruit; it’s exhausting the soil around it. It’s hurting the other trees and crops nearby by taking without giving back. It should be destroyed, says the owner of the garden.
The gardener (Jesus) agrees that the fig tree shouldn’t be allowed to go on this way. It must bear fruit—repent—or it should perish. But note something extremely important: he doesn’t just insist that it should repent. He doesn’t even just give it extra time to repent. He comes and helps it. He gives it what it needs so it can, if it will, turn things around before it’s too late.
This reading dovetails so nicely with a short book I recently re-read: The Lost Princess by George MacDonald. It’s not as well-known as his excellent longer “princess” books, the two Curdie books or The Light Princess, but I think it deserves more attention than it gets.
To summarise without spoilers: Two young girls are raised by disastrously indulgent parents. One girl, Rosamond, is a princess, who has become monstrously selfish and capricious, terrorising the whole household. The king and queen are at their wits’ end with their daughter’s violent temper, so they summon a wise woman to help them. She abducts Rosamond and takes her on a brutal journey of self-knowledge and self-control, with many trials and many failures.
Then we are introduced to the second girl, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife, who isn’t openly monstrous, but she is so profoundly self-satisfied, she doesn’t really believe anyone else is real. She, too, is taken in by the wise woman for cultivation, and at some point, the shepherd girl and the princess switch roles, with varying consequences. At the end, both girls are returned to their homes to live the lives they have chosen.
The story, being Victorian, is pretty openly preachy. The narrator frequently delivers little lessons about life directly to the reader, which was the style at the time. But if you think of it as a sermon with a compelling and entertaining story, rather than a story that preaches at you, it’s wonderful, and harrowing in the best way—and don’t get me wrong; the fiction stands up on its own and isn’t solely a vehicle for a message. It has some scenes and some imagery that have stayed with me for 40 years or longer, and that have not lost any of their power when I read again it last week.
One such scene is when the wise woman returns, after having left the princess alone in a cottage with a list of chores she must do in order to earn food and drink, and to keep herself warm and secure. It’s nothing extraordinary; just basic cleaning up and caring for her surroundings.
But the princess is in full rebellion and disdains to do any work—or hardly any. She spends most of her time complaining and protesting, bargaining and blaming, and being miserable as a result. But she does make one feeble attempt to wipe the table before giving up. And that is all she manages until the wise woman returns.
“The wise woman walked straight up to the heart, looked at the fire, looked at the bed, glanced round the room, and went up to the table. When she saw the one streak in the thick dust which the princess had left there, a smile, half-sad, half-pleased, like the sun peeping through a cloud on a rainy day in spring, gleamed over her face.”
As a child very much like Rosamond, at least in my head, I took this passage to heart. I remembered that the wise woman understood completely what had happened—all the protesting, bargaining, despair, and rebellion that Rosamond puts herself through in order to avoid any kind of work, even to make herself more comfortable.
And when there is some evidence that she has done something, the wise woman not only notices it; she feels it deeply. She is rooting for Rosamond and wants to teach her how to become better. She wants to cultivate her, and she takes it personally.
MacDonald, as in many of his books, portrays the wise woman in such a compelling way that it will heal your image of what a holy woman is, if that needs healing. The figure in the story is not Mary, although she shares some characteristics with Mary. She is, I suppose, Wisdom herself, who is often portrayed as a woman in scripture. This passage and others like it made it clear to me that, when God wants more from us, it’s because he wants more for us.
What a needful message for halfway through Lent. There is still time. But not an endless amount of time. We must bear fruit, and if we don’t, we will perish. But the one who is wiser than you does not want you to perish. There is work to be done. But not done alone; help is here.
There is also, in this book, the acknowledgement that the girls’ terrible flaws are not really their fault. Their parents, without meaning to, brought them up poorly, and that is why they are so awful. The “soil” of their surroundings was not fertilised or cultivated. But just because the girls are in some way victims, that doesn’t mean they’re off the hook, and should just continue on being awful.
This is something modern audiences especially need to hear. Yes, your upbringing and your circumstances and the actions of others all affect who you are now. But who you are now is what you have to work with. Your past is not a free ticket to continue being terrible. Even if only for your own happiness, you will have work to do.
That is, in fact, one of the major themes of the book—and one which is not explicitly and repeatedly stated: That we all affect each other. One person’s sin ripples outward and has painful, sometimes horrific effects on other people, like the barren fig tree exhausting the soil. The princess, in particular, discovers this truth in the most horrific way when she’s put to the test in one of the Wise Woman’s “mood chambers.” She doesn’t just have to learn about herself; she has to understand that what she does matters for other people, because they are important, too.
If your Lent is faltering a bit, and you need a change of pace from the typical types of spiritual reading that everyone recommends, I suggest finding a copy of The Lost Princess. If Jesus himself told his disciples stories to illustrate a point, then it must be a legitimate way to learn! And I have yet to meet anyone who read this book and didn’t end up thinking about it for the rest of their lives.