Visiting with the North Wind

 

Nothing went wrong at the back of the north wind. Neither was anything quite right, he thought. Only everything was going to be right some day.

- At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

A young boy, Diamond, wakes up in the middle of the night feeling his bed shaking and blasts of the north wind. He wondered if the house would fall down. The wind was getting in through a small chink in the wall, and blew about him all night. The other side of his wall was the north wind.

I felt a lot like Diamond the other night as Hurricane Milton swept through Florida, bringing the north wind slamming against the wall of my bed as well, causing me to go without sleep and wonder about my home falling down. This story came to my mind during the long night of the hurricane's visit, so I decided to pick this book up again to re-read. It was quite perfect timing. I love when a situation is more personal and pressing and a book speaks to its reader in a recast deeper light. The illustrations are stunning as well, from Arthur Hughes in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition of the late 1800s.

The North Wind is personified as a beautiful women with long, flowing hair. She can shift herself to different appearance and sizes, showing up to Diamond differently each time. Sometimes a tiny breeze blowing the petals of a primrose. Sometimes as a giantess lifting him up to the sky for a big task. She takes him into the sky on adventures to view her work, the things she is told to do. As the North Wind, she obeys her Creator, no matter how cruel it may seem to other unknowing eyes. 

This book is the perfect avenue by which MacDonald can deal with tough questions of suffering, good/bad, and what is nature if it is not good or bad? From the angle of a child asking the North Wind question after question, each reader finds they are asking the same questions. Why would the wind, if it were good, blow a mighty squall to destroy a ship and kill many people? Why would the wind sweep the dark streets of London, causing a little girl to topple over as she tried to broom the walkways?

"But you're kinder to me, dear North Wind. Why shouldn't you be as kind to her as you are to me?
"There are reasons, Diamond. Everybody can't be done to all the same. Everybody is not ready for the same thing."

Everybody is not ready for the same thing. The wisdom in that. There are reasons, and we cannot possibly know all the reasons. We cannot see all things and what is to come. The North Wind does what she is told, it might mean something that seems to be cruel, and yet she knows she is part of a bigger story and she is playing her role. It's a difficult idea to grapple with, and George MacDonald does it so well through fantasy, using a child to be the image of innocence and the question factory that we are deep within. 

Is the wind good, bad, or exempt from such a label? How do we judge good and bad? Diamond accepts North Wind freely and quickly but then pauses when she does something to him that seems cruel. Yet later in the story you read how that event impacted something later, which would not have come to pass if not for the event caused by the wind. Here we play our part that browse ideas of God's sovereignty, being above all time and space, yet allowing suffering to take place. We cannot understand fully.

Through a fantasy story, MacDonald uses a beautiful way to showcase such questions. Instead of abstract ideas you cannot grasp, you meet a young boy and the personified wind, and have a few adventures to explore wisdom higher than us. These are the stories that sit with us for years, providing wisdom beyond the tale and come out again later in new senses of clarity.