Miss Montague

While spending the past two days in pure delight, including more tears than I ever shed before over this story, lost in the pages of Elizabeth Goudge's novel The Dean's Watch, the most recent of many readings of the book, I have become suddenly enamored with the frail and elderly Miss Montague.   Why now?  I met her years ago and have always appreciated her place within this story.   But somehow, this time, the beauty of her character shone out so brightly that the deep in her called to the deep in me; without it being named by the author (this is Elizabeth Goudge's special gift) I know it is nothing less than the dazzling love and light of Christ.

Miss Montague, though frail and elderly when we meet her, is not the least frail or failing in her qualities of faith and love.  We are told her story from her girlhood and we learn how her inner strength and beauty were hard won over many decades of battle with life and self.  

Curious to find out if others out there in the big wide world might share my profound admiration and love for this late-nineteenth-century lady, Miss Montague, I went exploring.   There is no lack of material to be found, and you, too, can find as much or more.   To whet your appetite,  I share a few selections below with links that you can visit if you are feeling particularly adventurous.

Billy Graham, I was surprised to discover, evidently reads Elizabeth Goudge, for he mentions Miss Montague in his book The Secret of Happiness.

I also found Miss Montague described quite lovingly in a 2004 newsletter from St. Ignatious Orthodox Church here.   Indeed, Miss Montague's approach seems to fall quite in line with what little I understand of the Eastern Orthodox way of things.  And since that has now become the Way upon which I very willingly go, I am doubly encouraged in it.

Some of you already know the blogger Lanier and will not be at all surprised to read what she has to say about The Dean's Watch.

So what, you may be asking, is it about Miss Montague that draws me so?  She achieved the rare beauty of a life fully surrendered to God.  How many of us even know what that really means?  In my own life the struggle continues, and it has taken me 60 years to even begin to appreciate the depths of meaning behind those words "fully surrendered to God" and the small glimpses I've been graced with have only made me desire this all the more.

Elizabeth Goudge must have walked a similar path, for listen to how knowingly she writes about Miss Montague . . .

  So she took a vow to love. Millions before her had taken the same simple vow but she was different from the majority because she kept her vow, kept it even after she had discovered the cost of simplicity. Until now she had only read her Bible as a pious exercise, but now she read it as an engineer reads a blueprint and a traveler a map, unemotionally because she was not emotional, but with a profound concentration because her life depended on it. Bit by bit over a period of years that seemed to her long, she began to get all her scaffolding into place. She saw that all her powers, even those which had seemed to mitigate against love, such as her shrewdness which had always been quick to see the faults of others, her ambition and self-will, could by a change of direction be bound over in service to the one overmastering purpose. She saw that she must turn from herself, and began to see something of the discipline that that entailed, and found too as she struggled that no one and nothing by themselves seemed to have the power to entirely hold her when she turned to them. 

It was then that the central figure of the Gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over another period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that He had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, behind the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of His love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself.  She could say, "I have been turned," and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.

Here is truth.  Here is love,  Here is deep and abiding joy that is centered only in God, the source and fountainhead of everything.  Here is glorious servanthood of the creature to the Creator.

To which, my prayer has been and remains

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; 

seek Your servant, 

for I have not forgotten Your commandments.  

Psalm 119:176