George MacDonald was born December 10, 1824. He wrote At the Back of the North Wind, The Light Princess, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie, all fairy tale/fantasies for children. I’ve read all four of these, and I like best The Light Princess, the story of a princess who was cursed at birth with “no gravity,” both in the literal and the figurative sense. I tried to read one of MacDonald’s romances a long time ago, but I don’t remember finishing it. C.S. Lewis was quite fond of MacDonald’s adult fantasies, Phantastes and Lilith. I think I also tried one of these long ago but didn’t understand it (which proves that I’m not C.S. Lewis’ intellectual equal, not that I ever thought I was). MacDonald also had a long and successful marriage which produced six sons and five daughters.

Some people think it is not proper for a clergyman to dance. I mean to assert my freedom from any such law. If our Lord chose to represent, in His parable of the Prodigal Son, the joy in Heaven over a repentant sinner by the figure of ‘music and dancing’, I will hearken to Him rather than to man, be they as good as they may.” For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.”

I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God’s name; who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to His children… The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart.”

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness —the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

How do you cultivate “Sacred Idleness”? What does that mean to you? Or is it just blather?

Geroge MacDonald also wrote a book poetic devotionals, one devotional poem for each day of the year. The poem for December reads thus:

What makes thy being a bliss shall then make mine
For I shall love as thou and love in thee;
Then shall I have whatever I desire
My every faintest wish being all divine;
Power thou wilt give me to work mightily,
Even as my Lord, leading thy low men nigher,
With dance and song to cast their best upon thy fire.

If it helps, I believe the poem is addressed to God.