A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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      In the poem to Clyde Kilby that stands as an epigraph to this collection of his writings, Luci Shaw—one of many writers and scholars who received early encouragement from Dr. Kilby—uses two metaphors to describe the kind of experience this remarkable scholar and teacher provided for many of his students. The first is of a doorkeeper, an allusion to the imaginative entrance to the world C. S. Lewis created in The Chronicles of Narnia.

      Then you swung open for us all

      the wardrobe door,

      pushed us farther up and farther in.

      The second picture is of the man as a deep well, returning with his wife, Martha, after a summer in England, bringing

      three score

      years and ten worth of wisdom, under

      your arm—letters and Lewis-lore—

      your mind a well of wonder.

      As we prepared this book and its companion volume, The Arts and the Christian Imagination: Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics, which includes Kilby’s writings on these topics, we invited many of his former students to write of his influence on them. Many of them responded with similar language. Mark Noll also sees Kilby as a doorkeeper. For a whole generation of American evangelicals, says Noll, “Kilby opened a wardrobe onto a land of wonder where the Lion stalked.” Tom Howard continues the metaphor in describing the effect of taking Kilby’s class in Romantic poetry: “He threw open the shutters. . . . He pointed to the things that troubled the very marrow in one’s bones, but for which one never had the vocabulary to summon into visibility.”

      In the dedication of his first book, Christ the Tiger, Howard uses the language of seeing: “For Dr. Kilby, who took my arm and said, ‘Look.’” Leanne Payne continues the metaphor. Speaking of the blindness resulting from a common kind of reductive modern analysis, Payne says, “He came against this blindness in all of his courses, and his bright students, heavy into analysis and sorely introspective, dropped their blinders, looked up, and began to see.” The poet Jeanne Murray Walker uses a different picture: “I praise him for being a liberator.” Dick Taylor, a historian with the Illinois State Historical Society, sums up Kilby’s effect on him in a seminar in life writing: “I can’t remember a thing he taught me about writing biography, but my experience in that class changed my life forever.”

      As this small sampling of comments makes plain, Clyde S. Kilby was, for many students, an extraordinary teacher. It is with that fact, rather than with his early, long, and effective championing of writers like Lewis and Tolkien, that I must begin in introducing this collection of his writings on those makers of “modern mythology” (as he called it). Kilby’s greatness was not simply the result of his influence from, or defense of, Lewis, Tolkien, and friends; rather he turned to them (and turned many others to them) because they expressed a truth about God and creation that he had already come to know.

      That truth—which kept filling and refilling that “well of wonder” which was Dr. Kilby’s life—was the fact that the whole of created reality is the miraculous gift of a loving, personal, and ever-present Creator. And this was not just a propositional truth intellectually known: it was lived, experienced, and shared. Often it was experienced—and expressed—through the apparently trivial or insignificant. Several of his former students, for example, mention Dr. Kilby’s love for the dandelion, and Marilee Melvin recalls his bringing a drooping dandelion to class and asking, “in a voice filled with awe, how many of you believe that the Lord God made this dandelion for our pleasure on this day.”

      Now it is not easy for a college student of any generation, let alone a sober faculty colleague, to take seriously someone who publicly shares his awe over a dandelion; there were many who were themselves mystified by the life-changing effect Dr. Kilby had on people. Since I, too, am one of those whose life was changed by the man, I want to try to express something of the mystery of how and why that change was effected.

      The dandelion incident calls to mind G. K. Chesterton’s words in Orthodoxy (one of the many books that I read first through Dr. Kilby’s recommendation).

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.¹

      Almost every recollection of Kilby mentions something of this quite unselfconscious, childlike delight in creaturely being. Chesterton traces that childlike delight in the commonplace back to its divine source, and all of the writers whose works, letters, and manuscripts Kilby was to assemble in what became the “Wade Collection” express something of that joyful wonder at the gift of Being. Writers like George MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien helped Kilby understand and express that awareness of Being as a divine gift—but he responded to the vision in them because it was first in him. Their springs flowed from the same source.

      This connection between wonder at the world, on the one hand, and trying to be a faithful Christian, on the other, was one that evangelical Christians like myself, growing up in mid-twentieth-century America, desperately needed to make. My own initial encounter with Kilby was in registration week at Wheaton in September 1961. Still somewhat groggy from a three-day bus trip across the continent (I had never been east of Oregon before), I recall a genial little man (speaking, I realize now, in his capacity as chairman of the English department) telling a group of us assembled for a freshman writing exemption test, “You’ve already been selected; now we’re going to select you some more.” But it was not till the next fall, when I took Kilby’s Romantic poetry class, that my world began to change—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a deep wound in my world began to heal.

      I had, sometime in high school, already fallen in love with the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Shelley. The intensity of their response to the beauty of the world articulated something I too had felt deeply. I grew up on a forested farm along an Oregon river, had hiked and climbed the Cascade Mountains, and was deeply homesick for that wild landscape (about as different from the plains and suburbs of northern Illinois as can be imagined). But I had no place, in my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian, to put this intensity of my response to creation. I had chosen Wheaton almost by accident—mainly because it was Jim Elliot’s school, and I assumed that being a missionary like him, preferably a martyr, was the only way to follow Christ in a world doomed to damnation anyhow. I was an anthropology major (as a preparation for being a missionary), and the Romantic poetry course was a luxury I felt a bit guilty about.

      We read Wordsworth early in the course. “Tintern Abbey,” in Kilby’s hands, bowled me over. To begin with, it seemed to describe my own solitary, unreflective boyhood.

      . . . The sounding cataract

      Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

      The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,

      Their colours and their forms, were then to me

      An appetite; a feeling and a love.

      But it also seemed to describe what I was feeling now, far СКАЧАТЬ