Reviewing "God So Loved the World" by Elizabeth Goudge

“The life of Our Lord is like a great symphony. It has three movements, with a silence between each when we are left wondering what is happening. The first movement is the music of his babyhood and boyhood, the second of his ministry and suffering and death, and the third of his resurrection.”

~ Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World, Chapter 4 , page 39

My reading habits do not naturally gravitate towards books that are retellings of true historical events. If truth is stranger than fiction, it is also more important and meaningful. What fictionalizations do accomplish, however, is making something come alive in our imaginations, so that historical events are not just some facts laid out in dry terms in an encyclopedia or textbook, but instead were real actions involving real people with feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, and failings.

Writing about Biblical events is an even more perilous undertaking. Even watching a VeggieTales interpretation of a Bible story can lead one into a misconception…and not just that David and Goliath were not, in fact, an asparagus and pickle (respectively). So if I avoid fictionalizations of history, that goes double, usually, for Biblical fictionalizations.

I made an exception, however, with Elizabeth Goudge for her book God So Loved the World. Goudge had impressed me with my previous samplings of her novels, Green Dolphin Street, The Rosemary Tree, and A Child of the Sea. Like Dostoevsky, Goudge’s writing seems to be able to deal with deeper spiritual conflicts without becoming preachy.

Not that I have been enthralled with all of her writing. One of her more famous books (thanks to J.K. Rowling) is The Little White Horse, which I found insipid and contrived (though I did like the adaptation, The Secret of Moonacre…but then, I watched it before reading the book, and also it had Horatio Hornblower in it which naturally raised it in my estimation). I Saw Three Ships was another one that was childish—possibly because it is a children’s book. That’s okay; not all authors write both juvenile and adult fiction equally well.

God So Loved the World is something altogether different from the books I’d read by Goudge previously. It’s a sort of paraphrase of the Gospels, starting with the birth of Jesus Christ and following His life on earth, His death, resurrection, and ascension. It’s fairly true to the Biblical sources of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I suspect Goudge was mostly inspired by John; their writing styles seem similar to me.

Like all paraphrases or fictionalizations, however, there are little details—those same details that bring a story alive—that might be insignificant but also lead to misconceptions. For instance, Goudge perpetuates the weirdly common idea that Mary (Jesus’ mom) wore blue. These sorts of faults are not, for the most part, egregious. I found that Goudge was often quoting directly from scripture, which was probably a good idea to keep from departing too much from her source material.

One insight Goudge shared was worth reading the entire book. It takes place in Chapter 4, which recounts when Jesus was twelve and visited Jerusalem, how His earthly parents lost track of Him, and how they eventually found Him at the Temple:

“In great anxiety Mary and Joseph looked for him among all their friends, and when they could not find him they went back to Jerusalem, where they spent three days searching for him. Mary must have been in misery all those three days. This was the first time that she had been parted from her son, and in her sorrow there was a foreshadowing of the anguish she would feel when he died. Then, as now, it was on the third day that he was given back to her again.”