A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
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 removed from those places.
. . . I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity. . . .
. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It would have been easy enough for this experience to degenerate into a kind of pantheism. What Kilby managed to convey, however—not usually by explanation or analysis, but mainly by simply reading the poems and stammering his appreciation of them—was that the sort of experience Wordsworth was describing could be fully appreciated and comprehended best within the circle of Christian faith, a circle that grew steadily bigger for me as the course progressed.
The door Kilby opened for me in that fall semester course in the Romantic poets allowed creation itself, and the full range of human feelings, to pour through, and by Christmas a door back into the world had been flung open. It has taken a lifetime to work out some of the implications of that Christian Romanticism. But the door was opened then.
A year later, with my new fiancée, Mary Ruth Kantzer, we joined a crowd of other students who climbed one evening a week the stairs of the house on Washington Street to read and discuss the works of Lewis, MacDonald, Tolkien, and Williams in the Kilbys’ crowded living room. In that setting I began to explore the resources that enabled me later