Have you ever met Fairlight Spencer? Isn’t her name delightful? It exactly describes her, for she is a beautiful woman whose merriment lights her up from the inside out. Have you met people like this? Their whole demeanor is joyful, and they shine from within. I’ve puzzled over the how and the why of this. Is it because everything in their lives is wonderful? Is it because they (the women!) wear miracle makeup? Is it heredity? I don’t know. I can only tell you what I know about Fairlight Spencer. The details of her life are in black and white for everyone to see. She is my second favorite character (My favorite is the title character.) in the book Christy, by Catherine Marshall.
Catherine Marshall, the author of Christy, was the wife of a minister and a minister’s daughter. Her husband Peter worked as the pastor of a church in New York and was the chaplain of the United States Senate. In the book, Catherine Marshall wrote about the experiences of her mother Leonora Whitaker, who taught in Appalachia in the area southwest of present day Del Rio, Tennessee. Leonora led a pleasant life, working on her family’s farm and in the church. Her parents were resistant to Leonora’s desire to travel alone far into rural Tennessee to teach, but Leonora was determined, and she traveled to the area, getting her first hint of how different life was there when she had to walk seven miles to get to the site of her new job. The people there were very poor, suspicious of outsiders, and either devout God-fearing people or enthusiastic heathens.
Leonora came to love the children she taught. She marveled at the happiness of the poorest children she had ever met. Despite hunger, perilous daily lives fraught with feuding over long held grudges, and violent fights between competing moonshiners, the children were just happy to be learning new things under the protective oversight of their pretty, sweet teacher. Then one day, Leonora met Flora, the inspiration for Fairlight in the book.
Fairlight (Flora) opens up a whole new world for Christy (Leonora). Fairlight sees beyond the poverty and violence in which she has always lived and takes delight in the first delicate flower of spring or in lightning flashing over the mountains. Fairlight cares for her husband, her children, and her home, but she may pause washing dishes at the sink to call her children over to look out the window at the sunset. Each time Christy and Fairlight meet, whether it’s to walk with Fairlight and her children through the meadows or to help Fairlight with daily chores, Christy goes back home having seen the world through new eyes, revealed in the happy spirit of her friend.
Life in the mountain settlement takes a turn for the worse when typhoid sweeps through the area. Fairlight is struck with the sickness and dies. The intensity of Christy’s grief leads to a crisis of faith. Christy can only ask why. Why was Fairlight taken? The question consumes her. Fairlight had been the personification of steady, joyful faith to Christy, and now she was gone. Because Fairlight’s life had been extinguished, it felt as if the light in Christy’s own heart was gone also. She felt weighed down, indifferent about her own future. When she could think more clearly, she resolved to get an answer to her question: Why had Fairlight been taken? Christy decided that each morning she would get up extra early to travel to her and Fairlight’s favorite spot in the mountains. There she would pray and wait for answers. Each morning she went, even before the sun was up. She would watch the sun rise, and her heart would be just as heavy each day when she left as when she had arrived.
One morning Christy got her answer, described so beautifully in this excerpt from the book.
Morning after morning she returned to her woodland retreat on Coldsprings Mountain to watch the sun rise. She reached out to the stillness she found there. Yet the silence was no sterile emptiness, because now she knew that at the heart of the stillness there was food to feed upon, wisdom to accept humbly, satisfaction to be found. Irresistibly the silence drew her because it promised that where there was hunger, there would also be bread. And slowly…out of the stillness, her answer started coming—only not in the way she expected. No effort was made to answer her “why?” Instead, she began to know, incredibly, unmistakably, beyond reason and beyond doubting that she was loved, tenderly, totally. Love filled her, washed over her, flowed around her. She did not know what to do with love as strong as this. Back off from its intensity? Embrace it? Then the thought came: Wasn’t this the confirmation for which she had asked? God insists on seeing us one by one, each a special case, each inestimably beloved for himself…She could not know what the future held, but she knew now: God is. This was her center.
So, in sweet Fairlight’s life and death, Christy found a deeper relationship with the God she already knew and a reassurance that in life and beyond into the grief of this life’s close, God is.
This is our center, too. GOD IS. This experience reminds me of Psalm 30:11-12 NKJV: You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; You have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, To the end that my glory may sing praise to You and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever.
I have thought many times that I would have liked to have known Fairlight. I have known few people who possess this sort of childlike wonder in the beauty of their surroundings, who can then inspire this in others. Maybe this is a gift found mostly in fiction. However, doesn’t God perhaps hope that nature will inspire joy in us, just as it did in Fairlight? Isn’t this one of His gifts to us? The world could be a drab, gray, silent place…no blue skies or green trees or blue oceans or yellow daffodils; no heavenly smelling wisteria or red birds or white snowflakes or wood thrushes’ songs or melodious music of streams and waterfalls. Instead, we see the same beauty around us that inspired Fairlight and moved her to laughter. This talk of nature also reminds me of this verse, which always makes me smile: For you shall go out with joy, and be led out with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Isaiah 55:12 NKJV)
Maybe we could all try to be a little more like Fairlight, seeing beauty in the world and spreading joy, even though bad things happened in her world and still happen in ours. Perhaps in the beauty of a sunrise, we could be reminded of Christy’s revelation that nothing matters more than the knowledge that GOD IS.