Christy

“There must be more to life than that. Or is there—for a woman? What was I born for, after all? I have to know. If I stayed at home going the round of the same parties, I don’t think I ever would know.”

This is one of Christy’s reflections on her old life in the social circles of Asheville. Again, there are connections here between this novel and a coming-of-age story, driven in part by questions of identity and purpose. This quote also highlights the theme of The Role and Status of Women in Mountain Society, which Christy wrestles with not only regarding the mountain women but also herself.

“One of our tasks here is to show folks a God who wants to give them joy. How they need joy! They have such hard lives.”

This quote is from Miss Alice, as she introduces Christy to the work of the mission. This quote shows Miss Alice’s characteristic compassion, as well as her theological emphasis on the love and goodness of God. The mountain people have been trained by their traditions to hold God in fearful awe but struggle to imagine a God of love who wants them to be happy.

“Probably I’m not making sense to you, Christy. But I’m sure you’ve realized that love has mending power. All of us have watched it work in small situations. Well, what I’m talking about is a vast multiplication of that power.”

In this quote from Miss Alice, she again puts her emphasis on love. Her central thought here—“love has mending power”—encapsulates the vision of her mission, which seeks to bring healing to the brokenness and pain of the mountain society by exposing it to the love of God.

“And I knew what I had to do. The call of the mountains and my own people was too strong to deny. I knew how desperately they needed a doctor back in these hills and coves. Personal ambition didn’t matter really. I’ve never regretted that decision, simply because I wouldn’t have been happy anywhere else.”

This quote records Doctor MacNeill’s reflections on his choice to return and take up his career in the mountains rather than in a more prestigious position elsewhere. Even at this early point in the book, Marshall reveals Doctor MacNeill’s clear-eyed vision of his purpose, driven by the needs to which he can respond. His motivations are closer to Christy’s charitable motivations than to the ongoing doubts and vocational questions of his romantic rival, David.

“[A]s I came to know the children and to think of them as persons rather than names in my grade book, I forgot my reactions and began to love them. I suppose the principle was that the higher affection will always expel the lower whenever we give the higher affection sway.”

Here, Christy is explaining how she got over some of her negative reactions toward the children around her—specifically, to their smell—by learning to love them as people. This ties in with the theme of Cultural Understanding as the Key to Personal Connection. Christy must understand the values and perspectives of the children she works with, and as she does so—thus learning who they are as people—she comes to love them.

“Teacher, Teacher, hain’t it true, Teacher, that if God loves ever’body, then we’uns got to love ever’body too?”

This quote, from Christy’s student, Burl Allen, continues the novel’s pattern of contrasting the suffering and pain of mountain life with a faith based on the love of God. Here, Burl grasps an insight that Christy herself only gradually attains, as it is later in the novel when she realizes that she must extend God’s unconditional love even to Bird’s-Eye and Lundy Taylor.

“How unmistakably her cabin bore the flavor of Miss Alice’s personality! In both the woman and her home there was an effortless beauty, never a straining for effect, a harmony that seemed to come from having one’s roots down in the place where the roots were meant to be.”

The novel frequently uses descriptions of cabins to reflect on the character of those cabins’ residents. Here, the symbolism of cabins is made explicit, as Christy directly connects the charm and stability of Miss Alice’s cabin with the Quaker woman’s character and life.

“With his sense of rhythm, his rafter-raising baritone, and his nimble fingers, David had a ready-made way into the hearts of the people, for music was the universal language of the highlanders. They sang as readily as they talked.”

The motif of songs and music weaves its way throughout the novel, frequently remarked upon as one of the central aspects of mountain culture. In this quote, David’s musical ability is shown to be an important means by which he connects with his local parishioners. As such, the motif of music supports the theme of Cultural Understanding as a Key to Personal Connection, giving David a cultural in-road by which to establish deeper relationships with the locals.

“From that day I could feel His love a-feedin’ my starvin’, thirsty soul. And the more I tried givin’ His love away to my young’uns and my man and the neighbor-folks, the more love He gave back to me.”

This quote is from Aunt Polly Teague, the oldest resident of the area. She began the conversation by asking David for some teaching on eternal life to console her as she approached death. However, David’s answers were wandering and ambivalent, so in reply, she gives her testimony, which is so full of sweet assurances of the love of God that it ends up ministering to David and Christy rather than vice versa.

“I began to wonder if the mountain values were not more civilized than civilization’s. […] Now I realized why these mountain people were shy with strangers. They had never learned the citified arts of hiding feelings or of smiling when the heart was cold.”

This quote underscores the theme of Cultural Understanding as a Key to Personal Connection. Here, Marshall reveals Christy’s newfound realization that what many people took as the mountain folk’s defects—such as a perceived wariness of outsiders—was a sign of their virtues: a mark of forthrightness and honesty opposed to the fake politeness of the city.

“What you’ve undertaken here in Cutter Gap in your schoolroom isn’t a state of perfection to be arrived at all of a sudden. It’s a walk, and a walk isn’t static but ever-changing.”

This is another piece of Miss Alice’s wisdom, as she encourages Christy to take the long view in pursuing her vision for the mission school. This advice also matches the overall narrative arc of the novel, which is marked not by sudden transformations and epiphanies, but by a long, slow process of change in its characters, like Christy, Doctor MacNeill, and Bird’s-Eye Taylor.

“David, no Christian ever has a right to sever any relationship with anybody out of anger or pique, or even injustice, no matter how much he disapproves of someone’s actions. It’s our place to demonstrate reconciliation—not judgment or revenge or retaliation. That’s God’s business, not ours.”

Miss Alice speaks these words to David as he wrestles with his feelings regarding the negative attention coming against himself and mission from various sectors of the community, including Ozias Holt, with whom he recently had a confrontation. As is characteristic of her theology, Miss Alice highlights the necessity of giving voice to the love of God. If, on the other hand, God’s judgment is necessary, then that is God’s place to dispense it, not humans.

“So Christ meant for life inside the church on Sunday and life outside the church on every day to be of one piece. That was why He declared unrelenting, unending warfare against the sin and evil in our world. And believe me that includes the evil in Cutter Gap. All these wrongs must be brought into the light of day.”

Here, David reaches the climax of his sermon in the mission church, addressing the moonshine affair which has caught the attention of the whole area. He views the underlying problem as partly a theological one: namely, that the people of Cutter Gap have come to believe that their Christian faith only places demands on them on Sunday and has nothing to say about their daily lives for the rest of the week. His black-and-white view of these issues, later contrasted with those of Doctor MacNeill, is visible here.

“I believe in God, in the sense that I’m willing to admit some starter-force for the universe. And I believe that love is the most creative force in the world. Trouble is, I’ve seen so many diseased bodies, so much suffering, pain, hatred, death and dying.”

This is Doctor MacNeill’s expression of his religious beliefs. While he avows a theoretical belief in God, it amounts to a practical atheism, in which God has no active role in the world and offers no personal connection to people like him. This quote, and the conversation from which it comes, plays into the theme of Faith Amid Suffering and Loss and is one of the elements of the story that drives Christy into her crisis of faith.

“So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It’s quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you’ve picked up some place or other, and die—never having come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about. But you, Christy, are facing these issues early. That’s good.”

Miss Alice delivers this counsel to Christy, who has just come and admitted her distress at not being able to answer Doctor MacNeill’s doubts about religion. While Christy likely expects an explanation of how to respond in such situations, Miss Alice surprises her by simply commending her quest for truth, not by giving her the answers she seeks. Part of the journey of faith, as depicted in the novel, is to make faith one’s own—not simply inherited from one’s family or society—and Miss Alice sees Christy’s questioning as part of that process.

“‘Fixin’ anything is man’s work,’ came Opal’s firm answer. ‘Tearin’ down or killin’, that’s easy. Any addlepated fool kin pull the trigger of a rifle-gun or fling a rock. It’s fixin’ that’s hard, takes a heap more doin’.’”

This quote is Opal McHone’s attempt to appeal to Bird’s-Eye Taylor’s better nature. She holds up a vision of manhood that centers on fixing problems rather than on violence or vengeance. While she is appealing here to the strength and nobility of manhood, the quote itself provides a view of the central place of women in mountain society, as it is her voice and her thoughts that stand as the transformational element in the situation.

“‘Go on, Christy,’ she had said to me, ‘ask questions, never be afraid of truth. Ask questions of yourself and of me. […] And ask God. Ask Him ultimate questions—about the why of things: about your place in the world, about life—and death. Ask, Christy, ask. Seek. You’ll find. The promise is here.’”

This is another exchange between Miss Alice and Christy, as Christy’s crisis of faith deepens. Again, Miss Alice encourages Christy instead of rebuking her. This response is a mark of the sincerity of Miss Alice’s faith, who is so sure of God’s presence that she is not threatened by Christy’s doubts; rather, she is certain that Christy will find the God who is there to be found.

“When your heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people—especially the rip-snorting sinners—so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.”

This is another of Miss Alice’s insights, here spoken to David as he goes through issues related to his crisis of identity and calling. Whereas David’s theology tends to be complicated and obscure, to the point where he is no longer certain of its validity, Miss Alice’s theology is simple, straightforward, and engaging. Miss Alice, who serves as Catherine Marshall’s main voice for teaching spiritual insights throughout the novel, often interacts with David in the manner of a traditional Christian rebuttal to the distortions of postmodern theology.

“I might never have discovered who I really was or have gotten answers to the relentless questions that had driven me to the Cove without those quiet hours spent with Fairlight in the mountains. I do not know why it is that an intimate contact with wildlife and a personal observation of nature helps so much in this self-discovery. But that it is so, I have seen in other people’s lives as well as my own.”

While the other characters in the novel play an important role in Christy’s development, the natural setting also serves as a change agent for her narrative arc. She reflects on this fact here, noting that the mountains themselves have become a means of transformation for her.

“Thee has made the right choice. Now thee will know as few humans ever know it, the love of thy God. Betimes it will mold thee into a great spirit. And that love will come to thee too from every soul in our Meeting. Our Meeting will be to thee as thy larger family. And thy daughter, this little girl, shall be loved as no child has ever been loved before.”

This is the Quaker leader’s verdict on how their congregation will respond to the disclosure of Miss Alice’s teenage pregnancy. The conventional response to such a situation in that period of history—sending the young mother away in shame—is instead replaced with a gracious embrace from the whole religious community, pledging to love not only Alice but also her daughter. As the Quaker leader predicts, this moment does mold Miss Alice into a great spirit, for it is the formative introduction to the great theme of her life: the love of God.

“In the light of Miss Alice’s story, I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person—even to Bird’s-Eye Taylor and to Lundy.”

Here, Christy describes her epiphany after hearing Miss Alice’s testimony, coming to a similar realization that Little Burl had come to in the early chapters of the book. Because God’s love applies unconditionally to everybody, one must love everybody—even the unlovable ones. Once again, Marshall highlights just how instrumental the insights of other people are in Christy’s ongoing journey of faith.

“I know I’m supposed to believe. But what do you do when suddenly you find you can’t believe?”

This quote is spoken by Christy in the darkest season of her journey of doubt, after having witnessed Fairlight’s death from typhoid. She is speaking to David here, and as usual, David’s response is unhelpful—he advises her just not to think about it. Christy is depicted as a person of sincere faith throughout the novel, and part of that sincerity is the honesty with which she wrestles with doubt. This depiction is one of the important contributions that the novel made to the mid-20^th century milieu of American Christianity, which in its popular context tended to avoid questions of doubt, as David was wont to do. The novel instead portrays the importance of dealing seriously with questions of faith and doubt.

“No effort was made to answer my ‘why?’ Instead, I began to know, incredibly, unmistakably, beyond reason and beyond doubting that I, Christy Huddleston, was loved—tenderly, totally. Love filled me, washed over me, flowed around me. I did not know what to do with love as strong as this.”

This experience is the first major resolution to Christy’s journey of doubt: a direct experience of the love of God. This fits with the experiential nature of the Christian faith as understood in Catherine Marshall’s tradition of Christianity—not simply a matter of believing certain dogmas but of experiencing the grace of God in a deeply personal way.