Many Beautiful Things (2015) - full transcript

(light rustling)

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Lilias Trotter had the opportunity to become one

of England's greatest painters.

I think Lilias is an iconoclast.

She defied all the categories.

If she's as good as I think she is,

why has nobody else heard of her?

Ruskin was one of the most important men

of the 19th century.

I don't think that he believed



that he couldn't win her.

Did she make the right decision?

Or did she make the worst decision of her life?

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December 31, 1895,

sunset is coming on with wonderful

effects of light and color.

As the sun sinks, they deepen and glorify,

beyond any possibility of putting

on paper, how the angels must watch when that light reaches

a new spot on this earth that God so loves.

Lilias Trotter was an artist.

She was a British writer.

She was contemplative, and she was visionary.



Lilias was born in 1853 into the home

of a distinguished West End family in London.

We do know that her mother identified, in her early,

an artistic talent.

There were a lot of artists in the family.

She had this amazing ability to capture, quickly, images.

But she was already developing an eye to record things,

but she clearly had this great spirit

of just receiving beauty and perceiving it in a way that

was extraordinary.

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It's recorded that when she first sighted the Alps,

she burst into tears.

The beauty so overcame her.

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But life changed enormously for her when, at the age of 12,

her father died.

There seemed to be a distinct turning to faith

after her father's death,

that she was seeking a comfort of her Heavenly Father

in the absence of her earthly father.

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In 1876, Lilias and her mother went to Venice.

Soon after checking in, her mother

heard that John Ruskin was also residing at the hotel.

Ruskin was the leading arbiter of art for the Victorian age.

Lilias' mother worked up her courage and wrote a note.

Her mother was probably hoping that she would get some

instruction in drawing and some general commendation

from Ruskin.

I doubt that she was expecting much more

than that, although there would obviously

have been the excitement of personal contact

with one of the most famous people

in the English-speaking world, which is what he was.

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John Ruskin is enormously important to the history

of culture in the 19th century.

His writing and prose is some of the greatest

in the English language.

He was a writer about art, literature, architecture,

and the natural world.

Ruskin was one of the most important men

of the 19th century

and went onto influence almost everybody's

life in the 20th century.

Ruskin made a famous statement,

"There is no wealth but life."

What is wealth if we don't have quality of life,

if we don't think about the fresh air around us,

if we don't think about the landscape.

Ruskin became an authority

whose opinion was always to be

taken seriously.

He managed to create, if you like,

a vision of life, which inspired just generations of people.

He was a true celebrity of the 19th century.

In his lectures in Oxford in 1883,

which were published under the title of The Art of England,

rather remarkably, he tells the anecdote

of meeting Lilias Trotter,

whom of course nobody in Oxford had heard of.

One minute Ruskin is talking

about famous contemporary painters, and the next minute

he's mentioning this young girl

that he met in Venice.

Certainly as the story is told, I mean, Ruskin

is a bit surly about this and thinks, oh gosh,

what's this going to be?

But actually, clearly, he responded to something

in these watercolors.

And he said that they lacked knowledge, but in the sense

that he could sense the spirit behind them.

And he asked her mother whether he could take her

out sketching with him.

I think he could see, in Lilias,

the possibility of adding another woman to the relatively

small list of serious women artists of the period.

And he would have wanted to encourage her.

He's challenging the conventional understanding

of what great art actually is, if you like.

Come and look.

These colored pages are with one and the same intent,

to make you see.

Many things begin with seeing in this world of ours.

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Looking at her work, it's an example of someone finding

a distinctive voice as an artist.

Having taken her up as a protege,

he's really very effusive about her.

He says that she seemed to learn everything

the instant she was shown it, and ever so much more

than she was taught.

One could see from her journals that she had a knack

for combining image and text, but also of developing

a way of drawing landscape, flower studies, and even

drawings of people.

One soon comes to realize, if you see something

like this over a period of time, that this can only

be by Lilias Trotter.

And establishing that kind of distinctive voice

is really quite a considerable achievement

for a relatively little known artist.

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And he actually said, "For more than five

and 20 years of my life, I would not

believe that women could paint pictures,

and all history seemed to be on the side of this conviction.

But I was wrong in this established conviction of mine.

Women can paint."

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What began as a modest interest became a passion,

pushing me forward in the search for Lilias.

Now this is the day before search engines.

It was through post and through phone that eventually led me

across the ocean to England,

to search out museums, archives,

a search that led me many, many different paths,

really over almost a three-decade span of time.

And I will agree that there

was an obsessive quality about it

that concerned some of the people closest to me.

I can't imagine anyone else knowing more

about Lilias Trotter than Miriam.

We would be getting ready for bed, and I'd say,

now am I with Miriam or Lilias?

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I wanted to think being a minister's wife didn't make

me different than anyone else.

But the fact is, my life was greatly impacted

by the vocation my husband had.

And so there was a sense of which, in my early years,

because I was very isolated with little children,

and I discovered that I could travel outside my confines

through books and through art.

And I can remember just saving that little space when

a child was taking a nap or at the end of the day,

and get a cup of coffee, and this would be my Lilias time.

Looking at this little white book

with gold lettering, Lilias Trotter of Algiers,

and just the opening sentence.

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Take the very hardest thing in your life,

the place of difficulty, outward or inward,

and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot.

Just there, he can bring your soul into blossom.

I just had chill bumps go through me

when I looked at this.

The art came straight through my mind into my heart.

This was the beginning, for me, of the discovery of Lilias.

I was determined to pursue, to the very end of my ability,

to find out who this woman was.

If she's as good as I think she is,

why has nobody else heard of her?

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There lies before us

the beautiful, possible life,

one with a passion for giving

that shall be put forth to God,

not spent out for man.

It's well known that Ruskin had an eye for young women

of intelligence, dedication, a good Christian,

with quite a talent for art,

but also in a way biddable to his

will in being able to push them in the directions he thought

might be useful.

Lilias fitted all the requirements.

She was clearly a very quick pupil.

From that point on, he draws her into his circle.

It's hard to appreciate what that could have meant for her

to be being coached by the master.

I don't know how we could even parallel

that in our own lives.

But it was not only a significant moment for her,

but it was the beginning of a very deep and rich friendship.

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Ruskin has said, and I believe it true,

the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is

to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.

Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,

but thousands can think for one who can see.

(birds chirping)

There's a practice of looking and trying to understand

your surroundings on a daily basis that was simply natural

to both Lilias and Ruskin.

And it may have been encouraged and developed by Ruskin,

but it was probably there in Lilias' work to begin with.

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Like Ruskin, she appreciated that a flower, an insect,

a landscape, is all, again, part of divine creation,

and by looking at it, and especially by drawing it,

one comes to understand it more.

It's looking at the world

with such intensity that you

not only see how beautifully and precisely it's made,

if you like the scientific view of nature.

But you also begin to see the meaning

that it has for you in terms of your own personal,

spiritual soul, by virtue of the intensity

with which you experience it.

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(birds chirping)

The true ideal flower

is the one that uses its gifts

as a means to an end.

The brightness and sweetness are not for its own glory.

They are but to attract the bees and the butterflies that

will fertilize and make it fruitful,

for it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Ruskin's love of fidelity to nature

has quite a complicated background.

It has partly to do with moral ideas of truth,

and of course,

in looking at nature, you're looking at divine creation.

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And in the way in which he wrote and spoke, as it were,

from the pulpit, he had the same kind

of standing as a church leader.

However, on a personal level, he was always a difficult man.

Geniuses always are.

They tend to lead very odd lives because they are out

of the ordinary.

When he bought Brantwood in 1872,

Ruskin was trying to escape celebrity

that had created around him.

It became something almost of a burden.

And he needed, particularly for his own personal sanity,

to retreat to the countryside, somewhere quiet,

where he could continue to work, and also

where he could reconnect with nature

because at the heart of his writing, getting back to nature

was also a really important part of it, understanding,

if you like, where we come from.

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Visitors who could actually come

and stay in Brantwood itself

were very few and far between.

It's interesting that Lilias did stay.

She was here, with Ruskin, in the place

that was most precious to him.

So it must have been incredibly exciting for this

20-something-year-old girl to come to a house like this,

surrounded by people who are painting and writing.

When Lilias would come to Brantwood,

she stayed in what's known as the Turret Room these days.

It's a small bedroom on the corner of the building.

She'd have woken up into this wonderland, really,

of looking out upon the lake and the mountains here.

And that must have been an inspiring view

to start anybody's day.

This was definitely a relationship that was

the mentor to the student, but there's also the sense that

there was a bond that was deeper than art.

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The most tantalizing, and yet frustrating,

aspect of my search, bar none, were the missing letters

that Ruskin wrote to Lilias.

That begins a search that has been going on for two decades.

When I began to pursue Ruskin scholars to see

if I could find anything out about Ruskin and Lilias,

they were welcoming anything I could tell them.

Lilias was a missing piece in Ruskin research.

I can't even tell you the effort and amount of time

that I spent, and the leads that were followed,

and they all came to a dead end.

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There were so many other people who had searched for me.

The friends that helped me try to track down these letters

were critical.

I was thinking about Miriam's obsession

earlier with Lilias Trotter, and I had this image

suddenly of a terrier that just

goes down that rabbit hole, determined to get the prey.

If Miriam had not spent 30 years researching Lilias Trotter,

she would have been forgotten,

I think lost to the sands of time.

Miriam had shared with us that she had taken the project

as far as she could take it,

but there were things that she wished

would happen, that it could go further.

I did share.

I had one unfulfilled dream, and that was

to find those letters that Ruskin wrote.

She knew they existed.

It was an obsession, looking for these things,

and it takes obsession to doggedly look

and look and look.

I check my email, and up comes Sally's email saying

the letters have been found.

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So now, that network of detectives

have come together in this wonderful point.

Just the few letters that I've looked at

start out with "Darling Lilias," "You, Darling Lilias."

Where are you to be this summer?

Write again directly, please.

I can't at all tell you how lovely I think you're doing.

You show great gain in landscape power these last two weeks.

I pause to think how I can convince you

of the marvelous gift that is in you.

My dear child, you must come and see me.

I can show you many little things in no time.

And besides, I want to thank you for praying for me.

Ever affectionately, your John Ruskin.

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So we have, now, Lilias growing as an artist.

We have this relationship which clearly

was of all importance to her.

But there was a challenge because there

are some other things entering into her life.

It was kind of a movement taking place,

a spiritual awakening,

among London society.

She's in a very intense religious culture

which was developing, both spiritually

and in terms of practical mission work,

responding to the conditions of the poor,

both in the inner city and in London.

This was a time

when the fledgling YWCA was just getting

off the ground.

It was really meeting needs.

Lilias' heart was definitely drawn to the poor of London,

and particularly to the women.

She did things that were actually very dangerous.

She would go down to Victoria Station,

and she would minister to the prostitutes

and try to get them off the streets

and into a place where they could have good food

and shelter, but also be trained

in respectable marketable skills.

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There are one or two references in his letters

where he seems to admonish Lilias

for spending too much of her time

on good works in London, helping the poor and disadvantaged.

I want to see you and scold you,

and I've got a cough and no voice to do it.

But if you could come out here to be scolded,

I think I could manage it in a feeble manner.

And it would do my heart good.

So do you ever go to see people, except naughty people?

He's being playful.

He's being playful.

But he's also turning the screws.

I don't think he's being entirely serious.

Ruskin did have a terrific sense of humor.

He is perhaps expressing annoyance

that she hasn't written for some time,

but he's over egging it and, I think,

playing a kind of word game with her as well.

He goes on, "I'm all very fine-"

Helping the station guards, but what will you think

of yourself someday, I wonder, for the neglect and contempt

and defiance and tormenting and disappointing and ignoring

and undoing me.

I am bad enough to begone unseen to, I'm sure.

But you won't.

I think that's probably simply

because she could have

been spending that time on her art,

whereas others could do the other good works who

didn't have the talents then that she did.

It did raise eyebrows, that a woman,

especially of her breeding, didn't just mingle with,

but embraced, people of a far lower estate and in terrible,

terrible conditions.

I think a lot of people thought she

was risking her own safety and her own health

to be doing this.

She had a heart of love,

and it was a love that transcended

any kind of social economic barrier.

Ruskin saw that and admired it, and he encouraged that.

But he was beginning to see this

as in competition with her art.

And of course, it was.

This was brought to a point of crisis.

She's there at Brantwood with John Ruskin.

He put to her what her future could be.

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Ruskin says I could be England's

greatest living painter,

that I could do things that would be immortal.

Please understand that it is not for vanity

that I tell you, at least I think not,

because I have no more to do with my gifts

than with the color of my hair, but because I need prayer

to seek God's way more clearly.

She understands what he's offering her,

and it's speaking to something she loves.

She now had the great crisis

of her life, and that crisis was,

what is the role of art going to be in my life?

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It seems as if I'd lived years

in just those few days.

At first, I could only rush about in the woods,

as if in a dream.

Since then, it's been an almost constant

state of suffocation,

half intoxication, so that I can hardly eat or sleep except

by trusting the Lord about it.

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There's no way to overestimate the crisis

of soul.

It all came to that moment that she knew she had to decide.

I see as clear as day right now.

I cannot give myself to painting in the way that he means,

and continue still to seek first the Kingdom of God.

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When she said no to Ruskin, she was turning her back

on the possibility of fame and embracing obscurity.

It's a very rare thing to do.

To turn down the kind of renown she might have known

and the trays of the society that she was really

a part of, in order to do something that garnered

no praise at that time, no fame, almost the promise

that that would not happen, is almost

perverse in its willingness

to renounce what most people know.

One has to admire Lilias' determination and drive to do

what she did.

She obviously had the confidence and the determination

to pursue her own path.

She did not necessarily feel that this choice she made was

something that another person would have to make.

It was simply a very, very personal thing,

that she believed this is what God wanted her to do,

and this is what she wanted to do as well.

She made a decision that almost broke her,

but with a complete independence

of soul that is the result of a spirit that's been released.

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There was a certain amount of torment

for him to see the course she was taking,

and his heart was broken.

After her decision was made, she returned to London

with renewed zeal.

Her life in service just flourished.

Lilias had that rare ability to look around and see a need.

One of the things that she saw was the conditions

for the working women.

There was no public place that they could eat.

For the woman, the working woman,

she was forced to eat her lunch from a paper bag

on the sidewalks.

Lilias saw the need to address that.

And so she was instrumental in forming

the first public restaurant for women in London.

Her passion was to reach out to the downtrodden.

She used all of her imagination to create environments

for these people where they could be treated with respect

and as worthy human beings.

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In all the withholdings of this year,

God has been opening a door where he closes a window.

She continued with her art,

and she continued to go up

and visit Ruskin, and he continued to complain.

Okay, that's where we are.

So now he sees his lovely Lilias wasting her beautiful gift.

Here he says-

The sense of color

is gradually getting debased under

the conditions of your life.

The grays and the browns in which you now habitually work,

technically, you are losing yourself.

Darling Lilias, I am beginning to think

of packing your drawings up.

I've examined them well, and they really are, as I've said,

wrong in grave respects.

Chiefly in want of sunshine, but there's also

real vulgarity in the way you put

to light things against dark to bring them out.

There's a wonderful letter

that he wrote to her where he

asked why it is that he can't see her so much.

What is he missing?

You never noticed

that you left me extremely sorrowful.

Can you come again today, any hour?

It's like a cross between a rejected lover

and an Italian mother, saying,

when are you going to come see me?

Yes, yes.

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I don't think that he really believed

that he couldn't win her.

And the fact that she kept meeting with him and painting,

and all of those good things, were still happening.

He held out hope, but clearly, the rudder of her will

was headed in a different direction.

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It was kind of a movement taking place,

a spiritual awakening.

The who's who of London were attending these Bible studies.

And this was not a movement

that stayed with the inner person.

It resulted in reaching out.

There was a quickening in Lilias' heart to this.

This was formative.

Something was taking place in her life that came so quietly,

that when the moment of decision came,

that there was almost an inevitability about it.

I attended a mission meeting

in London when, at the close,

someone stood up and asked,

"Is there anyone in this room whom

God is calling for North Africa?"

It's me, I said, rising.

He's calling me.

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My name's Sue.

I'm working on the archives of some

of the early mission work in North Africa.

And I just think it's very good to discover

that there was a band of women, and single women,

who felt that God was calling them to go and serve Him

overseas at a time when yes, it was quite a thing

for a single woman to do.

Now the plot thickens a bit here because then she applied

to North African Missions

and they turned her down for health reasons.

She wasn't physically strong.

She wrote in her diary, no doctor

would have passed us fit for this work.

If God wanted weakness, he had it.

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At sunrise, the first peeks

of land came into sight,

dim and purple, the lights of Algiers.

Lilias Trotter had the opportunity to become one

of England's greatest painters.

Did she make the right decision or did

she make the worst decision of her life?

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To go into an obscure and dangerous land really

is a wild choice, especially for a woman at that time.

It's almost unimaginable.

It's difficult to do today.

Here are these three women,

and you'd almost say they were clueless.

They found a home in the casbah,

which would be the old city,

and by many considered the slums.

They hardly knew what they were doing or where to go.

They did not know a person in Algiers.

They did not speak a word of Arabic.

In many ways, they were very ill equipped

from a personal point of view.

Lilias was brought up to have a servant awaken her

in the morning with a cup of tea.

They marveled in their ability to do

these things on their own.

She was really turning her back

on everything that was

familiar and everything that was comfortable.

She didn't really know exactly what

she was going to find over there, the challenges.

I mean, clearly, she couldn't have imagined

the cultural differences.

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Oh, we do so long to speak Arabic.

The power of talking can only come by

being among the people.

Lilias kept an almost daily record in diaries and journals

of her life in Algeria.

What's so amazing about this record

is not only is it a written record,

but it's a visual record, sketches,

and there were photographs, documenting

stories of adventure and amazing stories of her life

in North Africa.

Lilias' first contact with the people in the casbah

were the children.

Her joy was complete when she could wake up in the morning

and go out in the streets and talk to the people.

There were parapets on their windows

that she could actually reach out and touch the hands

of somebody on the other side.

Her early years was establishing a base in Algiers,

and also drawing people to that ministry,

providing classes for children, for women.

Her heart was very much with those women

and became involved in their struggles.

The role of the woman was not a very pretty thing

in this culture, at that time.

The women would come to her with their stories.

She saw that girls were in their father's house

until they were marriageable at the ages of 10 and 12.

And then they were in their husband's harem,

and then discarded for younger wives.

And so many of them lived lives of great destitution.

And she became concerned that they

have some kind of economic independence,

to be able to stand on their own and apart

from their fathers or the fate of their marriage.

And really, this wasn't being done at the time.

She even had a person come, who was skilled,

to teach them this.

And during that time, she not only pioneered ministries,

but she pioneered methods of reaching people

that scholars today will say were 100 years ahead

of her time.

It was not a big movement to help to rescue battered women.

It was simply a person responding to need

and providing some love and some comfort and safety.

I said to a sad-eyed woman,

you love that little girl.

"Yes," she answered.

"I am a widow and she is my eyes."

That is the way God loves you, I said.

These were women who so responded to the love that

Lilias gave them.

She became Lalla Lili, their loving Lilias.

One Arab lady leaned out

from her upstairs window and spoke

to an Arab lady across the narrow corridor, and she said,

"Nobody ever loved us like this.

Nobody ever loved us like this."

June 8, 1896,

the village lay silent in the sunlight,

and a woman glided out of the door and asked what I wanted.

I answered that I loved the Arabs

and had come to talk to her.

Immediately, she led me through dark twisting passages.

Then, one by one, a dozen women gathered.

I don't think they'd ever seen a European woman

in close quarters before.

Later, one of the women asked, "Why do you not stay?

Why do you not come and live with us?"

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What are these women to doin a country

that was a French colony, that resented English people,

coming to the Arab Muslim world that resented Christians?

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January was one of the darkest

and toughest months we've ever had.

One literally could do nothing but pray

at every available moment.

Still, the light does not come.

Just a blind holding on to a dim Christ.

From the earliest days in Algeria,

she longed to go beyond the plains and into the desert.

Almost from the day she arrived,

I would say Lilias had her eye on the far horizon.

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(vocalizing)

Looking on and on,

the desert stretched away like a great sea.

One looks and looks and feels as if in a dream.

The desert is lovely in its restfulness.

Everything is so full of God.

One does not wonder that he used to take his people

into the desert to teach them.

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(vocalizing)

September 6, 1899.

The next day was a battle of long and simple endurance

through a blinding blizzard of sand.

We would trace the footprints that had been swept away,

and the track was invisible, as we journeyed along.

I really was grappling with, was it worth it?

She could, in a way, have it all.

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She began to develop relationships

with people in the Southlands.

She found a group of mystics that she felt

were seriously looking for God.

To know Lilias' story, you have to know the bond

that she established between the Sufi mystic brotherhood.

She had such admiration for them,

and she felt this particular group of people,

in this particular geographic area,

were true seekers after God.

She totally related to them as they sought the way.

And they invited her, and this was almost unprecedented

for them to invite somebody

into their brotherhood, and a woman, no less.

And they would tell each other their stories of faith.

She sensed in them a journey to try and find the heart

of the mystery, trying to penetrate to the depths

of the mystery of God.

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(vocalizing)

In many ways, Lilias is a role model of what it is

to interact with a culture, to respect it,

to honor the people, and to value them,

and to see herself as learning from them,

and so that it wasn't me bestowing my goodness upon you

as much as us coming together and coming alongside,

and learning from them, even as they learned from her.

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I do know that her friends say that her mother was

disappointed that she gave up, perhaps,

options for marriage and pursued a course of life

that was radical.

It's interesting to me to note

that she did not go to Algeria

until after her mother's death.

(light orchestral music)

My dearest Lilias,

I asked you a grave question two years

since or thereabouts.

You said you must pray over it and never answered a word.

Ever, your much enduring JR.

The colleagues of Lilias claim to know firsthand that

John Ruskin offered his hand in marriage to Lilias.

Now whether he ever would have delivered on that,

had she ever accepted that, well, we'll never know.

Whether he saw a potential marriage partner in Lilias is

hard to determine.

This is what we have, you see.

Whether she had the view that to be wholly devoted

to the Lord and the work that he'd given her to do,

she had to remain single or not, I don't know.

And she doesn't say.

And I wouldn't want to speculate,

but one never has the impression with Lilias Trotter

that this was a lack or anything

that she perceived as a lack.

Her life was full and rich.

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(light piano music)

While probably at present,

the only person likely to help me

in my chief difficulties and lost ways, so please,

think much of what I told you and follow on your own path,

happily, the light I cannot find.

Ever affectionately, write as often as you can.

JR.

(light orchestral music)

As late as 1899, the very last year of Ruskin's life,

she sent him a book of hymns.

"I got this book of verses-"

Verses to send you some weeks ago.

It has been full of light and blessedness to me,

and I have such a feeling that it will have some ray for you

that I can't help sending it.

Always yours, with grateful and loving memories,

Lilias Trotter.

(dramatic orchestral music)

The thing that dogged me the most

was the thought that she had given up her art.

Oh, how good it is

that I have been sent here to see such beauty.

There is a peculiar loveliness about the art

of saints and a peculiar joy, for the artist,

more than other men, has the power in forgetting himself

in what he sees.

(light orchestral music)

She understood, the written words took on value

by their beauty.

The longer that she was in North Africa, I think,

the more she began to think in parable.

She writes, "A bee-"

A bee comforted me very much this morning,

concerning the desultriness that troubles me in our work.

He was hovering among some blackberry sprays,

just touching flowers here and there,

yet all unconsciously, life,

life, life was left behind.

Today's first lesson was in these little mountain paths.

I followed mine only a few yards further this morning,

and such an outburst of beauty came.

You can never tell to what untold glories

a little humble path may lead, if you follow far enough.

(light piano music)

I am now ready to be offered.

Measure thy life by loss, not by gain,

not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth,

for love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice.

And he who suffers most has most to give.

When you see the diaries with the tiny illustrations

and realize that those were for no one but herself.

She was pouring out her heart.

I think it would have delighted Ruskin's color-loving heart

to have seen all those wonderful paintings of sky, flowers,

or people in their wonderful colors that he encouraged.

My feeling about her art, it wasn't lost in Algeria.

If anything, it was fed.

(dramatic orchestral music)

This quality that drove her and made

her do some incredible things had a flip side to it.

I admire going to the limit, but actually,

that was an area in her life,

I think, it was also a weakness,

that she did not know when to stop.

Repeatedly, she would work to the limit

and then completely break down, physically.

It was a climate that tested the strongest of men,

and many people left that area because they couldn't

withstand it, physically.

There were definitely the issues of health, fatigue.

One of the great sorrows was when

the first person in their band died at a young age,

from typhoid.

(dramatic orchestral music)

In reading her diaries,

I felt her struggles and her humanity,

an earthiness that's hard to convey in any other words,

but her own.

Our souls have felt the scorching breath.

Nerves get over strung in this climate in a way they never

did before.

And an exhaustion comes

through the body to the spirit so vivid

at times, that the very air

is full of the powers of darkness.

How many of us have gone through the testing

of every fiber of our inner life since we left England?

And how many of us have had a bit of breaking down

under these tests?

I know she had her doubts.

I know she had her struggles.

And I could feel the weight of that in her journal.

Sometimes, it was almost too hard

for me to read on, feeling the heaviness of what

she was dealing with.

Things still look dark and heavy all around,

but when the clouds are full of rain,

they empty themselves upon the earth.

It is better to wait for the torrents that

will set life going.

I am beginning to see that it is out of a low place

that one can best believe.

What I see here

is a woman who was so entuned with God

that she could speak, even in the midst of difficulty,

to an absolute abundant joy.

What most impressed me about her work in Algeria was

the almost thankless nature

of it because so much of her vast energies

were like water on the sand of the desert.

It was just absorbed and seemed to disappear.

She dreamed and prayed for a church visible,

and that didn't happen.

People to whom she really poured out her life

turned on her or would leave, and yet, she was so committed.

(light orchestral music)

Before us all dawned a new horizon,

the glory in its every hardness and in the sense that we are

working for the future and its coming day.

We are dreamers, dreaming greatly.

(light orchestral music)

In the Ashmolean Museum, there's a painting of a lily

that John Ruskin took from Lilias' collection.

The English lily thrived and was nurtured in that almost

greenhouse condition.

But there's also a lily that she painted,

which is a desert lily or the sand lilies,

and the interesting thing about the sand lily

is that it thrived in the harshest of conditions

because it drew the nourishment from the bulb that

had some stored energy within.

I think Lilias is an iconoclast.

I don't think she was hedged

in at all by cultural boundaries, dictates.

As a woman, as a Christian, as an artist,

she defied all the categories.

I now see a sunset differently.

In a sense, she's taught me a way of seeing.

She herself said, to the end of her life,

that she would feel the ache

of not having completely developed

her artistry, not so much when she wasn't painting,

but when she did pick up her paintbrush

and realize what more she could have done.

What I saw in Lilias was just the idea

of being faithful, being faithful

to what you believe is right, being faithful

to what you believe God wants you to do, and to not be

concerned about the results.

The adding up is not really ultimately ours to see.

Who's to measure what is greatness?

She, in the end, answered my own questions

because she, to the end, felt the joy of her life.

(light orchestral music)

(light orchestral music)

At the very end of her life, in this faint pencil,

she's still scrawling sketches and images.

At her deathbed, her friends gathered around

and they sang together,

"Jesus, Lover of My Soul," her favorite song.

Then she looked out the window and she said,

"A chariot and six horses."

And someone said, "Are you seeing beautiful things?"

And she said-

Yes.

Many, many beautiful things.

(light orchestral music)

This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals.

It has reached its crowning stage of dying.

The delicate seed globe must break up now.

It gives and gives until it has nothing left.

It holds itself no longer for its own keeping,

only as something to be given.

(light orchestral music)

(light acoustic guitar music)

♪ More my love ♪

♪ Here love bleeds in tomorrow ♪

♪ Which agrees with me ♪

♪ And colors I don't understand ♪

♪ Unto my heart and of my head ♪

♪ A shade of loss ♪

♪ A new day shall ♪

♪ The deep brown of papa's eyes ♪

♪ Open up ♪

♪ Open up ♪

♪ Made me feel so safe, but now ♪

♪ Out of the lowest place ♪

♪ No measure for the great ♪

♪ And I've only just begun to see ♪

♪ Victoria Station ♪

♪ Where that street for shelter and something to eat ♪

♪ She sells herself, a humble fare ♪

♪ Tonight will come and seek us there ♪

♪ A tattered dress is all she has ♪

♪ Gives so much more than that ♪

♪ And if it's losing myself ♪

♪ If I'm to rest, let me fade ♪

♪ Out of the lowest place ♪

♪ Forgotten and disgraced ♪

♪ The splendor in each broken thing ♪

♪ Dry as the dawn ♪

♪ Sufi said, their mystical quiet way ♪

♪ Aunt Tilda saw a precious world ♪

♪ Brush the pair of both under ♪

♪ Gathering at the bedside, safe and to believe in God ♪

♪ Six strong chariots came for me ♪

♪ Between the desert and the sea ♪

♪ Out of the lowest place, I'm surely halfway ♪

♪ I've only just begun to see ♪

♪ I see ♪

♪ I see ♪

♪ I see ♪

♪ I see ♪