Madeleine L'Engle, from strength to strength

Madeleine L'Engle was an inspiration to me.

Passing on into God's hands at age 88, she leaves behind a world that still needs her graceful approach to imagination and faith.

Most accounts of her life celebrate her Newberry Award-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. But her fiction doesn't stand out in my mind and life.

Her masterpiece, to me, is a set of reflections on creativity and faith entitled Walking on Water.

When I decided to live out consciously my life as a follower of Christ, I figured my fiction-writing days were over. I was pretty sure God wouldn't be happy with my writing anything that contained curse words, sex, or any other questionable behavior. And I was smart enough to know I wouldn't be able to stand writing sanitized stories like that.

Plus, I figured writing was frivolous based on the deep needs besetting humanity: reaching out to the lost and broken, discipling those starting out in the faith-- building up the Kingdom, in the jargon. No place for "secular" fiction in my world.

But of course if you have a seed of compulsion for telling a well-made story, it doesn't matter what philosophy you subscribe to. That seed is going to burst and something is going to grow in you.

So as a young man I came to Madeleine L'Engle, who contended in Walking on Water that the writer of faith is not constrained by subject matter.

Incredulous, I found her address and wrote her. I do not have her reply to me-- written on a tiny piece of St. John the Divine Cathedral letterhead-- and filled with typos, to my considerable astonishment. She wrote that nothing is secular in God's world, because God made the entire creation. Therefore it is all sacred, and it is all worthy of the writer's attention. The only thing that is not sacred is that which man has twisted and robbed of its spirit.

L'Engle calls this quality of the world Incarnation, "God's revelation of himself through particularity." This quality is found in all art that sings with a spirit of life, or points to the goodness of God in any way, Christian-created or not. L'Engle writes:

If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, in music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the words of a sermon of John Donne.

L'Engle asks us to be open to God in every form, every corner, every moment.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.

All of L'Engle's inspirational words have not stopped there from being a multi-million dollar market of "Christian" books, written for people who believe that curse words and sex should not be in books read by Christians (you can still have violence, however). Just for the experience of being published, I once came close to being paid to write a novel for this market.

But I have taken on Ms. L'Engle's attitude towards creation, and towards myself.

I finally was able to reason that if I was a member of God's creation, and God gave me a gift to write fiction, then it was my duty and service to exercise that gift. All other service is well and good, but the important thing is to find the deep gift inside and bring that out.

If the work comes to the artist and says, "here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.

Thank you, Ms. L'Engle. Peace be to you, may you go from strength to strength in God's service, and pray for me and the world.

Comments

[Kellincatty]

I saw Ms. L'engle speak a few years ago - she's as inspiring to me now as ever. I too, was sad to hear of her death - but celebrate a life well-lived.

[M Light]

As much as I love her fiction, Walking on Water is my favorite book of hers.

I went through something similar in college - except with music. The only "useful" music was specifically Christian. Symphonies, secular songs, etc. were of no use at all. In fact, what use could instrumental music have - except as an accompaniment to a hymn? This posed a great difficulty since I was majoring in music at the NC School of the Arts at the time! I neglected most of my music collection - classical, popular, and Broadway. It got to the point where the only music I listened to consisted of the two John Michael Talbot and three Keith Green records we had. And I got bored with those after a while...

I don't remember what saved me from that. Madeleine L'Engle might have helped; I know I read Walking on Water at about that time (I love her view that you quoted). Or, my rebellious side might have kicked in. It's pretty good at saving me from hyper-ideological thought.

I sometimes wonder what God thinks of our view of Him. He gives us gifts (writing, music, other forms of beauty), and we try to turn away from them because we think they're not "right." Would we want our children to do that? Why do we think that God is any different? Which reminds me of Matthew 7:11: "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!"

[M Light]

“…written for people who believe that curse words and sex should not be in books read by Christians (you can still have violence, however)”

This reminds me of a blog post I never got around to writing. I had noticed that my conservative friends were extremely careful with the movies their kids watched as far as sex and language were concerned, but they let their kids watch movies more violent than those I let mine watch. My liberal friends tended to be more careful about violence than sex (I tend to fall between, being careful about everything, but, as the kids get older, I tend more towards the liberal side).

My daughter recently watched the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time. When dear husband, older son and I originally went to see this in the theater, older son and I spent a good bit of the first movie staring at the floor in the theater because of the violence. However, the orc heads flying by aren’t as prominent when you watch them on a small TV. She did ask me afterwards if LOTR would have been rated R if those had been human heads soaring across the screen rather than orc ones.