Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Page 1
Praise for WALKING ON WATER
“This classic helps me define and live out what it means to be a Christian writer, communicator, and artist.”
—GLORIA GAITHER, singer and songwriter
“L’Engle has the unique ability to look at her faith, her art, and her culture in an open-minded yet wholly biblical manner. Putting her knowledge within the context of her family, her heart, and her imagination, she has given us a book full of depth and insight into the creative Christian mind.”
—ANDREW OSENGA, musician and recording artist, The Normals
“Walking on Water guides the wandering artist back to the Savior and says, ‘There, you’ve come home again where you belong!’ ”
—PATRICIA HICKMAN, author of Katrina’s Wings
“Madeleine L’Engle has put into words what music would say if it had a voice. We have been created by the master artist, and in return we must create art that directs others to him. The book has encouraged, refreshed, and renewed my vision for my art and my purpose.”
—MICAH WATSON, musician and recording artist, No Apples for Adam
“A book through which all thinking Christians can gain a better understanding of the specialized vocation that artists have.”
—Provident Book Finder
“Readers will find here in satisfying abundance [L’Engle’s] laconic wisdom, real-life anecdotes, candid self-revelations, and respect for mystery.”
—Christianity Today
“A book to linger over, to mark up, to ‘talk with’ as one reads. A book to share with other persons who love God and love literature….To hear from Madeleine L’Engle herself about her faith and her art is no small privilege.”
—Christianity and Literature
“Profound.”
—Cahill & Company
“Anyone interested in the profession of writing or other professions in the arts shouldn’t miss this book. A delightful journey into the world of the Christian artist.”
—Librarian’s World
Copyright © 1980, 1998, 2001 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Preface and Reader’s Guide copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and the C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published by Harold Shaw Publishers, Illinois, in 1980 and subsequently by Waterbrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1998 and 2001.
Scriptures in this book include direct quotations, as well as the author’s adaptations, from the King James Version and other translations.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:
Crosswicks, Ltd.: excerpts from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle, copyright © 1975 by Crosswicks, Ltd. Used by permission of Crosswicks, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: excerpts from “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; copyright © renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1940, 1942 by T. S. Eliot; copyright © renewed 1968, 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Open Road Integrated Media: excerpts from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle, copyright © 1975 by Crosswicks, Ltd. Used with the permission of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
W. W. Norton & Company: excerpts from “i thank You God for most this amazing,” copyright © 1950, 1978, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780804189279
Ebook ISBN 9780804189293
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface by Sara Zarr
Chapter 1: Cosmos from Chaos
Chapter 2: Icons of the True
Chapter 3: Healed, Whole, and Holy
Chapter 4: A Coal in the Hand
Chapter 5: Probable Impossibles
Chapter 6: Keeping the Clock Wound
Chapter 7: Names and Labels
Chapter 8: The Bottom of the Iceberg
Chapter 9: Do We Want the Children to See It?
Chapter 10: The Journey Homeward
Chapter 11: The Other Side of Silence
Chapter 12: Feeding the Lake
Reader’s Guide by Lindsay Lackey
For Bion and Laurie
I first came to Madeleine L’Engle’s work the way so many of us did—through her books for young readers. As a child of the seventies and a teenager of the eighties, my entrance into the wonderful world of independent reading coincided perfectly with her most prolific publishing years. Her stories were important to me for how they portrayed characters who were smart, who got along better with adults than with their peers, who liked reading and classical music and believed in the existence of a realm beyond what the eye could see. In other words, kids like me.
When I was an adult working toward a writing career, L’Engle’s words came back into my life when someone, knowing I desperately needed her perspective, presented me with a copy of Walking on Water. In it I found breathtaking contrast to the way I’d grown up hearing religious people talk about art, culture, and creativity. My Christian beliefs were formed in the context of a blue-jeans-and-guitars Jesus Movement church in San Francisco that was later touched by the sort of Evangelicalism that looked askance at popular music, most prime-time television, and any book you couldn’t find at the local Christian bookstore—anything that could fall into the category of the secular.
Secular. It’s a word that got a lot of airtime in the religious contexts of my youth. Secular meant don’t look, don’t read, don’t listen, don’t touch. It meant anything that came from outside the church as we defined it, anything made by non-Christians, unbelievers, the group of people identified by what they weren’t. They were “the world” and we were separate, in it but not of it, and we needed our own books, music, and movies (and bookstores and magazines and dentists and accountants and car dealers).
Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I don’t ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the church’s understanding of the God of the universe.
By the time I began to write, I knew there was something false about this compartmentalization, though I could not articulate it. And I knew I didn’t want to write for the religious market. Still, the “us” and “them” rhetoric around me planted seeds of doubt. By wanting to write as honestly as I could about human experience, was I on the wide path to destruction? Wouldn’t it be better to apply my intellectual capacities (limited though they are) toward building an unassailable apologetic for my faith so that I never had to fea
r not having an answer?
When I encountered Walking on Water and a few other books on the topic of art and faith and the faithful artist, it was like the sun dawned on a room whose contours had previously been flattened and grayed by fluorescent lights. I began a quest—one I’m still on today—to find out everything anyone had ever said about what it meant to hold your faith devoutly while also holding your art as devoutly, without one replacing the other. There had, of course, been others writing about this for decades and even centuries, but kids from eighties suburban youth groups weren’t reading Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene or Montaigne. We were reading Madeleine L’Engle. Who better to speak to a young writer about the possibilities for living a faith and a writing life with equal and interdependent vigor than the woman whose stories had filled my childhood and adolescence? Who better to grant me permission to be both believer and doubter?
In the very first chapter, L’Engle begins to articulate something I had felt innately but could never have explained: “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.” Though L’Engle goes on to explore numerous facets of the connection between art and faith, this is essentially the book’s thesis statement. And I think everyone knows this innately. We know, or at least we sense, when a work is created in bad faith, through the way it panders or degrades or thinks very little of its audience or offers certainty in response to the mysteries of the ineffable. As a reader, I want good religion. As a writer—even more than when I first began—I want to create in good faith.
How does one do this? L’Engle writes that the discipline of creation is “an effort toward wholeness.” In some ways this feels far more daunting than efforts toward income, audience, and critical success, which are things that we believe (falsely, for the most part) are within our control. They are about us, we think, what we do, how good and savvy and talented we are. Yet L’Engle insists over and over again in a hundred different ways that it is not about us, at least not in the way we think.
She knew this was a difficult thing to reckon with in 1980 when she first wrote it. How much more, now, do artists wrestle with the constant call to make our work about us—our platforms and presence and sales numbers and likes and followers? We, all of us, live in a culture that urges us to cultivate and curate idols of ourselves. This is true of the person working in a cubicle as much as it is for the artist, but it’s especially easy for those of us in public careers to be propelled away from wholeness rather than toward it, as we splinter off bits of ourselves to construct the idol versions.
When L’Engle asks toward the end of the book, “Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?” and essentially answers “Yes,” I connect it to this question of wholeness, of writing in good faith, and what “good religion” might look like for creative people of any tradition. L’Engle gives us more than a few hints: It looks like vulnerability. It looks like having the courage to let go of being right and of ideas we might have about our qualifications. It looks like a “rebuttal of death” and an openness to participate in wonder and joy as well as in pain and suffering.
For some of us from a Christian background, it looks like growing up out of a belief that the opposites of secular are clean and safe, and into an understanding that the sacred is all around us. L’Engle’s fiction is saturated in this idea of the sacred and mysterious being with us in the everyday, and the barrier between the visible and the invisible being thin, permeable. Her writing about writing and art brings us even more directly into that paradigm, where the artist is in an ongoing work of participating in God’s creation—beyond categories, beyond control, and even beyond time itself.
Since its publication, the ideas in Walking on Water have gained much wider acceptance in the church and been expanded upon by spiritual writers who have come after. The culture wars have been fought, and some are still fighting the same old battles over what’s acceptable to represent in art, what is good and true, and what might cause the weaker brother to stumble. Meanwhile, an ever-growing group of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and performing artists have left the war and put their energy instead into doing their work with as much excellence as they can, living their faith with as much honesty and humility as they can muster, and embracing mystery with as much passion as possible.
I think L’Engle would be very happy about this (while at the same time perhaps appalled that science and religion are still at war in many corners). The world she envisioned and brought to the page, in both her fiction and nonfiction, is born of a deeply held faith that the universe itself is an act of love and therefore the world is worth loving. “God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us,” she wrote, “and to co-create with God is our human calling.” This is good religion, not only for the artist but also for anyone else who would choose to believe.
—Sara Zarr
The apple trees in the orchard at Crosswicks are growing old. Last winter the beautiful green pie-apple tree died during the ice storms. This summer I notice that the leafing of some of the others is thin. A neighboring farmer friend tells me that these trees have been “winter killed.”
When the children were little we used to tie presents, presents and balloons, on the trees for summer birthdays. This year the willow by the north meadow was hung with balloons and a big basket of blooming ivy-geraniums as we prepared for a spring wedding. A lot of water has run under the stone bridge of the brook since the birthday trees. The pebbly shoreline of Dog Pond, where the children learned to swim, has been tarred for motorboat launching, so that the utter stillness of the lake is often broken. But there is still a pattern to the summers which I hope will never change, a lovely kaleidoscope of family and friends coming and going. Quite a few of the photographs taken at the time of this spring’s wedding show me in a typical position, standing at the stove, stirring something. In the summer I seem to spend my days between the stove and the typewriter, with time out for walking the dogs to the brook, bearing the big red clippers which help to clear the paths.
I sit on my favourite rock, looking over the brook, to take time away from busyness, time to be. I’ve long since stopped feeling guilty about taking being time; it’s something we all need for our spiritual health, and often we don’t take enough of it.
This spring I was given two posters which I find helpful in reminding me to take being time. (Both givers must have known I needed the message.) A few weeks before the wedding I ran impetuously out to the dark garage to turn on the outside light and rammed into a cardboard cat carrier—mere cardboard, mind you!—and broke the third metatarsal bone in my foot. I have frequently taken mammoth, crashing tumbles without breaking a bone. What a way to do it now! Humiliating, to say the least, and my children rub it in by emphasizing the cardboard.
“Can you stay off your feet for six weeks?” the doctor asked.
“No, I’m off day after tomorrow for a ten-day lecture tour all over Ohio. Then we have the wedding, and then I get my grandchildren for a week…”
So off I went, leg in cast, via wheelchair and crutches and elegant pre-boarding on planes. The first poster was given me on my second stop, the Convent of the Transfiguration near Cincinnati, where I was conducting a retreat. The poster tells me: Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit.
The second poster came a month later, when I was out of the cast but still on crutches, sent me by Luci Shaw, who is largely responsible for my struggling to write this book. It shows a covered bridge in the autumn, very much like the covered bridge we drive through en route to Crosswicks, and it echoes my need: Slow me down, Lord.
Good messages. When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening. I will never understand the silent dying of the green pie-apple tree if I do not slow down and listen to what the Spirit is telling me, telling me of the death of trees, the death of planets, of people, and what all these deaths mean in the light of love of the Creator, who brought th
em all into being, who brought me into being, and you.
This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires at night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves; the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn. It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all of God’s creatures.
So when the two messages, Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit, and Slow me down, Lord, came, I was forced to listen, and even to smile as I heard myself saying emphatically to Luci, “No, I most certainly do not want to write about being a Christian artist,” for I realized that the very vehemence of my reaction meant that perhaps I should, in fact, stop and listen. The Holy Spirit does not hesitate to use any method at hand to make a point to us reluctant creatures.
Why is it that I, who have spent my life writing, struggling to be a better artist, and struggling also to be a better Christian, should feel rebellious when I am called a Christian artist? Why should I feel reluctant to think or write about Christian creativity?
It’s more than just that I feel the presumption of someone like me—wife, grandmother, storyteller—attempting such a task. I wouldn’t even consider it had I not already struggled with it in talks which Mel Lorentzen, Bea Batson, and others in the English department at Wheaton College have pulled out of me. It was some of these faltering lectures which caused Luci and Harold Shaw to ask me to expand my thoughts into a book. And then came Ayia Napa.
Probably it was Ayia Napa that clinched it. When Dr. Marion van Horne asked me to come to Ayia Napa, in Cyprus, for two weeks, how could I resist? I love to travel. My brief trip several years ago to Greece and the Greek islands made me love the incredible blue and gold air of this land where Apollo drove his chariot across the sky, where John brought the mother of Jesus, where Pythagorus walked on the beach, and where Paul preached a message of love even more brilliant than the sun.