Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  If I found this world in Emily of New Moon, in books of Chinese fairy tales, as well as in Andrew Lang’s collections, I also found it in the Bible stories. I was fortunate (in the strange way in which tragedy brings with it blessings as well as griefs) because my father’s deteriorating lungs dictated an unusual schedule; he worked best in the afternoon and evening, and slept late into the morning. Therefore there was no one to take me to Sunday school. I have talked with such a surprising number of people who have had to spend most of their lives unlearning what some well-meaning person taught them in Sunday school, that I’m glad I escaped! All the old heresies of the first few centuries—Donatism, Manicheism, Docetism, to name but three—are still around, and Satan doesn’t hesitate to use them wherever possible.

  In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable. When I am referred to in an article or a review as a “practicing Christian” it is seldom meant as a compliment, at least not in the secular press. It is perfectly all right, according to literary critics, to be Jewish or Buddhist or Sufi or a pre-Christian druid. It is not all right to be a Christian. And if we ask why, the answer is a sad one: Christians have given Christianity a bad name. They have let their lights flicker and grow dim. They have confused piosity with piety, smugness with joy. During the difficult period in which I was struggling through my “cloud of unknowing” to return to the church and to Christ, the largest thing which deterred me was that I saw so little clear light coming from those Christians who sought to bring me back to the fold.

  But I’m back, and grateful to be back, because, through God’s loving grace, I did meet enough people who showed me that light of love which the darkness cannot extinguish. One of the things I learned on the road back is that I do not have to be right. I have to try to do what is right, but when it turns out, as happens with all of us, to be wrong, then I am free to accept that it was wrong, to say, “I’m sorry,” and to try, if possible, to make reparation. But I have to accept the fact that I am often unwise; that I am not always loving; that I make mistakes; that I am, in fact, human. And as Christians we are meant to be not less human than other people but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human.

  One time I was talking to Canon Tallis, who is my spiritual director as well as my friend, and I was deeply grieved about something, and I kept telling him how woefully I had failed someone I loved, failed totally, otherwise that person couldn’t have done the wrong that was so destructive. Finally he looked at me and said calmly, “Who are you to think you are better than our Lord? After all, he was singularly unsuccessful with a great many people.”

  That remark, made to me many years ago, has stood me in good stead, time and again. I have to try, but I do not have to succeed. Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love.

  —

  So does the Bible. God’s love for his people. All of us. As the psalmist sings, “God loves every man….He calls all the stars by name.”

  I’m particularly grateful that I was allowed to read my Bible as I read my other books, to read it as story, that story which is a revelation of truth. People are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they are taught about it, and I’m grateful that I was able to read the Book with the same wonder and joy with which I read The Ice Princess or The Tempest or about E. Nesbitt’s Psammead, that disagreeable and enchanting creature who would have been no surprise to Abraham or Sarah. In Isaiah I read about those dragons who honour him because he gives “waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, to give drink to his people.” So it was no surprise to me to read about a mediaeval dragon who was a great pet in the palace; he helped heat water, and on cold winter nights he got into every bed in the palace, by turn, breathing out just enough warmth to take off the chill and make the sheets toasty to get into.

  I had an aunt who worried that I lived in an unreal world. But what is real? In the Bible we are constantly being given glimpses of a reality quite different from that taught in school, even in Sunday school. And these glimpses are not given to the qualified; there’s the marvel. It may be that the qualified feel no need of them.

  —

  We are all asked to do more than we can do. Every hero and heroine of the Bible does more than he would have thought it possible to do, from Gideon to Esther to Mary. Jacob, one of my favourite characters, certainly wasn’t qualified. He was a liar and a cheat, and yet he was given the extraordinary vision of angels and archangels ascending and descending a ladder which reached from earth to heaven.

  In the first chapter of John’s gospel, Nathanael was given a glimpse of what Jacob saw, or a promise of it, and he wasn’t qualified, either. He was narrow-minded and unimaginative, and when Philip told him that Jesus of Nazareth was the one they sought, his rather cynical response was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” And yet it was to Nathanael that Jesus promised the vision of angels and archangels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

  In the novels and stories which have always meant the most to me, and to which, as both child and adult, I return and return, I find the same thing: the unqualified younger son finishes the quest where the qualified elder brothers fail because they think they can do it themselves. In Twelfth Night, Viola, a young, unqualified girl, ends up solving all the tangled problems and marrying the duke. The Macbeths bring disaster on themselves and others because they take things into their own hands; they think they have a right to do what they need to do in order for Macbeth to get the crown; they listen to the witches, and they fall for the three temptations of power—temptations which have been the same since Satan offered them to Jesus in the wilderness. King Lear moves into tragedy when he assumes that he has a right to be loved by his daughters and when he tries to compare their love quantitatively.

  Moses wasn’t qualified (as I run over my favourite characters in both Old and New Testaments, I can’t find one who was in any worldly way qualified to do the job which was nevertheless accomplished); Moses was past middle age when God called him to lead his children out of Egypt, and he spoke with a stutter. He was reluctant and unwilling, and he couldn’t control his temper. But he saw the bush that burned and was not consumed. He spoke with God in the cloud on Mount Sinai, and afterwards his face glowed with such brilliant light that the people could not bear to look at him.

  In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.

  —

  It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness. Could Beethoven have written that glorious paean of praise in the Ninth Symphony if he had not had to endure the dark closing in of deafness? As I look through his work chronologically, there’s no denying that it deepens and strengthens along with the deafness. Could Milton have seen all that he sees in Paradise Lost if he had not been blind? It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

  My mother’s long life had more than its fair share of pain and tragedy. One time, after something difficult had happened, one of her childhood friends came to give comfort and help. Instead of which, she burst into tears and sobbed out, “I envy you! I envy you! You’ve had a terrible life, but you’ve lived!”

  I look back at my mother’s life and I see suffering deepening and strengthening it. In some people I have also seen it destroy. Pain is not always creative; received wrongly, it can lead to alcoholism and madness and suicide. Nevertheless, without it we do not grow.

  —

  Demetrios Capetenakis s
ays, “One must really be brave to choose love or writing as one’s guides, because they may lead one to the space in which the meaning of our life is hidden—and who can say that this space may not be the land of death.”

  Even to the Christian this land of death is dark and frightening. No matter how deep the faith, we each have to walk the lonesome valley; we each have to walk it all alone. The world tempts us to draw back, tempts us to believe we will not have to take this test. We are tempted to try to avoid not only our own suffering but also that of our fellow human beings, the suffering of the world, which is part of our own suffering. But if we draw back from it (and we are free to do so), Kafka reminds us that “it may be that this very holding back is the one evil you could have avoided.”

  The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

  —

  We are hurt; we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space. We all have glimpses of glory as children, and as we grow up we forget them or are taught to think we made them up; they couldn’t possibly have been real because to most of us who are grown up, reality is like radium and can be borne only in very small quantities.

  But we are meant to be real and to see and recognize the real. We are all more than we know, and that wondrous reality, that wholeness, holiness, is there for all of us, not the qualified only.

  I am glad that in the communion of my church we are baptized as infants, because this emphasizes that the gift of death to this world and birth into the kingdom of God is, in fact, gift—it is nothing we have earned, or even, as infants, chosen. It is God’s freely bestowed love.

  Juan Carlos Ortiz, a priest in South America, uses this baptismal formula: “I kill you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve and please him.”

  It is baptism itself that I am talking about, not “immersion” or “splashing.” My husband, being properly submerged in the First Baptist Church when he was ten, experienced the same undeserved glory that I did, who was baptized before the age of reason. It is the gift that matters. It is death, and life.

  It is as radical as that, and it is gift. Through no virtue of our own we are made dead to the old and alive in the new.

  And for each one of us there is a special gift, the way in which we may best serve and please the Lord, whose love is so overflowing. And gifts should never be thought of quantitatively. One of the holiest women I have ever known did little with her life in terms of worldly success; her gift was that of bringing laughter with her wherever she went, no matter how dark or grievous the occasion. Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.

  In the Koran it is written, “He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.”

  I am grateful that I started writing at a very early age, before I realized what a daring thing it is to do, to set down words on paper, to attempt to tell a story, create characters. We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.

  With God, even a rich man can enter the narrow gate to heaven. Earthbound as we are, even we can walk on water.

  Paul certainly wasn’t qualified to talk about love, Paul who had persecuted so many Christians as ruthlessly as possible; and yet his poem on love in 1 Corinthians has shattering power. It is not a vague, genial sense of well-being that it offers us but a particular, painful, birth-giving love. How to translate that one word which is the key word? Charity long ago lost its original meaning and has come to mean a cold, dutiful giving. And love is now almost entirely limited to the narrower forms of sex. Canon Tallis suggests that perhaps for our day the best translation of love is the name of Jesus, and that will tell us everything about love we need to know.

  It is a listening, unself-conscious love, and many artists who are incapable of this in their daily living are able to find it as they listen to their work, that work which binds our wounds and heals us and helps us toward wholeness.

  —

  When I was a child my parents loved me not because I was good but because I was Madeleine, their child. I loved them, and I wanted to please them, but their love of me did not have to be earned.

  Neither does the love of God. We are loved because we are his children, because we are. The more we feel that we ought to be loved because it is our due or because we deserve it, the less we will truly feel the need of God’s love; the less implicit will be our trust; the less will we cry out, Abba!

  Dostoyevsky writes, in Crime and Punishment,

  Then Christ will say to us, “Come you as well, Come drunkards, come weaklings, come forth ye children of shame….” And he will say to us, “Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark, but come ye also.” And the wise men and those of understanding will say: “O Lord, why do you receive these men?” And he will say, “This is why I receive them, O ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.” And he will hold out his hands to us and we shall fall down before him…and we shall weep…and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all things!…Lord, thy kingdom come.

  The root word of humility is humus, earth; to be human, too, comes from the same word; and the parables of Jesus which show the kind of humility he is seeking in us are often earthy, such as the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the parable of the seed and the sower, and the parable of the prodigal son. We all have within us that same lack of humility as the workers who worked in the heat of the day and resented those who got equal pay for shorter hours of work, and we all understand the lack of humility in the elder son who was offended by his father’s humble forgiveness.

  King Lear’s humbleness at the end of his play is all the more moving because it has been born of the pain caused by his arrogance.

  And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God’s children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.

  —

  The disciples, like the rest of us, did not deserve God’s love, nor their Master’s. How must Jesus have felt when he was forced to realize that his disciples, whom he had called to be with him all the way, would not stand with him at the end? Without exception they fled the garden, even John and James and Peter, who had been with him the most. And of the men, only John was at the foot of the cross. The women were there, perhaps because throughout the ages women have been allowed to remain more in touch with the intuitive self than have men, who traditionally have been trained to limit themselves to the rational self. Men are to be strong; able and ready to fight, never to cry; to solve all problems with the rational intellect. While women, involved as they are in the nurture and upbringing of children far more than men, have thereby been helped to retain the child and the dreamer in themselves.

  And yet, despite the fear and unfaithfulness of his followers, Jesus’ love never faltered, for it was not dependent on the merit and virtue and the qualifications of those he loved.

  —

  Wounds. By his wounds we are healed. But they are our wounds, too, and until we have been healed we do not know what wholeness is. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness.

  The great male artists have somehow or other retained this wholeness, this being in touch with both intellect and intuition, a wholeness which always has to be bought at a price in this world. How many artists, in the eyes of the world, have been less than whole? Toulouse-Lautrec had the body of a man and the legs of a child. Byron had a clubfoot. Demosthenes was a terrible stutterer. Traditionally, Homer was blind. The great artists have g
ained their wholeness through their wounds, their epilepsies, tuberculoses, periods of madness.

  My son-in-law, Alan Jones, told me a story of a Hasidic rabbi renowned for his piety. He was unexpectedly confronted one day by one of his devoted youthful disciples. In a burst of feeling, the young disciple exclaimed, “My master, I love you!” The ancient teacher looked up from his books and asked his fervent disciple, “Do you know what hurts me, my son?”

  The young man was puzzled. Composing himself, he stuttered, “I don’t understand your question, Rabbi. I am trying to tell you how much you mean to me, and you confuse me with irrelevant questions.”

  “My question is neither confusing nor irrelevant,” rejoined the rabbi. “For if you do not know what hurts me, how can you truly love me?”

  —

  No matter how much we are hurt, God knows about it, cares about it, and so, through his love, we are sometimes enabled to let go our hurts.

  But it is not only our hurts which we are required to give over but our wholenesses, too. It must all be his.

  To trust, to be truly whole, is also to let go whatever we may consider our qualifications. There’s a paradox here, and a trap for the lazy. I do not need to be “qualified” to play a Bach fugue on the piano (and playing a Bach fugue is for me an exercise in wholeness). But I cannot play that Bach fugue at all if I do not play the piano daily, if I do not practice my finger exercises. There are equivalents of finger exercises in the writing of books, the painting of portraits, the composing of a song. We do not need to be qualified; the gift is free; and yet we have to pay for it.

  Isaiah knew himself to be mortal and flawed, but he had the child’s courage to say to the Lord, “Here I am. Send me.” And he understood the freedom which the Spirit can give us from ordinary restrictions when he wrote, “When you pass through deep waters I am with you; when you pass through rivers, they will not sweep you away; walk through fire and you will not be scorched, through flames and they will not burn you.” He may not have had this understanding before he wrote those words, for such understanding is a gift which comes when we let go and listen. I think I looked up this passage because I dreamed that a friend reached into the fireplace and drew out a living coal and held it in his hand, looking at its radiance, and I wondered at him because he was not burned.