Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  But the reality of the outcome of all annunciations is a reality which is scoffed at by most of the world. It is one of the greater triumphs of Lucifer that he has managed to make Christians (Christians!) believe that a story is a lie, that a myth should be outgrown with puberty, that to act in a play is inconsistent with true religion.

  —

  One of my favourite paintings among El Greco’s is a large canvas of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Andrew, which I saw in the Prado, and before which I stood in awed joy, for St. Andrew and St. Francis are companionably talking together, side by side, with the cross between them mediating the distance of eleven hundred years.

  And as I set down the word mediate, I realized that it is part of the word immediate, that place of now, where past and future come together.

  Those of us who fly a lot know the randomness of time. Two nights in Athens were necessary for me en route to Cyprus because my spirit is able to adjust to the radical time difference more easily than my intestines. Our bodies do not relish having their circadian rhythms disturbed, and that’s partly because, over the centuries, we’ve forgotten how to move about in time, and that particular ability has atrophied.

  I’m not sure jet travel is the way we’re meant to adapt once again. Technology, for which I am grateful, has too often turned into technocracy, which can become a monster. I’m often asked by people who have read The Arm of the Starfish if I believe that experiments like Dr. O’Keefe’s on human regeneration will ever become possible. And I can reply that not only do I believe so but that doctors in England have discovered that if a child accidentally loses a finger, the thing to do is not to close the wound or to stitch it up but to keep it clean and open and unbandaged, and the finger will grow again. The younger the child, the more rapid will be the regeneration. We are beginning to recognize that medicine has not always done the right thing in turning to the knife or the needle; the human body is far more regenerative than we have realized.

  So my feelings about our massive airplanes are part of my feelings about technology-turned-technocracy in general. Surely our machines were not meant to deal out death. More people have been killed in automobile accidents than in all our wars put together: a terrifying statistic.

  So I sit in the airport waiting to board my plane, and my storyteller’s mind gets to work, and I envision a planet with a civilization more enlightened than ours, where children and animals and old people are not killed by cars and trucks because cars and trucks are not necessary for travel. For short distances, the people fly; for longer distances they sit and meditate and then (as Meg Murry would say) they tesser, and they are there.

  Is that more far-fetched than children in England growing new fingers? Not really. When Jesus wanted to go somewhere he didn’t summon a taxi to take him to the airport. He went. And if we examine the Gospels carefully, we discover that sometimes he went farther than even the fastest runner could go in that length of time. His sudden appearances and disappearances confused and frightened the disciples, leaving them to say, “What manner of man is this?” And after the Resurrection his appearances are even more puzzling; at one point he is seen by five hundred of the brethren, but not everybody; in John’s gospel the disciples have seen him twice, and yet when they go fishing and see him on the beach, they don’t recognize him. It is even possible that he may have been seen in more than one place at the same time, being even less restricted by time and space than he had been during his mortal life. And never once in his post-Resurrection appearances was he recognized immediately. Mary knew him when he called her by name. And he was known in the breaking of bread, in the eating of a fish.

  —

  We were not meant to be any more restricted than Jesus was during his sojourn with us here on this earth. If we take seriously that during the time of his Incarnation he was truly man, truly human as we are, then anything he did in his lifetime is available to us, too.

  Am I suggesting that we really ought to be able to walk upon water? That there are (and not just in fantasies) easier and faster ways to travel than by jet or car? Yes, I am. There are too many stories of mystics being able to move hundreds of miles through the power of contemplation for us to be able to toss them aside. Over and over again throughout the centuries we have made choices which were meant to free us, but which ultimately have limited and restricted us. But the artist has retained some of the freedom we have lost in the industrial dailiness of our living.

  —

  Our way of looking at the place of the earth in the heavens changed irrevocably when the first astronauts went to the moon. Standing on the lunar surface, they looked back and saw “earthrise”—and all their concepts of up and down, backwards and forwards, left and right, changed. Since there is, in space, neither up nor down, left nor right, here nor there, backwards nor forwards, we can either fall apart in terror of chaos or rejoice in the unity of the created universe. Just as Jesus knew a world of nonlinear time, so, too, he knew a world of nonlinear space.

  Theologians, back in the sixties, tried to grapple with this by saying that God is not “up there,” that heaven is not “up,” and they listened in awe as Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut to go into space, said that of course there is no God; he was out in space looking for God, and he didn’t see him. (As I try to visualize the “God” Gagarin was looking for, all I can do is smile.)

  We look into outer space, and because we cannot “see” a God we can touch, a God we can comprehend with our rational intellects, we invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy, little gods who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, hands and touch not, and who have nothing to say to us in the times of our deepest need.

  Montaigne saw this and wrote, “O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens.” We have been doing this for centuries, and perhaps only the coming of the kingdom will stop this futile activity.

  Nonlinear space/time is more easily understood by poets and saints than by reasonable folk. Back somewhere around the end of the eleventh century, Hildevert of Lavardin wrote:

  God is over all things

  under all things,

  outside all,

  within, but not enclosed,

  without, but not excluded,

  above, but not raised up,

  below, but not depressed,

  wholly above, presiding,

  wholly without, embracing,

  wholly within, filling.

  And that says all that needs saying.

  —

  When I am looking for theologians to stimulate my creativity, theologians who are contemporary enough to speak to these last years of our troubled century, I turn to the Byzantine and Cappadocian fathers of the early years of the Christian era, because their world was more like ours than the world of such great theologians as Niebuhr and Tillich and Bultmann, who were writing in the framework of a world which was basically pre–World War II, and definitely pre-the-splitting-of-the-atom. In the first few centuries A.D., Rome was breaking up; civilization was changing as radically as is our own; people were no longer able to live in the luxury they had become accustomed to, as the great aqueducts and water-heating systems broke down and the roads were no longer kept up. Such people as St. Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and his brilliant sister, Macrina, were facing the same kind of change and challenge that we are, and from them I get great courage.

  And when I try to find contemporary, twentieth-century mystics to help me in my own search for meditation and contemplation, I turn to the cellular biologists and astrophysicists, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself, and their questions are theological ones: What is the nature of time? of creation? of life? What is human creativity? What is our share in God’s work?

  In his letter to the people of Ephesus, Paul wrote, “Each of us has been given his gift, his due portion of Christ’s bounty.” To accept our gift means accepting our freedom. This involves a new understanding of tim
e and space, the same understanding towards which the astrophysicists are struggling, that same understanding which Jesus was offering John and James and Peter on the mountain, despite their obtuseness. They didn’t begin to understand this kind of freedom until after the mighty acts of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit.

  And the men and women to whom Jesus offered this gift were ordinary human beings, faulted and flawed, just like the rest of us. He gave his disciples no job descriptions; he did not disqualify Mary Magdalene because she had been afflicted with seven demons; he did not spend a lot of time looking for the most qualified people, the most adult. Instead, he chose people who were still childlike enough to leave the known comforts of the daily world, the security of their jobs, their reasonable way of life, to follow him.

  For the past several generations we’ve forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We’re all born with archaic understanding, and I’d guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

  But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

  —

  What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career. Several women have written to me to complain about A Swiftly Tilting Planet. They feel that I should not have allowed Meg Murry to give up a career by marrying Calvin, having children, and quietly helping her husband with his work behind the scenes. But if women are to be free to choose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg’s choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.

  Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.

  —

  Long before Jung came up with his theories of archetypical understanding, William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”

  The creator is not afraid to leap over the “accidental fences” and to plunge into the deep waters of creation. There, once again, and in yet another way, we lose ourselves to find ourselves.

  —

  One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking. The creator, and the mystic, have tended more towards Platonism than Aristotelianism, and tend to be willing to accept Plato’s “divine madness,” with its four aspects of prophecy, healing, artistic creativity, and love.

  These divine madnesses have been nearly lost in this century, and so we’ve lived almost entirely in the pragmatic, Cartesian world. I wonder if Descartes knew what he was doing when he wrote his famous I think, therefore I am, and subsequently, if not consequently, we began even more than before to equate ourselves with our conscious minds. Cogito, ergo sum nudges us on to depend solely on intellectual control, and if we insist on intellectual control we have to let go our archaic understanding and our high creativity, because keeping them means going along with all kinds of things we can’t control.

  And yet, ultimately, our underwater, intuitive selves are never really incompatible with the above-water, intellectual part of our wholeness. Part of Jesus’ freedom came from the radical view of time which allowed him to speak with Moses and Elijah simultaneously, thus bursting through the limitations of time accepted by the intellect. Yet what he did is not at all inconsistent with what contemporary astrophysicists are discovering about the nature of time. Secularists have long tended to laugh away the story of “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,” but according to some new research, it now seems as though something actually did happen to the physical world at that time; the earth may have shifted slightly on its axis, and time would have been affected, and the sun for a moment may indeed have stood still.

  For the astrophysicist as for the saint, chronos and kairos converge. Robert Jastrow in his book, God and the Astronomers, talks about the astronomers, after all their questions, struggling up to a mountain peak and finding the theologians already there.

  Chronos: our wristwatch and alarm-clock time. Kairos: God’s time, real time. Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos; during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.

  —

  Chronology, as we know it, began with Creation. Time exists only where there is mass in motion. A certain amount of consternation has been caused among some scientists because our great radio telescopes are giving clues that indicate that this universe did have a beginning, when an unexplained and violent explosion of an incredibly dense ball of matter suddenly burst into the void. As it exploded and expanded, our galaxies and solar systems were formed, and the original explosion continues as the galaxies hurtle outward into unknown space. What our radio telescopes are picking up now are echoes of the sound of that primal explosion, so long ago that it is scarcely expressible numerically.

  As the echoes of the beginning linger, so, too, all that we say moves outward in gradually diminishing but never-ending sound waves. One of the more delightful mysteries of sound came when the astronauts on one of our early spaceships heard a program of nostalgic music over their sound system and radioed NASA to thank whoever it was who had sent them the program. From NASA came the rather baffled reply that they had sent the astronauts no such program and knew nothing about it.

  This phenomenon triggered a good deal of interest and research: who had beamed the music to the astronauts? What was its source? All the radio and TV programs all over the country at that day and hour were checked out, and none of them was responsible for the music the astronauts had so enjoyed. Further research. Could they all have imagined hearing a nonexistent program of old popular songs? Was it a kind of mass hallucination? It seemed highly unlikely. Research finally revealed that that particular program had been broadcast in the 1930s.

  How do you explain it? You don’t. Nor can you explain it away. It happened. And I give it the same kind of awed faith that I do the Annunciation or the Ascension: there is much that we cannot understand, but our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates it.

  —

  We simply do not understand time. We know that a moving mass is necessary for the existence of time as we define it and that time had a beginning and will have an end. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable and that pure energy is freed from the restrictions of time. But even chronos varies from time zone to time zone. When I flew to Cyprus, I had to make a seven-hour adjustment. Even within the United States I have had cause to tell someone who phones me at midnight, “Hey, I am not in California, and it is not nine o’clock here.”

  In my grandfather’s lifetime there was no standardization of time such as we’re accustomed to today. Every locality set its own time, according to its own convenience; one village might be two or three hours different from another just a few miles away, and there was outrage at the violation of freedom when the time zones were made obligatory. I have to admit that a certain amount of consistency is practical and helpful. However, no matter how we systematize it, chronological time does not work out evenly in the long run. We base it on the movement of the earth as it turns on its axis and around the sun, and on the movement of the stars across the sky—but every two thousand years or so the astronomers all have to adjust their timepieces a few seconds.

  In chronos we are restricted to this unevenness; in chronos we live
most of our lives and watch our bodies growing older, our skin losing its elasticity, our energies their powers of duration. For most of us a watch is accurate enough so that we know when to get up, to go to work, to go to church, to meet a friend. But even though we now have a moderately consistent chronology according to our clocks, there is considerable variation in our interior clocks. How long is a toothache? How long is a wonderful time? Lewis Carroll expressed a profound truth when he had the Mad Hatter say, “If you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn’t be talking about wasting it. It’s him….We quarrelled last March…and ever since that…he won’t do a thing I ask.”

  —

  Lewis Carroll was a storyteller, an artist, as well as a mathematician, and artists often have a more profound sense of what time is all about than do the scientists. There’s a story of a small village (about the size of the village near Crosswicks) where lived an old clockmaker and repairer. When anything was wrong with any of the clocks or watches in the village, he was able to fix them, to get them working properly again. When he died, leaving no children and no apprentice, there was no one left in the village who could fix clocks. Soon various clocks and watches began to break down. Those which continued to run often lost or gained time, so they were of little use. A clock might strike midnight at three in the afternoon. So many of the villagers abandoned their timepieces.

  One day a renowned clockmaker and repairer came through the village, and the people crowded around him and begged him to fix their broken clocks and watches. He spent many hours looking at all the faulty timepieces, and at last he announced that he could repair only those whose owners had kept them wound, because they were the only ones which would be able to remember how to keep time.

  So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.