Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  We may not always be able to make our “clock” run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound so that it will not forget.

  —

  Since time was created, had a beginning, and will have an end, it is a creature with whom we can have understandings and misunderstandings. All artists know days when time collaborates with them and they can do more than they can do in one day. There are other days when they are equally diligent, and yet get little or nothing accomplished.

  Perhaps one of the saddest things we can do is waste time, as Shakespeare knew when he had Richard the Second cry out, “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

  But being time is never wasted time. When we are being, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos and are freed from the normal restrictions of time. In moments of mystical illumination we may experience, in a few chronological seconds, years of transfigured love.

  Canon Tallis says that his secretary does not understand that when he is thinking, he is working: she thinks he is wasting time. But thinking time is not wasted time. There are some obvious time wasters, such as licentious living, drunkenness, adultery, all the things Paul warns us about. A more subtle time waster is being bored. Jesus was never bored. If we allow our “high creativity” to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the supermarket. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

  Some random words from my seatmate as I was flying to Evansville, Indiana, gave me the idea for a sort-of-science-fiction story: We see more and more Japanese-made cars on our roads, and if the Japanese wanted to retaliate for the dropping of the atomic bomb, they could make cars to self-destruct after a certain span of time or number of miles, killing all the occupants…I will never write this story; it was, however, practice in seeing story wherever I go, whatever I do.

  Time is to be treasured, worked with, never ignored. As the astrophysicists understand time now, it is not like a river, flowing in one direction, but more like a tree, with great branches and smaller limbs and twigs which may make it possible for us to move from one branch to another, as did Jesus and Moses and Elijah, as did St. Andrew and St. Francis when they talked with each other in that light of love which transcends all restrictions of time.

  —

  Kairos. Real time. God’s time. That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unself-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time. The saint in contemplation, lost (discovered) to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at work is in kairos. The child at play, totally thrown outside himself in the game, be it building a sandcastle or making a daisy chain, is in kairos. In kairos we become what we are called to be as human beings, cocreators with God, touching on the wonder of creation. This calling should not be limited to artists—or saints—but it is a fearful calling. Mana, taboo. It can destroy as well as bring into being.

  In Our Town, after Emily has died in childbirth, Thornton Wilder has her ask the stage manager if she can return home to relive just one day. Reluctantly he allows her to do so. And she is torn by the beauty of the ordinary and by our lack of awareness of it. She cries out to her mother, “Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me…it goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another.” And she goes back to the graveyard and the quiet company of the others lying there, and she asks the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” And he sighs and says, “No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”

  Poets and saints. What an odd coupling. And yet Freud, too, puts them together, saying that they are the two classes of human beings who defy all his psychological categorizing, who are full of surprises. Are we willing and able to be surprised?

  If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves. Because our reflexes have been conditioned as thoroughly as those of Pavlov’s dog, this is never easy. But reflexes can be unlearned, or reconditioned. When my husband was on Broadway we were, perforce, night people, going to bed in the small hours of the morning and sleeping late. Now that Hugh is on a daytime television show, we have had to recondition our reflexes to become morning people, getting up early and changing our bedtime, too. It wasn’t easy, but we made the transition, and now I find it difficult not to wilt around ten in the evening.

  Daylight at first can be shocking and painful to the night-conditioned; it hurts the eyes, burns the skin; it takes a while to want it. And once we decide that we want the light, we must learn to trust it. We are given hints along the way, our nighttime dreams for one.

  In our dreams we are bound by neither time nor space. We move through the ages and all over the world and sometimes beyond. In dreams we are able to fly, and though the Freudian frame of mind would label this as a mere sex symbol, I believe that it is far more than that, that it is a remembering of how we are meant to be.

  I have always enjoyed my dreams and can remember clearly some that go back as far as my eighth or ninth year. I am often someone else in my dreams; I was once, when I was around eleven, an Elizabethan pirate. I am often not present in my dreams at all, not even as a conscious observer. Sometimes I dream full stories, and they are so satisfying as dreams that I seldom have any desire to put them on paper. Only very occasionally does something that comes to me in a dream end up in whatever it is that I am currently writing.

  I do not want to become faddy about dreams, though I took them seriously long before it was popular to record them. If I wake up in the middle of the night with a dream which interests me, I do not turn on the light and write it down, which would stop me from sleeping for several more hours. I turn over and go back to sleep. If I’m meant to remember the dream in the morning, I will. I try to think about those I remember, to see if I may find in them some message from God which I was too stupid to understand during my waking hours.

  Scripture is full of dreams; Joseph was no exception. And God often called people when they were asleep (Samuel, for instance) because in sleep we have let down our defense mechanisms. Pilate’s wife, Claudia, told him not to execute Jesus because she had been warned about him in a dream, and I often wonder if he regretted not listening to her. Peter thought he was dreaming when the angels unlocked the gates and led him out of prison. If we are close to our angels, the dream world and the waking world will not be far apart.

  —

  In the creative act we can experience the same freedom we know in dreams. This happens as I write a story. I am bound by neither time nor space. I know those distant galaxies to which Meg Murry went with Charles Wallace and Calvin. I live in seventeenth-century Portugal with Mariana Alcoforado. But this freedom comes only when, as in a dream, I do not feel that I have to dictate and control what happens. I dream, sometimes, that I am in a beautiful white city I have never seen in “real” life, but I believe in it. I also believe in the planet Uriel, with its beautiful flying creatures, and also in that other planet where are found the unicorn hatching-grounds.

  When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

  —

  Small children, knowing this freedom, do things which, to adults living in the grown-up world, are impossible. They see things which grown-up eyes cannot see. They hear things which fall on deaf ears with their parents. And they believe the things they do and see and hear. And when, eager and unprepared, they describe these marvellous things, they are told, by kindly and
reasonable and well-meaning parents, that they have vivid imaginations. Less understanding adults tell the children that whatever it is they think they have done or seen or heard is impossible. Some children are told to stop telling lies. Some are even punished.

  We grow up and forget. Peter didn’t remember that he had forgotten how to walk on water, and so he walked—until he remembered—and then he got frightened and sank, and Jesus took him by the hand and pulled him out of the water and told him that he lacked faith.

  Children are taught fear early: fear of water, fear of fire. Not that parents aren’t right to warn; too many little ones have drowned, have been burned, because of careless parents. But there’s a fine line between essential prudence for the child’s sake and the destruction of creativity. Allowing the child a certain amount of solitude in a reasonably safe environment (no environment in this world is totally safe) is allowing the child’s imagination to grow and develop, so that the child may ultimately learn how to be mature. Traherne says, “We do not ignore maturity. Maturity consists in not losing the past while fully living in the present with a prudent awareness of the possibilities of the future.”

  I was lucky as a child in being given a lot of solitude. Some of this was happenstance because of my father’s illness and my lack of siblings. But it did provide me with an atmosphere in which imagination could flourish. And nobody told me it was childish to believe in angels. And so I was able to do a few impossible things.

  For instance: when I was a small child, visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage, I used to go down the winding stairs without touching them. This was a special joy to me. I think I went up the regular way, but I came down without touching. Perhaps it was because I was so used to thinking things over in solitude that it never occurred to me to tell anybody about this marvellous thing, and because I never told it, nobody told me it was impossible.

  When I was twelve we went to Europe to live, hoping the air of the Alps might help my father’s lungs. I was fourteen when we returned, and went to stay with my grandmother at the beach. The first thing I did when I found myself alone was to go to the top of the stairs. And I could no longer go down them without touching. I had forgotten how.

  Did I, in fact, ever go down those winding stairs without touching them? I am convinced that I did. And during the years enough people have timidly told me of “impossible” things they have done that I am convinced that the impossible is open to far more people than we realize—mostly because we are fearful of being ridiculed if we talk about it. Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

  —

  Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman’s compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice.

  Choice is an essential ingredient of fiction and drama. A protagonist must not simply be acted upon, he must act, by making a choice, a decision to do this rather than that. A series of mistaken choices throughout the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on our planet.

  All the Faust stories are studies in the results of choice. Dostoyevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most brilliant pieces of Christian writing that I know, and one of the most frightening, because the Grand Inquisitor, like many dictators, is plausible; he wants people to be happy; he does not want them to suffer; the church, because of the great love it has for humanity, has done its best to reverse all the damage caused by Jesus, with his terrible promise of the truth that will make us free. We do not want to be free, the Grand Inquisitor assures Jesus. We want these stones to be turned into bread.

  Why would God give the gift of freedom to creatures who are not ready for it, who have kept making wrong choices for thousands and thousands of years—ever since Eve listened to the snake? Freedom is a mistake, we might well agree with the Grand Inquisitor as we drive through the slums of any of our great cities, where buildings are gutted by tenants who are so frustrated by lack of heat in winter, no hot water ever, and sometimes no water at all, that they resort to burning the buildings in order to get relocated. Or buildings gutted by landlords (not all landlords are vicious and greedy) who cannot afford to heat them at the present price of oil or to keep the water hot, and in desperation burn the building for the insurance money and get out. If all our freedom has done is build up our financially bankrupt, corrupt, tottering cities, what good is it?

  Neither philosophy nor theology helps me much here. The painters and writers who see the abuse and misuse of freedom and cry out for justice for the helpless poor, the defenseless old, give me more hope; as long as anybody cares, all is not lost. As long as anybody cares, it may be possible for something to be done about it; there are still choices open to us; all doors are not closed. As long as anybody cares it is an icon of God’s caring, and we know that the light is stronger than the dark.

  I am encouraged by the young people who express their caring by giving several years of their lives to the Peace Corps or Vista or Food for the Hungry, who shun shoddy workmanship, who are building their own furniture, making pottery, doing needlework in a striving for that excellence we have lost by some of our choices.

  I do not decry all that technology has given us. In the “olden days” I would have died in childbirth with both Josephine and Bion, and I am glad to be here in this alarming and disastrous and marvellous world. Western civilization may be on the decline, but a civilization which has produced Bach and Rembrandt and Dostoyevsky (to limit myself to three favourites) cannot be tossed aside as worthless.

  Bach, who, in terms of the evolutionary process, is as close to us in time as last night—Bach will always pull me back and give me the courage to accept that what our free will is meant to do is to help God to write the story.

  —

  What if?

  What if—the basis of all story. The small child asks all the what ifs. All of life is story, story unravelling and revealing meaning. Despite our inability to control circumstances, we are given the gift of being free to respond to them in our own way, creatively or destructively. As far as we know, even the higher animals (with the exception, perhaps, of the dolphin) do not have this consciousness, not necessarily self-consciousness, but consciousness of having a part in the story.

  And the story involves what seems to the closed mind to be impossible—another reason for disbelieving it. But, as Christians, we may choose to live by most glorious impossibles. Or not to live, which is why in the churches, by and large, the impossibles, the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and walkings on water and raisings from the dead, are ignored or glossed over.

  I see my young friends groping back towards a less restricted view of time and space, though sometimes in frighteningly faddish ways. True contemplation is sought through drugs, which can never produce it. Séances and trips in the astral body are on the increase, and the church condemns and draws back. But if we do not offer a groping generation the real thing, they will look for it elsewhere, or they will fall, as George Tyrrell observed, for the garbage of any superstition.

  It is not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe twenty-four hours a day all that I want to believe. I stray, and then my stories pull me back if I listen to them carefully. I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.

  Remembering the lovely things we have for-gotten is one of the reasons for all art. Surely the
customs officer Rousseau knew those jungles he painted. And Marlowe, having Satan cry out,

  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it!

  Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,

  And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven

  Am not tormented with ten thousand hells

  In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

  knew hell himself, for we know the terrible things as well as the beautiful. Bach, setting down the soprano and alto duet in the 78th Cantata, knew such heavenly joy that it is shared by all who hear the music. In the act of creation our logical, prove-it-to-me minds relax; we begin to understand anew all that we understood as children, when we saw wee folk under the leaves or walked down the stairs without touching. But this understanding is—or should be—greater than the child’s because we understand in the light of all that we have learned and experienced in growing up.

  George Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”

  Despite this wadding, the artist in the moment of creation does hear the tiny beating of the squirrel heart and does indeed die to self on the other side of silence, where he retains the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns. The great artists never lose this quality which the world would limit to children. And along with this “wadding with stupidity” comes the denigration of children’s books and the writers of children’s books. A year or so before she invited me to come to the conference on Ayia Napa, Dr. Marion van Horne asked me to give a talk on Christian children’s books. A large part of my job was to give a definition of what, in fact, makes a Christian children’s book.

  Such a definition would seem to be a simple task, but it is not. It used to be answered the easy way: how many times is Jesus mentioned? But that doesn’t work. Jesus may be mentioned on every page in a book that is for neither children nor Christian. It perturbs me to observe in how many contemporary novels “Oh, Christ!” and “Jesus!” are spattered over the pages, side by side with the four-letter words.