Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. If my faith falters, I may well give it a surge of renewal if I think of the story of Ananias and Paul. What faith Ananias must have had in what he could not control when he took blind Paul into his house and gave him his sight, with no guarantee that Paul had changed from the zealot persecutor. Nevertheless, Ananias was daring enough to trust the message the Lord had sent him in a vision and to welcome Paul into his heart and home.

  We don’t hear much about visions nowadays. And yet they have always been an accepted part of life and literature. Hamlet was frightened by the ghost of his father, but not because seeing a ghost was considered impossible. Shakespeare takes it for granted that Caesar will take dreams seriously. The artist, by and large, is less afraid of the below-the-surface part of the personality, the messages of dreams, than (perhaps) the developer or the lawyer. But the general tenor of our age is scepticism and doubt. A casual scanning of Freud leads us to believe that everything in the subconscious mind is something nasty we have repressed, but perhaps it is the repression which has caused the nastiness, rather than whatever it is we have repressed. A lot of the time we don’t want to know all of ourselves, our more ignoble motives, our greedy desires, our participations in the stonings of Stephens. But only if we accept all of ourselves, our flaws as well as our virtues (and we’re all a grab bag of good and evil, and by and large can’t tell which is which) do we become useful servants—of our art, of our Lord.

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  Complicated creatures we are, aware of only the smallest fragment of ourselves; seeking good and yet far too often unable to tell the difference between right and wrong; misunderstanding each other and so blundering into the tragedies of warring nations, horrendous discrepancies between rich and poor, and the idiocy of a divided Christendom.

  Sometimes I think that it is only laughter which saves us. George MacDonald says, “It is the Heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.”

  If we are sure of our God we are free to laugh at ourselves, and artists have helped heal with laughter—from Molière’s comedies poking fun at the human condition to Aristophanes’ hilarity at our bewilderedly mixed emotions to some of Bach’s mirth-filled and even slightly bawdy secular cantatas. It’s all part of what helps keep us in proportion; we can best take ourselves seriously if we are free to laugh at ourselves and to enjoy the laughter of God and his angels. As William Temple remarked, “It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion.”

  When we take ourselves too seriously, as the chief or only object of God’s interest, then we fail to understand the magnitude of his love and concern for us. Artist and saint alike grope in awe to comprehend the incomprehensible disproportion of the glory of God and the humility of the Incarnation: the Master of the Universe, become of the earth, earthy, in order to be one with his creatures so that we may be one with him.

  In my Goody Book I’ve copied out some words which are important to me, but, alas, I do not know who wrote them:

  The saints (and artists) are those who not only accept, but rejoice in the incongruity and so learn that laughter is holy. The infinite disparity between God’s love and man’s deserts is an indubitable fact; the saint embraces it for joy. The greater the incongruity, the more wonderful the love and mercy of God. The saint does not call himself a worm because he enjoys being wormy, but because there is simply no other way graphic enough to express the richness of God and the meagreness of men….

  One night I woke up with the words of the Twenty-second Psalm in my mind, not the terrible words which Jesus cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but the words, “I am a worm and no man,” and instead of thinking elevated thoughts, I glimpsed a picture of Jonah sitting under his withered vine, furiously castigating the worm for eating his gourd, and then I heard the worm’s disclaimer, “After all, I am a worm and no man,” and laughing I went back to sleep, and that was the moment of gestation for the little play The Journey with Jonah.

  I hope that I will never forget the salvific power of joyful laughter.

  —

  Each time an unexpected discovery is made in the world of knowledge, it shakes the religious establishment of the day. Now, we are often taught that it is unfaithful to question traditional religious beliefs, but I believe that we must question them continually—not God, not Christ, who are at the center of our lives as believers and creators—but what human beings say about God and about Christ; otherwise, like those of the church establishment of Galileo’s day, we truly become God’s frozen people. Galileo’s discoveries did nothing whatsoever to change the nature of God; they threatened only man’s rigid ideas of the nature of God. We must constantly be open to new revelation, which is another way of hearing God, with loving obedience.

  The great artists keep us from frozenness, from smugness, from thinking that the truth is in us rather than in God, in Christ our Lord. They help us to know that we are often closer to God in our doubts than in our certainties, that it is all right to be like the small child who constantly asks: Why? Why? Why?

  Caiaphas asked no whys. He was frozen into the rigidity of the religious establishment of Jesus’ day, and because of this frozenness, he feared Jesus as a blasphemer. Throughout the ages, our religious establishments have on occasion followed Caiaphas rather than Jesus, and this is something we must be on the alert for, all of the time.

  But how? How to stay open? How to make sure that the voice we hear is the voice of the Lord? There are all kinds of dirty devices that get in the way, a principal one being the climate of success in which we live, the need for success with our peers, in our careers, in our bank balances. The mistake is in thinking of the journey in terms of success at all (though inevitably we do). Success is one of the dirtiest temptations of the devil.

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  The great metaphysical poet, John Donne, writes, “To come to a doubt, and to a debatement of any religious duty, is the voice of God in our conscience: Would you know the truth? Doubt, and then you will inquire.”

  If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo’s day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God. I want to be open to revelation, to new life, to new birth, to new light.

  Revelation. Listening. Humility.

  Remember—the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker.

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  I often seek theological insights in reading science fiction because this is a genre eminently suited to explorations of the nature of the Creator and creation. I’m never surprised when I discover that one of my favourite science-fiction writers is Christian because to think about worlds in other galaxies, other modes of being, is a theological enterprise.

  What is this universe like? What are its possibilities? How deep is space? Why is there so much suffering? What does it mean? What if…

  A long time ago I read a science-fiction story about a planet which earth was attempting to colonize, a harsh and unwelcoming planet with terrible weather and hostile inhabitants. Earth’s best men and women were gathered into teams and sent to do the job, and expedition after expedition came home broken, failed. Finally the department head was changed. The new head did not look for the strongest and most qualified people he could choose. He went to the waterfronts, to the slums, and got together a contingent of thieves, prostitutes, indigents, and sent them. And where the able had failed, the disabled succeeded.

  Why? For many reasons. First of all, they already had learned to survive in a hostile environment. Second, they had no place to go but up. Australia was largely colonized by outcasts from prisons.
And the roll call of our first American pioneers was made up of people who needed, for one reason or another, to get away. The writer of science fiction—as all other fiction—draws on present knowledge and past history, and says: What if?

  The what if always springs from what is known. The writer understands that it may take the mavericks rather than the beautiful people to overcome great odds because every work of art is the discovery of a new planet, and it may well be a hostile one. How dare the writer say, “What if?” and “Yes, but?” and see visions which threaten the status quo and do heretical things like Bach’s putting the thumb under rather than over the other fingers on the keyboard and explore the vast underwater bulk of man’s mind in the great unwieldy volumes of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and plumb the depths of human agony in Crime and Punishment or the wild paintings of Hieronymous Bosch?

  The child, like the artist, asks, “Why?” and, “How?” and interrupts, “But…”

  Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it. Edison was dropped from the public school system in second grade because he was considered uneducable (his mother, who believed in him, taught him at home). Einstein could not manage lower math; arithmetic was too hard for him, and he made mistakes in his equations, though his mind could rove through the universe, unfettered. Winston Churchill was an inept and unsuccessful schoolboy and young man. But, Why? the artist asks. And, What can be done about it? What are the possibilities? What if?

  Honest, earnestly seeking doubt may well be part of the What if.

  Many Soviet writers have grown up believing in their system, and only as they grew old enough to start serving their work did the work itself prod them into asking questions. Sinclair Lewis questioned whether or not we have been true to the American Dream in his satirical novels and in his more prophetic works, such as It Can’t Happen Here. In the past decade we have had novels questioning the medical establishment, the political establishment, the religious establishment. Such works, if they are not scandalmongering, are not anti-science, unpatriotic, nor heretical. They come from a longing that promised truth, that abundant life, which the present circumstances on our planet do not offer to more than a small minority of people, and which are too often rejected by those who could accept.

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  A help to me in working things out has been to keep an honest—as honest as the human being can be—unpublishable journal. Granted, much of my nonfiction work is lifted directly from my journals, but what I use is only a small fraction of these numerous, bulky volumes. If I can write things out I can see them, and they are not trapped within my own subjectivity. I have been keeping these notebooks of thoughts and questions and sometimes just garbage (which needs to be dumped somewhere) since I was about nine, and they are, I think, my free psychiatrist’s couch.

  Not long ago someone I love said something which wounded me grievously, and I was desolate that this person could possibly have made such a comment to me.

  So, in great pain, I crawled to my journal and wrote it all out in a great burst of self-pity. And when I had set it down, when I had it before me, I saw that something I myself had said had called forth the words which had hurt me so. It had, in fact, been my own fault. But I would never have seen it if I had not written it out.

  Fiction, in a less direct way, will teach me, teach me things I would never learn had I not opened myself to them in story. And often the events of my life and the events in whatever book I am writing are so inextricably intertwined that I cannot separate them. But I always learn from the writing, and it is usually something unexpected; for instance, did I plan to study cellular biology before starting to write A Wind in the Door? Definitely not.

  A third aid is to have someone to talk things over with, a friend, a minister or priest. It’s usually a help if it’s someone to whom we are not too close, to whom we are not biologically bound. I have a hunch that if we avail ourselves of all these aids we’re not so likely to need a psychiatrist, for we have been helped to discover that truth which will make us free.

  When I write things in my journal or open them up in story, I have to admit all the things that Freud saw in the subconscious mind, all kinds of unpleasant things I’d rather not see in myself; but the subconscious mind can also be transformed, as Shakespeare realized when he had Ariel sing:

  Full fathom five thy father lies.

  Of his bones are coral made.

  These be pearls which were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —

  It is just as much a mistake to extol the subconscious mind at the expense of the conscious as vice versa. A friend of ours took his small daughter to a special collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the paintings seemed to be a spilling out of all the glop in the artist’s subconscious mind, with no modification from the conscious level. Our friend wondered if he was too square to understand them, but his daughter was merely bored. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand modern art but that she didn’t like chaos untouched by cosmos. He took her to the Guggenheim Museum, where she loved Miró, Di Chirico, Bracque.

  In one of Ionesco’s plays, The Chairs, an elderly couple living on a small island spend the timespan of the play waiting for the man who is going to come to them with the message which will tell them the meaning of life. As I remember the play (which I saw a good many years ago) the old man and woman keep shifting chairs about while the sharks swim outside. At the very end of the play a man comes onstage, dressed in top hat and tails, and unrolls a script on which is written the meaning of life, and he mumbles: “Anhh, unhh, aunh…”

  No. I won’t accept that. That’s chaos adding to chaos. Or am I misinterpreting? Is Ionesco saying that it is hubris to think that any human being can give one the key?

  The art of the absurd can, indeed, be revelatory, as in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which is an icon, an affirmation of the value of being fully human and so an affirmation of incarnation. But sometimes it can lead into madness, occasionally literal madness, as in the lives of Nijinsky, Nietsche, van Gogh. The boundary between Plato’s divine madness and destructive insanity is so close as to be well-nigh invisible. It is frightening to have to accept the fact that much that has passed for art in this century has depicted distortion, meaninglessness, destructiveness. And it is interesting to note that when the art of the absurd was at its height, theologians began to announce the death of God. Religion and art both reflect what is happening to the world around us. And both must learn to discern the difference between revelation and nightmare.

  Robert Lindner, author of Rebel Without a Cause, The 50-Minute Hour, etc., concludes in Must We Conform? that society today shows all the clinical symptoms of psychosis. This isn’t the first time that a civilization has suffered from collective insanity, but one of the gravest dangers is the loss of the distinction between vision and delusion. Far too often today children are taught, both in school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can’t understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds, then it isn’t true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through, past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds.

  The result of this artificial limitation is rebellion. The destructive rebellion is the most apparent—the alarming rise in the number of juvenile delinquents, the school dropouts, the continuing dependence on drugs. But there is also constructive rebellion on the part of our kids, as in their rediscovery of fairy tale, fantasy, myth; needlework and stained glass and ceramics; dancing and singing and baroque music; surely their passion for the Pachelbel canon is a passion for order in a disordered world. And they love the combination of order and delight in a Bach fugue.

  There is something healthily affirming about such structure, a promise that we have a part in the making of meaning. This is not a
false promise or an unreal self-control but a promise that we are coauthors with God in the writing of our own story.

  Laurens Van Der Post, writing about the Kalahari Bushman, says, “The extreme expression of his spirit was in his story. He was a wonderful storyteller. The story was his most sacred possession. These people know what we do not: that without a story you have not got a nation, or a culture, or a civilization. Without a story of your own to live you haven’t got a life of your own.”

  My children and their contemporaries, having grown up during the nightmare of the Vietnam War, where the story was ruthlessly taken out of their hands, are striving once more to return to the full health of living their own story and of thinking with their whole selves, affirming the left as well as the right.

  But our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, “It’s my own business.” I think that our children are sensing this interdependence and that they would agree with James Baldwin that “the role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

  There is much that we do not see, inequity as well as overfullness; the old woman groveling in the garbage can and the old man on the park bench remembering his first love; the woman who offers her coat to someone colder and the young man who snatches her purse. Good and bad in an incredible and seemingly inextricable muddle. Artists used not to be afraid to personify in order to simplify: Mr. Greatheart; Sir Toby Belch; Lady Teasle; Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Despite our efforts to label, we are often afraid to personify nowadays, because it means to call by name.

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  How many of us call the devil by name today? If we see God’s love manifested for us in the Incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, then we need to also recognize the malignant force that would try to destroy God’s love in a particular way, too. The antagonist in a story or play is never vague or general; there is always a person behind the forces of evil; otherwise we will not take them seriously. Mephistopheles, without a name, would not be nearly so tempting, or horrifying.