Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  We take things into our own hands. We listen to promises of security, promises that can only be false. We forget those absolutes against which we can set our behaviour, make our decisions. And we lose heart and are no longer able to pluck out of the nettle danger, the flower of courage.

  And we draw back.

  At school in Charleston I was running, tripped, and fell through a window. I picked myself up in a shower of glass and did not have a scratch on me because I did not have time to draw back. If I had, I would have been cut, and badly.

  Starting a novel demands a conscious falling through the window, a journey through the looking glass, and a return to the imaginative courage of the child.

  Dare I? Of course I don’t. But I’m going to anyhow because I have no choice.

  —

  How do we survive the unreliability of life in this world? Everything appears to be going along smoothly, and then, without warning, tragedy strikes.

  I flew out to Chicago one July, to speak at Wheaton, and was met by a young graduate, a friend of mine. She took me to her home for a cup of tea, and I called my husband, who was at Crosswicks, as I always do after a trip, just to check in. And what I learned was that my just-nine-year-old granddaughter Léna had been hit by a truck on her way home from swimming. That was all he knew because to add to the unreliability of all things, our phone was out of order when I first called, and the operator reported it. During the fifteen minutes I waited before calling again, a neighbour had called him frantically for information. So it was she who told him what she knew: the little girl had been hit by a truck and was being taken from the local hospital to the bigger hospital in Hartford. We knew that this meant head injury because the local hospital could take care of everything except a neurological problem.

  While we had been drinking tea, my young friend had informed me that she had decided not to marry and have children. She was a painter, and a fine one, and she felt that a family would interfere with her work. Still with my hand on the phone, I said slowly, “The decision you have made means that you will never have to go through the anguish I’m going through now. But I don’t think I would want to be in a position where I could not know it.”

  She drove me to Wheaton, and I called home again. Our daughter having at last been able to reach her father, we now knew the terrifying extent of the damage. Both of Léna’s femurs were broken, up near the hips. Her ribs were broken. Her jaw was broken in two places. Her skull was fractured. She had a head wound which laid bare the bone. Her arms and legs were covered with lacerations and contusions. Léna was the little girl whose pain we alleviated by reading stories hour after hour, so this is a story with a happy ending, but that evening we did not know what the ending was going to be. She was unconscious, and the neurosurgeons were pessimistic. Worse than the fear of death was the fear of terrible brain damage.

  Because I was at a Christian college, I was able to ask my friends for prayers, and a network of prayer quickly went out. That evening, after my lecture, Mel Lorentzen stepped up to the lectern and told the audience what had happened and asked for prayers. And I went back to my room to try again to reach Canon Tallis in New York, and the Episcopal Sisters who ran the school where my little granddaughters had gone and from which their mother had graduated. I had not been able to get any calls through, and I could not understand why. Finally the phone at the convent began to ring, and it rang and rang, and I waited until it was answered by Mother Mary Christabel, who told me that she had had to grope to the phone in the darkness because New York had plunged into a blackout. I told her what had happened and asked for prayers. Then I got ready for bed, and part of my bedtime routine is to read Evening Prayer. I opened the small prayer book I bring with me when I travel, and when I came to the psalms for the evening, there was a picture of nine-year-old Léna, taken just a few weeks before, at the baptism of her baby brother. It was almost more than I could bear. I held the prayer book loosely, and a card fell out, a card given me years ago by one of the Sisters at Mundelein (how intricately the strands are woven). On it were the words of John of the Cross: “One act of thanksgiving made when things go wrong is worth a thousand when things go well.”

  And I knew that I had to make that act of thanksgiving.

  I’m sure I was given the grace to make it that night and during the several days that followed, when I jammed many lectures and classes into a short time in order to be able to get home to the family as soon as possible. The largest part of that act of thanksgiving was gratitude for my children and grandchildren, for the first nine years of Léna’s life, and then to say with Lady Julian of Norwich, “But all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” and then to add, “No matter what.” That was the important part, the “no matter what.”

  It was ten days before Léna regained full consciousness and we knew that she would recover.

  The gift of that card falling out of my prayer book when it did was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It made me affirm to myself that God is in control, no matter what, that ultimately all shall be well, no matter what.

  That autumn Mother Mary Christabel told me that at the onset of the blackout their phone had gone dead; they hadn’t even been able to use the intercom between the convent and the school. They could make no calls out. No calls came in. Except mine, my plea for prayer.

  Jacques Lusseyran, in And There Was Light, tells us that for the child, what happens is from God and is good. A child will never feel self-pity unless some adult is stupid enough to suggest it. And he reminds us that courage, which we grownups make so much of, is for the child the most natural thing in the world.

  I saw the truth of those words as I watched Léna during that long summer, when she never once said, “Why did this happen to me?” or questioned the rightness or wrongness of her pain in any way. Not once did she whine; she screamed with pain; if anyone bumped the ropes which held her legs in traction, it caused her excruciating pain; but she didn’t whine. And if I needed an example of calm courage, I found it in my daughter, who was nursing a two-month-old baby and who kept on nursing with no loss of milk. We will always be grateful to the head nurse, who allowed us to bring the baby onto the pediatric floor, contrary to the regulations. When the student nurses came to that part of their training when they had to wash a baby, instead of using the usual doll they used Edward, who quickly became a great pet on the floor.

  I have heard that in time of tragedy, a family either breaks apart or draws together. I will be eternally grateful that ours drew together. My son, who had planned to spend the summer at his university, writing, came home immediately to help out with the driving, the cooking, with whatever was needed. His medical-student bride-to-be spent her one week of vacation with us, in order to make the hour-long daily drive to the hospital to see Léna. How much I learned from all of these people who are so close to me that sometimes I do not remember what they teach me. But the two deepest lessons were Léna’s uncomplaining acceptance and her mother’s loving courage.

  It was a long summer, and a hard one, but there were many joyful times, and funny ones, too. Most of the children had little television sets, with hearing discs they could put under their pillows in order not to disturb the others, and we got one for Léna. One day one of the nurses who hadn’t seen her since she had been in the intensive care unit, came to visit. Léna was watching All My Children on television, and the nurse said, “What are you watching, Léna?” “I’m watching my grandfather.” At that the nurse hurried to the nurses’ station and said in great agitation, “The child’s delirious!” There was much laughter as she was reassured that the little girl was indeed watching her grandfather, who plays the head of the hospital in that TV show.

  All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. No matter what. That, I think, is the affirmation behind all art which can be called Christian. That is what brings cosmos out of chaos.

  Light—dark; brillian
ce—cloud. How often God appears in a cloud. A cloud was the sign of God’s presence as he led Moses and the children of Israel towards the Promised Land, and the cloud by day became a pillar of fire by night. The psalmist sings out the great affirmation, “Yes, the darkness is no darkness with you, O Lord, but the night is as clear as the day; the darkness and light to you are both alike.”

  A cloud covered Jesus and Moses and Elijah, that extraordinary cloud which signals God with Us. As Gregory of Nyssa points out, when Moses first talked with God, he talked in the light, but as he grew in spiritual stature he talked with God in the darkness. But what darkness! When Moses came down from the mountain his face shone with such brilliance that the people could not bear to look at him, and after that whenever he went into the darkness of the cloud to talk with God, he had to cover his face when he returned so that the brilliance of his countenance would not blind the people.

  Perhaps it is only the artists who have not forgotten that cloud of brilliance which shines through all Scripture. Ezekiel knew it, with his great wheels of light. Adam and Eve cowered before it when the cherubim held swords of flame to bar them from their garden home. When Solomon completed the building of the first temple, he brought in all the things which David, his father, had dedicated for the temple and put the silver and gold and the engraved vessels among the treasures of the house of the Lord. Then he assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes, the chiefs of the fathers of the children of Israel, that they might bring up the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Zion, the city of David.

  All the people of Israel assembled themselves before King Solomon, and all the elders came, and the priests took up the ark, and untold sheep and oxen were sacrificed. And the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord into the Holy of Holies, under the wings of the cherubim. And there was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets which Moses had put there at Horeb, the tablets of the covenant which the Lord had made with the children of Israel.

  When the priests came out of the sanctuary, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord, and the priests could not bear to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Creator of the Galaxies had filled the house of the Lord.

  When did we last see that light in the sanctuary of one of our churches, of no matter what denomination or affiliation? Perhaps it is there, but we may not recognize it because we are afraid of it. We have become so bound by the restrictions of the choices made over the past centuries that we cannot see it. We are afraid of that which we cannot control; so we continue to draw in the boundaries around us, to limit ourselves to what we can know and understand. Thus we lose our human calling because we do not dare to be creators, co-creators with God.

  Artists have always been drawn to the wild, wide elements they cannot control or understand—the sea, mountains, fire. To be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are. The novel we sit down to write and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ.

  —

  We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God or we can write the great American novel. But the only way we can brush against the hem of the Lord or hope to be part of the creative process, is to have the courage, the faith, to abandon control.

  For the opposite of sin is faith and never virtue, and we live in a world which believes that self-control can make us virtuous. But that’s not how it works. How many men and women we have encountered, of great personal virtue and moral rectitude, convinced of their own righteousness, who have also been totally insensitive to the needs of others and sometimes downright cruel! Surely Elizabeth Barrett’s father was convinced that he was right. To quote H. A. Williams again,

  When I attempt to make myself virtuous, the me I can thus organize and discipline is no more than the me of which I am aware. And it is precisely the equation of my total self with this one small part of it which is the root cause of all sin. This is the fundamental mistake often made in exhortations to repentance and amendment. They attempt to confirm me in my lack of faith by getting me to organize the self I know against the self I do not know.

  In prayer, in the creative process, these two parts of ourselves, the mind and the heart, the intellect and the intuition, the conscious and the subconscious mind, stop fighting each other and collaborate. Theophan the Recluse advised those who came to him for counsel to “pray with the mind in the heart,” and surely this is how the artist works. When mind and heart work together, they know each other as two people who love each other know; and as the love of two people is a gift, a totally unmerited, incomprehensible gift, so is the union of mind and heart. David cried out to God, “Unite my heart to fear thy name.” It is my prayer, too.

  When I urge that we abandon our rigid self-control I am not suggesting that we abandon ourselves into hysteria or licentiousness, uninhibited temper tantrums or self-indulgence. Anything but. However, when we try to control our lives totally with the self we think we know, “the result is that growth in self-awareness is inhibited.” And, Williams continues, “there is a sort of devilish perversity in this organizing me not to sin by means of the very thing which ensures that I shall. Faith, on the other hand, consists in the awareness that I am more than I know.” Such awareness came to the prodigal when he realized that he was more than a starving swineherd. What led him home was his becoming aware that he was also his father’s son. Yet his awareness of sonship was enough to make him journey homewards.

  The journey homewards. Coming home. That’s what it’s all about. The journey to the coming of the kingdom. That’s probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist—the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

  —

  Berdyaev expresses it thus:

  All the products of man’s genius may be temporal and corruptible, but the creative fire itself is eternal, and everything temporal ought to be consumed in it. It is the tragedy of creativeness that it wants eternity and the eternal, but produces the temporal, and builds up culture which is in time and a part of history. The creative act is an escape from the power of time and ascent to the divine….

  Most artists are aware that during the deepest moments of that creation they are out on the other side of themselves and so are free from time, with the same joyousness that comes in the greatest moments of prayer.

  “Creativeness,” Berdyaev continues,

  is the struggle against the consequences of sin, the expression of man’s true vocation, but creativeness is distorted and debased by sin. Hence the ethics of creativeness deal with the agonizing struggle of the human spirit. Creativeness needs purification, needs the purifying fire.

  Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it:

  Who then devised the torment? Love.

  Love is the unfamiliar Name

  Behind the hands that wove

  The intolerable shirt of flame

  Which human power cannot remove.

  We only live, only suspire,

  Consumed by either fire or fire.

  It takes great faith to open oneself to this purifying fire, to believe that it is the power of love. The extraordinary thing is that it is often imaged as a fire of roses. Eliot concludes Little Gidding, from which I have just quoted, with these lines:

  When the tongues of flame are in-folded

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.

  In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald describes the fire of roses into which the princess must plunge her hands to be burned and purified. And Dante uses this metaphor in The Divine Comedy. Where did the fire of roses originate? I suspect that it goes back beyond human memory.

&nbs
p; Dare we open ourselves to this purifying fire, to believe that it is the power of love? H. A. Williams continues,

  Such faith cannot be contrived. If it were contrivable, if it were something I could create in myself by following some recipe or other, then it would not be faith. It would be works—my organizing the self I know. That faith can be only the gift of God emphasizes the scandal of our human condition—the scandal of our absolute dependence on him. I have to depend completely upon what very largely I do not know and cannot control.

  The artist knows total dependence on the unseen reality. The paradox is that the creative process is incomplete unless the artist is, in the best and most proper sense of the word, a technician, one who knows the tools of his trade, has studied his techniques, is disciplined. One writer said, “If I leave my work for a day, it leaves me for three.” I think it was Artur Rubinstein who admitted, “If I don’t practice the piano for one day I know it. If I don’t practice it for two days my family knows it. If I don’t practice it for three days, my public knows it.”

  The moment of inspiration does not come to someone who lolls around expecting the gift to be free. It is no giveaway. It is the pearl for which we have to pay a great price, the price of intense loneliness, the price of that vulnerability which often allows us to be hurt; the less readily understandable price of hurting those we love, even though in less radical ways than Gauguin’s. And I am not sure it’s a choice. If we’re given a gift—and the size of the gift, great or small, is irrelevant—then most of us must serve it, like it or not. I say most of us because I have seen people of great talent who have done nothing with it and who mutter about getting down to work “when there’s time.”