Walking on Water

by Madeleine L'engle

  I have a friend who is a fine writer, one of the best storytellers around, who goes regularly to AA. Several times she remarked to me how much more spiritual sustenance she gets from her AA meetings than from church. When I asked her why, she replied, “In AA, the enemy has a name.”

  The enemy has a name in church, too, but we’ve forgotten it. In the Bible it is usually Satan. The most poignant name to me is Lucifer because Lucifer means, literally translated, “light bearer.” That loveliest of all angels, the light bearer, turned from God to self-will, and ever since Michael and his angels threw him out of heaven he has been walking to and fro on the earth, as the book of Job reminds us, seeing what he can do. Lucifer. What happened? How did he fall into the pit of pride?

  Chesterton said that it was by gravity that Satan fell; one sees representations of the devil sneering, but never in a state of levity, merriment, joyous laughter.

  I’m grateful once again that I went to my Bible stories with no preconceptions because many of them are hilarious. If I’m depressed or out of sorts with God and man, all I have to do is read the book of Jonah. And surely God was amused at some of his early conversations with Moses. “Who am I?” Moses asks. And God replies, “Certainly I will go with you.” Many of the parables make sense only if we realize that Jesus was telling a funny story to make his point, a funny story that was supposed to be greeted with a laugh, like the story of the judge and the importunate widow. And what about exaggeration for effect? Jesus wasn’t afraid of hyperbole. What about the camel going through the eye of the needle? Or the man with the beam in his own eye who sees the mote in his brother’s? And people accuse me of exaggerating!

  I’ve been doing my evening Scripture reading in the French Jerusalem Bible, and came, the other night, to the parable of Caesar’s coin, and coming upon it afresh, its humour hit me, and I burst into laughter. French is the only language besides English in which I am even moderately conversant, but it helps us to regain newness if we can look at something in a tongue other than our native one. I struggle on occasion with bits of the Bible in Spanish, Latin, German. I’ve tried the 121st Psalm in Swedish and the 18th in Hebrew, and some of the Canticles in Greek. It’s fun, and as long as one doesn’t stumble over the block of perfectionism, it’s not all that difficult.

  We need to be careful about the difference between laughter which is healthy and creative and laughter which, like Satan’s, is destructive—at someone else’s expense. The laughter in the Bible is never nasty (for that kind of laughter isn’t laughter at all) and true laughter is freeing. We can laugh with pleasure as Jesus holds out his hand with the Roman coin, turning away wrath with a soft answer, a smile: Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.

  —

  I was outraged a number of years ago to read a book by an eminent Freudian analyst whose theory was that all artists are neurotic, psychotic, sadomasochists, peeping Toms; that not one is normal.

  At this moment I do not know why it bothered me so. He means one thing by his labels; I would call it something quite different; but there is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato’s divine madness there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophony, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain.

  It is not that what is is not enough, for it is; it is that what is had been disarranged and is crying out to be put in place. Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well every night, to eat anything without indigestion, to feel no moral qualms, to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood. But the artist cannot manage this normalcy. Vision keeps breaking through and must find means of expression.

  If to be in a healthy state of mind means to be whole (not divided into left and right), and if to be whole means to be holy, then wholeness is what the Christian artist seeks. It is what the Christian seeks. It is what any artist seeks.

  A pianist does not have to be a practicing Christian to play Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata or the rippling second movement of Ginastera’s piano concerto. As my friend Tallis once remarked, “When your car breaks down, you don’t ask if the mechanic is an Episcopalian. You want to know how much he knows about cars.”

  I want my doctor to be well trained, to take the Hippocratic oath seriously; I don’t need to know about my surgeon’s sex life or his religious affiliation. So why should I care what Emily Brontë or Bracque or Vaughan Williams believed? But I do care. Perhaps if I knew my surgeon as well as I know the great artists who inspire me, I’d want to know more about what he believes, too. But why? What does it have to do with the skill with which the surgeon wields the knife? Or how Picasso painted or Madeleine Grey sang or William Blake wrote?

  If we are whole, then it does have something to do with it, but that something may not be what we expect.

  Is there, then, any difference in the creative process for the Christian and the non-Christian?

  Yes. No.

  There may be a great deal of difference in work which has no element of transcendence. Times Square and Eighth Avenue in New York, which used to have the glamour of serious theatre, are now filled with porno movies and massage parlours and head shops. Even an “art” movie is not likely to be a box-office success unless it has at least one gratuitous nude scene. It is not that the nude body cannot be art or that it cannot be seen, appropriately, onstage. But porno cheapens the body by treating it as a thing, a thing to be used, controlled, manipulated, an object whose free will is of no importance.

  We’re not the only generation to seek titillation in perversion, though I doubt if it’s ever been so open since the days of the great Roman excesses. Our civilizations are not dissimilar, both reflecting the end of something rather than looking towards a new beginning (which is always the stance of the artist), and both are the expressions of a secular culture, accepting only the immediate and shunning the transcendent.

  We shudder at the thought of the Roman arenas, with masses of people getting a thrill out of seeing other people being torn to pieces by lions, by each other. But we, too, have burdens on our conscience.

  These burdens are reflected in the work of many serious artists, even when the work seems to have little, on the surface, to do with current offenses against humanity. One can cry out in anguish against tortures in Chile, in Iran, by writing about a coyote hunt in Arizona. Human problems transcend their locale without losing any of their particularity.

  An artist seeking for the truth behind human brutality may express it in the bleeding body of an animal shot for sport rather than need. The truth of an incident may lie artistically far from the facts of that incident. The most difficult part of trying to show truth lies not only in believing in it oneself but in making it believable to the reader, viewer, listener.

  Credibility in creativity is a hard lesson to learn, and I’m grateful that it was pointed out to me early by Leonard Ehrlich, who gave me those useful first two assignments. I had written a story for him in fulfillment of an assignment, and when he returned it to me, he said, “It’s well written, Madeleine, but I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true,” I defended hotly. “I wrote it exactly the way it happened. It’s true.”

  Calmly he replied, “If I don’t believe it, it isn’t true.”

  Like many lessons, that was painful. But I had to take it seriously. No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed. I learned slowly, struggling to acquire the technique which will help me to become more able to put down on paper the truth I see. The artist seeks that truth which offers freedom and then tries to share this offe
ring.

  I am made more free by my participation in the work of other artists, especially the giants. And it is the other artists who teach the rest of us, offering their vision of truth.

  And if this vision is true, how can it conflict with the truth which Christ told us to know?

  —

  It is one of those odd ironies that Anglican Madeleine is often asked to speak in Roman Catholic and Evangelical settings and seldom, until very recently, in Episcopal ones. The two colleges where I feel most at home, and where I have been going regularly for the past decade, are Mundelein, in Chicago, which is Roman Catholic, and Wheaton, less than an hour away, which is Evangelical. You’d think they’d be about as far apart as Christians can get, but I feel equally at home and befriended in both places. I do not change my voice; I do not need to translate into different theological languages; we are far closer than we realize. Especially when the topic is art, for art cuts across all denominational barriers. Art is.

  Mundelein may be more familiar with sign and symbol than Wheaton, but sign and symbol, sacrament and myth, metaphor and simile, are essential to all art, regardless of the personal belief or lack of belief of the artist.

  In a lecture at Wheaton I quoted the Anglican theologian, H. A. Williams, “The opposite of sin can only be faith, and never virtue.”

  The creative process has a lot to do with faith and nothing to do with virtue, which may explain why so many artists are far from virtuous—are, indeed, great sinners. And yet, at the moment of creation, they must have complete faith, faith in their vision, faith in their work.

  Again, the degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

  A ten-year-old boy asked me of A Wrinkle in Time, “Do you believe all that?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Of course I do.”

  The artist, like the child, is a good believer. The depth and strength of the belief is reflected in the work; if the artist does not believe, then no one else will; no amount of technique will make the responder see truth in something the artist knows to be phony.

  My faith in a loving Creator of the galaxies, so loving that the very hairs of my head are counted, is stronger in my work than in my life, and often it is the work that pulls me back from the precipice of faithlessness. It is not necessarily an unmixed blessing to be a well-educated person in a secular society. A man whose name is unknown to me but whose words I copied out years ago wrote, “God must be very great to have created a world which carries so many arguments against his existence.”

  —

  To work on a book is for me very much the same thing as to pray. Both involve discipline. If the artist works only when he feels like it, he’s not apt to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration far more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of the artist is to listen to the work and to go where it tells him to go. Ultimately, when you are writing, you stop thinking and write what you hear.

  To pray is to listen also, to move through my own chattering to God to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say. But if I pray only when I feel like it, God may choose not to speak. The greatest moments of prayer come in the midst of fumbling and faltering prayer rather than at the odd moment when one decides to try to turn to God.

  We used to call my mother (usually collect) once a week; then, in her last years, several times a week, just to keep in touch. We, in our turn, like our children to keep in touch with us. If they never called, then they might be so far from our own busy lives that they might not even know if the phone number was changed.

  A faltering analogy. But it is good for the children to keep in touch. It is good for all of us children to keep in touch with our Father.

  —

  Work. Prayer. As with all of life, it is a rhythm: tension, release; tension, release. Work, discipline, obedience; pull the bowstring taut, and then let go. But it must be done daily.

  I tried to talk about the necessity for both work and letting go in the creative process one hot morning at Ayia Napa. I learned long ago that the listener hears not always what is said but what he wants to hear.

  The response to that particular morning’s lecture made this problem especially clear. I had spent half the lecture on the necessity for discipline, regularity in work habits, obedience, and the other half on letting go our rigid self-control in order to listen to the work. After the lecture, two young men came up to me, both deeply troubled over what they had heard. Mitau, an Asian, who had won a prize for his first story and wanted a literary career handed to him on a silver platter, heard nothing but the injunctions to work. Discipline, he heard. “Write every day, whether you feel like it or not. Be obedient to the work. Work, work, work,” was all he heard.

  Julio, a South American minister who lives in a community filled with ecstatic charismatics, heard nothing but, “Don’t think. Write.”

  “But you heard only half of what I said!” I told them and tried to make each hear the part he had ignored. The balance of tension and release is somewhat like that of a violin; the strings must be taut before they will play, but if they are not released, they will break.

  Did I, in the end, get them to realize that each had heard only a selected part of what was said? I hope so. But I am not sure. For when I am reading or listening, I, too, tend to hear what applies to me, in my particular situation.

  In psychology class in college I remember the professor telling us that if we suddenly become interested in, say, mitochondria, we will come across articles on mitochondria in newspapers and magazines; they will appear to be in the news everywhere. But, if it were not for our particular interest, we would not have noticed the articles or turned on the television programs.

  —

  I doubt if there’s any such thing as total objectivity. We listen out of our own skins, our own ears, see through our own eyes with their various myopias and astigmatisms. A history of either the English or American Civil War will show a totally different war when told from the point of view of one side or the other. The villains of one book will be the protagonists of the other. The historian trying to show both points of view fairly is still caught within his own subjective interpretations. We come more closely to a clear view in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Robertson Davies, the plays of Shakespeare.

  In an interview in a well-known Christian magazine, I explained earnestly that we are limited by our points of view; “I have a point of view,” I told the interviewer. “You have a point of view. But God has view.” When the article appeared, some overdiligent copy editor had changed it to, “I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has a point of view.”

  I wrote back in a white heat. “This is a theological error. Please correct it. The point is…”

  In our daily living the actions we choose, from within our own skins, as the best possible under the circumstances, may well turn out to have been the wrong ones. Something we regret at the time as abysmally stupid may well end up being the one thing needed under the circumstances. We are trapped in unknowing.

  Nothing is certain. I sat writing on my first novel, quite bogged down, and in annoyance at my own lack of creativity got up and walked across the room. As I reached the window, the heavily molded plaster ceiling crashed down where I had just been sitting. My husband came home on the subway train just before the one that had the accident; someone else’s husband didn’t. On a calm and sunny summer afternoon someone came to tell my daughter and her husband that their little girl had been hit by a truck. A kind word twenty years ago may be responsible for an unexpected good job today.

  Literature deals with this inability to see around the corner, and the disastrous results when we play at being God. The Macbeths could have refused to heed the witch’s foreseeing that Macbeth would wear a crown. Beauty
’s sisters thought she was a stupid girl to honour their old father to such an extent that she gave herself to the terrible beast in his palace. How enraged these pragmatic sisters must have been when the beast turned out to be a handsome and wealthy prince, bewitched until someone should kiss him in spontaneous affection. But Beauty could not know that her act of compassion would release the spell.

  We don’t know. We can only make guesses, and our guesses may be wrong. Far too often in this confused world we are faced with choices, all of which are wrong, and the only thing we can do, in fear and trembling, is to choose the least wrong, without pretending to ourselves that it is right. As I look at all the great protagonists of literature, from Greek drama to the contemporary novel, and add up the results of all the choices, and the motivation behind the choices, I keep coming back to that reason of my husband’s for turning down a lead role in a cheap play:

  Do we want the children to see it? That’s as good a criterion as any I’ve found.

  —

  It is a criterion of love. In moments of decision, we are to try to make what seems to be the most loving, the most creative decision. We are not to play safe, to draw back out of fear. Love may well lead us into danger. It may lead us to die for our friend. In a day when we are taught to look for easy solutions, it is not always easy to hold on to that most difficult one of all, love.

  During a summer session at Wheaton, one of the students asked, “Do you think there are any absolutes?”

  I thought for a second and then said, off the top of my head, “Yes, I think the Ten Commandments are absolutes.” Later, as I set them against the great works of literature, they seemed to hold fast. When we break one of the commandments, we are doing something we would not want the children to see. We are being destructive rather than creative. We are taking things into our own hands and playing God. Playing God, hubris, presumption, the tragic flow of all the great Greek heroes. But having broken the first commandment, it is almost inevitable that the breaking of others will follow. Oedipus dishonours both his parents. Anna Karenina commits adultery. Macbeth is covetous. Dorian Gray makes a graven image of himself. Iago bears false witness against his neighbour. And so it goes. Whenever the first commandment is broken, more breakage follows. We are, as a consequence, unable to love ourselves, and so we are not able to love our neighbour.