Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  FINDING ANSWERS

  It is through the writing of my books that I myself am helped to come to terms with the meaning of life and death and the ultimate questions: Who am I? Who are you? Do we matter? Are we alone, an accidental universe? Or is there really a God who cares about the sparrow and counts each hair on our heads? I remember again: except you come as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.

  Now this doesn’t mean I revert, go back in the age of anybody else. It does mean that as a child I must accept my dependency. I cannot do it myself. I’m dependent on my family. I’m dependent upon my friends. In a strange way, I’m dependent upon other people as part of the body of Christ. I am as well a human being, and part of our humanness consists in the fact that we do have a small amount of freedom in which to make final decisions. And, therefore, we often make errors. And it is through these errors that we can learn.

  GOD’S GUIDANCE

  I think my seeking of God’s guidance is as unconscious as the best work I do when I’m writing. When I am doing my best work, I am not being self-centered. To do something consciously is to be thinking into your own self. When I’m doing my best writing, I trust I am doing God’s work; but I am not thinking about myself or anything except getting out on the other side of selfishness and self-will and listening to the work. And I think that is true of God’s guidance.

  When I demand that God guide me, what I’m really saying is “Do it my way, God. I want to go down this path. Why are you pushing me in that direction?” Whereas if I can get out of my way, I’ll know that that’s the direction I really ought to be shoved in.

  COMPLETE DEPENDENCE

  I cannot live in a world without God. I am frequently asked “Aren’t you strong enough to live without God?” And I say, “No, of course not.”

  THE ARTIST’S VOCATION

  Thy kingdom come. That is what co-creation with our Maker is all about, the coming of the kingdom. Our calling, our vocation in all we do and are to try to do is to help in the furthering of the coming of the kingdom—a kingdom we do not know and cannot completely understand. We are given enough foretastes of the kingdom to have a reasonable expectation. Being a loved and loving part of the body; praying together; singing together; forgiving and accepting forgiveness; eating together the good fruits of the earth; holding hands around the table as these fruits are blessed, in spontaneous joy and love, all these are foretastes.

  STORY IS REVELATORY

  Your point of view as a human being is going to come over in your work whether you know it or not. There’s no way you can hide it. So if you are a Christian, your work is going to be Christian. There’s no way you can hide that. If you’re not, you can talk about Jesus all you like and it’s not going to be Christian. If you are someone who cares about human beings, that’s going to come over in your work. If you are indifferent to the fate of other people, that’s also going to show.

  You cannot hide yourself, and that’s a very scary thing—particularly true, oddly enough, in fiction. Sometimes in nonfiction you can hide yourself behind statistics and facts, but in fiction you are writing story, and story is revelatory. One of the wonderful things that comes out of story is that you not only find out more about your characters, ultimately you are helping to write your own story.

  WE WRITE OUT OF OUR FAITH

  Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?

  I think that’s the way it always happens, even when one is constantly struggling to be Christian in daily living. I cannot try, consciously, to write a “Christian” story—even in such a book as Dance in the Desert which (although it is never overtly stated) is about the holy family’s flight into Egypt. When I am working, I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. I do not mean that I discard my intellect, that I am an anti-intellectual, gung-ho for intuition and intuition only. Like it or not, I am an intellectual. The challenge is to let my intellect work for the creative act, not against it. And this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.

  CIRCLE OF BLESSING

  Easter: that day which follows the harrowing of hell of Great and Holy Saturday; Easter, which turns a terrible Friday into Good Friday. It is almost too brilliant for me to contemplate; it is like looking directly into the sun; I am burned and blinded by life.

  Easter completes the circle of blessing, and the joy of the completion remains, despite all the attempts of the powers of darkness to turn it into cursing.

  A graduate student wrote to ask if my Christianity affects my novels, and I replied that it is the other way around. My writing affects my Christianity. In a way one might say that my stories keep converting me back to Christianity, from which I am constantly tempted to stray because the circle of blessing seems frayed and close to breaking, and my faith is so frail and flawed that I fall away over and over again from my God. There are times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given him cause; but Easter is always the answer to My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!

  MY BOOKS WRITE ME

  I was freed during the writing as my book wrote me, not as I wrote it. And surely this was an experience of that special kind of unity which makes me understand the Trinity. The pages which built up on my writing table were not me, nor was I typewriter and paper; but we were, nevertheless, one. The same kind of collaboration can come when I read a book; the books which matter to me, to which I turn and return are those which read me. The music I play, or listen to, is that which actively participates with me in harmony or counter-point. The same thing is true in graphic art. There has to be an amorous interaction between the work of art and the person who is opening himself to it, and surely the relationship within the persons of the Trinity is one of Love, Love so real we can glimpse it only on rare occasions.

  SOURCES OF THEOLOGICAL INSIGHT

  It is not only in the religious writings of various peoples that I find truth. I find that my forbearance is widened, my understanding of human potential expanded, as I read fiction, even if it is only to disagree with a narrow or ugly view of life, or to turn away from discontent. The fiction to which I turn and return is that which has a noble understanding of God’s purpose for all that has been created.

  My theology is deepened and broadened as I study the new sciences. I do try to read with discrimination, to turn to writers whose vision is not mean or narrow or degrading. It was a sad moment when I had to admit to myself that I was not going to be able to read, in this lifetime, all the books I need to read!

  CHOSEN THEOLOGIANS

  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.

  THE POWER OF GOD IN WEAKNESS

  My profession is writing—stories, novels, fantasy, poetry, thoughts. Writing is not just my job, but a vocation, a total commitment. I started to write when I was five, and as I look back on fifty years of this work, I am forced to accept that my best work has been born from pain; I am forced to see that my own continuing development involves pain. It is pain and weakness and constant failures which keep me from pride and help me to grow. The power
of God is to be found in weakness, but it is God’s power.

  He has a strange way of loving; it is not man’s way, but I find evidence in my own experience that it is better than man’s way, and that it leads to fuller life, and to extraordinary joy.

  Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed to the cross had not love kept him there.

  THEOLOGY IN THE FANTASIES

  If we want a God we can prove, or an Incarnation we can prove, aren’t we making an idol, rather than falling on our knees in awe of the wonderful mystery? It’s a lot easier, a lot safer (in finite terms) to worship an idol than to expose ourselves to the fire of the eternal God—not the flames of hell, but the flames of love. Perhaps that’s why some of the best theology is found in story—Jesus’ stories, the stories of Daniel or Gideon or Esther or Jael; the novels of Dostoyevsky, the plays of Shakespeare, the stories of O. Henry; and—yes—stories written for children. Not so much myths or fairy tales which were originally not written for children, but The Wind in the Willows or The Book of the Dun Cow or Grandfather Twilight or The Secret Garden or (of course) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. That’s why some of the theology that matters to me most is in my fantasies.

  THE THEOLOGICAL UNDER LEVEL OF STORY

  C. S. Lewis used to write a book of fiction and a book of theology simultaneously, both dealing with the same theological problem. But if we saw in the fiction theology rather than story, then he would have failed. Obviously, the seven Narnia books are deep Christian parables; but if this message reached all of the young readers in a conscious rather than an unconscious way, first of all they would reach only people who were already Christians. And they wouldn’t have that under level, that stratum which makes people go to them and read them again and again and again.

  FLICKERING LIGHTS

  In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable. When I am referred to in an article or a review as a “practicing Christian” it is seldom meant as a compliment, at least not in the secular press. It is perfectly all right, according to literary critics, to be Jewish or Buddhist or Sufi or a pre-Christian druid. It is not all right to be a Christian. And if we ask why, the answer is a sad one: Christians have given Christianity a bad name. They have let their lights flicker and grow dim. They have confused piosity with piety, smugness with joy. During the difficult period in which I was struggling through my “cloud of unknowing” to return to the church and to Christ, the largest thing which deterred me was that I saw so little clear light coming from those Christians who sought to bring me back to the fold.

  REFLECTING THE LIGHT

  When a young woman told me that she wanted to be a novelist, that she wanted to write novels for Christian women, and asked me how was she to go about it, I wrote back, somewhat hesitantly, that I could not tell her, because I do not write my books for either Christians or women. If I understand the Gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who already have seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

  THE FOUNDATION OF OUR STORIES

  Christ with us always, before the journey, during it, after the end. That is the rock under our feet, the rock which springs forth with healing, thirst-quenching water. The Trinity has always been a unity; the Father, who will be what el will be, the Holy Spirit, before creation, brooding over the universe. And then the Word shouting for joy.

  Section V

  AN ACCEPTED WONDER

  The Wisdom of Children

  To write for children is usually synonymous with writing down to children, and that’s an insult to children. Children are far better believers than adults; they are aware of what most adults have forgotten.

  CHILDREN LOVE STORY

  Story, telling story, listening to story, has been such a large part of my enjoyment, of my legitimate pleasure, that it’s difficult for me to realize that this is not necessarily generally true. All children, I believe, love story, enjoy story, need story. “Tell me a story!” they beg. And then, alas, the grown-up world tells us that story is not true and is only fit for children, who should outgrow it. If story is not true, is it fit for children? Children love story because it is true.

  CONCENTRATION

  The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is that he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself.

  I had just witnessed this in Crosswicks, observing an eighteen-month-old lying on her stomach on the grass watching a colony of ants, watching with total, spontaneous concentration. And I had played ring-around-a-rosy with her; we skipped around in a circle, grandparents, parents, assorted teenagers, wholly outside ourselves, holding hands, falling in abandon onto the lawn, joining in the child’s shrieks of delighted laughter.

  And with her we were outside self and outside time.

  When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. The throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

  A RICH VOCABULARY

  A child sitting in rapt silence in front of a page—just listening—is creating the book along with the writer. We nourish our children with the same kind of attentive silence, but we also nourish with words. It is a shocking thing that many children are losing so much vocabulary that they are not able to participate in the marvelously creative act of dialogue. In order to redeem for the children a multicolored and varied vocabulary for their dialogue with us so that they may be able to create books as they read, we too need to have as wide as possible a vocabulary to choose from.

  THE CAPACITIES OF CHILDREN

  A child is not afraid of new ideas, does not have to worry about the status quo or rocking the boat, is willing to sail into uncharted waters. Those tired old editors who had a hard time understanding A Wrinkle in Time assumed that children couldn’t understand it, either. Even when Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to which house I am devoted, decided to risk taking it, they warned me that they did not expect it to sell well, and they did not think it could possibly be read by anyone under high school age. This is the typical underestimation of the adult as to the capacity of children to understand philosophical, scientific, and theological concepts. But there is no idea that is too difficult for children as long as it underlies a good story and quality writing.

  CREATIVITY IN CHILDREN

  I don’t think all children have to write, but I think they all have to read. Reading is an incredibly creative act. Once a schoolchild asked about all of the illustrations in my books and was a little bit surprised that they’re not illustrated. He’d read them and seen the illustrations in his own mind. So to read a book is to create a book. To read a book is to listen, to visualize, to see. If the reader, child or adult, cannot create the book along with the writer, the book is stillborn.

  To teach a child to read creatively is to teach a child to be a creator. When a child has really learned to read creatively, he’ll probably be less blocked about writing.

  CHILDREN ARE BETTER BELIEVERS

  Most writers of children’s fantasy do not write for children; they write for themselves. To write for children is usually synonymous with writing down to children, a
nd that’s an insult to children. Children are far better believers than adults; they are aware of what most adults have forgotten. They know that the daily time-bound world of limited facts is a secondary world. And stories, paintings, or songs—though they are not themselves the primary world—give us glimpses of the wider world of our whole selves, the selves which are real enough to accept the world’s darkness as well as its light.

  THE WONDER OF A CHILD’S IMAGINATION

  Children will read and accept stories which would be frightening to their parents. Children are still in touch with dragons and seraphim. Adults do not like having the status quo threatened. Most are really not interested in new ideas which might shake them and shove them in new directions. But children from nine to ninety have not closed their windows and bolted their doors. New ideas excite rather than upset.