A Light So Lovely

by Sarah Arthur

  • • • •

  Almost immediately upon Madeleine’s success with Wrinkle in 1963, the world wanted to know her secret sauce. She had already been teaching writing at her children’s private Episcopal school, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s on the Upper West Side, but now her role as popular speaker and writing instructor launched in earnest.

  At first she ran the usual circuit of libraries and schools alongside such authors as Lloyd Alexander (the Prydain Chronicles) and Sidney Offit (Memoir of the Bookie’s Son). Offit, for instance, recalled the first time he and Madeleine were to speak together on the annual fall children’s book festival tour in the 1960s. He had developed an entertaining style for children, while the more famous authors always seemed to him to be “deadly dull”—so he suggested to the host librarian that maybe Madeleine should go first, then himself, in case someone needed to salvage things after her presentation. “I can tell that you’ve never heard her speak,” the librarian told him. “Don’t worry about Madeleine L’Engle.” Sure enough, Madeleine held the audience enrapt, like the trained actress she was.7

  Her reputation as a presenter grew, leading to everything from teaching writing workshops in East Harlem to preaching at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—where one parishioner considered her “the greatest preacher he had ever heard,” with sermons that “were always captivating and original and yet informed by a powerful understanding of classic religion.”8 By the 1970s she was regularly leading spiritual retreats and teaching writing workshops, particularly through an Episcopal convent known as the Community of the Holy Spirit on the Upper West Side. She also added places like Wheaton College and many other religious institutions to her speaking circuit—when she wasn’t doing things like addressing the Library of Congress, where she delivered her speech “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?” in 1983.

  In widowhood, during the 1980s and ’90s, Madeleine increased her role as a writing instructor and mentor as well as spiritual director for hundreds of acolytes—most of them women. The smaller class sizes and intimacy of her workshops meant that many of them felt they knew Madeleine deeply and personally. Dinner parties and reunions at her Manhattan apartment became a regular fixture amongst her alumni, as described in their 2009 collection A Circle of Friends: Remembering Madeleine L’Engle.

  One former student, Lesa Rader, told me, “I didn’t feel that I belonged in that group of writers, but Madeleine made me feel that I belonged. She was authentic and a deep reader of the Bible. She also understood the pain and suffering in the lives of the participants.” Lesa recalled, “At that time I was coming to accept my role as a parent of a child with severe disabilities, with all the guilt that goes with that role. She just accepted me and encouraged me to write about my experiences even more.” Story after story by Madeleine’s students reflect a similar attention to their unique circumstances.

  Barbara Braver—who was Madeleine’s apartment-mate for twelve years while commuting from Massachusetts to work part of each week in New York—said of those mentoring relationships, “Madeleine took very seriously the fact that she had a gift to offer and she offered it. She had the gift of drawing out of people their stories and encouraging them and prompting them.” Barbara reflected, “Madeleine was also curious about people and relationships. And certainly, when you’re talking to people about their writing, you’re meeting people beyond their favorite flower and whether they like breakfast. That was important to her.”

  Of that circle, one of Madeleine’s nineteen goddaughters, Cornelia Duryée Moore, became Madeleine’s personal assistant and honorary family member. When Madeleine grew increasingly overwhelmed by the vast and echoing Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Cornelia says she persuaded Madeleine to join her in worship at All Angels’ on the Upper West Side.9 At Madeleine’s prompting, Cornelia eventually went on to become a filmmaker, with collaboration from the author to adapt several of her novels and unpublished plays for film. Camilla Dickinson, a lovely, quiet film starring Adelaide Clemens and Cary Elwes (yes, Westley from The Princess Bride!), released from Kairos Productions in 2012, based on Madeleine’s 1951 novel. The author never had the chance to see the production, obviously, but the two women remained extremely close (Cornelia’s sons, Tallis and Theo, are named for characters in Madeleine’s novels) until Madeleine’s death.

  The author’s influence wasn’t limited to her writing students, however. In 1979 Madeleine sat down with TV producer Norman Lear’s young assistant, Catherine Hand, who from childhood had longed to see Wrinkle adapted for the big screen. Madeleine initially resisted the idea, but she and Catherine struck up a friendship that, for Catherine, became one of the most transformative relationships of her life. “Without question, Madeleine influenced my view of Christianity, God and the universe,” Catherine told me in her interview for this book. “Madeleine and I developed a very strong bond over the years, and her trust in me mattered a great deal. I wouldn’t give up on the film, because I didn’t want to let her down.”

  The two would collaborate on how best to turn the book into a film. Their discussions led Catherine to eventually make a Disney television movie that aired to mixed reviews in 2004, and later the 2018 blockbuster produced by Catherine and directed by Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Ava DuVernay. For Catherine, the spiritual journey of having Madeleine as a mentor was just as important as the collaborative result: “The most important thing a mentor can do is believe in you with their whole heart. I felt that from Madeleine, and I wanted to live up to the faith she had in me.”

  In the course of researching this project, I asked my peers and colleagues to describe the mentoring role Madeleine played, through her books, in their lives. When I asked them which title had the biggest impact on their faith or vocation, the 1972 Crosswicks journal A Circle of Quiet came up repeatedly: a book about finding the space to simply be without abandoning the tasks you’re called to do.

  Madeleine describes her difficult decade of trying to write while parenting small kids—which, for many women writers, in particular, resonates powerfully. Freelancer Aleah Marsden told me, “She blessed my desire to pursue something outside of mothering in a way that didn’t diminish either calling’s importance. Yes, of course, I was to be the best mother I could be to the children entrusted to me. No, they didn’t have to be the epicenter of my existence. Yes, my writing was a gift worth protecting and pursuing, and I would be a better human (and mother) for it. No, it didn’t give me license to abandon the embodied work that came with the season of mothering young children.”

  Missional activist D. L. Mayfield (Assimilate or Go Home) reflected with me, “Parenting small children both makes me numb and also causes me to turn over the biggest questions of all as I rock my children to bed or seek nurturing, wise books to read to them at night.” For Mayfield, “Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship—full of questioning—of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don’t think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.”

  Author and blogger Sarah Bessey told me that reading Madeleine’s description of the “tired thirties” was a tremendous encouragement during a similar stage in her own life. “Madeleine mentions that she used to literally fall asleep with her head on the typewriter. And at that exact moment I had just signed my first book contract for Jesus Feminist; I’d had three children in four years,” Sarah said. “I was on maternity leave, and I remember the day I read that part of A Circle of Quiet: I was sitting cross-legged in the bathroom typing on my laptop, and the baby was having her nap, and I was still lactating, and I had my two other ones in the bathtub right beside me so they could be busy and have fun and be contained. And I had one eye on them to make sure nobody slipped under, and I’ve got the baby sleeping, and one eye on my laptop—at the same time I’m trying to write down some really big thoughts on patriarchy.”

  The biggest takeaway from
Madeleine, for Sarah, was the idea that “just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you quit. Just because it doesn’t look like everyone else’s day when they’re on maternity leave, or just because it’s not this mythic, housewifely ideal that people like to have . . . if Madeleine L’Engle was just this tired and still kept going and fell asleep on the typewriter, then you know I get to keep going too.” Sarah concluded, “It gave me permission to write that book.”

  It turns out, the secret sauce to great writing isn’t some magic formula, but rather, it’s perseverance born out of obedience to a holy calling.

  • • • •

  As Madeleine taught more and more aspiring writers, she began articulating a unique, transformative understanding of art as a spiritual discipline. “To serve a work of art is almost identical with adoring the Master of the Universe in contemplative prayer,” she would often say.10 For Madeleine, writing wasn’t just a hobby to be done on the side while attending to other, more legitimate work. It was a God-given vocation that deserved the same attentiveness as prayer—indeed, that writing itself can be a form of worship that brings us into the presence of God.

  Her students, she discovered, had never heard anything like this. The divide between sacred and secular had become so great that imaginative creativity was perceived—both by artists and people of faith—as something wholly at odds with religion. You were either a practicing artist or a practicing Christian, but you couldn’t be both.

  Luci Shaw was the one who convinced Madeleine, in the late 1970s, to compile her thoughts on faith and writing into a book. “About six or eight months later she had come to visit again,” Luci told me, “and she handed me this typescript—we didn’t have computers, it was all typewriters—she had this typescript of paper that was probably half an inch thick and it was really kind of messy. And she kind of threw it at me and said, ‘Well here it is, do what you want with it. It has no shape.’” Over the next few weeks, Luci recalled, “I pulled the whole thing apart and made little piles on my living room floor of things, chapters and words that seemed to work together. And I put it back in a new ordering of the chapters and ideas, and handed it back to her, and she was thrilled.” The shapeless mass, transformed by Luci, came out in 1980 as Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.

  Robert Hudson, writer and longtime editor in Christian publishing, wrote, “Walking on Water shaped my life as a writer. I read it in the early 1980s while attending a somewhat restrictive church. I’d just had a broken engagement, was depressed, and was questioning the value of my writing altogether. Walking on Water (maybe even a little more than metaphorically) saved my life at a time when I was thinking pretty dark thoughts. I’ve read many of Madeleine’s books, but that one is closest to my heart.”

  Novelist Leif Enger (Peace Like a River), in his foreword to the 2003 edition of Madeleine’s Penguins and Golden Calves, tells of how he struggled in the 1980s to understand the role of faith in the writing life. “The few examples of sanctioned ‘Christian fiction’ I’d picked up,” he wrote, “had been earnest, evangelical, and drafted to a set of closely drawn boundaries that sucked out all prospects for spontaneity and joy.”11 He was beginning to fear that any attempt to reconcile faith with the longing to write meant that “one of the two had to die.” Leif was then given Madeleine’s Walking on Water, in which she asserted things like, “We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds.”12 Leif began to wonder, “Could God really be so generous? Might he actually want us to do those things we desire most? Could he—it seemed almost heretical—have designed us to want and to accomplish those things?”13

  Walking on Water was a game-changer. And Enger wasn’t the first, nor the last, writer to find in Madeleine a patron saint of the arts. Jeffrey Overstreet, who teaches film and creative writing at Seattle Pacific University, told me, “I can’t count how many artists I’ve met who just light up when you mention that book. And they will talk to you about that as their passport into their life of faith and imagination, where there is harmony between vocabularies of faith and vocabularies of creative writing and craftsmanship and the dedication required to achieve excellence.”

  A key concept in the book is Madeleine’s insistence on the role of the artist as a religious vocation: that artistic practices are religious practices, whether or not the artist is aware of it. And, conversely, religious practices, for the artist, are not somehow compartmentalized from the creative process but, rather, all of a piece. The artist, while creating, is in some kind of communion with the Maker who made us in his own image—who made us to make things—which has implications not only for individual artists but also for religious communities and their engagement with the arts.

  Overstreet described growing up in an extremely conservative Baptist church: “I’m grateful for many things I learned there, but one of its weaknesses was an extreme suspicion of, fear of, and avoidance of the imagination.” He said, “It was Walking on Water, during my senior year of high school, that changed my life probably more than any work of nonfiction outside of the Bible itself.” Indeed, “So much of what L’Engle was writing about was trying to reclaim Christian freedom and the value of the imagination. . . . There are so many lines from that book that I know as thoroughly, and have taken to heart as deeply, as many of the Scriptures that have shaped my life.”

  Poet Marci Rae Johnson, a colleague from my Wheaton College days and editor for WordFarm, told me, “My senior year of high school I had decided that I not only wanted to read books but write them as well.” As was the case with Jeffrey, “Walking on Water was full of the type of encouragement and advice I needed—not only as a writer, but as a Christian struggling to define my own beliefs after a fundamentalist upbringing as well as a Christian trying to see how and whether one could be both Christian and artist. And indeed, for Madeleine the two were tightly and irrevocably connected.” (If we haven’t learned by now that Walking on Water makes a great graduation gift, we’re not paying attention.)

  For Aleah Marsden, whose life has recently transformed from write-at-home-mom to seminary student, “Madeleine gave me permission to use my imagination in a way that feels holy. I had never considered that my fantasies and fascinations could be tools used to point people to truth in a way that they may never otherwise find it.” The childhood creativity so often squashed in adulthood becomes, with Madeleine, something to be cultivated. Aleah told me, “She gave dignity to my daydreaming, that my art was actually a vital expression of the gifts I had been given and therefore a responsibility.”

  When I myself am not writing, I feel cut off from God, committing a sin of omission by failing to do what I was made for. As a Christian, I’m not only called to serve Jesus but I’m called to “serve the work” that Jesus gave me, as Madeleine put it—indeed, serving the work is to serve Jesus. “The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth giver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.”14 Like Mary, we respond to our calling by saying, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38).

  Art is not merely a task but also a kind of spiritual surrender.

  • • • •

  While there’s no secret sauce to obedience—you literally sit down in a chair and start stringing nouns and verbs together—the artist still attends to excellence of the craft. “When we write a story, we must write to the absolute best of our ability,” Madeleine said. “That is the job, first and foremost. If we are truly Christian, that will be evident, no matter what the topic. If we are not truly Christian, that will also be evident, no matter how pious the tale.”15 We don’t throw things like active verbs, complex characters, or interesting plots out the window. This is how we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind (see Luke 10:27), as so many writers of faith have done before us.

  In Wa
lking on Water Madeleine famously insists that we judge a book not by whether it deals with “Christian” topics or promotes our personal worldview, but whether it has merit as a work of art. None of that changes just because the publishing market or the target readership gives far too many books a pass in favor of some other social or political agenda.

  My husband once unwittingly checked out a book from the library that had been among my pile of nos for that judging season. He made it a few chapters into what I knew was a historical Christian romance (I didn’t let on), but then he flung it aside. When I asked why, he said, “I quit when the book said, ‘He looked at her, not lustily, but with admiration.’ And I thought, Oh, hell, no.” It wasn’t because of its genre, nor that its author wasn’t a trained historian, but because of its sanitized view of human relationships that delivers all the feel-good, wish-fulfillment stuff (“He loves me for my smarts!”) but leaves out the mess, the brokenness—or even the good gifts of a body designed by God. This is an incomplete, if not willfully dishonest, portrait of the human condition. Which is bad art.

  Madeleine would’ve been horrified, of course. “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.” This is a strong statement, stronger than most of us are willing to make. Who are we to judge someone else’s religion? And yet it’s through the weaknesses of our art that the weaknesses of our theology are exposed.