by Sarah Arthur
I’m indebted to my theology professor J. Kameron Carter (Race: A Theological Account), who introduced his students to the metaphor of jazz improvisation as central to our theological task. Only once we’ve mastered a particular school or tradition (whether it’s an artistic medium or theology) can we both improvise on it and critique its performance by others. Black Christians in America, for instance, haven’t thrown out the Bible just because it’s been used to defend the distorted racialized theology of white Christianity; rather, people of color have studied, sung, and performed the Scriptures such that those texts become a prophetic challenge to the tradition from the inside out. Like jazz performance, religious belief and practice are a kind of artistic training: repetition, memorization, daily reps are how you learn. Eventually you gain the freedom for creative play as well as your own prophetic voice.
Madeleine would’ve concurred. Very few of us are original geniuses. But once we demonstrate mastery of the essentials, we are given tremendous freedom to improvise our unique contribution. Mrs Whatsit’s metaphor of the sonnet comes to mind: “You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?” Calvin asks her, and she replies, “Yes. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”16 British author G. K. Chesterton once said of his conversion to Catholicism, “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”17 There is a pattern to faith that provides both boundaries and meaning; but within the structure we improvise. And this too is both an artistic and a spiritual discipline.
• • • •
For many artists of faith, the trick to integrating faith and art comes in not making artistic practice a substitute for religious practice. It’s tempting, once we find our creative people, to make those the only spiritual family we have. I’ve known many a writer who, upon attending a writing conference for the first time, felt like a refugee among other refugees who speak his or her mother tongue: Oh, the relief of being understood! of realizing you’re not the only one who thinks this way! If the writing life expresses the deepest longings of our souls—while church, on the other hand, sometimes feels like a foreign, even hostile, country—then it’s easy to bail on communal worship altogether.
Lisa Ann Cockrel, who directs the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, reflected with me on the tension between the arts and faith communities: “You’re driven to make art out of questions, not answers,” she said. “I think that writers, visual artists, musicians, they seek out communities where questions can be explored without fear and also a kind of joy. I don’t know that our churches are those kinds of places.” This is where Madeleine’s influence has been so powerful for people like Lisa and her colleagues. “Madeleine did become, for my cohort in college—for my friends who were also kind of bookish and were interested in pop culture—an interesting enough figure that when my best friend from college moved to New York City on a Teach for America stint, she actually started attending All Angels’ specifically because it was Madeleine L’Engle’s church.”
All Angels’ is known, not incidentally, for giving primacy of place to the arts. But this is a rare example. It’s the distressing unwillingness of many faith communities to allow for the possibility of God’s grace in artistic practice that has contributed to those communities being hostile environments for artists. “It is nearly impossible be an artist today,” painter Makoto Fujimura told me, “to be seen in the artist’s full, authentic self. The church makes this even harder, I am afraid, trapped in limited-resource thinking and utilitarian pragmatism.” We are perfectly happy to organize church golf outings, for instance, but we are far less willing to expend resources on the materials it takes for artists to pursue their crafts.
D. L. Mayfield lives and serves in a refugee neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, a missional vocation that often feels at odds with the writing life. “Madeleine makes me, an incredibly utilitarian activist, believe in the mumbo-jumbo language of creativity,” she reflected with me; “of what it means when you don’t just write down what is right, but you write down what is true. When I get lost in my world of trying to do the most good, it is people like Madeleine who call me to something bigger, something that will last much longer.”
All of these conversations beg a number of questions: In what ways are we, as a Christian body, bracketing art into some other, less valuable category, something subpar to other vocations or ministries such as missions or preaching or running health clinics? In what ways are we diminishing the roles of the artists in our midst by framing their jobs as secular (and expensive) hobbies rather than as vital for the spiritual upbuilding of the whole community? By contrast, in Makoto’s words, “L’Engle brought her language of creativity and imagination to the fore of our discussions, and thereby mediated the gap between the church and the world. Her language is the antidote to the modern malaise of scarcity mindset.”
Things don’t always go swimmingly once churches become tentatively open to the arts, however. Spoken word poet Amena Brown, in a podcast episode for Christianity Today, said, “What I’ve found sometimes in a faith-based setting is there’s a way people want art to go. And they either want it to have answers and not have unanswered questions in it, or they want it to have faith and not doubt, or they want it to be so spiritual that it is no longer human.”18 Artists continually find themselves playing the role of apologist to their fellow believers—a role that can become exhausting over time. And yet, if Madeleine taught us nothing else, she taught us a kind of tenacious compassion for those to whom we’ve been called.
Overstreet told me, “She shows imaginative believers how to speak the truth back to the church, but to speak the truth in love.” Madeleine the apologist at times became Madeleine the prophet: “You can tell she’s frustrated with the church, you can tell she’s angry. But she never separates herself from the church and points a finger. She stands within the church and insists on what the gospel gives us, insists on the full vision, saying, ‘Don’t deprive me of the riches of Christ’s teaching.’” For Jeffrey, “That was an incredible model for me. I hear so many voices like that now that have to trace those sentiments back to her.”
Like Madeleine, we face a choice to live out our faith on the ground, with real people in all their messiness, because this is part of our artistic obedience. We not only have something to say as writers, but our fellow believers need to hear it.
• • • •
“If it’s good art . . . ,” Madeleine says, leaving us hanging by those ellipses; “and there the questions start coming, questions which it would be simpler to evade.”19 She goes on to assert that God is no respecter of persons or religious beliefs when it comes to giftedness, that indeed, the Holy Spirit uses all kinds of otherwise “secular” or even “non-Christian” things to touch us on a spiritual level, whether or not the artist intended it.
Given the nature of the CT awards, I’m not generally facing the question of how to judge art by non-Christian authors. But the experience has given me a particular lens by which to view all literature. I’m often asked if it’s really possible to gauge a good book just by the opening sentences, for instance. As any literary agent or editor will tell you, the answer is yes. Give us a snippet of dialogue, a paragraph of description, a brief glimpse of the author’s worldview, and we’ll know. Editors read so many proposals (remember: they do this every day, all year long) that they’re pretty good at spotting what doesn’t work. What’s harder is finding the book that does.
Some of what shapes the criteria is the publishing house’s brand, its unique mission and vision, its own target readership or tribe. These factors set pretty clear limitations on what can be considered, regardless of the editor’s own personal literary tastes. The same is true for my role as a preliminary fiction judge. CT’s mission is “equipping Christians to renew their minds
, serve the church, and create culture to the glory of God”—so my job isn’t to decide which books are my personal favorites (often, after judging, I’ll go back and indulge in a few on my own). Rather, my job is to ascertain what books best reflect CT’s mission, particularly the third item, creating culture. I’m not looking for authors who merely reflect the already-cherished values and attitudes of a Christian subculture; rather, I’m looking for writers who generate art that intentionally seeks to engage, transform, and contribute to culture at large.
In short, my modest task as fiction judge is to discern which books have the best chance of still being on the shelves—of Christians and non-Christians alike—in a hundred years.
What authors of Christian faith will have their obituaries written up, as Madeleine did, by the New York Times? Whose fiftieth-anniversary editions will send their publishers into a frenzy of celebration, as Macmillan did for Wrinkle in 2012? Whose novel, when translated into a blockbuster film depicting the main characters as a multiracial family (as in director Ava DuVernay’s recent version of Wrinkle), will inspire an entire demographic that may have never read the story before? This isn’t to say a work only has merit if the author gains the attention of mainstream media or if the book earns key placement in trade bookstores or is published by a trade (rather than Christian) publishing house. Rather, as Madeleine said, “If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.”20
Ultimately, the task for any novelist of faith is not to shore up the cherished values of a tribe that believes itself to be under siege. It’s first to worship the living God, to love him with everything you’ve got: heart, mind, soul, and strength. And the second task of the artist of faith is wrapped up in Christ’s own commission to his disciples in Matthew 28:19–20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” [emphasis added]. This is not the same as a “misguided attempt to protect the truth from culture,” as Overstreet said to me, but “to bring the truth to culture.”
So, we make good art, and we hope that by doing so we have offered up an honest, well-executed gift of worship to the Maker who designed us to make things. And we share that work with our fellow readers—not just our fellow believers, but all story-loving humans—because not only do we want them to experience our own delight in making it, but also because, as people of faith, we are called to play a small part in transforming the culture in which we live. Our works become icons: windows by which others can see the “light so lovely.” And by this, we hope, lives can be changed. Including our own.
“Writing fiction, then, for L’Engle, is not merely a way of ordering life,” wrote scholar Don Hettinga, “it is a way of living it. The choices before a storyteller as she composes are the same spiritual and moral decisions that any individual confronts daily. The effect that a writer has then also bears moral consequences.”21 For Madeleine, those effects were overwhelmingly positive in the lives of thousands of students and readers. But now we must make the turn toward a more difficult chapter, in which we also acknowledge that not all of her artistic decisions—particularly her propensity to blur fact and fiction—let in the light.
Chapter Six
FACT and FICTION
We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.
Walking on Water
When I was a child, my family lived for several years in an economically depressed area of rural upstate New York. Our 110-year-old parsonage sat next door to my father’s Presbyterian church, built in 1825 after the spiritual revival of the Second Great Awakening. Next door, a graveyard with tilting headstones dated back to the late 1700s; and beyond those, farm fields stretched in all directions. There in the region that revivalist Charles Finney had called the “burned-over district,” where the fires of the Holy Spirit once swept the landscape, a small cluster of houses and barns along the state road was all that remained of our hamlet.
One Saturday evening, we had gone a mile down the road for dinner at a parishioner’s home when the sirens started. First one firetruck blared past, then another. Then more, wailing in the dark. And they didn’t pass out of hearing but instead remained at some fixed point in the near distance.
Eventually my father rose and went to the window. Above the treetops, roughly where our hamlet stood, the sky glowed orange.
“I need to go,” he said. “That could be the church. Or the house.”
He was out the door within seconds, accompanied by our host. I recall a tense quarter of an hour while the children stirred restlessly, the women speculating in quiet tones so as not to alarm us. Then the phone rang. It was my father from the parsonage. A nearby barn blazed violently. So far, the church and the parsonage were safe, but firemen were everywhere: on our rooftops, in the fields, hosing down the church, stamping out sparks and small blazes all over the property. We were to stay put until things were under control.
It was a long night, I remember. The barn was a total loss. Eventually we were allowed to come home for bed, but firemen remained long after, monitoring the blaze. Sunday morning dawned with gray smoke and ash rising from the ruins next door; and while we thanked God during worship that our historic buildings were saved, I’ll never forget standing at a window during coffee hour watching a wraithlike coil of smoke drift up lazily from the hollow of an ancient stump behind the church. Even after the fire had burned itself out, it smoked for days, an eerie reminder that as much as we might desire a nice, tidy resolution to a crisis, such an ending is not, ultimately, guaranteed.
If this story sounds familiar to Madeleine L’Engle fans, it’s because she tells a similar tale in the first of her autobiographical Crosswicks Journals, A Circle of Quiet. Hers is much more eloquent, of course, with a wonderful setup about an unpopular new family, the Brechsteins, who alienated everyone in the Franklins’ small town; and the heroism of a certain grumpy farmer who saves the Brechsteins’ children when their house catches fire. You can imagine how riveted I was the first time I read it: Gosh, but that same thing happened to me! Our hamlet too had its grumpy farmer. My parents, the newcomers, were considered outsiders too; we never felt entirely at home. Sure, not all of Madeleine’s details lined up with mine: it wasn’t our house that burned; my sister and I didn’t need saving. And our story didn’t have a feel-good ending either—if anything, my parents were treated unkindly as the years went by. But I’d experienced a similar small-town scenario. Madeleine got it right.
Even more striking, her version had such an “all shall be well” tone, as if, deep down, no matter our petty differences, real people can come together in a crisis, overlook our troubles, and make the world a better place. Her version had everything I’d wished had been resolved in our own family’s story, in that strange and unhappy corner of the Finger Lakes that we left, a few years later, without ever desiring to return. Her story is what I wanted my own to be.
Except, in Madeleine’s case, it never happened.
• • • •
“My husband says, and I’m afraid with justification,” Madeleine wrote in A Circle of Quiet, “that by the time I’ve finished a book I have no idea what in it is fabrication and what is actuality; and he adds that this holds true not only for novels but for most of my life. We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.”1 There were no Brechsteins, she went on to explain—or at least no family with that surname and those exact circumstances. There was no grumpy farmer—or rather, there were lots of grumpy farmers all rolled into one person. Fires came and went in that small town, and heroics indeed happened. But the main thing, the significant point for Madeleine, was that “the emotional premise of the sketch, the feeling of being a stranger and so
journer—all of this is true. This is the way it is.”2
Stories are about what happens, Madeleine insisted, not just about what happened. As a writer myself, I know this, of course. If I can’t express my themes universally, then I have only succeeded in reporting disjointed events, not narrating a deeper truth. And yet my reaction to having been emotionally invested in a purportedly nonfiction work, only to discover the episode wasn’t factual, gives me pause. What else in her “nonfiction” have I been assuming was biographically accurate? What about the ways I narrate my own life? And what do our loved ones think of all this?
The Brechstein story is an example of Madeleine’s insistence on truth taking primacy over facts. This is a key trope in both her fiction and her nonfiction. As her housemate Barbara Braver told me, just because you know the fact that water boils at a certain temperature doesn’t mean you know what water really is, what it symbolizes, what truth it holds. The same can be said of the human life. I can prove all sorts of facts about you scientifically, but this in no way sums up your ontological worth, your purpose, your dignity as a human being made in the image of God.
“Thinking about the Brechsteins,” Madeleine mused, “attempting the not-quite possible task of separating fact from fiction in this sketch, teaches me something about the nature of reality. On one level, one might say that the Brechsteins are not real. But they are. It is through the Brechsteins, through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.”3
The phrase “beyond provable fact” surfaces over and over in Madeleine’s fiction and nonfiction, and it’s not merely a literary assertion about the nature of story: for Madeleine it’s a key theological point. “We do not need faith for facts; we do need faith for truth.”4 If I have all the facts about God, I don’t need faith to believe in him, do I? Certainly, as we already explored in chapter four, we continue to learn new facts about the universe every single day. But this doesn’t change the essential nature of God, whose character isn’t bound by what we can or can’t prove.