by Sarah Arthur
Madeleine wrote, “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!”27 Luci Shaw told me, “We have times of stagnation and we have a further leap of faith. It’s not just a steady growth in God.” Charlotte agreed: “I’ve been thinking about the way we talk about our lives as a journey, and that death is maybe the end. Except where you are at the end maybe says more than you want it to about what your journey has been about unless you end on an up note. It’s depressing, the oppressive expectations of things getting better: you will get wiser, you will get kinder, you will get calmer as you go down the one road that you are on—as if it’s one road in one direction all the time.”
For Charlotte, “I think it’s liberating, too, not to try to shake that narrative off. Like, ‘Oh, I’ve learned so much toward my journey toward adulthood; and now I am a wise old woman, and people come to me for advice, and I dispense advice, and nothing new happens to me.’ To realize that getting older doesn’t mean things stop happening to you, yet continuing to remain open to those as intense experiences—it’s not easy for us to allow for that in our idols.”
On stage with Luci at the 1996 Festival of Faith and Writing, Madeleine described her accident in California: “I was half dead in the hospital and Luci was—you were in Europe, weren’t you?” Luci murmured assent, and Madeleine continued, “And when she came home she simply got on a plane and flew to San Diego and came to the hospital and stayed with me. That’s friendship. I was a total mess. Why I was alive, I don’t even know. And Luci was . . . I couldn’t hold the Bible, she read the psalms for me, and just helped pull me back into life.” Madeleine concluded, “Without these real testaments of friendship I wouldn’t be here . . . All of the old primordial fears surfaced in me . . . I didn’t want to be enclosed . . . I was afraid of the dark . . . And it was a long time before I could sleep without a nightlight on and rejoice in the dark again.”
We never stop growing and changing, facing down our fears, confronting new ones. Even when our own hearts grow dark, we need the loving presence of friends and companions to draw us back to the light.
• • • •
In the face of irrational evil, of the darkness that penetrates even our own souls, “believing,” Meg says in A Wind in the Door, “takes practice.” Charlotte told me that her grandmother “described A Wrinkle in Time as a sort of aspirational story, writing about a universe in which she hoped to believe. ‘All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’ is an aspiration,” Charlotte said. “I think of that quote, ‘Some days I hold onto my faith with my fingernails’—and that’s just sometimes how it is.”
Yet even in Madeleine’s seasons of doubt, she still prayed and read her Bible nearly every night. “No matter where I am, at home, abroad, I begin the day with morning prayer [from the Book of Common Prayer], including the psalms for the day, so that at the end of each month I have gone through the book of Psalms. I also read from both the Old and New Testaments . . . I end the day in the same way, with evening prayer, and this gives the day a structure.”28
When asked about the spiritual practices Barbara Braver and Madeleine did together as apartment mates for those twelve years after Hugh died, Barbara explained, “We lived as persons of sacrament, of ‘outward and visible sign’: the candles on the table, the effort to make a meal, the comfort food, the sacraments and rituals.” One of those rituals was nightly Compline, which Madeleine referred to as the “Go-to-Bed-Quietly-and-Fearlessly Office.” Barbara told me that, “Madeleine said more than once, ‘Well. Monks, you know, they often lie down to do this.’ So she would quite often insist that she was going to lie down to pray, but was vigorous nonetheless.” Barbara chuckled at the thought. “And we loved to sing. Every now and then, we’d burst into song. And of course, sometimes we’d come home at different times and both be exhausted and nothing like that would happen at all.”
Madeleine herself described Compline as “just this beautiful intimacy with God where they can hear Jesus saying, ‘Fear not, little flock. I’m with you. I came because I care. I came because I love you.’” Was it always wonderful and powerful and life-giving? No, Madeleine asserted:
There are times when I just do it. It doesn’t mean anything; nothing happens. But I do it. And I think that’s rather like a pianist who goes to practice the scales and does not like doing it. But if you’re going to play the Bach fugues you have to practice the scales. And so for me this regular reading of scripture is the practicing of the scales of faith. And I don’t have to enjoy it every day—sometimes it’s marvelous; I love it! But I have to do it every day whether I like it or not. And it is one of the great building blocks of keeping my faith alive.29
Prayer and Bible study weren’t a magic formula that would fix everything. But she chose to practice it anyway, because “I knew only that I was lost and that I needed to be found.”30
Thus, when she encountered people who likewise felt lost, her response was prayer. Don said of her 1996 Calvin College visit, “She was in a wheelchair because of a leg injury, and as her companion wheeled her into a very small elevator, a woman approached her to thank her for her writing about the death of her husband in Two-Part Invention. It meant a lot, the woman said, because she had recently been diagnosed with cancer. L’Engle’s response was to roll out of the elevator, grasp the woman’s hand, and to pray with her for healing.”
Madeleine also attended worship whenever she was able, where taking the sacrament of Communion was a particularly poignant way to let in the light of Christ. When her own mother was dying, Madeleine’s son-in-law Alan, an Episcopal priest, or Canon West would celebrate the sacrament with the family, “and from this I receive the same kind of strength which, in a different way, comes to me in the C minor Fugue, and I am able to return to the routine of these difficult days with a lighter touch.”31 A decade later, when Hugh was dying, she regularly took Communion then too: “It is by these holy mysteries that I live, that I am sustained.”32
But it’s not only in spiritual practices that we find ourselves able to put one foot in front of the other; it’s also in the simple, daily practices of ordinary living. Incarnational practices, we might call them—by which we claim that God shows up in our everyday activities like eating and washing and conversing and winding down at the end of the day.
One of Madeleine’s editors, Sandra Jordan, once asked her at a writer’s conference how she could withstand “all that intensity, the overwhelming tide of people wanting something from her, needing something beyond a book signed or a comment about their manuscript, needing a spiritual connection.” Madeleine’s response was, “I have a rule. At 9:00 p.m., I go to my room no matter what, and I’m done for the day.”33 Similarly, Charlotte told me about Madeleine’s practice of opening the many shutters that lined the windows of her Manhattan apartment bedroom every morning and then ceremonially closing them all at night. The simple routines of letting the light in at dawn and then saying goodbye to the day—these were yet another way to practice faith in the God who made it all—day, night, sun, moon, and stars—and called them good.
I’ve already discussed how writing was, for Madeleine, a spiritual discipline, one of the ways that she experienced the presence of God. One wonders how her inability to write in those later years, during her decline, affected her sense of drawing near to God, of God drawing near to her. She had written in Walking on Water, “It is not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe twenty-four hours a day all that I want to believe. I stray, and then my stories pull me back if I listen to them carefully. I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.”34 But what happens when you can no longer write your way to clarity or peace or even belief? Where is God in the midst of that terrifying
vocational silence?
As I was tracking the timeline of her publications, I noticed that she wrote nothing of real significance after Bion’s death. Yet in her interview with Bob Abernethy of PBS in 2000 she said she planned to write someday about the loss of her son.
“Did she?” I asked Charlotte.
“As far as I know she never wrote about his death,” Charlotte reflected. “She did keep writing, and she was sort of writing two books towards the end: a book about Meg in her forties and a book about aging. But she never got very far with them.” Madeleine’s physical and mental decline also coincided with that time, Charlotte said, and “I think as different kinds of capacities began to stale, that was really hard. But even towards the last, the scraps of a journal entry on a yellow pad, or the beginning of a poem, were things that surfaced and spoke to her. But I think it must have been terrible not to have that outlet.”
At the same time, Charlotte reflected, “I didn’t observe her being in distress about not writing. When people would ask her, she had the answer: she would say, ‘I am writing a book about aging and Meg in her forties.’ That didn’t change even if she wasn’t actively writing about it. That’s so much of who she was, that’s what she said. She kept her prayer book and her Bible at her bedside.”
Madeleine taught us that we don’t abandon spiritual habits just because we’re in a season of struggle and doubt. We keep attending to those practices, day in and day out. This is not the same as legalism, in which we obey certain commands in some misguided attempt to be on God’s good side. Instead, it requires deep humility and trust to acknowledge, “I don’t understand this right now. Everything feels dark and meaningless. But there’s more going on than I understand; and somehow God has promised to show up in the midst of these daily habits. So here goes.” Prayer, worship, reading Scripture, breaking bread in community, spiritual counsel, and conversation with spiritual friends: all those are ways we put one foot in front of the other, even in the dark. These are the ways we practice believing.
• • • •
In the early part of the eight years between Bion’s death and her own, Madeleine split her time between New York and the cottage she’d had built at Crosswicks, near the big farmhouse. Eventually, however, the stretches of time in each place grew longer. “And in between,” Charlotte said, “she’d fall and her hip would dislocate and at one point she had a pretty significant brain hemorrhage.” After one particularly bad fall the family moved her into a nursing home in Litchfield, Connecticut, and there she spent the last few years of her life.
Luci and Barbara together went to visit her. Luci recalls, “The thing that was important for me and Barbara was right at the end, when Madeleine was in an elder-care place. She had really lost her memory and she was unable to communicate. She couldn’t respond to anything we said.” But then, Luci says, “We started to sing a hymn—you know, we’d always do Compline together when it was the three of us; we would sing a hymn at the end of Compline together—and as soon as we started singing this hymn, she joined in. It was an underlying current in her memory that the music and the words broke open again.” Luci then asked the home staff to contact her if Madeleine was ever alert enough for a phone call, and not long thereafter, they were able to have a lucid conversation across the miles between Connecticut and the West Coast.
Two weeks later, Madeleine was gone.
Luci, ever the poet, painted that last scene for us all:
TO THE EDGE
for Madeleine L’Engle
Be with her now. She faces the ocean
of unknowing, losing the sense
of what her life has been, and soon
will be no longer as she knew it, as
we knew it with her. Lagging behind,
we cannot join her on this nameless shore.
Knots in her bones, flesh flaccid, the skin
like paper, pigment gathering like ashes driven
by a random wind, a heart
that may still sing, interiorly—we cannot
know—have pulled her far ahead of us,
our pioneer.
As we embrace her, her inner eyes embrace
the universe. She recognizes heaven with its
innumerable stars—but not our faces.
Be with her now, as you have
sometimes been—a flare that blazes,
then dulls, leaving only a bright
blur in the memory. Hold her
in the mystery that no one can describe
but Lazarus, though he was dumb
and didn’t speak of it. Fog has rolled in,
erasing definition at the edge. Walking
to meet it, she hopes soon to see
where the shore ends. She listens as
the ocean breathes in and out in waves.
She hears no other sound.35
• • • •
Despite the darkness, Barbara Braver concluded, “Madeleine showed up. Maybe we can write a little chapter called ‘Madeleine Showed Up.’ She did. She showed up to people who needed her when they needed her, she showed up for prayer, she showed up to let the voice of inspiration speak.” Madeleine showed up to serve the work of writing; she disciplined herself to sit down and be present. And she showed up as a struggling believer; she disciplined herself to continue praying, continue reading the Bible, continue practicing hospitality, continue worshiping in community. She perhaps never wrested every chapter of her life into a tidy resolution in which “all shall be well,” but she put her trust in the One whose love does not fail.
We can picture it in our mind’s eye, Madeleine’s bedside table with her prayer book and her Bible. Many of us have a similar table, piled with books, maybe, or photos of loved ones. Is our prayer book there too, tabbed to Compline? Is the Bible there, that complex, bewildering, life-giving book Madeleine taught us to read as we read our favorite childhood stories? Because the kinds of things on our bedside table today most likely will not change in forty years. “How we spend our days,” wrote author Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.”36 We won’t magically become more spiritually disciplined in old age if we’re not practicing now.
So it starts tonight. It starts with the closing of the shutters against the darkness. It starts with our determination to go to bed quietly and fearlessly, talking to God about our day. Then, when dawn comes, we can arise like Madeleine, open the shutters, and let in the light so lovely, whether we feel like it or not.
EPILOGUE: TESSER WELL
If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love—and of our own free will.
The Irrational Season
When Catholic writer Jessica Mesman Griffith (Love and Salt) was fourteen, her mother died of cancer. “And that,” Jessica said to me when I interviewed her for this book, “ended life as I knew it.”
Jessica had grown up Catholic in New Orleans, but when her mom got sick her parents grew “desperate for a faith healing,” so they became involved in a nondenominational Pentecostal church. The family left Catholicism; and when Jessica’s mother died her father quickly remarried someone from that church. “Which meant that everything that was familiar to me was gone: my Catholic faith, my mother.” And she was not allowed to grieve. “My life took on the feeling of an alternate reality.”
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time became a key story for her. “I became really, really troubled, a rebellious teenager, very stubborn, very angry. Which are listed as all of Meg’s faults. Mrs Whatsit gives Meg her faults as a way to fight the darkness. Looking back, I think I could’ve become something worse—suicidal, addicted. But I was determined to survive, almost as an affront to my dad.”
Years later, after her own marriage had begun falling apart, Jessica was persuaded to return to Louisiana and attempt reconciliation with her father. She
said, “I packed up my two young children and put them in a car and drove nineteen hours home. And the whole way we were listening to A Wrinkle in Time audiobook, narrated by Hope Davis—in its entirety several times.” But things in Louisiana quickly deteriorated. “I saw that, no, this was exactly the reason why I left; I was right to leave. This is a toxic place to me. There is no home where suddenly everything is better.”
She packed up the children again, uncertain of where to go. “I was driving around the dark streets at night. It was raining, cold, and dreary. And we were just driving around because listening to the book was the only thing my kids wanted to do.” Then suddenly, she became aware of what the book was saying. It was chapter ten, “Absolute Zero,” when Meg has barely survived her father’s attempt to tesser them away from Camazotz.
“She had found her father,” came Hope Davis’s voice, “and he had not made everything all right.”
“In that moment,” Jessica explained, “I pulled over and thought, ‘This could be it for me. This could be the thing that I don’t survive.’ And I realized I could let it consume me; I could let it push me down into hate. Or I can fight through it for these kids. Find a way. And then I remembered my faults, my stubbornness.”