The Irrational Season

by Madeleine L'engle

  It’s always pain, this letting go, and yet it leads to joy, and a kind of lightness which is almost physical.

  Pride is heavy.

  It weighs.

  It is a fatness of spirit,

  an overindulgence in self

  This gluttony is earthbound,

  cannot be lifted up.

  Help me to fast,

  to lose this weight.

  Otherwise, O Light one,

  how can I rejoice in your

  Ascension?

  We tend to be heavy, we middle Americans, heavy in all ways. More than half the world is starving, and we go on crash diets to try to take off weight. Nor are we jolly fat people. Affluence tends to bring with it a stupor, a flatulence of spirit. It is difficult to laugh freely as long as we are clutching all that we have accumulated and are afraid to lose.

  One day in early spring Pat and I drove up to Crosswicks. There was snow on the ground; I made Pat put on boots and a heavy coat and trek with me across the fields to the brook. I strayed from the path several times, fell, laughing, into snowdrifts, from which she had to pull me, but at last we reached the brook, which was rushing noisily, at its fullest from melting snow. And Pat looked at it and then said in a bemused voice, “It’s not polluted!”

  Pat is a physician who is Chief of Health for a large Southern city. Part of her job is understanding problems of pollution, overconsumption. This was three years before the oil crisis, but she had already seen that it was coming, and told me so. Standing there on the rock bridge over the brook I asked her, “Are we going to be able to save planet earth?”

  She replied calmly, “No. Not unless we’re willing to make drastic changes in our standard of living. Not unless we’re willing to go back to being as cold in winter as our grandparents were, and as hot in summer.”

  That is even more true now than it was then. But we are loath to let go all the creature comforts which are the result of the distortion of the American dream. The idea of the recovery of the real dream is an exciting one. My family and I do try to live simply, and the simpler our lives, the freer. Not that I enjoy being hot in summer, sitting at the typewriter with the sweat trickling down my back and the inside of my legs. In late afternoon with the sun pouring onto my desk it is often so hot that I cannot stay in my workroom. But there’s always a moderately cool place somewhere. The leaf-protected rock at the brook is always cool.

  We eat largely out of Hugh’s magnificent vegetable garden, and we are indeed blessed in having the space for it. I freeze vegetables all summer long, so that the garden feeds us for much of the winter.

  When we lived in the house year round we got used to putting on more clothes when it got cold, as the English do, rather than turning up the heat. But I’d better be careful not to get sentimental about being hot in summer and cold in winter, as our forebears were. The old, the ill, the weak, did not survive the excessive temperatures of either winter or summer. And we have become delicate, with our thermostats set to keep us at a constant temperature of around 70° year round. Pat told me that college football coaches discovered the hard way that they had better warn their athletes not to take a summer job in any kind of air-conditioned office, but to work outdoors in the heat of the sun. When the body becomes accustomed to a constant temperature, our inner thermostats lose the ability to adjust, and so a young man who has spent the summer sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office drops dead on the playing field on a hot autumn day, because his body’s thermostat can’t cope.

  I console myself when I’m wet with heat in summer, shivering with cold in winter, that I’m helping my body’s thermostat to become functional once more.

  I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day. Worse than physical acquisitions are spiritual ones, small grudges, jealousies, hurt feelings. I am helped by the fact that nursing a grudge gives me no pleasure; I cannot bear to go to bed angry; I am compelled by an inner drive to ‘make up,’ to reconcile, to restore relations. It doesn’t always work, of course. It does take two, and there are people who not only cannot make an apology; they cannot accept one. Once when this happened to me, Tallis said, “You’ve done what you had to do. That’s all you have to worry about. Let it go.” Letting go, again.

  I once had an acquaintance who was a far more regular churchgoer than I, rose early to go to Holy Communion each morning before he went to work, and yet hated all Orientals. Whenever an Oriental priest celebrated communion, he refused to receive the bread and wine.

  I knelt behind him in a small chapel on a morning when a Japanese priest, one of my friends, was the celebrant, and I knew that this man would not touch the Body and Blood because it was held by yellow hands. And I was outraged.

  I am not in love and charity with this man, I thought, and therefore, according to the rubrics, I should not go up to the altar. And yet I knew that my only hope of love and charity was to go forward and receive the elements.

  He did not know that he, himself, was acting wholly without love and charity. Something within him obviously justified this abominable reaction, so that at the next Eucharist, if it was presided over by somebody he recognized as priest, as he was unable to recognize the Japanese priest, he would hold out his hands and receive in love and humility.

  He does not know what he is doing. He does not know.

  Surely within me there is an equal blindness, something that I do not recognize in myself, that I justify without even realizing it.

  All right, brother. Let us be forgiven together, then. I will hold out my hands for both of us today, and do you for me tomorrow morning when I will be asleep while you trudge through the dirty streets to church. It is all right for me to be outraged by what you are doing here in the presence of God, as long as it does not set me apart from you.

  It was heavy, heavy for a while there. I put on several hundred pounds in a few minutes, and now they are gone, at least for a while. My spiritual scales fluctuate wildly. They are always on the heavy side, but there are days when I am able to travel light, and these days show me the way.

  The most difficult thing to let go is my self, that self which, coddled and cozened, becomes smaller as it becomes heavier. I don’t understand how and why I come to be only as I lose myself, but I know from long experience that this is so.

  9 … Whispers

  The holy spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is the easiest of this not-at-all-easy concept for me to understand. Any artist, great or small, knows moments when something more than he takes over, and he moves into a kind of ‘overdrive,’ where he works as ordinarily he cannot work. When he is through, there is a sense of exhilaration, exhaustion, and joy. All our best work comes in this fashion, and it is humbling and exciting.

  After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called “It,” because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind. That acronym had never occurred to me. I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT does not have a heart or soul. And I did not understand consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil.

  But a further proof that my books know more than I do came later, again with this same book, when my husband’s television wife, Ruth Warwick, who plays Phoebe Tyler in All My Children, was on the Today Show with Ed Mitchell, who was one of the second group of astronauts actually to walk on the moon. His present job is to explain scientific concepts of space to laymen. And, he told Ruth, he finds this very difficult to do; scientific concepts of space are not easy to understand. So he uses a book, a book which he said can get these concepts across far better than he is able to. “It’s supposed to be a children’s book,” he said, “but it really isn’t. It’s called A Wrinkle in Time.” “Oh, yes,” said Ruth, “my husband’s wife wrote it.”

  So my book knows more about physics than I do, an
d I find this very exciting. I did, indeed, study physics while I was writing Wrinkle, but I’ve never taken a course in physics, and surely I could not have learned enough, reading on my own, to make my book useful to an astronaut.

  It was not until I was nearly forty that I discovered that higher math is easier than lower math. Lower math lost me way down in the grades when I was informed that three multiplied by zero=zero. Now, I understand that if I have nothing, and I multiply it by three, three somethings are not suddenly going to appear. But if I have three apples, and I multiply them by zero, nobody has been able to explain to my satisfaction why they are going to vanish—and yet this is what lower math would have us believe.

  It was not until I discovered higher math that I understood 0 × 3=0. First of all, I had to accept that arithmetic is simply an agreed-upon fiction which makes life easier. Secondly, I realized that 0 × 3 =0 is a philosophical rather than an arithmetical problem, and I worked this out in writing The Other Side of the Sun. But I have a hunch I understood it already, with my intuition, while I was working on Wrinkle; any kind of hate which would annihilate, any kind of lust for power which makes people expendable, is an example of three multiplied by zero equals zero.

  When I talk about my books knowing more than I do, I am not referring to something magic. Nor is it an easy way out which eliminates the hard work of putting together a story. Writing a book is work; it involves discipline, and writing when I don’t feel like writing. Robert Louis Stevenson said that writing is ten percent inspiration, and ninety percent perspiration. The inspiration doesn’t come before the perspiration; it’s usually the other way around. Inspiration comes during work, not before it. The hardest part of the morning is the first half hour or so when I will put off for as long as possible the actual work on whatever book I’m currently writing. I’ll sharpen pencils I don’t intend to use; I’ll check over my black felt pens, with which I write when I’m not near a typewriter; I’ll even change the typewriter ribbon; anything to put off the moment of plunging in. But after I’ve dipped my toes in the cold water for long enough, I hold my breath and jump in. And once I’m in, if it is a day of grace (and it often isn’t), then something will happen, and just what that something is remains, for me, a mystery. But it is involved in servanthood, my servanthood, in a day when service is considered degrading.

  I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, “Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me”; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.

  At its highest, the relationship between the artist and the work shifts, and artist and work collaborate. In my own way I have known such moments—I think all artists know them, because it has nothing to do with the degree of talent. And, just as in my tiny efforts at peacemaking I must not reject the small things which are given me in my daily life, so I must not worry about comparisons between great and small. I used to irritate my children by frequently quoting Marlowe: “Comparisons are odious.”

  As I understand the gift of the spirit in art, so I understand prayer, and there is very little difference for me between praying and writing. At their best, both become completely unselfconscious activities; the self-conscious, fragmented person is totally thrown away and integrated in work, and for the moments of such work, be it prayer or writing, I know wholeness, and sunside and nightside are no longer divided.

  Whence comes this rush of wind?

  I stand at the earth’s rim

  and feel it streaming by

  my hair, my eyes, my lips.

  I shall be blown clean off.

  I cannot stand the cold.

  Earth shrinks. The day recedes.

  The stars rush in, their fire

  blown wild as they race by.

  This wind’s strange, harsh embrace

  holds me against the earth,

  batters me with its power.

  My bones are turned to ice.

  I am not herenor there

  but caught in this great breath.

  Its rhythm cracks my ribs.

  Blown outI am expelled

  Breathed in I am inspired

  The wind broods where it will

  across the water’s face.

  The flowing sea of sky

  moves to the wind’s demand.

  The stars stretch fiery tongues

  until this mortal frame

  is seared to bone, to ash,

  and yet, newborn, it lives.

  Joy blazes through the night.

  Wind, water, fire, are light.

  One of the holiest of archbishops, Father Anthony Bloom likens the Holy Spirit to a shy and gentle bird who must be approached quietly and slowly, lest he be frightened and fly away.

  Whereas Alan likens the Holy Spirit to a ravening hawk, and while both similes hold truth, when I have been aware of the Spirit at the time (rather than later, by hindsight) my experiences have been more hawklike than dovelike. But considerable violence is needed to pull my fragments together, to join sunside and nightside; it’s a rather wildly athletic act to place the mind in the heart, and a lot of muscles get pulled.

  And, of course, whenever we become whole, Satan moves in to fragment us again. There’s a renewed awareness of the gifts of the Spirit nowadays, but Alan reminded me that not all spirits abroad are the Holy Spirit.

  We have forgotten the warning in the Letter to the Ephesians, where the people of the Church at Ephesus are warned that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” When we limit ourselves to the rational world of provable fact, a warning like this tends to sound like something out of science fiction rather than the Bible, but as I look at the world around me, in the city, as I listen to the news, the warning seems like anything but fiction, and I read on gratefully as Paul continues, “Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day.”

  In his letter to the People in Rome, Paul talks reassuringly about the help of the Holy Spirit in this battle against the dark spirits, “for we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves.… Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”

  Paul’s language is strong, too strong for many of us. We’d like the joys of the Spirit without any of the groaning. But any spirit which promises us easy ecstasy is not the Holy Spirit. Indeed, one of the quickest ways to make sure that the spirit is not the Holy One is to be convinced, at the moment of inspiration, that it is.

  If I am conscious of writing well as I am writing, those pages usually end in the wastepaper basket. If I am conscious of praying well, I am probably not praying at all. These are gifts which we know only afterwards, with anamnesis.

  Trouble always comes whenever we begin to take credit for any of the gifts of the Spirit, be they gifts of prayer, tongues, prophecy, art, science. This can be as fatally true in the secular world as in the religious—but one of the greatest victories of the Enemy has been the separation of sacred and secular, and placing them in opposition. All of creation is sacred, despite everything we have done to abase and abuse it. Healing used to be looked on as a sacred calling, and surely the Hippocratic oath is a prayer. Modern medicine suffers, despite all its advances, because it has almost completely forgotten that healing is a gift as well as a science. I want my doctor to have every possible amount of training, but this training
will not make him a great doctor unless he has the gift as well.

  We need to recover and reverence vocation in this time of confusion between healing and curing. We have forgotten the Spirit.

  I believe in prayer, and I believe in miracle, because I have seen enough evidence, pragmatically and scientifically documented, to satisfy the coldest scientist. But it is not the proof which has convinced me. It is far greater and more exciting than proof.

  As the woman with the issue of blood knew:

  When I pushed through the crowd,

  jostled, bumped, elbowed by the curious

  who wanted to see what everyone else

  was so excited about,

  all I could think of was my pain

  and that perhaps if I could touch him,

  this man who worked miracles,

  cured diseases,

  even those as foul as mine,

  I might find relief.

  I was tired from hurting,

  exhausted, revolted by my body,

  unfit for any man, and yet not let loose

  from desire and need. I wanted to rest,

  to sleep without pain or filthiness or torment.

  I don’t really know why

  I thought he could help me

  when all the doctors

  with all their knowledge

  had left me still drained

  and bereft of all that makes

  a woman’s life worth living.

  Well: I’d seen him with some children

  and his laughter was quick and merry

  and reminded me of when I was young and well,

  though he looked tired; and he was as old as I am.

  Then there was that leper,

  but lepers have been cured before—

  No, it wasn’t the leper,

  or the man cured of palsy,

  or any of the other stories of miracles,

  or at any rate that was the least of it;

  I had been promised miracles too often.

  I saw him ahead of me in the crowd