Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

by Madeleine L'engle

  I would not hide the human body from the children, as though it were something to be ashamed of—though neither would I flaunt it. Let it be natural and holy. The Incarnation was a total affirmation of the dignity of this body, and Paul goes on to emphasize that we are, moreover, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and if we abuse or reject or ignore our bodies, we are abusing and rejecting and ignoring this temple.

  I was both amused and appalled in a rotunda in the Prado, filled with Greek and Roman statues, to see that all the genitals had been removed and covered with some kind of leaf. This prudery is in itself a form of pornography.

  The balance is, as always, delicate. We seldom find the center. We are constantly falling off one side or the other. But the center is always there, waiting for us to discover it.

  I would allow the children to ask any kind of cosmic or practical question they want to; but I would answer only the question they ask, not precede them with responses to further questions, as adults are so often tempted to do. I would share with them all of life, not hide death from them, thereby making it more fearful. Nor would I hide love, human as well as heavenly. I was amazed when the five teenaged girls in my cabin at a Congregational youth conference all told me that they were disturbed that they had never seen their parents touch each other, not to kiss, not even to hold hands. And this wasn’t that long ago.

  Perhaps it is never, in the long run, I who will make the decision as to what to let the children see. If I listen, I will know. It is another of those things which does not belong in the realm of do-it-yourself.

  But it does make a difference. It is part of my becoming Christian—for it is never a fait accompli; it is always a becoming.

  Vulnerability is something we instinctively reject because we are taught from kindergarten on that we must protect ourselves, control our behaviour and our lives. But in becoming man for us, Christ made himself totally vulnerable for us in Jesus of Nazareth, and it is not possible to be a Christian while refusing to be vulnerable.

  I am beginning to see that almost every definition I find of being a Christian is also a definition of being an artist.

  And a Christian artist?

  We care about what the children see.

  We are, ourselves, as little children, and therefore we are vulnerable. We might paraphrase Descartes to read, “I hurt; therefore I am.”

  And because of the great affirmation of the Incarnation, we may not give in to despair.

  Nor superstition.

  Being a Christian, being saved, does not mean that nothing bad is ever going to happen. Terrible things happen to Christians as well as to Hindus and Buddhists and hedonists and atheists. To human beings. When the phone rings at an unexpected hour my heart lurches. I love; therefore I am vulnerable.

  When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.

  —

  During the question-and-answer period after a talk, a college student rose in the audience and commented with some surprise, “You don’t seem to feel any conflict between science and religion!”

  I tried to explain. Of course not. Why should there be a conflict? All that the new discoveries of science can do is to enlarge our knowledge of the magnitude and glory of God’s creation. We may, and often do, abuse our discoveries, use them for selfish and greedy purposes, but it is the abuse which causes the conflict, not the discoveries themselves. When they upset the religious establishment it is not because they have done anything to diminish God; they only diminish or—even more frightening—change the current establishment’s definition of God. We human beings tend to reject change, but a careful reading of Scripture reveals the slow and unwilling acceptance of change in the ancient Hebrews’ understanding of the Master of the Universe, and the Incarnation demanded more change than the establishment could bear. But our fear and our rejection do not take away from truth, and truth is what the Bible instructs us to know in order that we may be free.

  Neither our knowledge of God and his purposes for his creation nor the discoveries of science are static. I must admit that the scientists are often easier for me to understand than the theologians, for many theologians say, “These are the final answers.” Whereas the scientists—correction: the best of them—say, “This is how it appears now. If further evidence is to the contrary, we will see where it leads us.”

  And of course I’m being unfair to the theologians. The best of them, too, are open to this uncertainty, which is closer to the truth that will set us free than any closed system.

  One of the impulses behind all creativity is a divine discontent with the shadows on the wall of the cave, which appear to be the truth but which do not expand us creatively. We have many mythic ways of expressing this. One is the superb story of Adam and Eve, tempted by pride “to be as God,” and later turned out of Eden. We human beings were meant to be something which we are not.

  —

  Homo sapiens. “Man who knows.” Or rather, “man who is conscious” would be more accurate. Man who is conscious that he does not know. Has there been a loss of knowing since Adam and Eve, rather than a gain? Despite all our technology there is far more that we do not know than that we know, and the most terrible defect is our inability to tell right from wrong, to do horrible things for all the right reasons, and then to blunder inadvertently into doing something which turns out to be good. We try to make the loving, the creative, decision, but we cannot know whether or not we are right.

  Alleluia! We don’t have to be right! We do have to love, to be vulnerable, to accept joy and pain, and to grow through them.

  Was it predetermined that Milton go blind in order to write Paradise Lost? That Beethoven go deaf to write the Ninth Symphony? That these artists grew through affliction is undeniable, but that this affliction was planned? No! Everything in me rebels. I cannot live in a world where everything is predetermined, an ant world in which there is no element of choice. I do believe that we all have a share in the writing of our own story. We do make a decision at the crossroads. Milton could have retreated into passive blindness and self-pity instead of trying the patience of his three dutiful daughters and any visiting friend by insisting that they write down what he dictated. Beethoven could have remained in the gloom of silence instead of forging the glorious sounds which he could never hear except in his artist’s imagination. Sometimes the very impetus of overcoming obstacles results in a surge of creativity. It is in our responses that we are given the gift of helping God write our story.

  —

  During the Second World War one of my friends was an Englishwoman who was married to an RAF officer. Daily she walked with vulnerability, not knowing whether or not his plane would be shot down. One day he was allowed an unexpected leave before a dangerous mission and came home to London for a brief visit with his wife and three small children. Joyfully, she left him at home, took all their food coupons, and went shopping to prepare as festive a meal as could be procured in wartime London. While she was gone there was an unexpected daytime raid, and her house was hit. Her husband, her three children, were killed.

  During the rest of the war she worked hard, was helpful to many other people, did her passionate grieving in private. Ultimately she met a man who fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. It was, she said, the most difficult decision she had ever had to make in her life. If she did not marry again, if she had no more children, she was safe; she could not be hurt again as she had been hurt. If she remarried, if she had more babies, she was opening herself to total vulnerability. It is easier to be safe than to be vulnerable.

  But she made the dangerous decision. She dared to love again.

  I told this story once at a college, and during a reception a handsome young philosophy professor came up to me; she had been married, and her husband had died; she told me that she was not going to do as the Englishwoman had done; she was never going to open herself to that kind of pain again; s
he refused to be vulnerable.

  I do not think that I would want to be a student in her philosophy classes.

  —

  To be alive is to be vulnerable. To be born is to start the journey towards death. If taxes have not always been inevitable, death has. What, then, does life mean? No more than “Out, brief candle”?

  The artist struggles towards meaning. Mahler was terrified of death and worked out his fear in music. I had a letter from a college student at Harvard saying, “I am afraid of nonbeing.” That same day, a friend with whom I was having lunch said, “I cannot bear the thought of annihilation.”

  Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death.

  And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die.

  To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self. If the artist is to be able to listen to the work, he must get out of the way; or, more correctly, since getting out of the way is not a do-it-yourself activity, he must be willing to be got out of the way, to be killed to self (as Juan Carlos Ortiz sees the mythic killing of baptism) in order to become the servant of the work.

  To serve a work of art is almost identical with adoring the Master of the Universe in contemplative prayer. In contemplative prayer the saint (who knows himself to be a sinner, for none of us is whole, healed, and holy twenty-four hours a day) turns inwards in what is called “the prayer of the heart,” not to find self, but to lose self in order to be found.

  We have been afraid of this kind of prayer, we of the twentieth-century Judeo-Christian tradition. It is not talked about in many temples or churches. And so those intuitively seeking it have been forced to look for it elsewhere.

  Why have we been afraid of it? Because it is death, and no matter how loudly we protest, we are afraid of death.

  Many young people have asked me about Hindu or Buddhist or Sufi methods of meditation and are astounded, and sometimes disbelieving, when I tell them that we have such a Way within our own tradition.

  The techniques of contemplation are similar in all traditions, just as the pianist, no matter what kind of music he is going to play, must do his finger exercises. But ultimately the aim is different. For the Easterner the goal is nirvana, which means “where there is no wind,” and for us the wind of the Spirit is vital, even when it blows harshly. We do not move from meditation into contemplation, into self-annihilation, into death, in order to be freed from the intolerable wheel of life. No. We move—are moved—into death in order to be discovered, to be loved into truer life by our Maker. To die to self in the prayer of contemplation is to move to a meeting of lovers.

  The great artists, dying to self in their work, collaborate with their work, know it and are known by it as Adam knew Eve, and so share in the mighty act of Creation.

  That is our calling, the calling of all of us, but perhaps it is simplest for the artist (at work, at prayer) to understand, for nothing is created without this terrible entering into death. It takes great faith, faith in the work if not conscious faith in God, for dying is fearful. But without this death, nothing is born. And if we die willingly, no matter how frightened we may be, we will be found and born anew into life, and life more abundant.

  —

  Dare we all die? Willingly or unwillingly, we must, and the great artists go furthest into this unknown country.

  Great art. Great artists. What about all the rest of us little people, struggling with our typewriters and tubes of paint?

  The great ones are still the best mirrors for us all because the degree of the gift isn’t what it’s all about. It’s like the presents under the Christmas tree: the ones which came from Woolworth’s may be just as rejoiced over as the more expensive ones, and best of all are those which are handmade and which may have cost love rather than money. Perhaps it’s something like the parable of the workers in the vineyard; maybe those who worked through the heat of the day were the Michelangelos and Leonardos and Beethovens and Tolstoys. Those who were able to work only one hour served their gift of work as best they could. And as in Alice in Wonderland, everybody gets prizes; there is the same quality of joy in turning a perfect bowl on the potter’s wheel as in painting the Sistine Chapel.

  The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness.

  Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

  —

  We all feed the lake. That is what is important. It is a corporate act. During my time in the theatre I knew what it was to be part of such an enlarging of the human potential, and though I was never more than a bit player or an understudy, I knew the truth of Stanislavsky’s words: “There are no small rôles. There are only small players.” And I had the joy of being an instrument in the great orchestra of a play, learning from the play (how much Chekov taught me during the run of The Cherry Orchard), from the older actors and actresses. I was part of the Body. That’s what it’s all about.

  —

  When Jesus called Peter to come to him across the water, Peter, for one brief, glorious moment, remembered how and strode with ease across the lake. This is how we are meant to be, and then we forget, and we sink. But if we cry out for help (as Peter did) we will be pulled out of the water; we won’t drown. And if we listen, we will hear; and if we look, we will see.

  The impossible still happens to us, often during the work, sometimes when we are so tired that inadvertently we let down all the barriers we have built up. We lose our adult scepticism and become once again children who can walk down their grandmother’s winding stairs without touching.

  Last spring I was giving a series of talks at the Cathedral of St. Peter, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and was staying with parishioners who had a house right by the water. I was unusually tired; into an already overcrowded schedule I’d had to interject trips to England and to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem I’d fallen and bashed in my ribs (“You’ve wrinkled your ribs,” the doctor reading the X-rays told me), and I was strapped up and in considerable pain. One afternoon I had a couple of hours to myself, and so I limped to the sea wall and stretched out and closed my eyes and tried to let go all my aches and pains and tiredness, to let go and simply be. And while I was lying there, eased by the cool breezes, the warm sun, bursts of bird song, I heard feet coming to me across the water. It was a sound I recognized, a familiar sound: the feet of Jesus coming towards me.

  And then another noise broke in, and I was back in an aching body. But I had heard. For a moment in that hearing I was freed from the dirty devices of this world. I was more than I am. I was healed.

  It is one of those impossibilities I believe in; and in believing, my own feet touch the surface of the lake, and I go to meet him, like Peter, walking on water.

  —

  But only if I die first, only if I am willing to die. I am mortal, flawed, trapped in my own skin, my own barely used brain, I do not understand this death, but I am learning to trust it. Only through this death can come the glory of resurrection; only through this death can come birth.

  And I cannot do it myself. It is not easy to think of any kind of death as a gift, but it is prefigured for us in the mighty acts of Creation and Incarnation; in Crucifixion and Resurrection.

  You are my helper and redeemer; make no long tarrying, O my God.

  Crosswicks

  June 1980

  Chapter 1: Cosmos from Chaos

  1. When defined as a “Christian artist,” L’Engle admits she feels rebellious against the title and is reluctant to discuss Christian creativity. Do you understand her reservations? Why or why not?

  2. When she says, “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject,” do you agre
e? Discuss some examples of “bad” art. Can you think of examples of art that is pious in subject but poorly executed artistically? Do these examples offend you? Amuse you? Disgust you? Inspire you? Why or why not?

  3. L’Engle says that “my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable…it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.” Do you feel this way? Have you ever attempted to understand and share the meaning of your life? Try to do so now, either in discussion or in writing. What gives your life “its tragedy and its glory”? How do these things affect your art and your faith?

  4. “One does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding—that intellectual understanding which we are so fond of—there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand.” Have you experienced this kind of understanding? Discuss a time in your life when you did something you didn’t necessarily understand just because it “felt right.” Was it, in the end, the right decision? Why or why not? What did you learn from this experience?

  5. There is great value placed on the correlation between working and listening. L’Engle asserts the importance of each in an artist’s and in a Christian’s life. What do you think she means when she says an artist must “listen to the work”? Is this, to you, similar to listening to God? Do you think the creative process is similar to the act of prayer? How so?