Walking on Water

by Madeleine L'engle

  God created man in his own image, male and female.

  That is Scripture, therefore I refuse to be timid about being part of mankind. We of the female sex are half of mankind, and it is pusillanimous to resort to he/she, him/her, or even worse, android words. I have a hunch that those who would do so have forgotten their rightful heritage.

  I know that I am fortunate in having grown up in a household where no sexist roles were imposed on me. I lived in an atmosphere which assumed equality with all its differences. When mankind was referred to it never occurred to me that I was not part of it or that I was in some way being excluded. My great-great-grandmother, growing up on the St. John’s River in times of violence and hardship, had seven homes burned down; nevertheless she spoke casually in seven languages. Her daughter-in-law ran a military hospital, having been brought up at the court of Spain, where she was her ambassador father’s hostess; her closest friend was the princess Eugenie, soon to be empress, and the two young women rode and competed with the princess’s brothers in all sports; to prove their bravery, each drove a sharp knife into the flesh of the forearm without whimper. Others of my female forebears crossed the country in covered wagons and knew how to handle a gun as well as any man.

  Perhaps it is this background which has made me assume casually that of course I am not excluded when anyone refers to a novelist—or anyone else—as he or him. My closest woman friend is a physician, and so is my daughter-in-law. Not all women have been as fortunate as I have been. When my books were being rejected during the fifties it was not because of my sex, it was because the editors did not like what I was writing. My words were being rejected, not my femaleness.

  Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

  But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

  In time of war language always dwindles, vocabulary is lost; and we live in a century of war. When I took my elder daughter’s tenth-grade vocabulary cards up to the school from which she had graduated, less than a decade after she had left, the present tenth-grade students knew almost none of them. It was far easier for my daughter to read Shakespeare in high school than it was for students coming along just a few years after her.

  This diminution is worldwide. In Japan, after the Second World War, so many written characters were lost that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the present-day college student to read the works of the great classical masters. In the USSR, even if Solzhenitsyn had been allowed to be read freely, it would not have been easy for the average student to read his novels, for again, after revolution and war, vocabulary fell away. In one of Solzhenitsyn’s books his hero spends hours at night reading the great Russian dictionary which came out in the late nineteenth century, and Solzhenitsyn himself draws on this work, and in his writing he is redeeming language, using the words of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, using the words of the people of the street, bringing language back to life as he writes.

  So it has always been. Dante, writing in exile when dukedoms and principalities were embroiled in wars, was forging language as he wrote his great science-fiction fantasies.

  We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually. Yet another reason why Wrinkle was so often rejected is that there are many words in it which would never be found on a controlled vocabulary list for the age-group of the ten-to-fourteen-year-old. Tesseract, for instance. It’s a real word, and one essential for the story.

  As a child, when I came across a word I didn’t know, I didn’t stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens. When I started to read Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, I was determined to understand it. I read intelligently, with a dictionary beside me, stopping to look up the scientific words which were not familiar to me. And I bogged down. So I put aside the dictionary and read as though I were reading a story, and quickly I got drawn into the book, fascinated by his loving theology, and understood it far better, at a deeper level, than if I had stuck with the dictionary.

  Is this contradiction? I don’t think so. We played with my daughter’s vocabulary words during dinner. We kept a dictionary by the table, just for fun. But when we read, we read. We were capable of absorbing far more vocabulary when we read straight on than when we stopped to look up every word. Sometimes I will jot down words to be looked up later. But we learn words in many ways, and much of my vocabulary has been absorbed by my subconscious mind, which then kindly blips it up to my conscious mind when it is needed.

  —

  We cannot Name or be Named without language. If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than “the way things are.”

  Some of the Ayia Napa delegates came from countries ruled by dictators, either from the right or the left. In both cases, teachers are suspect; writers are suspect because people who use words are able to work out complex ideas, to see injustice, and perhaps even to try to do something about it. Simply being able to read the Bible in their own language made some of the delegates suspect.

  I might even go to the extreme of declaring that the deliberate diminution of vocabulary by a dictator, or an advertising copywriter, is anti-Christian.

  One cannot have been brought up on the Book of Common Prayer, as I was, and not have a feeling for language, willy-nilly. In my first boarding school we had mandatory Morning and Evening Prayer, through which we sat, bored, looking for divertissement, ready to snicker if someone broke wind or belched. But the language of Cranmer and Coverdale could not but seep through the interstices. Ready and willing or not, we were enriched.

  It is not surprising that there has been considerable discussion about the New Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, in church circles, Protestant and Roman Catholic, and by Everyman as well. The language of the Book of Common Prayer is part of our literary heritage, as is the language of the King James translation of the Bible. Writers throughout centuries of literature have drawn from the Prayer Book as well as the Bible—how many titles come from the Psalms! Novels often contain sentences from Scripture without identification, because it is part of our common heritage; there is no need for footnoting.

  There was much in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer which needed changing; indeed, revision was first talked about in the year of publication. So it is not that all the critics of the new translations are against change (though some are), but against shabby language, against settling for the mediocre and the flabbily permissive. Where language is weak, theology is weakened.

  I do not want to go back to the 1928 Prayer Book. We can’t “go home again.” On the whole, the new Prayer Book is a vast improvement over the ’28. But I do want us to be aware that not only the ’28 Prayer Book had flaws. What has been gained in strength of structure has been lost in poverty of language. Some of the translations of Cranmer’s Collects (those magnificent, one-sentence petitions) or Coverdale’s psalms remind me of what Bowdler did to Shakespeare. Well, Bowdler had his way for a while, but we went back to the richness of Shakespeare.

  There are some elegant sentences in the new translation (“I myself will awaken the dawn”), but some verses aren’t much better than a French translation of Hamlet, in which the famous words Hamlet utters when he first sees the ghost of his father, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” are rendered, “Tiens, qu’est que c’est que ça?” And surely Shakespeare’s words prove his familiarity with Scripture, for they are reminiscent of Saul�
�s encounter with the ghost of Samuel.

  Pelican in the wilderness has now become vulture. Praise him, dragons and all deeps, has become sea monsters, which lacks alliteration, to put it mildly. I have been using the new Book for—approximately ten years, I think. It is now thoroughly familiar. In the old language I read, “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” That is a lot more potent theology than “For the Lord himself has made us and we are his.” True. But we also need to be reminded in this do-it-yourself age that it is indeed God who has made us and not we ourselves. We are human and humble and of the earth, and we cannot create until we acknowledge our createdness.

  In the old language I read, “O God, make clean our hearts within us, and take not thy Holy Spirit from us.” In the new version it is, “Create clean hearts within us, O Lord, and comfort us with your Holy Spirit.” All very well, but we need to know that if we turn from God, if we are rebellious and stiff-necked we deeply offend the Holy Spirit; we may not take him for granted; he indwells us on his own conditions, not ours. We cannot simply ingest him when we feel like it, like an aspirin.

  Although Holy Ghost has been rendered as Holy Spirit throughout, there seems to be considerable fear of the word Spirit and all its implications:

  To “The Lord be with you,” we used to reply, “And with thy spirit.”

  Now it goes, “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.”

  To which the only suitable response is, “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  We’re told that the new Prayer Book is meant to be in “the language of the people.” But which people? And in language which is left after a century of war, all dwindled and shrivelled? Are we supposed to bring our language down to the lowest common denominator in order to be “meaningful”? And, if we want to make the language contemporary, why not just cut out the thy and say, “And with your spirit?” Why are we afraid of the word spirit? Does it remind us of baffling and incomprehensible and fearful things like the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and the Passover, those mighty acts of God which we forget how to understand because our childlike creativity has been corrupted and diminished?

  Perhaps the old Prayer Book dwelt too much on penitence, but there was also excellent psychology in confessing, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,” before “We have done those things which we ought not to have done.” In the new confession we confess our sins of commission before our sins of omission. But I have noticed that when someone dies, those who are left are apt to cry out, “Oh, if I had only taken her on that picnic!” or, “If only I’d gone to see him last Wednesday.” It is the things I have left undone which haunt me far more than the things which I have done.

  In restricting the language in the new translations we have lost that depth and breadth which can give us the kind of knowing which is our heritage. This loss has permeated our literature and our prayers, not necessarily in that order. College students of the future will miss many allusions in their surveys of English literature because the language of the great seventeenth-century translators is no longer in their blood stream. I like to read the new translations of the Bible and Prayer Book for new insights, for shocks of discovery and humour, but I don’t want to discard the old, as though it were as transitory as last year’s fashions.

  Nor do I want to be stuck in the vague androidism which has resulted from the attempts to avoid the masculine pronoun. We are in a state of intense sexual confusion, both in life and language, but the social manipulation is not working. Language is a living thing; it does not stay the same; it is hard for me to read the language of Piers Plowman, for instance, so radical have the changes been. But language is its own creature. It evolves on its own. It follows the language of its great artists, such as Chaucer. It does not do well when suffering from arbitrary control. Our attempts to change the words which have long been part of a society dominated by males have not been successful; instead of making language less sexist they have made it more so.

  Indeed we are in a bind. For thousands of years we have lived in a paternalistic society, where women have allowed men to make God over in their own masculine image. But that’s anthropomorphism. To think of God in terms of sex at all is a dead end.

  To substitute person for man has ruined what used to be a good theological word, calling up the glory of God’s image within us. Now, at best, it’s a joke. There’s something humiliating and embarrassing about being a chairperson. Or a chair. A group of earnest women have put together a volume of desexed hymns, and one of my old favourites now begins:

  “Dear Mother-Father of personkind…”

  No. It won’t do. This is not equality. Perhaps we should drop the word woman altogether and use man, recognizing that we need both male and female to be whole. And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees. For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

  —

  A friend of mine at a denominational college reported sadly that one of his students came to complain to him about a visiting professor. This professor was having the students read some twentieth-century fiction, and the student was upset at both the language of this fiction and the amount of what she considered to be immoral sex.

  My friend, knowing the visiting professor to be a person of both intelligence and integrity, urged the student to go and talk with him about these concerns.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” the student said. “He isn’t a Christian.”

  “He” is a Roman Catholic.

  If we fall into Satan’s trap of assuming that other people are not Christians because they do not belong to our own particular brand of Christianity, no wonder we become incapable of understanding the works of art produced by so-called non-Christians, whether they be atheists, Jews, Buddhists, or anything else outside a frame of reference we have made into a closed rather than an open door.

  If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the words of a sermon by John Donne.

  One of the most profoundly moving moments at Ayia Napa came for me when Jesse, a student from Zimbabwe, told me, “I am a good Seventh Day Adventist, but you have shown me God.” Jesse will continue to be a good Seventh Day Adventist as he returns to Africa to his family; I will struggle with my own way of belief; neither of us felt the need or desire to change the other’s Christian frame of reference. For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God’s purifying light in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.

  —

  I happen to love spinach, but my husband, Hugh, does not; he prefers beets, which I don’t much care for—except the greens. Neither of us thinks less of the other because of this difference in taste. Both spinach and beets are vegetables; both are good for us. We do not have to enjoy precisely the same form of balanced meal.

  We also approach God in rather different ways, but it is the same God we are seeking, just as Jesse and I, in our totally different disciplines, worship the same Lord.

  Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It’s no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses b
ehind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

  God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming.

  When we look at a painting or hear a symphony or read a book and feel more Named, then, for us, that work is a work of Christian art. But to look at a work of art and then to make a judgment as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous. It is something we cannot know in any conclusive way. We can know only if it speaks within our own hearts and leads us to living more deeply with Christ in God.

  One of my professors, Dr. Caroline Gordon, a deeply Christian woman, told our class, “We do not judge great art. It judges us.” And that very judgment may enable us to change our lives and to renew our commitment to the Lord of Creation.

  —

  But how difficult it is for us not to judge; to make what, in the current jargon, is called “a value judgment”! And here we blunder into paradox again. Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” And yet daily we must make decisions which involve judgments:

  • We had peanut-butter sandwiches yesterday because they are Tod’s favourites. Today it’s Sarah’s turn, and we’ll have bologna with lots of mustard.

  • I will not let my child take this book of fairy tales out of the library because fairy tales are untrue.

  • I will share these wonderful fairy tales with my child because they are vehicles of hidden truths.

  • I will not talk with the Roman Catholic professor lest he make me less Christian than I think I am.

  • I will not talk to the Jewish scientist in the next apartment or Hitler and the Storm Troopers might send me to a concentration camp.

  • I will not read this book because it might shake my belief in the answers I am so comfortable with.