Walking on Water

by Madeleine L'engle

  This is a useful assignment for teaching the beginning writer point of view, and it is not always easy. Often I get wails of, “But I can’t!”

  One eleventh grader in the class of techniques of fiction I teach at St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School in New York, wrote a story of her move from the country to the city, to Harlem, when she was seven or eight years old. She was frightened by the tall buildings, the crowded streets, the constant noise of taxi horns and shouting and sirens. So she would escape to the park, where she found an old tree which had branches onto which she could climb. The tree became her friend, her confidante, her solace. At the end of the summer the tree was struck by lightning and felled. She had lost her best friend.

  The tree and the child were the only characters in the story. When I gave the second assignment there was the expected, “I can’t.”

  I gave her no hints. “You can. Use your imagination.”

  Her second story, written from the point of view of the tree, was much better than the first, and the class was delighted—and everyone had a glimpse of what imagination can do.

  A Catholic priest at the Baptist, Green Lake Writer’s Conference in Wisconsin, wrote a story about a man, a fly, and God. We switched the point of view to God in the second assignment and realized that this was a mistake; it would have been better for him to have tried the point of view of the fly.

  I can’t take credit for these assignments. They were given me by Leonard Ehrlich in the one “creative writing” class we were allowed in college. After graduation, when I went to New York and started sending the stories I had written during my four years at Smith around to various magazines, the result of this second assignment was one of the first to be sold.

  From these assignments I will learn everything I need to know about the student’s strengths and weaknesses in writing fiction and will have a good idea of where to go next in teaching techniques. I also learn a great deal about the students, which can in itself be helpful. So I gave these two assignments my first two days at Ayia Napa. Many of the eleventh and twelfth graders I teach in New York have had hard lives, come from broken families, have learned too early about anger and death and despair. But I had never read anything like the first assignments I had from the young men and women at Ayia Napa. Edith is married to a Kenyan and is becoming African, but she was born in the U.S. and schooled in an affluent suburb. One day the science teacher at her high school came to talk to the students about evolution. “I can prove we came from monkeys,” he said. “Look at her.” And he pointed at Edith.

  Edith’s second story, which she wrote from the point of view of the science teacher, was a lesson to me in Christian compassion. The teacher is forgiven, wholly forgiven, because she can look at that experience without feeling the hurt all over again.

  Joseph, from Papua New Guinea, wrote about his father’s experience as a cook in the Australian army when Joseph was a child. One evening there were fifty extra men, and Joseph’s father had not been told they were coming, and he didn’t have enough food. So he was beaten by the Australians, and then boiling water was poured over him. The message of Joseph’s story was love; it had not been easy for him to learn not to hate Australians, but he had learned. He is married to an Australian, and they have a charming baby. And he has taken hate and turned it to love.

  And perhaps that is an essential ingredient of a Christian children’s book (or any Christian book): the message of love. A Christian children’s book must have an ultimately affirmative view of life.

  So a children’s book must be, first and foremost, a good book, a book with a young protagonist with whom the reader can identify, and a book which says yes to life. Granted, a number of young-adult books have been published with a negative view of life, just as with antiheroes. Again, from all I hear from librarians and teachers, they may be read once, but they are not returned to.

  —

  Not long ago a college senior asked if she could talk to me about being a Christian writer. If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it?

  I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

  —

  When another young woman told me that she wanted to be a novelist, that she wanted to write novels for Christian women, and asked me how was she to go about it, I wrote back, somewhat hesitantly, that I could not tell her because I do not write my books for either Christians or women. If I understand the gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who already have seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

  If our lives are truly “hid with Christ in God,” the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be. Some of those angry etchings of Hogarth, depicting the sordidness and squalor and immorality caused by the social inequities of his day are profoundly incarnational, for they are filled with anguished pity for the thief and the prostitute and the scum of the earth, and this compassion is Christ’s.

  —

  When my mother was a little girl, there was a popular series of books about an appallingly pious little girl named Elsie Dinsmore. As I remember the story of one of these volumes, Elsie had a worldly papa whom she nevertheless adored and yearned to convert. One Sunday her papa had guests for lunch, and he asked her to play for them—something appealing and wicked by a composer such as Bach or Mozart. But on Sunday Elsie would play nothing but hymns. Papa insisted. Elsie refused. So she sat at the piano bench, martyrlike, refusing to soil her hands with secular music, until she fainted and hit her head. Then she had brain fever and nearly died, and papa was converted.

  It is possible that in its day and age that book might have qualified as a Christian children’s book. Much of it was familiar to my mother. When she was a child, children were not allowed secular music on Sunday, nor were they allowed to read secular books or play secular games. They had a game, much like Authors, which substituted Bible characters for authors, and with such diversions Mother and her numerous cousins always managed to have fun on Sundays—but there was none of the piosity which makes Elsie so unattractive and which limits her to her own setting and day. Sunday, no matter how differently we observe it in various times and places, is a day for remembering the Resurrection, and although we observe it with reverence, we also celebrate it with joy. Few children are reading the original Elsie Dinsmore books today, but they are reading other stories by other writers of the same era.

  I read my mother’s copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett when I was a child. During a rainy weekend at Crosswicks I read it to a small group of eager little girls and, a generation later, to the children of some of those little girls, up in the attic bedroom as autumn winds shook the house. The Secret Garden is probably the most successful and most read and reread of Burnett’s books; it is also Christian, though I don’t remember whether or not it ever mentions Jesus. And it is more successful than Little Lord Fauntleroy, for instance, because it is a better piece of storytelling, less snobbish, and the message doesn’t show, like a slip hanging below the hem of a dress. I think we can all recognize ourselves, at least to some degree, in Mary Lennox, who is as spoiled and self-centered a child as one can find, thoroughly nasty and unlovable, basically because she’s never been taught to love anybody but herself. The secret garden is as much the garden of Mary’s heart as it
is the walled English garden, and we watch Mary’s slow growth into the realization of other people’s needs and then into love. Mary’s journey into love is, in fact, her journey into Christ, though this is never said and does not need to be said.

  E. Nesbitt was a nineteenth-century woman whose fantasy and family stories are still popular with children. It has sometimes been remarked upon as odd that she writes about warm and happy families when her own childhood was often lonely and full of traumas. But I think that’s probably why she wrote about families, the kind of family she would have liked to have had. My own lonely childhood is very likely the reason why family is so important to me—my own present family of children and grandchildren and the families in my stories.

  I probably didn’t answer the young women who wrote to me about writing for Christians. Their chief job right now is to learn the techniques of fiction, to read as many of the great writers as possible, and to learn from them, without worrying about how often they went to church or to what denomination they belonged. The important thing to look for is whether or not they could write.

  I’m grateful that Bach’s Christianity was realized in both his conscious and subconscious mind. But being a practicing Christian is not part of the job description, and sometimes God chooses most peculiar people to be vessels of genius. My mother used to sigh because her beloved Wagner was such a nasty man. And I was horrified to have some students tell me that a lot of people actively disliked Robert Frost. How does one separate the art from the artist?

  I don’t think one does, and this poses a problem. How do we reconcile atheism, drunkenness, sexual immorality, with strong, beautiful poetry, angelic music, transfigured painting? We human beings don’t, and that’s all there is to it. Dostoyevsky’s magnificent theology is not always compatible with his agonized life. Mozart wrote one of his merriest and most joyful pieces while he was frantic over his dying mother. Mendelssohn, who helped give Bach to the world, was a Jew.

  It’s all more than I can cope with—or, rather, it’s more than my conscious mind can cope with. Jung says that we are far more than the part of ourselves we can know about and that one of the most crippling errors of twentieth-century culture has been our tendency to limit ourselves to our intellect.

  We use only a fragment of our complex and superb brains, and we use this fragment oddly indeed. The right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body and the intuition, we are told; and the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and the intellect. And we’re afraid of that left, intuitive side of the body. Left in Latin is “sinister.” In French, left is “gauche,” “clumsy.” When an English nobleman had a child out of wedlock, it was called “a child of the left hand.” And politically the left is socialism or communism or anarchism. Odd.

  Right. Intellect. In Latin right is “dexter”; the right hand is dexterous. Last summer while I was teaching at Mundelein College, one of the Sisters told me that a left-handed child had been upset on hearing that the right hand of God was the favoured place in heaven. In French, right is “droit,” right on. Something correct or appropriate is called right. Right conduct, according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, is morally good. Right-mindedness is true, correct. (Do we ever call people left-minded?) People do things right side up as opposed to upside down. If you’re on the right side of forty it means you’re still in your thirties. If you’re in your right mind, it means you aren’t insane. Politically, the parties which lean towards conservatism or Nazism or fascism are to the right. Odd, again.

  The poor old left gets left out.

  When our son was four and in kindergarten he was taught that left is bad. He was naturally ambidextrous, and his teacher insisted that he use only his right hand, and put on his right shoe or boot first, because right is good, and left is bad. He didn’t tell us of this until he was grown. It is an added horror that the woman who did this damage was the wife of a minister and considered herself a virtuous Christian woman.

  Left is bad; art is bad; theatre is wicked; story is lie.

  Left is bad?

  When my mother broke her right arm, she discovered a talent for watercolour painting with her left hand. Whatever happened to make us fear the left so much that we call it bad?

  —

  From that misunderstood left come prayer and poetry and song, and these have a healing power we are losing touch with in this technocratic age.

  One of the lecturers at Ayia Napa was Helen Mullen, a librarian from Philadelphia, who had us all in laughter or tears as she demonstrated her art of storytelling. One day she told us about visiting the pediatric wards of hospitals and telling stories to the children, many of whom were in severe pain. But while the children were listening to the stories, they did not feel the pain.

  And I remembered my elder granddaughter’s ninth summer, most of which was spent on the pediatric floor of a city hospital after she had been hit by a truck on her way home from swimming. She could not be given any painkillers because of the head injury, and she was in great pain.

  As she returned to full consciousness, she said to her parents and grandparents, “I love you,” and then, “Read to me.” So we read to her, hour on hour. When our voices would tire and we would slow down, we would immediately hear, “Keep on reading,” and so we kept on.

  Story was painkiller, quite literally. When her brain was focused on story, then it was not on the pain center. Story was a more effective painkiller than any chemical medication.

  Even the greatest neurologist knows little about the mysteries of the brain. But we would do well not to think of any part of it as bad.

  —

  Another oddity of the brain is that our eyes see upside down, and then our brain has to turn things right side up (and, maybe, left side up). I don’t understand why we see upside down; I know that nobody has been able to make a camera that doesn’t see upside down, and maybe there’s a message for us in that. Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.

  Left on!

  That old iceberg analogy has become blunted from overuse and nearly destroyed by jargon, but it’s still true: our conscious minds are indeed only the tiny tip of the iceberg which is above the water, and the largest part of ourselves is unseen below the water, below the conscious level, and it is not easy to admit this, to admit it and not fear that large part of ourselves over which we have very little control, but in which lies enormous freedom, and the world of poetry, music, and the region of that deepest and truest prayer which is beyond all our feeble and faltering words. We need the prayers of words, yes; the words are the path to contemplation; but the deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

  —

  My son-in-law, Alan, says in his book, Journey into Christ, “Our identity is hidden, even from ourselves….The doctrine that we are made after the image of God proclaims that the human being is fundamentally a mystery, a free spirit. The creative artist is one who carries within him the wound of transcendence. He is the sign that human beings are more than they are.”

  And, as St. Augustine of Hippo says, “If you think you understand, it isn’t God.”

  Even when the artist bears the spirit (the Saint Matthew Passion; Michelangelo’s Pietà; The Tempest) he does not fully understand, and that is all right. The work understands. God understands. And God understands that part of us which is more than we think we are.

  A real problem for most of us is that this “more than we think we are” is not necessarily recognized as good. It is difficult for most of us to recognize, accept, and affirm those large areas of ourselves which are not compatible with the image of ourselves we would like to project or which the world has taught us we ought to project. Jesus was very clear about these projections, referring to those who projected them as “whited sepulchre
s,” clean and white without, and full of dead bones and decay within.

  Part of our inheritance from our Puritan ancestors is a feeling that we “ought” to be good. Certainly it is not a bad thing to want to be good. The daily problem is that what my finite, conscious mind tells me I ought to do and what the untamed, submerged, larger part of me makes me do are often in direct conflict. But this is no surprise for the Christian. Two thousand years ago Paul of Tarsus admitted quite openly that the things he wanted to do were the very things he didn’t do, and the things he didn’t want to do were the very things he did. And yet Paul did not despair nor drop out. He was even able to accept the reality that he had cheered on the stoning of Stephen and had been one of the most successful persecutors of the early Christians. And yet when God took him by the scruff of the neck and shook him, he was able to let go, to let go of himself and his control of himself and instead trust God and experience a total reversal of his life. Alan Jones points out that before his conversion on the Damascus Road, Paul was suffering from paranoia, was out of his right mind. And afterwards he was in a state of metanoia—and metanoia means being turned around, repentant, being in a healthy state of mind.

  A working out of the ambiguities of being good and caught in the traps of our own subconscious minds and the changes and chances of our most careful plans is present in all the books which speak most powerfully to me. A complete and unexpected change in the fortunes or destiny or path of the protagonist has always been an element of storytelling, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. Cinderella never expected to leave the ashes of the fireplace and go to the ball in a gorgeous gown and glass slippers; Hamlet could not believe that the mother he adored had actually connived in the killing of the father he honoured; Nathanael did not believe that anything good could come out of Nazareth.

  Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. If my faith falters, I may well give it a surge of renewal if I think of the story of Ananias and Paul. What faith Ananias must have had in what he could not control when he took blind Paul into his house and gave him his sight, with no guarantee that Paul had changed from the zealot persecutor. Nevertheless, Ananias was daring enough to trust the message the Lord had sent him in a vision and to welcome Paul into his heart and home.