Bright Evening Star

by Madeleine L'engle

  I would go home after church and make our traditional waffles and milk shakes, and we sang grace and were grateful for God’s forgiving love.

  4

  KING JAMES’S IMAGINATION

  I still wanted someone to explain everything to me so that I could understand it, explain it all so there would be no more painful questions.

  I knew something was wrong with my own thinking, and I continued to ask my minister friends all my difficult questions, and they continued very kindly to answer them with all the good answers they had been given in seminary. They tried to find facts for me to prove their theology, but there are very few facts.

  Facts?

  We know that there was someone called Jesus who was crucified about two thousand years ago, and that’s about all we know as far as historical facts are concerned.

  Even in my confusion, I knew that I needed more than facts. I tried to believe, but when I wrestled with theology I felt that I was surrounded by a deep, dense fog through which I could not see.

  My heart believed even when my mind faltered. I listened to my heart and I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as an affirmation that there was indeed light in the darkness with which I was surrounded. I wrote it for God.

  * * *

  —

  When I had finished I was excited, because I thought it was the best thing I had ever written. I waited with anticipation for word from the publisher who had done my most recent book. She diddled and dawdled and finally said, “I may be turning down another Alice in Wonderland, but I’m afraid of it.”

  Most of the subsequent rejections were not that encouraging. Just the plain printed rejection slips without a personal word. It hurt. I had had six books published, overall with reasonable success.

  After nearly a decade in the country, we moved back to New York and my husband’s world of the theatre, and I had great hope that once I was back in the city of my birth, the city that was the center of art and music and literature, a publisher would soon see what I had been hoping to write in this book, and would say yes to it.

  I’ve written before about the long struggle to find a publisher. I didn’t know that mainline publishers did not publish science fiction. I did not know that science-fiction novels didn’t have female protagonists. I struggled to keep on keeping on. I painted bright murals on the cupboard doors of the kitchen. Our children were in an Episcopal school so we went to the local Episcopal church for consistency’s sake. My husband was steadily employed in the theatre, but like every actor I have ever known, when the play he was in closed, he was convinced that he would never, ever, have a job again.

  But he did, and we enjoyed each other and our children and our friends and finally A Wrinkle in Time was published, and after that I did not have the long months and years of waiting to hear from a publisher.

  * * *

  —

  I began to get speaking engagements to librarians’ groups, teachers’ meetings, colleges, universities. I was invited to speak at Wheaton College, and that was my introduction to the evangelical world. It is amazing to me that I was in my mid-forties before I had even heard of the evangelical world, and I didn’t hear about it until just before I left for Wheaton when the dean of the cathedral came into the library where I was volunteer librarian, and told me about it. I listened, open-mouthed.

  But the moment I reached Wheaton I felt at home, and two of my dearest friends have come from that first experience, now over a quarter of a century ago. The evangelical world didn’t seem to me to be much different from the Congregational church in northwest Connecticut, except it didn’t have the New England reticence. By precept I was taught spontaneous prayer, and I will be ever grateful that when I am asked, sometimes out of the blue, to pray, I can do it, and without embarrassment. I felt loved and affirmed at Wheaton, and saw little or no conflict between this new world I was meeting and the Episcopal world I grew up in.

  Wrinkle and its companion books were affirmed as “Christian” books, though I didn’t then and don’t now like that label; basically I don’t like labels. And what is a “Christian” book? Is it something that will be appreciated and understood only by Christians? Is it telling the Good News to those who already know it? Is it preaching to the choir? I want my books to bring joy and hope and courage, and I pray that they are and will be inclusive and not exclusive.

  Meanwhile my faith slowly grew. I just lived long enough to live through pain and joy and birth and death and failure and fulfillment; slowly I let go my demands for reasonable explanations. I lived long enough to grow old and believe, once again, in the impossible. The impossible is easiest for the very young and the very old. If I am blessed with continuing to grow old, the impossible will become less and less difficult. The impossible is all that makes life itself possible, with all the anxieties and griefs and pains that come with experience. Joy, too, I don’t forget joy, but joy sometimes comes in the midst of pain.

  Finally I understood that I had to believe in the impossible, rather than trying to prove it.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t prove anything that makes life worth living. My childhood, adolescence, young womanhood, my marriage, childbearing and rearing, loss of parents, husband, friends, all become comprehensible when they are set in the context of a love so great that in ordinary terms it is impossible.

  I still don’t love God or Jesus as much as I should, but I’m learning that my love of God grows through my love of people. My understanding that God forgives even my most base thoughts is deepened as I learn to forgive those who hurt me, sometimes deliberately, and most deeply when I need to forgive someone who has hurt someone I love. As one young friend said fiercely, “You can do pretty much anything to me, but touch one hair of my child’s head, and you’re dead!” I understand that if I do not love, I cannot believe.

  Meanwhile, while I was growing, aging, while my children grew up, married, had children of their own, something else was changing in the world around us. It has always been a frightening world, but fear seemed to increase along with drug abuse and pornography. And I began to get angry criticisms of my writing, especially A Wrinkle in Time. Yet not a word of the book has changed.

  Something else has changed. What?

  Suddenly the Bible seemed to be an idol rather than the truth of God. I was asked, sternly, “Do you believe in Creationism?”

  “Yes, of course, but was it Greenwich Mean Time, or Eastern Daylight Savings Time, or Mountain Central Time?…Doesn’t Scripture say that God’s time and our time are completely different? So why shouldn’t the first day take a few billion years as we count time, and the second day a few more?”

  Literalism is a terrible crippler. The combination of fundamentalism with literalism has sometimes encouraged slaughter in the name of Christ. I don’t like to use the word fundamentalism in a derogatory sense, since I believe in the fundamentals, so when I was writing Penguins and Golden Calves I coined the word fundalit, a combination of fundamentalist and literalist. It is meant to be a descriptive and not a negative or unloving word. But there is no denying that the fundalit way of thinking has produced fear and anger and hardness of heart. In the fifties I could not understand some of what I was hearing about Jesus and God. In the eighties and nineties it was and is a different world, but some of the theology is just as confusing.

  Why is A Wrinkle in Time now being censored as an unchristian and dangerous book? That hurts! How do I respond with love and without judgmentalism?

  Imagination seems to have become a suspicious word for the fundalit. One group of women wanted the middle-school textbooks banned because they were afraid that these school texts might “stimulate the children’s imaginations.”

  What?! I was totally baffled until I realized that in the King James translation of Scripture the word imagination is not used as we use it; it does not mean opening ourselves to wonder;
rather it is a negative word.

  In Genesis we read: “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

  Proverbs: “…an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations.”

  Lamentations: “…vengeance and all their imaginations against me.”

  Luke: “…scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”

  Romans: “…became vain in their imaginations.”

  And so forth. Words change. Several translations now use the word conceit instead of imagination.

  It is a mistake to assume that all words written in a translation several hundred years ago still mean the same thing today. What a sad loss it is to lose the current lovely meaning given to imagination and see it as something ugly! One small child at his uncle’s burial watched the sky cloud over and rain beginning to fall, and said, “God is crying.” How beautiful his imagination! My son was given a flashlight for his second birthday, and when there was an unexpected storm and the lightning flashed, he clapped his hands and said, “God’s flashlight!”

  When words change their meaning we must be careful to understand this, otherwise story gets changed along with words.

  * * *

  —

  A senior monk was telling a novice that he had come to the point where it made no difference whether someone was king or beggar, sculptor or robber, but sometimes when he looked out and saw a stranger walking up the road, he couldn’t help saying, “Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, is it you again?”

  In New York, where I spend so much of my time, it is not always easy to see Jesus in those I pass on the street. In New York we tend to hurry along and not see anybody, much less see Jesus. In St. Luke’s Hospital, across the street from the cathedral, the philosophy used to be that every patient was to be treated as Jesus. St. Luke’s is no longer an Episcopal hospital, but I think there’s still a residue of that old compassion. When I have been there as a patient it has been easy for me to see Jesus in the patience and humor of the nurses.

  A patient in preparation for surgery must remove all jewelry, watches, rings. At this point my wedding and engagement rings have been on for so long that I cannot take them off even with warm water and soap, so they have to be taped. But many years ago when I was having minor surgery, I could still take them on and off, so I gave them to my husband for safekeeping during the surgery. When I was returned to my room, still groggy from anesthesia, the first thing I did was ask my husband for my rings. The student nurse who was in the room with us told me later that she would never forget my asking Hugh for the rings, and especially the expression on Hugh’s face as he slipped them back on my finger.

  Was Jesus in the room with us then?

  Another time, not long ago, friends came to my hospital room to bring me Holy Communion, that glorious paradox of paradoxes.

  Earlier that day I had been brought the New York Times, and the newspaper lay on my lap. During the wondrous words of the Eucharist my eyes dropped down to the picture on the front page, a picture of Rwandan babies conceived and born since the terrible troubles, because, said the writer, there was so little else to do.

  The bread was put in my mouth, and the bread was for those little ones as well as for me and those who stood around my bed. Otherwise it was meaningless, and it is never meaningless, and it is never for myself alone. Here is the Love of the Creator shown in small things, a piece of bread, a sip of wine, a picture of some babies still so young that all they know is the comfort of their mother’s breast, and the warmth of sunlight.

  * * *

  —

  The winter of my foot surgery was a winter of special awareness of paradox. In New York snow fell on snow, keeping me housebound when I was not off on a speaking job. To add to the problem, my apartment is completely wheelchair inaccessible. There are corners and turns, and I could not get the chair either into the bedroom or the kitchen. When I could get to my cottage I felt free as a bird because it’s all on one floor, with wide boards and no sills, so I could wheel around. I even mopped the kitchen floor from my wheelchair! And I wondered what was happening on the bitter nights to the street people who had helped me over the snowdrifts; where were they sleeping? The city shelters are always overcrowded, and in any case, unsafe.

  Protected and warm under the old down quilt I had in boarding school, I tried to pray, simply opening myself to God and the love of Christ.

  5

  A HORSE NAMED HUMPHREY

  When Ethel Heins invited me to be part of a conference on the mythic in children’s literature to be held in Dublin, Ireland, I immediately said yes, and then I suggested to my friends Barbara Braver and Luci Shaw that they join me in Dublin and that we go on to Iona and other holy places. To my delight they both immediately said yes!

  Barbara (called Bara by Luci and me) took over the accommodations, using an excellent book listing Bed and Breakfasts. To her chagrin and ultimately our delight, she got the currency mixed up, reversing the order of dollars and pounds and reversing the exchange rate, and by the time her mathematical husband pointed out what she had done, the reservations had been made, and we stayed at much more elegant places than we had planned or expected. We gulped at the expense and then never regretted it. Every morning we ate full Irish/Scottish/English breakfasts (we all liked haggis), skipped lunch, and relaxed over dinner. I don’t remember the weather, only our delight. Did it rain?

  We talked, dreamed, prayed together. Everywhere we went we touched and were touched by the holy. We fell in love with the fields of sheep and the wonderful Border collies who herded them. We saw entire hedges of blooming fuchsia. In northwest Connecticut we’re doing well if we can keep a hanging basket of fuchsia blooming for a few months. Here the hedges were radiant with spontaneous blossom. If Jesus had not actually walked the trails we traveled, perhaps Joseph of Arimathea had, for that is the tradition. In the very air there was a sense of the compassion of Jesus, his healing love, his demanding freedom. Each step we took reminded us of the scandalously particular love of God which sometimes we forget in the overbusyness of our daily lives. We were a delighted trinity, and we enjoyed the fact that during the time of our pilgrimage Barbara was fifty-six, Luci was sixty-six, and I was seventy-six. In our hearts there was no chronological difference, nor in our sense of the holy.

  Bara and Luci came to join me in Dublin in time to make the trip to Newgrange, where there is a temple which is five thousand years old, two thousand years older than Stonehenge and a thousand years older than the pyramids. The building is covered to protect it, but we could still see the opening above the entrance through which, on the winter solstice, the sun’s ray pierces all the way through the temple to an altar in the center of the building. Whoever the people were who lived there five thousand years ago, they were astronomically and mathematically sophisticated, but this one building is all that is left of what once must have been a complex civilization. To whom was the temple dedicated? Whom did they worship?

  I was particularly fascinated because about ten years earlier when my husband and I were in Egypt, we had seen a similar temple. It had been on an island that was going to be covered with water when the Aswân High Dam was built, so the temple had been moved, stone by stone, each carefully computed and computered, to another, higher island. This temple, like the one at Newgrange, had been designed so that at the winter solstice the sunlight would shaft through the building to the altar. Different gods, a thousand years apart, but the same awe of the movement of the sun and the stars in their heavenly, patterned dance. The two temples were built with the same kind of astronomical and mathematical precision, as cultured as that of the twentieth-century engineers who moved the Egyptian temple to higher land. Does each civilization assume that it knows more than the ones before? Despite all the aid of our superb computers, the mathematics were fifteen seconds off at the moment of the winter solstice.

  Why did that give me comfort?
We do not always have to be right. What we did in moving the temple was nevertheless marvelous.

  What is there in the human psyche that calls for a temple in honor of the Maker?

  Bara, Luci, and I left our college dorm rooms in Dublin and the community of friends and colleagues we had found there, flew to Scotland, and picked up a car. The three of us were open for what each day had to teach us, the people we met, the villages, the narrow roads, the sheep, the dogs, the flowers. We tried to be open to the holiness of place, and we talked about the holiness of words. We talked about runes, those ancient collections of words put together at a time when words were understood to have power, power that came not only from the people who spoke the words, but from the words themselves. We can heal with words and, far more frightening, we can hurt. In so-called primitive societies today it is known that words can kill. Even evil thoughts can have murderous effects. We use words with both intents, either consciously or subconsciously.

  I remembered one cold Sunday in New York when I wore my warmest coat to church, with a pin on the lapel in the shape of a frog. As I came into the meeting hall, saying hello to people as I passed, a young man said, “That’s an interesting pin.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It was a Christmas present from one of my granddaughters.”

  “Isn’t it a symbol of Satan?” It was more a statement than a question, and it shocked me.

  “No!” I answered. “It’s a symbol of resurrection.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a symbol of resurrection. The tadpole turns into a frog. The caterpillar turns into a butterfly. They are symbols of resurrection.” I was still shocked. I think he was still unconvinced. But why on earth would he ask such a question of a fellow Christian, someone who came regularly to church, someone he saw every week? What was in his mind?