Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  AVOID MAKING IDOLS OF WORDS

  Words are icons when they are open doors, when they lead us beyond ourselves over new horizons. But they can also make us want to stay in closed systems, where any change is considered heresy. Words can indeed be either icons or idols

  So let me not make my passion for words into a golden calf, either, or I may fail to recognize the wonder of language changing as it emerges out of the experience of living in these last years of a troubled century.

  DEFINING ICONS

  I am convinced that everybody, no matter how Protestant, lives by icons. An icon is a myth. An icon is that which was true, is true, and will be true. The great icon painters, if they’re painting a picture of Jesus, are taught that they cannot possibly paint what he looked like. No human being could presume to do that. The icon is not meant to look like him, but it is meant to have in it a mythic truth.

  I think that we all have icons. Sometimes our icons may be people. Sometimes they may be something somebody has given us, which means something. A rather small, silly iconic thing I have is a strange little Mexican animal with a long stuck-out neck, which I keep on my desk. One of my students gave it to me at a time when I had stuck my neck out very far for the students, and I had got clobbered. And she gave it to me as a reminder to keep sticking my neck out. And this, for me, is iconic because if I tend to draw back and play safe, then this reminds me, no, you cannot do that. To draw back and play safe is ultimately death.

  AN ICON’S SYMBOLISM

  An icon is a symbol, rather than a sign. A sign may point the way to something, such as: Athens—10 kilometers. But the sign is not Athens, even when we reach the city limits and read Athens. A symbol, however, unlike a sign, contains within it some quality of what it represents. An icon of the Annunciation, for instance, does more than point to the angel and the girl; it contains, for us, some of Mary’s acceptance and obedience, and so affects our own ability to accept, to obey.

  THE LANGUAGE OF POETS

  An icon is more than a simile; it is a metaphor, containing within itself something of the indescribable, so that the need for description vanishes. It is not just like. It is. Jesus is God. What an affirmation! Jesus is not like God, Jesus is God, the ultimate metaphor. Poets use both similes and metaphors, but metaphor is the stronger. “The moon is a golden galleon.” “My love is the sun and the moon.”

  Whatever is an open door to God is, for me, an icon. It may be that small picture pasted on wood with which I travel. The icon of the three angels, the Holy Trinity, does not prove to me anything about God, but it opens the doors and windows of my heart.

  WINDOWS TO GOD

  If it’s impossible for me to describe the wild wonderfulness of Antarctica, it is equally impossible for me to describe what I, personally, mean by icon. I am not thinking of the classic definition of the icons so familiar in the orthodox church, icons of Christ, the Theotokos, saints, painted on wood and often partially covered with silver. My personal definition is much wider, and the simplest way I can put it into words is to affirm that an icon, for me, is an open window to God. An icon is something I can look through and get a wider glimpse of God and God’s demands on us, el’s mortal children, than I would otherwise. It is not flippant for me to say that a penguin is an icon for me, because the penguin invited me to look through its odd little self and on to a God who demands of us that we be vulnerable as we open ourselves to intimacy, an intimacy which leads not only to love of creature, but to love of God.

  ICONS BEAR REALITY

  If an image is not easy to define, an icon is even more difficult. We usually think of icons as corrupt images which ought to be broken. But it is only the icon misused (like “like” misused) which needs breaking. A true icon is not a reflection; it is like a metaphor, a different, unlike look at something, and carries within it something of that at which it looks. In Russia or Greece, when a painter begins to learn about icons, he is taught that the icon must never look like the person it portrays, it must never be an attempt at a photographic likeness, otherwise it becomes only an image. An icon, if it “works,” is more than itself; it bears a fragment of reality.

  THE WONDER OF STARS

  My first remembered icon was a heavenly one indeed. It is so important to me that though I have written about it before, I cannot leave it out here. I was a very small child visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage in north Florida. One night someone came into my little room, untucked the mosquito netting from around my crib, and carried me out onto the beach to see the stars. It must have been an unusually beautiful night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake up the baby and show her the stars.”

  All I remember is glory.

  There were no nearby city lights on the horizon to dim the magnificence of the night. The stars patterned the sky with their heavenly dance. The wind was quiet, and the ocean rolled gently to the shore. The little waves lapped the sand, and the lacy froth picked up the starlight. It was my first glimpse of night, of the world that was far larger and more magnificent than the ordinary daily world of the small child. I have never forgotten that moment of glory.

  Section X

  THIS I KNOW

  Telling Our Story

  Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

  THE PERFECT VEHICLE OF TRUTH

  “And it came to pass.” “Once upon a time.” Wonderful words! To be a human being is to be able to listen to a story, to tell a story, and to know that story is the most perfect vehicle of truth available to the human being. What is so remarkable about the stories of ancient cultures is not their radical diversity, but their unity. We tell basically the same story in all parts of the world, over and over again in varying ways, but it is always the same story, of a universe created by God. We can tell more about God through the words of a story than through any amount of theology.

  INSPIRATION FROM A TRUE STORY

  Can we ever again become wholly what we are meant to be?

  Story helps to show me. Sometimes in the darkest of moments we are fully human. There is a story told of the evil time when Adolf Hitler and his armies tried to enslave Europe and destroy the Jews. A village in Poland was taken, and all the Jewish men were rounded up and put into the synagogue. While the women and children watched, the synagogue was set on fire. From within the burning building came the sound of the men singing the Kaddish, the great Jewish prayer for the dead, singing it for themselves as they died, in total affirmation of the Lord of Creation who cares for us creatures—in life, and beyond.

  One of the results of the Fall is that we have forgotten who we are, and so have forgotten how to be. Learning to be hurts. We can sing songs of happiness without knowing pain. But we can sing the joy of our creation and honor our Creator only from within the fire.

  MIRRORS TO GOD’S IMAGE

  When I was a child, story helped me find out who I was in a world staggering from the effects of that war which was meant to end war but which, alas, was the beginning of a century of continuing war. Story helped me to accept that human beings do terrible things to other human beings, but that human beings also do marvelous things. Story was a mirror in which I could be helped to find the image of God in myself.

  GOOD STORYTELLERS

  George Macdonald was a Congregational parson, but children see only that he was a master teller of tales. When he wanted to write a sermon—and he wrote and published thousands—he wrote a sermon. But in a story he could go much further than he could in any number of volumes of sermons. And his sermons really aren’t read very much today.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of the greatest writing about mankind and our relationship to God and his creation comes to us in the form of story, myth, and parable. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, with the exception of the Sermon on the Mount, which is really poetry, Jesus taught by telli
ng stories.

  STORIES REVEAL HUMANITY

  We tell stories, listen to stories, go to plays, to be amused, to be edified, but mostly so that we can understand what it means to be a human being. Jesus was a storyteller. Indeed, according to Matthew, he taught entirely by telling stories. One of the great triumphs of Satan has been to lead us to believe that “story” isn’t true….Jesus did not tell his parables in order to give us facts and information, but to show us truth. What is the truth of the story of the man with the great plank in his eye? Doesn’t it tell us very clearly that we must not judge others more stringently than ourselves?…

  Story is the closest we human beings can come to truth. God is truth. God is beyond the realm of provable fact. We can neither prove nor disprove God. God is for faith.

  GOOD ART HEALS

  Stories should be healing. If they’re not, there’s something wrong. A story which leaves you frightened, fragmented, depressed, cannot be a Christian story. If I’m in need of healing, if I can go to the museum and look at the paintings, I will be healed. Music is very healing to me. Once I was full of righteous indignation over something and my adolescent said, “Oh, Mother, sit down and play Bach for a while,” knowing that if I did and gave that time to the beautiful structure of Bach, I would at least calm down. Art heals us, puts us all together, but only if we’re willing to open ourselves to it and collaborate with it.

  FINDING REALITY

  So story is real. And music is real, and what is real is an icon of our Creator, even if some of us who have been wounded balk at the use of the word, Father. A Bach fugue is for me an icon of this reality, and so with my often inadequate fingers I struggle at the piano, in order to get myself back into reality.

  And when I go to a museum I am not going just to look at an exhibition of painting or sculpture in order to be au courant with the latest cultural fashion; I am going in order to look for that reality which will help me to live my own life more fully, more courageously, more freely.

  STORY GIVES US COURAGE

  That love which cannot be destroyed has been the central core of stories since stories were first told or chanted around the campfires at night. Sometimes that love is shown by what we human creatures do to hurt it. We learn about love by being shown the abuses of love in Anna Karenina, or The Brothers Karamazov, or King Lear. Often when I am tired at night my bedtime reading is a murder mystery. Most of the writers to whom I turn are committed Christians, because it takes a firm grounding in the love of God for a writer to go into the darkest depths of the human heart. Often in these mysteries that love which will make us more human shines through the ugliness of greed and murder. Love does not triumph easily or without pain, but story gives us the courage to endure the pain.

  STORIES BRING MEANING

  When the powers of this world denigrate and deny the value of story, life loses much of its meaning; and for many people in the world today, life has lost its meaning, one reason why every other hospital bed is for someone with a mental, not a physical, illness.

  Clyde Kilby writes, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything….it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”

  The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs, but in truth.

  STRIVING TOWARD TRUTH

  Myth is, for me, the vehicle of truth. Myth is where you look for reality. Myth is how God speaks to us. We’re still hung up on the idea that myth is wrong, that myth is lie. The only way we have to grope toward the infinite is through myth. We do not say that myth is the truth. We say that myth is our striving toward truth. We get closer to truth as we strive through myth to understand that which the human being cannot comprehend in finite terms. The finite cannot comprehend the infinite in finite terms, but believe me we try. We make the infinite finite, and that’s always disastrous. Story does not do that. Story is open. A story says, “Yes, but what if…?” and “This is like…” and “This is how I feel now, but my next story might be different.”

  DEFINITIONS OF MYTH

  I went through a thesaurus trying to find a word to use instead of myth. I can’t find one. If anybody can, please write me. One of my favorite authors, “anon,” says that a myth deals with those things which never were but always are.

  For instance, if you look in great literature, was Ivan Karamazov? Was Hamlet? Was Alice in Wonderland? I mean, to say that they never were is absolute madness. Of course they were. They are.

  MYTHS SPEAK TO THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN SPIRIT

  The reason the myths of all of the civilizations have lasted is that they speak to something universal in the human spirit. If our religion does not speak to that which is universal, then we’d better reexamine it. If it’s just for us, for our little, small “in” group, then we’d better watch out that we’re not trying to domesticate God again. Sometimes we try to have the God that we want rather than the God of all, who is so great that the tiniest mitochondria and those great lobes of radio emission and all of us are held in God’s creative hand to create with God.

  Myths can be used devastatingly. Anything that is good can be distorted. Anything that is good can be misused. Christianity can be misused. Judaism can be misused. One of Satan’s cleverest ploys is to take something good and try to make it bad, but that does not change the original good. The original good is good. God made all and saw that it was good.

  THE GOD OF STORY

  We are still being taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” I received a disturbed and angry letter from a young mother who told me that a friend of hers, with young children, gave them only instructive books; she wasn’t going to allow their minds to be polluted with fairy tales. They were going to be taught the “real” world.

  This attitude is a victory for the powers of this world. A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, “Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.”

  Yes. God who told stories.

  WE MUST KNOW OUR CRAFT

  The storyteller is a storyteller because the storyteller cares about truth, searching for truth, expressing truth, sharing truth. But that cannot be done unless we know our craft, any more than a violinist can play Sibelius’s Violin Concerto unless the techniques are there, learned, until they are deep in the fingertips as well as the mind.

  INTERDEPENDENCE

  Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, “It’s my own business.” I think our children are sensing this interdependence, and that they would agree with James Baldwin that “the role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

  ART IS A PARTICIPATORY EVENT

  If I write a book and the reader cannot create it with me, then that book is stillborn. A painting which brings forth no response from the viewer never lives. A song which is not heard or evokes no reaction, dies. The one who reads, who listens, who sees, who hears, is equally creator with the person who set down the words or carved the stone or sang the notes.

  READERS CO-CREATE WITH ARTISTS

  The building of a novel is…corporate work. The writer at the desk is indeed writing in isolation, but (for me, at least) this isolation must be surrounded by community, be it the community of family, village, church, city….

  The
joyful acceptance that readers create my books along with me and share their creation in their letters, helps me to grow, to be more daring than I would be able to be otherwise. In trying to share what I believe, I am helped to discover what I do, in fact, believe, which is often more than I realize. I am given hope that I will remember how to walk across the water.

  THE READER’S ESSENTIAL ROLE

  A reader has an opportunity for collaboration which is denied the television viewer. In television it is all done for you. The images are there. You sit passively and accept them. But the reader must see in his mind’s eye the people and the pieces of the story, must make decisions, argue, if necessary, with the author. I argue with authors violently with pencil. “No!” or “Yes!” in the margin.

  The reader plays an active and essential part in bringing words to life, and the reader, like the writer, must temporarily abandon his control and open himself to the under aerial, underwater area of creativity. And this takes courage.