by Sarah Arthur
Do you feel it, the quiver of longing? I’m guessing I’m not the only one who knows firsthand just how rare, how valuable, such a grace-filled, truth-seeking kind of friend is. Not an idol, not a mentor or spiritual director: a friend.
What would it look like to have friendships with those who are not like us, wherein we learn to argue well and lovingly—and yet at the end of the day we can still be friends? This is a lost art in our culture, particularly as we create ever narrower, taller, insular silos on social media, cut off from opposing viewpoints. With a mere click of a button we can “unfriend” and “unfollow” those with whom we disagree, and meanwhile we learn to studiously avoid those difficult topics at Thanksgiving dinner that could disrupt the false unity a sentimental holiday too often cultivates. False unity is no healthier than silos of like-mindedness.
We need iconoclasts, mentors, and friends that push us, that challenge our narrowness and yet still affirm our humanity. What would it mean to meet in person, on purpose, in good faith, with someone whose perspective is vastly different than ours? To argue face-to-face without rancor, without demeaning the humanity of the other? What would it mean to allow yourself to acknowledge areas where you might, in fact, agree? Or even more, to allow yourself at times to be persuaded—if not wholly to the other person’s perspective—at least to meet halfway? This is what it means to live life with those who don’t insist that everything, including our own persons, be either/or. Rather, we can be both/and.
This is the rare gift that Luci and Madeleine gave to each other. And we, in turn, are the beneficiaries.
• • • •
In our digitized age, the word icon has become synonymous with a simple, universally recognized symbol, a kind of modern hieroglyphic shorthand. It’s intended to reduce complexity and accelerate communication, especially when shared language or even literacy cannot be assumed. (For instance, long before they could read English, my sons, ages five and seven—both digital natives—recognized the Play icon, or button, on a tablet and knew its use.) But for Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout the centuries, the original meaning of icon is a painting that depicts a biblical character, story, or saint from Christian history—not merely as a symbol or shorthand, and certainly not as an object to be revered (again: that would be an idol), but rather as a window to a bigger reality.
For example, the vanishing point of a Byzantine-style icon is the reverse of the linear, Western European style of painting: it comes out, toward the viewer, rather than in, toward the painting’s horizon. Psychology professor and author Richard Beck of Abilene Christian University describes it this way:
As we stare into the icon the world we are looking into isn’t shrinking or vanishing. Rather, it is expanding and growing. I like to call this The Wardrobe Effect, borrowed from the scene in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the children move into and through a small space (the Wardrobe) to emerge into this vast expansive space (Narnia). An icon is trying to create, via reverse perspective, this same effect upon us. Heaven is more real and larger than this world.25
While he acknowledges that the early icon artists likely didn’t know their perspective was the reverse of some other style, the implications are profoundly theological. Yes, one could argue that religious icons have a utilitarian purpose, to give the illiterate access to communication—in this case, access to God’s Word in visual form; but they also provide literate believers with new ways of seeing, of comprehending, of meditating on the Word.
To many readers, Madeleine’s works often have the same effect, as we’ll discuss further in the next chapter. However, Madeleine would’ve resisted the metaphor of an icon applied to herself—especially since, in her words, “it is precisely because an icon touches on reality that it far too often becomes an idol.”26 And certainly she was idolized and adored more than she liked. Her longtime friend and housemate, Barbara Braver, talked with me about how Madeleine handled her own fame:
“Sometimes when you idolize somebody you don’t really know them and you don’t really want to because it would tarnish your idol. She did not take her celebrity as a measure of herself. She had clarity about who she was with her various gifts and weaknesses and failings and strengths, so she didn’t need to look to everybody who idolized her in order to get some self-regard . . . Madeleine had compassion for people and interest in their particularity. She was not from a mold; she was very much herself, very much a character. She was interested in how other people were formed and made. Also, she had suffered some in relationships in her growing-up years . . . being left unexpectedly at a boarding school in Switzerland by her parents—that’s a tough thing to have happen. She was very compassionate for people.”
As both Luci and Barbara reiterated, “Madeleine would say, ‘I’m grateful to be loved and appreciated. I don’t want to be adored.’” For all her imperfections, there was something about her pithy way of communicating, about the unforgettable images, characters, and scenes she created, about her dogged insistence on pointing her readers and students to God’s love, that tore down the idol others had made of her and turned it into an icon.
An icon is not a mirror, merely reflecting our own selves back to us. It’s a window that points to light and truth beyond itself. It’s not to be mistaken for the light. “He must become greater,” said John the Baptist at the coming of Jesus into public ministry; “I must become less.”27 Beyond Madeleine was the bigger reality of God’s presence in the world, God’s particular love for each one of us. That’s the light she wanted us to see.
We also must—like iconoclasts, like Madeleine herself—insist that what we had thought was inviolable (our cherished platitudes, our well-crafted doctrines) are, in fact, limited by our very humanity. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror,” wrote Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “then we shall see face to face.”
If Madeleine taught us nothing else, as both icon and iconoclast, it’s that we are flawed and imperfect beings. It’s not our own light we bring to any situation, but the light of Christ we attempt to shine on others.
The question becomes, what happens when the light makes others feel uncomfortable?
Chapter Two
SACRED and SECULAR
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
Walking on Water
One freakishly hot day in late September, I stop by my local Michigan library. I’ve put about forty-seven L’Engle-related titles on hold through interlibrary loan, which feels like the literary equivalent of ten Christmases; and I plop them all down at the desk like someone cashing in at a casino. The young man behind the counter grins and starts scanning.
“It’s Banned Book Week. What’s your favorite banned book?” he asks brightly, as if censorship is the juiciest gossip around.
I pause, flummoxed that he hasn’t noticed all the L’Engle books he’s so helpfully checking out for me. “Um, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle?” I wave at the pile.
He perks up. “Cool!”
Ah, he recognizes the patron saint of banned books—and of librarians, for that matter. More importantly, he recognizes the name of an author who also happened to be unashamedly Christian. Who loved Christ. Who talked about Christ—in her life, in her books. And who won a Newbery anyway.
• • • •
Over the years, A Wrinkle in Time has met with a dizzying array of responses: everything from publishers’ rejections to high acclaim to vociferous censorship. When Madeleine was first trying to find a publisher, the story got rejected twenty-seven times (or was it thirty-two? Thirty-six? Her numbers changed every time she told the story) before it was picked up and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962. In the years following she often described the various reasons why it had been turned down: it was hard to classify, it dealt with difficult topics like the problem of evil, and on and on. When I told my marketing-savvy husband, “Did you know that her origina
l title was Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which?” he said, without hesitation, “Well, that’s why it got rejected, right there.”1
Her book has been hard to categorize ever since. Leonard Marcus, in Listening for Madeleine, refers to Wrinkle’s “aggressively unorthodox mongrelization” of genres.2 Is this for children? adults? Is it science fiction? fantasy? magical realism? religious? Whatever it is, like Madeleine herself, it doesn’t stay within the strict categories we place on everything, those stringent binaries of either this or that. At times her writing makes us uncomfortable, forces us to question our cherished assumptions. Indeed, it’s rather like the description of Aslan the lion in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles: good but not “safe.”
Perhaps that’s why, in both sacred and secular circles, Madeleine and her works have been suspect.
From the nonreligious side, people treated Wrinkle (and its author) as questionable because it was so obviously Christian—and not just vaguely “spiritual” either; but clearly, unequivocally Christian. When, for example, the main characters want to know who those “fighters” are that have squared off with the Powers of Darkness, one of their mentors, Mrs Who, quotes directly from the gospel of John: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (1:5 KJV). “Jesus!” exclaims the youngest child, Charles Wallace. “Why of course, Jesus!” When editor Beatrice Creighton of Lothrop, Lee & Shepard was asked why she didn’t publish Wrinkle, another editor remembered Bea saying something like, “Madeleine writes wonderfully well, but I just couldn’t go along with all the religion business. I thought it got in the way of the story.”3
Madeleine’s own explanation was more poignant: “In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable. When I am referred to in an article or a review as a ‘practicing Christian’ it is seldom meant as a compliment, at least not in the secular press. It is perfectly all right, according to literary critics, to be Jewish or Buddhist or Sufi or a pre-Christian druid. It is not all right to be a Christian. And if we ask why, the answer is a sad one: Christians have given Christianity a bad name.”4 Thus, the editorial gatekeepers, at publishing house after publishing house, practiced their own form of censorship in advance: they wouldn’t even publish it.
It was Hal Vursell at Farrar, Straus and Giroux who took a personal liking to it, despite thinking it was “distinctly odd.”5 He gave it to an outside reader, who told him it was the worst book that person had ever read; but he nonetheless decided to give it a chance. No one was more surprised than Madeleine’s own publisher when it won the 1963 Newbery.
Years later, children’s author Lois Lowry said in a 2012 panel celebrating Wrinkle’s fiftieth anniversary, “Rereading the book quite recently I was startled because I had forgotten the religious references in it, the number of Christian references . . . And I’m not sure that that would be published today. Or that an editor might ask you to tone that down a bit. Or that the Newbery committee would say, ‘It’s not politically correct to give an award to a book that’s so Christian.’” The panel’s moderator, then New York Public librarian Betsy Bird—who herself had served on a Newbery Committee—agreed: “I don’t think they would choose it. And it’s for the very reasons that you said. And it’s a pity, because it’s a grand book. My respect for the committee that did select it just goes up all the more.”6
After Madeleine won and catapulted from obscurity to literary wunderkind, she would tell how she was invited to various literary-artsy galas, and publishers would say, “Why didn’t you submit A Wrinkle in Time to me?” And she’d respond, “Oh, but I did.” And when they protested, she’d say, “I can show you the rejection letter.”
But from the other side, the conservative Christian censorship was just as pronounced and much more public. How crushed she was that it was her fellow believers who loudly insisted on banning Wrinkle from libraries, schools, and churches. Their reasons were vast and largely uninformed. Parents complained, for instance, that high schoolers were secretly passing the book around for the “sex scenes.” (Which, it turns out, were the scenes when Meg and her companions tessered, or traveled, to other planets. The teens assumed innuendo when Madeleine intended none, and the parents took their word for it.)7 The book also contained witches, according to Madeleine’s critics. “If you read the book,” Madeleine said in a 1989 interview with religion journalist Terry Mattingly, “there is no way that they [Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which] are witches. They are guardian angels—the book says so. You don’t have to clarify what is already clear.”8
Other detractors studied all her works extensively, bent on identifying what they felt was demonic and making a career out of “exposing” her. According to her critics—whom she dubbed “fundalits,” short for “fundamentalist literalists”—Madeleine’s fiction and nonfiction alike supposedly featured “communication with the dead, mind control, psychic healings, communicating telepathically with dolphins (a New Age favorite), goddess worship, witchcraft/shamanism, occult meditation, astral projection, divination, and more.”9 One of them concluded, “L’Engle’s novels are not just pure fiction; they are spiritual poison for children, precisely because they are considered ‘Christian.’”10
Madeleine said in a 2001 interview with the New York Times, “First I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really.”11 And yet, it’s safe to wonder if she ever really reached the “finally” of that statement. For her, the conflict was a theological problem, a serious error on the part of her fellow Christians. “There is a new and troublesome fear of the imagination—though without it, how can anyone believe in the Incarnation, the Power that created all of the galaxies willingly limiting itself to be one of us for love of us! And this fear is expressing itself in a new kind of book burning and witch-hunting.”12
Undeterred, Madeleine’s critics virulently insisted that public libraries and schools, not just churches, should regard her works as evil. Madeleine found these attempts at censorship deeply disturbing: “If I believe that I am qualified to decide what the entire population of the United States, particularly Christians, ought not to be reading, am I not making an idol of my own judgment?”13
Idols again. How persistent our perennial inability, whether we inhabit religious or irreligious circles, to engage an author on her own terms. How reticent we are to allow her to be an icon—admittedly an imperfect one—through which God’s light shines, rather than an idol to either worship or shun.
• • • •
Recently I interviewed YA author Sara Zarr (Story of a Girl) about Madeleine L’Engle’s influence on YA lit in general and on her own writing in particular. I was intrigued by Sara’s reflections on the word “secular” in her preface to the new edition of Madeleine’s Walking on Water, in which she tells of growing up in the ’80s in Christian circles that were influenced by the rising evangelical subculture. “Strangely,” she writes, “as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians [such as pop music, prime time TV], I don’t ever remember hearing the word sacred, its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly.”14 Like Sara, I’m struck by how wildly inadequate—and ultimately insupportable—that binary is. What book of the Bible qualifies, for one thing? (I’m reminded of the student whose unchurched mother discovered the copy of the Bible he’d been reading for youth group; she opened it randomly to the book of Judges and then forbid him to ever read the Bible again.)
“When I first decided ‘I want to try and become a novelist,’” Sara told me, “I never really remotely entertained the idea that I would be a ‘Christian’ novelist. Because the books that made me want to write and gave me an emotional response—that felt like they were connecting to something real—were always just regular books.” For Sara, those were “mainstream writers like Madeleine L’Engle, like Robert Cormier, even Judy Blume, Norma Fox Mazer, people like that who were writing YA rea
lism. And as you may recall, in the ’70s and ’80s most YA was realism.”
Sara remembers in the ’80s there would be outcries over books that included things like sex; and authors fought against “the expectation that the book should have a purpose other than to tell the story of the book.” Now, she sees the same thing happening, except in the other direction: “It’s a time of a kind of secular Puritanism where having the correct thoughts and opinions is—and I may just be spending too much time in social media—but it seems like there’s not a lot of room to be in the middle on things. It’s like, ‘You’re for us or against us’ on almost any issue.”
For groups that have previously been marginalized, she recognizes this as a helpful corrective to voices that have been silenced in the past. But many younger writers “don’t know we fought this battle before—as far as what gatekeepers thought was appropriate for teen readers—and consider it a triumph that now you can literally write about anything in YA.” In particular, Sara said, “Christian writers, or writers of faith, should be free to explore the realities of the experience of being alive, on the full spectrum.”
It’s a rough guess, but the word sacred—meaning “holy,” or “set apart”—may sound just a little too Catholic for many Protestants. It may evoke too much of the inaccessible nature of the Catholic God, whose face we cannot see without intermediaries, whose presence we sinners approach with fear and awe—rather than the kind, forgiving, nondenominational “Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist” who knows us personally and forgives us anyway.15 We don’t want a God whose holiness renders him Other, in whose presence we feel unclean and unsafe. So we substitute other words for sacred; and then leverage an antonym, secular, that is likewise thin and unsupportable.
As spoken-word poet Amena Brown says, non-Christians don’t get what Christians mean when they say secular. If Christians were to describe it, non-Christians would say, “Oh, you mean regular things.”16 As if God doesn’t deal in regular things.
