by Sarah Arthur
I reached out to children’s and YA author Nikki Grimes (Bronx Masquerade, Jazmin’s Notebook, Dark Sons) about how she navigates the artificial divide between sacred and secular. Nikki responded, “The answer is, of course, in the question. The phrase artificial divide is key, as Madeleine L’Engle understood better than anyone. The divide is, in fact, artificial, and one can simply choose to ignore it.” She went on to explain: “Of course, early in my career, I worried incessantly about crossing some invisible line between secular and sacred in my work. But what I’ve realized, over time, is that as long as the presence of God is organic within a literary work, secular publishers are not bothered by it, nor do readers find that presence intrusive in any way.” Questions Nikki asks herself include, “Is faith in God, and all that goes along with it, authentic to the character in your story? Are God-related occurrences organic within the framework of that story? Those are the only questions I need ask, and if the answer to both questions is yes, then the work can easily straddle secular and sacred publishing worlds.”
Madeleine herself didn’t make a distinction between sacred and secular—or at least, she didn’t define them the way other people did. Madeleine’s understanding of sacred encompassed every aspect of God at work in the world. “To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.”17 There is no sphere where God is not, and thus no place where God is incapable of transforming what evil has deformed. And meanwhile God’s beauty and truth and goodness speak through the most ordinary things, through their essential nature or “sheer quiddity,” as C. S. Lewis called it. Madeleine wrote,
Life cannot be separated into secular and sacred, that if God created everything, and called it good, then all of life is good, and only we can see it as sacrilegious. There is nothing which is, of itself, sacrilegious. Just as the act of making love can be sacramental, so can all aspects of our lives, even the most lowly. If we cannot pray in the bathroom, it is not likely that we will be able to pray anywhere.18
Philip Yancey reflected with me on how unique her perspective was compared to his own upbringing: “The church I grew up in was very much ‘this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through,’” he told me, “and as soon as you get saved it’s all over: the rest of life is just gritting your teeth and managing to survive until that glory day when you cross into Beulah Land, wherever that is. And later I found that actually, no: God created this world, God loves this world, God wants us to thrive in this world. And that includes culture, beauty, and art.” When it comes to Madeleine’s unique legacy, he said, “I think Madeleine negotiated that divide very well because she was uncompromising about her faith and yet she was fully invested in thriving in this world and helping others to thrive.”
• • • •
As controversial Christian authors go, she was in good company. C. S. Lewis too was among those banned by fundamentalists and treated cautiously by the literati. At one point, someone sent her a clipping from a daily newspaper featuring a list of ten books that libraries should not carry because the books were somehow “pornographic.” “On the list was one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books,” she wrote. “Also on the list was my book A Wind in the Door. I am totally baffled and frankly fascinated. This is the first time C. S. Lewis and I have been listed together as writers of pornography. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”19
In fact, the parallels between Lewis and L’Engle are striking. They shared the same birthday, for starters, November 29; Lewis was exactly twenty years older. They both wrote widely in many different genres, for both grown-ups and children, and are credited with influencing the faith of generations. However, they never met and inhabited vastly different planes of understanding the world.
When it came to a vision of the created order, Lewis was a Medievalist: for him, all creation comprises a hierarchy of beings, from stars to planets to angels to humans to animals and on down the list. And while this framework limited his imagination regarding such things as gender and societal roles, he insisted that every living person bears a “weight of glory” that would bring us to our knees in worship of them if it weren’t for the mercy of God.20 Madeleine, meanwhile, stressed that it’s this very same love and mercy that makes equals of us all, women and men, children and adults alike; indeed, the suffering of the smallest mitochondria affects the farthest flung galaxies of the universe. She refused to accept traditional categories that would limit what is possible in God’s world. Next to Lewis, Madeleine looks practically postmodern.
And yet Lewis and L’Engle were barely one generation apart. It’s hard to believe she started working on Wrinkle a mere three years—three—after Lewis’s final book in the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie Medal in 1956. Yet both were, in their own ways, reacting to the assumptions of modernism, of the Enlightenment, which insisted that the only truths we can accept are those facts provable by science. To combat this, Lewis mined back into the riches of tradition—the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche for his novel Till We Have Faces, for instance, or from Plato and Aristotle’s universal moral law in The Abolition of Man—in order to glean insights about God and human nature that had been dismissed or forgotten.
L’Engle, by contrast, pressed forward into the mysteries of scientific discovery. As we’ll discuss more thoroughly in chapter four, she engaged science in part to show just how small, how relative, how limited our view of God has been in light of the wonders of an astonishing universe.21 Each new discovery doesn’t diminish our faith; it increases our sense of awe that this same God, whose works are revealed to be more amazing by the day, loves us enough to become one of us and knows each of us by name.
Perhaps because of his mining back, Lewis was able to reach that generation of American evangelicals, those Baby Boomers and early Gen-Xers, whose parents and grandparents had lost their sense of wonder and yet still valued tradition. He gave those evangelicals the ability to say, “Yes, tradition matters, but you haven’t gone back far enough. You must reclaim myth and mystery.” But for many postmoderns, it’s Madeleine—in her pressing forward; in her trust that ongoing scientific discoveries only bolster our understanding of God; in her “unwillingness to limit God in any way”22—who has become a bridge to Christian faith even more, perhaps, than Lewis. Indeed, one could make the case that Madeleine is the C. S. Lewis for a new generation.
She was, like Lewis, a lay evangelist—or more specifically, an apologist who attempts to explain the plausibility of Christian belief to skeptics and nominal believers. Her calling was, first, to those who don’t know God in Christ. In the words of L’Engle scholar Donald Hettinga of Calvin College, “She perceives the mission of all Christians to be evangelical, concluding, nonetheless, that her mission is not to alienate non-Christian readers by antagonizing them.”23 One of her editors recalls, “In a way, Madeleine was always preaching: in her books, in conversation. She had a mission, and a part of the editorial work was trying to pare some of that down in her fiction.”24 This comment sheds even more light on the reaction of the publishing world to her overt Christianity, which was, how can we soften this, cut it down, if not cut it out?
Her calling as an apologist was, secondarily (and not because she wanted it), to the Christian fundamentalists bent on limiting God. Some have described her as even having a kind of “mission” to conservative evangelical communities. Says her granddaughter Charlotte, “I think she felt she had a real mission with what she called ‘fundalits’—fundamentalist literalist interpreters of the Bible. She felt she had something to say to them.”25 To Madeleine, these were people that needed to be set free from binary thinking about how God chooses to engage the world.
But many conservative Christian communities she tried to reach were skeptical, particularly of what they felt were dangerous theological errors in her thinking. A signature accusation was universalism, the belief that, at the end of all things, everyone will be saved. She writes about being interrogated by a student at a cons
ervative college during a Q&A session as to whether she was a universalist. She replied that she was not. But the student kept pressing her, insisting, “But your books do seem to indicate that you believe that God is forgiving.”
“What an extraordinary statement!” Madeleine exclaimed.
The conversation devolved from there, with the student backpedaling a bit, and Madeleine pressing him, “I don’t think God is going to fail with Creation. I don’t worship a failing God. Do you want God to fail?”
Well, insisted the student, there had to be “absolute justice.”
“Is that what you want?” she demanded. “ . . . Me, I want lots and lots of mercy. Don’t you want any mercy at all?”26
Luci Shaw too, from a much more loving stance, pressed Madeleine on the topic of universalism. Whenever Madeleine insisted that “no one will finally be excluded from the party,” Luci pushed back: what if people choose to be excluded? Luci recalls, “We discussed this endlessly, for my part referencing C. S. Lewis’s depiction of [George] MacDonald in The Great Divorce that ran counter to her conviction. I guess I came to think: ‘Well, if universalism is a heresy, it’s one I wish were true!’”27
Not all of Madeleine’s detractors were so gracious. Confrontation after confrontation finally forced her to try and understand what evangelicals meant by the charge of universalism. Eventually, her interpretation was that “what the evangelicals mean by universalism is that all of a sudden, and for no particular reason, God is going to wave a magic wand and say, ‘Okay, everybody, out of hell, home free.’ So, no, I say, I am not a universalist; that plays trivially with free will.”28 This is not the sum total of what all evangelicals believe about the topic (and there’s a ranging spectrum), but it was, for her, a meeting point.
But the damage was done. No matter what she said, critics insisted on seeing heresy in her writing. In an attack on An Acceptable Time, one of her detractors warns that L’Engle is writing a “recruiting manual” for druidism and New Age thought, making her “trusting young reader easy prey for Satan’s snare.”29 And yet Madeleine’s book depicts the main character, Polly, praying to Jesus, who “always was.”30 Polly is about to be sacrificed to appease the gods, but instead of giving into terror, “she was calling on Christ for help,” repeating the fifth-century words of Saint Patrick: “Christ beneath me, / Christ above me, / Christ in quiet, / Christ in danger.”31 Polly is not saved by ancient druidism but by calling on the even more ancient, eternal person of God in Christ.
Yet for Madeleine, controversy was an unwinnable battle. When I asked Luci whether she got blowback for publishing Madeleine’s books, she said, “Oh, yes. As publishers we went to the Christian Booksellers Association, which had a yearly convention in various parts of the country. And we would have a table with our books, with Madeleine’s book, and people would come up to me and say, ‘That’s New Age. How can you carry that book?’ There was a fair amount of prejudice against it in that area. . . . People said, ‘Oh, you’re making money out of the devil.’”
If these episodes were common—and irritating—for Luci, they were much more so for Madeleine. Such encounters were stressful and deeply saddening, and any one of us would be tempted to simply stop speaking at institutions where a fire of accusations could come hurling. But not Madeleine. Philip Yancey told me, “I had my own share of criticism over the years, and it’s not easy to take. But here are people she has much in common with, and yet they’re calling her a heretic or a witch and banning her books in libraries. And that hurts. It hurts at a deep level, and you have to come up with a way to deal with it. And she came up with a way.” Madeleine continued, in her relentless style, to not only engage those communities but even found herself, at times, among unlikely friends.
• • • •
When Madeleine was still a young college student, searching for answers, “The first Sunday I went to church and nobody spoke to me, so I never went back.”32 Later she and her husband, Hugh, attended a Congregational church in Goshen, Connecticut, the location of Crosswicks: “In that church, we found friends who are still friends for life,”33 she wrote. “I also learned why I am not a Congregationalist.” Madeleine in time circled back to the Episcopal Church, and that’s where she stayed.
Both C. S. Lewis and L’Engle had the knack for creating rippling rings of community and connection. They were friends with Christians, atheists, agnostics, and everything in between. Indeed, L’Engle, as a one-time president of the national Author’s Guild Council, counted among her colleagues some of the household names in the publishing world, including authors like Judy Blume and Lloyd Alexander. And yet this world rarely overlapped with the Christian nonfiction she published with people like Luci, or the evangelical speaking circuit she traversed. Her secular colleagues knew she was a Christian, but the extent of her influence was likely underestimated—especially since the only Christians such mainstream authors tended to interact with were those fundamentalists intent on shutting their books down.
L’Engle sought sacred communities in her work with the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan as volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence. She also served as a writing instructor and retreat leader for the Community of the Holy Spirit, an Episcopal convent not far from St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s private school (where her children had attended). Later in life she worshiped at All Angels’ Church on the Upper West Side. These were sacred spaces, sacred friendships, particularly with Canon Edward West of the Cathedral until his death in 1990. His office was immediately next to hers; he was her adviser and spiritual director, a kind of father-figure, one of those rare friendships between giants in their own spheres.
But the Christian friendships didn’t end there. In the mid ’80s, author and spiritual director Richard Foster began gathering a group of Christian writers for regular retreats. In time, the group became known as the Chrysostom Society and went on to publish numerous collections together. “I think Madeleine found this was a safe place,” Philip Yancey recalls of those early meetings, “a safe place where she could give her own opinions—and as I mentioned, they were strong opinions. She would say things like, ‘I’m not a Christian writer, I’m a writer who happens to be a Christian!’ But she was a Christian and she found some commonality, and I think she found genuine fellowship in that group.”
The very first gathering on a snowy weekend in the Colorado Rockies led, rather improbably, to an uproarious serial murder mystery called Carnage at Christhaven. It features a group of writers, each of whom looks and acts suspiciously like a real-life counterpart, trapped together at—you guessed it—a resort in a Colorado snowstorm. Each member of the group took a different chapter, and no one knew where the story was going until the previous chapters were handed to them. Not surprisingly, the plot twists, devolves, revives, implodes—and it’s hilariously, intentionally awful.
“I refused to cooperate,” Philip remembered, laughing. “I said, ‘I don’t know anything about writing fiction, it’s not a game. You need to know what you’re doing.’ And everyone else punished me by making me the [first] victim of the carnage of that book.” In the opening chapter, a character dubbed Nathaniel Yates, “the writer whose several books had only recently made pain a popular topic of polite conversation,” is found murdered.34 Among the many suspects is Philippa d’Esprit, “an elderly Episcopalian, a prolific writer of adult stories for children” whom we first encounter sitting “erect, bejeweled, gowned in brocade.”35 She had grown irritated by the state of publishing; and “closing her eyes, she yearned intensely for the thirteenth century.”36 Chapters later, Philippa ends up nearly being wiped out by, of all people, her closest friend there—a seemingly gentle-souled poet who looks unmistakably like . . . Luci Shaw.
Welcome to your evangelical fellowship, Madeleine: they love you enough to fictionalize and nearly murder you.
• • • •
“In that curious and artificial divide between the secular and spiritual worlds,” wri
tes Luci in the foreword to Carole F. Chase’s Suncatcher: A Study of Madeleine L’Engle and Her Writing, “there has long been a dearth of effective interpreters—communicators who can bridge a gap by planting a foot firmly in both worlds and representing each to each with integrity and enthusiasm. Madeleine L’Engle, as one such mediatrix, has made an astonishing contribution to contemporary culture.”37 Indeed, I would argue that perhaps more than any other author, Madeleine reached a new generation of wavering evangelicals and post-fundalits with a message of hope.
A few years ago I was invited to join a private Facebook group of youngish artists, writers, and culture-makers whose experience with organized religion is rocky at times. Many were raised in conservative circles and have since moved left, either socially or theologically or both. Some have become Catholic; many have given up on church altogether. Some are attempting to speak prophetically to our evangelical communities, deeply troubled by the increasing polarization over politics, particularly in regard to issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. We lament the shrinking role of artists in faith communities; the collapse of discourse into blunt, graceless, unwinnable battles; and the inability of people on both the left and the right to laugh at themselves. And lest you assume we’re overthinking all this, most posts either begin with or devolve into scatological humor or innuendo. Because if you can’t laugh when the world is burning, you’ve lost your bearings.
It was to this group that I posed the question, “Who here can claim that Madeleine saved their faith/art/life?” And the responses kept coming. “She basically saved my faith after a bout with bad charismaticism,” wrote one member. “Maybe not ‘saved,’ but radically changed; absolutely,” wrote another. One person claimed that Madeleine saved her life “in a literal way,” and then went on to describe a nervous breakdown interrupted by a flash of insight from A Wrinkle in Time (more on that story in the epilogue). Fascinated, I couldn’t let any of these stories go. I had to find out more.
