by Sarah Arthur
For Chris Smith, editor of The Englewood Review of Books, questions about his faith began after a transplant to Taylor University in Indiana from his home in Washington, D. C. “I moved five hundred, six hundred miles away from where I grew up,” he said, “and, in a distinct way, uprooted myself from family and church and all the things that give meaning and bearings to our life.” He began to turn away from the conservative culture of his home church: “Part of the struggle was disillusionment with evangelicalism,” he recalled. “[Madeleine’s] works were some of the first that helped me rethink some of those questions about who God is . . . The Genesis Trilogy, particularly, was really helpful to me, and realizing you could be a Christian and have deep thoughtful commitment to following Jesus outside of evangelicalism.”
Smith was so influenced by L’Engle that he created one of the first websites for her fans in the mid ’90s. It was through that site and its discussion forums that he met his wife, Jeni.
Jeni too came from a conservative background: “When I first read some of Madeleine’s nonfiction and heard the term fundalit,” she recalled, “I knew what a fundamentalist was, but I had never considered that that’s how I had been raised. It seems obvious now, but it was all new to me.” When asked for an example, Jeni explained, “My dad would decide he would take over the household finances because he was the man and that’s what he was supposed to do. And we’d all be like, ‘But Mom is the one that can do it; you can’t. She’s better at this.’ And we all knew it.” Jeni credits A Live Coal in the Sea as the book that sent her searching for others who were wrestling with questions of faith. “I feel like my faith is bigger because of her,” she said. L’Engle challenged her to read Scripture as story and to see nuance instead of binaries, concepts that would’ve been heretical in the church of her childhood.
Religion writer Jana Riess remembers discovering Madeleine’s fiction when she was a child, “and that’s when I began to think a little more seriously about faith for myself,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t say it was the only catalyst or anything dramatic like that. But it was definitely an influence, through her characters, that there were other kinds of Christian faith than the one—the pretty predictable one—that I felt was around me.” For Jana, “church was part of the culture, people went to church, it was expected, it wasn’t a source of excitement, spiritually or intellectually for people my age. And in her books you could see something so much bigger, so much more interesting and fluid and exciting.”
Thomas Bona, a Catholic-turned-Mennonite from the Bronx, was introduced to L’Engle’s work at a fortuitous time: right after the “first real challenge” to his faith. Though twenty years ago, the memory is seared into his brain. It was at a church camp during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years in college. One night a camp counselor spoke in tongues, placing his hand on Bona’s head. The program director across the room began to translate. “She was saying things like, speaking as if the voice of God, ‘Oh Thomas, you used to have so much faith, you used to believe so much, now you doubt. What happened? You used to be on fire for me and now you’re not, and I can feel the flames of hell below us,’” he remembers. “I was paralyzed.”
Thereafter he was torn by second guesses. If he didn’t believe the way these faithful people did, he wondered, was he still believing? He grew to resent what happened. “Had those feelings festered, I don’t know that I’d still be a Christian.”
But then Madeleine intervened. A church leader lent him some books when he returned from camp, including the Genesis Trilogy. Bona appreciates L’Engle’s “joyful uncertainty,” he said. “She really wasn’t like, ‘here’s why you should be a Christian.’ She was like, ‘here’s why I’m a Christian.’” He can still quote whole lines from the book. The surprises continued for him when he returned to Goshen College that fall. “Madeleine was there waiting for me,” he said. She had come to speak. “I felt so blessed that God shared with me her work that summer in a really painful, really vulnerable time.”
• • • •
The more stories like these that I hear, the more I’m convinced that Madeleine’s mission as apologist to the wavering, the wounded, the wondering, was a resounding success. She has helped many of us cling to faith when our basic worldview is being challenged by our own universe-disturbing questions. She has encouraged us to rethink our theological assumptions about what’s safe versus what’s sacred. She’s challenged our narrow reading of Scripture (“How does engaging this passage as poetry, rather than as journalism, change the way I understand it?”). Even more importantly, she has kept many of us from giving up altogether on the church.
But how did she, herself, arrive here? What steps in her spiritual journey led to this unique approach?
Chapter Three
TRUTH and STORY
Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons.
Walking on Water
Back when I was a full-time church youth director in my twenties, I could count on a panicked parent or parishioner approaching me annually, right before prom, with some flyer about “teen issues.” “Why aren’t you warning our kids about this stuff?” they would ask, “Why don’t you teach a session on drugs and alcohol?” I tried to explain: Our teens were already overinformed. They were drowning in facts about sex and substance abuse—at school, at home, via targeted marketing—and these facts didn’t seem to be particularly persuasive.
And anyway, why should “teen issues” be the only things youth supposedly cared about—issues, incidentally, that were not invented by teenagers? Why should their experience of faith be reduced to a long list of thin commands: don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t disobey your parents, don’t have sex? As if a list of rules were the only thing our faith communities had to offer. As if rule-keeping were the only reason Christianity mattered, the only reason Christ died.
We have a better story to tell, I insisted. If we don’t tell it, who will?
I never articulated my reasons very well. I didn’t always convince even myself. There were days when I wondered, What if my job is to be like Ulysses sailing his crew past the Island of Sirens? What if the best I can do is tell everyone, “It’s gonna get really bad. You’re gonna really want to do something that’s really bad”—then distribute earplugs and strap myself to the mast?
Nevertheless, I hosted book groups for middle schoolers in which we read things like The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis. Always in the back of my mind were the words of Madeleine L’Engle in The Rock That Is Higher: “Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”1 Ultimately, I decided, if I want young people to understand that their actions have significance, I’m not going to read kids a tract on substance abuse: I’m going to tell them a story.
It’s what Jesus did with the parables, after all. “Who is my neighbor?” an expert in religious law asked him in Luke 10:29; and instead of listing five precepts about neighborliness, Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho . . .” Sermonizing on the topic would’ve bored his listeners and sent the questioner away feeling justified (the lawyer knew Scripture backward and forward already). But telling a story meant they would listen; it would lodge in their memories; they’d be mulling it over for days, months, years. Truth sneaks in through the back door of the imagination, while our defenses are down, when it has a greater chance of changing us from the inside out. Let those who have ears, hear.
Story, at its heart, is one of the primary modes in which God speaks to us. And thus it’s one of the primary vehicles of God’s truth. But it’s also formative truth: the best, most ennobling stories have the power to shape our actions. “Rather than taking the child away from the real world,” Madeleine asserted, “such stories are preparation for living
in the real world with courage and expectancy.”2 The question is, where did Madeleine gain the wisdom and confidence to say such things?
• • • •
I’ve already mentioned Madeleine’s lonely childhood reading books and writing stories because her parents were so often absent. But Madeleine also claimed that “the greatest gift my mother gave me, besides her love, was story. She was a wonderful storyteller, especially about her childhood in the South. . . . ‘Tell me a story,’ I would beg, and my mother would take me in imagination back to her world so different from mine.”3 Before leaving for the opera, her mother would pause at bedtime and give Madeleine a bit of herself, a memory to treasure. Those stories shaped Madeleine’s sense of family identity significantly and sometimes later resurfaced, fictionalized, in her novels like The Other Side of the Sun (1971). As a child, they helped her feel less alone.
At boarding school she was miserable and even “psychologically abused” by inept and cruel teachers, which is why, “possibly as a defense against the troubled, everyday world of my childhood, for nourishment I learned to rely more and more on the private world that I discovered in books.”4 Madeleine’s maternal grandfather, who lived in Europe, regularly sent her English children’s literature, which was unlike any of the forgettable things she was supposed to be reading for class. Books by E. Nesbit (The Railway Children), Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden), and Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)—all nurtured her imagination, along with the Scandinavian fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and works by North American authors like L. M. Montgomery.
“I’m particularly grateful that I was allowed to read my Bible as I read my other books,” she wrote in Walking on Water, “to read it as story, that story which is a revelation of truth. People are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they are taught about it, and I’m grateful that I was able to read the Book with the same wonder and joy with which I read The Ice Princess or The Tempest . . .”5 She would later claim that she was grateful her parents slept in too late to take her to Sunday school; it shielded her from those well-meaning teachers who foreclose on—and even at times distort—what a Bible story means. (I say this as a Sunday school teacher myself.)
Her engagement with all of these books was deeply formative. They nourished “the same hunger in me, the hunger for the truth that is beyond fact, the hunger for courage and hope in a difficult world, the hunger for something more than ordinary vision.”6 But the one author who not only cultivated that hunger but fed her solid spiritual meat was the nineteenth-century Scottish minister and writer, George MacDonald.
Author of children’s literature such as At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin, among other fairy tales, MacDonald saw storytelling as a moral enterprise: “In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey—and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.”7 That’s because the storyteller is not, ultimately, the source of storytelling: God is—and, for MacDonald, we cannot avoid accountability to the original Storyteller for the moral universe he has created. But that doesn’t mean we bludgeon our readers over the heads with overt statements of Christian belief. MacDonald wrote in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.” For a preacher, this was particularly hard; MacDonald, throughout his fiction, seemed unable to occasionally refrain from sermonizing. But his chief desire was that “if there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.”
And wake, it did. C. S. Lewis, for example, was in his teens, already an avowed atheist, when he picked up MacDonald’s Phantastes at a train station sometime in 1916 and, a few hours later, knew he had “crossed a great frontier.”8 What it did to him, Lewis claimed, “was to convert, even to baptize . . . my imagination.” The conversions of his conscience and intellect were to come much later; but the experience of “goodness” or holiness in the story—and the longing that sparked in him—was the catalyst for transformation. Lewis would go on to credit MacDonald for influencing everything from his understanding of heaven to his trust in the great love of God.
The same was true of Madeleine. In a little-known essay on the topic, “George MacDonald: Nourishment for a Private World”—which Madeleine wrote for a book with other members of the Chrysostom Society originally titled Reality and Vision, edited by Philip Yancey—she described how MacDonald shaped her understanding of God. MacDonald depicted God as “a loving Father who knows that sometimes ‘No’ is the only possible answer of Love, a Father who can be trusted, who understands laughter and tears, a Father who is nothing like the stern, Victorian image.”9 She also celebrated MacDonald’s depiction of “wise women” such as the North Wind in At the Back of the North Wind, and the great-grandmother in The Princess and the Goblin, both of whom serve as mysterious, occasionally frightening, mentors and guides, much like the Holy Spirit.
So how does a lonely child come to understand that she is uniquely loved by God? That she, like each of us, matters? Through stories, Madeleine asserted. Through the writings of authors like George MacDonald. Through the kinds of books that she, herself, would go on to write one day.
• • • •
When I first began publishing my own books for teens on spiritual themes in great literature, it was because I had found so few resources out there. And no wonder. It’s an embattled topic, as I learned the hard way. To wit, here’s an early Amazon review of my book Walking with Frodo: A Devotional Journey through The Lord of the Rings:
Never in my life have I heard of such rubbish. The Word of God is to be the only basic source for the study of God’s Word—not a trilogy of fantasy novels. Many Christians are becoming so wrapped up in pop culture that they have trouble differentiating the difference between the fictional events found within The Lord of the Rings and the true, inerrant Word of God. We need to get out of Middle-Earth and into the real world. You cannot find strength, guidance, and spiritual power in a fictional collection of stories, regardless of whether or not they are allegories of the Christian’s journey. Walking With Frodo?! Is this meant to equate Frodo with Jesus Christ? Reality check: Frodo was never real, Middle-Earth was never real, and all the events which took place within Tolkien’s world never happened. Christ was real, however. The battles He faced and the battles we face are very real, and we therefore should not waste our time in thinking that this garbage will assist us in them.
Pause. Keep in mind this sort of attack was par for the course for someone like Madeleine. (It also helped that other reviewers chimed in with everything from a thoughtful, well-researched defense of The Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien, to the obvious “Has the reviewer actually read the book?”10) I knew I was in good company, a literary tradition of readers and authors who—like Jesus with the parables—trusted the Holy Spirit to convey truth through the vehicle of story.
To understand Madeleine in context, as the direct literary heir of a particular strand of Christianity, let’s back up a moment. Let’s define what we mean by story—or, more broadly, myth—and how our understanding of myth shapes what we think about the claims of Christianity. I find it helpful to look at it from four views11:
View #1: All myths are untrue, including Christianity. This first view sees myth (cultural stories, legends, fairy tales) as humankind’s attempt to make sense of a senseless world through sheer invention. This view is atheistic, existentialist: life has only the meaning that we bring to it. There is no inherent purpose to the universe: we create that purpose. Myths are unverifiable, unscientific, devoid of facts, and thus completely untrue. This view is also relativistic: if every worldview is essentially made up, then no one worldview or story is better than any other. In that sense, the Christian gospel is just another myth, lumped in there with everything else.
View #2: All
myths are untrue; but the Bible is literal fact. The flipside of the above, one we’ve already heard expressed by my Amazon reviewer, is that everything except the Bible is false. The Bible is fact: it shares nothing in common with story or myth at all. Further, there is no truth outside of a literal reading of Scripture. Allegorical or even mythic interpretations of Scripture are therefore lies—or worse, deceptions propagated by the devil to drive us away from the truth.
View #3: All myths participate in truth; Christianity is no truer than any other story. This view—what we might think of as agnostic or “spiritual but not religious”—sees all myth as a shadow of the Real, an echo of the True, which remains veiled and mysterious. This view holds that most myths around the world share common themes (a creator, laws that must not be broken, a dying god), patterns that point to an underlying pattern to the human psyche that is both ancient and spiritual. It’s a view made famous by mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and since embraced by many postmoderns. Like the first view, this one is relativistic: since all myths are attempts to articulate what psychiatrist Carl Jung called universal archetypes, no one myth is truer than any other—including Christianity.
View #4: All myths participate in truth, but Christianity is the Myth-Become-Fact. This final view of myth is the flipside of the above but with a uniquely Christian twist. It says that myths give us glimpses of a larger narrative that undergirds the universe: a story that will one day be revealed in full. Through the world’s great legends and stories we catch hints now and then of what C. S. Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien called the “True Myth.” For them, the veil over the Real has lifted, uniquely, in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The Mystery has taken on flesh and blood; the whole pattern and purpose to our human story has become known; myth has collided with history. As Tolkien wrote in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,”
