A Light So Lovely

by Sarah Arthur

  It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed . . . The Christian joy, the Gloria . . . is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.12

  Before meeting Tolkien in the 1920s, Lewis had held the first view: myths were man’s attempts to make sense of a senseless world. All myths, including the Christian gospel, were not true—beautiful, but not true. But then he met Tolkien, and slowly Lewis started to come around to the latter category. In Christianity, he realized, myth became fact. In a later essay Lewis summed it up like this: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact . . . It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.”13

  This is the Christian literary legacy of which Madeleine was a direct cousin. Unlike Lewis, however, who converted rather spectacularly from atheism to Christian orthodoxy, Madeleine started out squarely in liberalism, a genuine seeker. “Myth is, for me, the vehicle of truth. Myth is where you look for reality. Myth is how God speaks to us . . . We do not say that myth is the truth. We say that myth is our striving toward truth.”14 Only in later midlife—through a kind of deepening rather than a conversion (as we’ll explore in chapter four)—did she begin to embrace a Christ-centered orthodoxy, “the ultimate unfathomable mystery of the Word made flesh.”15

  She would go on to write, “If I speak of the Christian myth it is assumed not only that I am certainly not a fundamentalist, but that I am an intellectual who does not need God and speak with proper condescension of the rather silly stories which should be outgrown at puberty. But I am far closer to the fundamentalist than the atheist when I speak of myth as truth.”16 As with Lewis and Tolkien, she was intrigued by the idea that the best “myth” of all—the story that touches and enchants and changes us the most—became historical fact in Jesus Christ. Jesus is not just any old hero from any old story; Jesus is wholly unique, the Savior of the world. His story is the True Myth. All the best stories echo the True Myth; and all the best mythmakers only do what they do because they are made in the image of a Maker who stepped into human history.

  Madeleine wrote, “Jung says that we are a sick society because we have lost a valid myth to live by, and in my small back room I was absorbing a mythic view of the universe, a universe created by a power of love far too great to be understood or explained by tenets or dogmas.”17 For the writers of faith, this is how we give young readers hope that their small lives matter, “matter cosmically.” This is our spiritual task.

  • • • •

  Madeleine was turned off by the idea that faith can be reduced to a bunch of principles that intellectually must be affirmed rather than a Person whose Story and way of life must be embraced. Truth is not some abstract idea out there, as if we can divorce it from the story we inhabit as Christians, as humans. “It? It?” Madeleine demanded, “For truth we can read Jesus. Jesus is truth. If we accept that Jesus is truth, we accept an enormous demand: Jesus is wholly God, and Jesus is wholly human. Dare we believe that? If we believe in Jesus, we must.”18

  I’m reminded of the youth worker who pressed me, during a Q&A at Duke Divinity School about my book The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry, on whether I believed in “absolute truth.” Taken aback, I found myself insisting, “I believe in Jesus, who is the Truth.” We volleyed a bit until the instructor (my good friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth DeGaynor) asked me, “Sarah, why are you being so slippery about this question?” to which I responded, laughing, “Because so was Jesus when Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth’?” The youth worker—whose previous career, I later learned, was litigation—likewise laughed and said, “So, am I Pilate in this story?”

  Many of us were taught that one must have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ in order to be truly Christian, which involves assent to basic principles, agreement with certain “absolute truths,” as the youth worker said:

  God is the maker of everything.

  Jesus is God.

  He died on a cross and was resurrected from the dead for our salvation.

  Confessing Jesus as Lord gives us forgiveness of sins and eternal life with God.

  And so on.

  These are all vital Christian beliefs. And yet, it’s worth asking why Jesus didn’t state them in exactly this way, over and over and over again, to anyone who would listen? Why veil them behind stories, hide them in parables, embody them in practices of healing, in miracles, in poetry like the Beatitudes, in cryptic statements that biblical scholars still can’t quite explain? Why do we assume our methods for sharing the good news should be blunter than Jesus’s own approach?

  And meanwhile, many of us were also taught to view the imagination with skepticism. As Luci Shaw told me, when she first asked Madeleine in the late 1970s to write a book on faith and art, “There hadn’t been much literature written that joined those two ways of thinking about life. And in fact, in those days, I think particularly in the Christian community, poetry was considered frivolous and not really worth spending time with. And it could lead you astray. I remember someone quoting the book of Genesis to me about the imaginations of your heart and ‘all the imaginations of their hearts were only evil continually [see Genesis 6:5 KJV]’; so that was the context in which imagination was received in many conservative circles.”

  Visual artist Makoto Fujimura (Culture Care) told me, “Madeleine gave us the language to value imagination. That gift resonates in the gap between art and religion, but also for society at large.” Indeed, the imagination plays a vital role in spiritual formation. Without it, we can’t visualize the ancient world of the Scriptures; we can’t grasp the metaphors of Jesus’s parables; we can’t practice empathy by seeing things from someone else’s perspective, nor picture the people we’re interceding for in prayer. We can’t trace a pattern of meaning in the events of our lives, and we can’t dream a better dream for the future God has in store. Someone might give us all the knowledge and information there is to know about Jesus, but it takes the Holy Spirit at work in the imagination to connect the dots to our real lives on the ground.

  “When we try to define and over-define and narrow down,” Madeleine wrote, “we lose the story the Maker of the Universe is telling us in the Gospels. I do not want to explain the Gospels; I want to enjoy them.”19 Those of us from Reformed backgrounds instantly recognize echoes of the Westminster Catechism, through which we were taught that the “chief end” of humankind is “to love God and enjoy Him forever.” It’s not, chiefly, to understand God. It’s not, firstly, to get all our theology right. It’s to delight. Love. Worship.

  This can happen with the child alone in her apartment reading stories. But spiritual formation can’t just be a private enterprise. As Madeleine eventually began to understand, it takes place best within the faith community as it gathers for its main worship service: through music, prayer, hearing or telling biblical narratives, testimony, creeds—all of which constitute a deep well that nurtures the human heart and imagination with meanings that may not be intellectually graspable. The mentally disabled kid in the front row can encounter Jesus while taking Communion even if he can’t string together the words to tell you who Jesus is or what Jesus has done for us. We affirm the faith by participating in its communal stories together.

  Madeleine also eventually recognized that simply hearing and telling stories is not enough. After all, it was her fellow Christians who were her fiercest critics, and hadn’t they read the same Bible stories she did? Didn’t they worship the same God? Madeleine began to realize that we can’t neglect to talk about the Bible, about worship, about the key doctri
nes of faith as a way to help us articulate who God is and what God is up to. As she penned her various reflections on Scripture—things like the Genesis Trilogy, for example—she first engaged in wondering, then second, in stepping back to reflect. She said in And It Was Good, “I believe in the Bible as the living Word of God. But this faith involves an acceptance that the Bible is not static, that at different times the living Word can speak in different ways to different ears, and that even the Bible itself can never fully express or manifest the glory of the Creator. That does not make it any less the living Word. It is because it lives that it moves.”20

  Rather than jumping immediately to ideas about the Bible—say, three points about God creating the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1—she gave readers permission to encounter the story, to walk around inside it, to pause and wonder, to hear it in context. If we must extract three points from the creation account, let’s at least refrain from announcing, “What the biblical author really means here is . . .” Really? We can say this better than the story itself? What if the story is what the Bible really means? The form of narrative carries the point and cannot be divorced from it.

  It boils down to the question of whether we’re comfortable—as Jesus was with the parables—in letting the story not merely deliver some other point but to actually be the point. When I ask my son, “What did you learn in Sunday school today?” am I expecting him to repeat some moral lesson about sharing? Or am I comfortable with him replying, “Once there was a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho . . .”?

  In short, do I trust the Holy Spirit?

  • • • •

  Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, wrote, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”21 Picture a teenager letting herself into the house after school. One text from her boyfriend (“can I come over”), and the narrative now can go several ways. But whatever she chooses will not be an isolated incident, as if this young woman only has a moral life when a decision faces her. What the next chapter of her afternoon holds has everything to do with the story that her life is already telling, the stories she embraces that have shaped her to be one kind of person over another.

  Of what stories do I find myself a part? From birth we inhabit stories (usually more than one) that began long before we got here and will continue long after we’re gone. We become part of narratives that are both spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and implied. And those narratives differ from family to family, community to community. How you act is influenced less by your acceptance of universal commands (“Don’t get drunk”) and more by the narratives your family or community tells itself (“Uncle Ron drank himself to death”).

  This is why stories get told and retold every year, every month, every time you sit down for dinner. Because it is through the stories that we learn who we are, what our community values, what our next line is supposed to be. “Deprive children of stories,” MacIntyre says, “and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources.”22 In short, we are story-shaped people.

  This point must not be confused with strict determinism, in which the odds are stacked against someone before she is conceived. It is not enough to tell young people, “Bummer. I wish you had been born into a different story.” Such a response is on the same inadequate level as simply giving youth a list of bald commands and expecting them to be heroes in a moment of crisis. On the one hand we’re saying, “You can’t do anything about the story you find yourself in,” while on the other hand we’re saying, “There is no story except the story you choose when you have no story” (to quote theologian Stanley Hauerwas). In either case we have failed to offer an alternative narrative that has the power to transform the plot, the action, the script, the set, the entire stage of a person’s life.

  In her teen fiction, Madeleine was at times completely unsubtle about the kind of narrative forces that she believed shaped her main characters to act morally in the critical moment. In Meet the Austins, Vicky’s grandfather, a clergyman, displays a poem on the walls of his loft, which Madeleine attributes to “Thomas Browne”23:

  If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,

  Like to a shell dishabited,

  Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf,

  And say—“This is not dead,”—

  And fill thee with Himself instead.

  But thou art all replete with very thou

  And hast such shrewd activity,

  That, when He comes, He says—“This is enow

  Unto itself—’Twere better let it be,

  It is so small and full, there is no room for Me.”

  The poem gains in significance by the fourth book in the Austin Family Chronicles, A Ring of Endless Light, when Grandfather is diagnosed with cancer and Vicky herself attempts poetry of her own. Vicky learns that it’s only in a kind of dying to self, of self-emptying (see Philippians 2:5–11), that we make room for God and others.

  In example after example, Madeleine surrounds her characters with great literature, with quotes and songs from Scripture, with grown-up saints (flawed but not ruined), and with stories from history. She gives them mentors like Mrs Whatsit, who school them gently in a moral universe that requires certain actions if the story is to make the joyful turn. Madeleine gives them companions and guides—fellow teens but also key adults—who aren’t afraid to affirm what is good and right in the main characters’ essential nature and who hold them accountable to acting accordingly.

  Here is an author who doesn’t foreclose on what teens are supposedly interested in. Most of Madeleine’s novels are family stories, for starters. Sara Zarr told me that, when writing The Lucy Variations, “I was very conscious that this was my ‘Madeleine L’Engle book,’ because it was full of classical music and adults. They don’t break out into hymns around the fire, but it had that feeling of teenagers in a world of adults where there are a lot of adult things going on in a way I associate with L’Engle. That was my favorite kind of book when I was a teen, a young adult.” Unlike contemporary YA lit, which often insists that young people prefer stories of teens operating in the world with no parental oversight, Madeleine gives us large families, tight-knit families, like the Murrys and O’Keefes. And many of their quests center around restoring family health and relationships, as in Wrinkle. While our culture assumes teens are interested exclusively in sex and social status, Madeleine gives us heroines like Poly O’Keefe in The Arm of the Starfish (her name changes to “Polly” in later books) who feel out of place for being nerds—and yet who are nevertheless affirmed by the adults in their life.

  Meanwhile, many of Madeleine’s male protagonists, such as fifteen-year-old Charles Wallace in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, are endowed not just with intelligence but intuition: they grasp they’re part of a larger story that began long before they got here and will continue long after they’re gone. When a crazy South American dictator threatens nuclear annihilation of the United States, it’s Meg’s mother-in-law who delivers the ancient prayer of Saint Patrick to Charles Wallace and calls him to act upon it. He eventually learns that his job is not to be the hero who claims victory through superior strength or even superior intelligence, but to give of himself for the greater good—to submit to a power of selfless love beyond his control.

  Novelist and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet (Auralia’s Colors) reflected with me on the tremendous gift Madeleine gave her readers by insisting on placing her characters in moments of vulnerability. “Charles Wallace and Meg are such unique heroes,” he said, “because instead of building a strategy and arming themselves and marching on to war, they step into a place of vulnerability and uncertainty. And it is the love that directs them into those places that brings about healing, sometimes at great cost
to them.”

  Jeffrey also noted how “ahead of her time” Madeleine was in the creation of Meg: “I think we cannot emphasize enough that she gave girls a protagonist, and not just a protagonist who is preoccupied with boys—although I do sometimes think that Calvin is a bit of an ideal figure. Meg has a maternal impulse toward her brother Charles Wallace; yet she’s as capable with scientific concepts as any of the male characters.” It’s the creation of protagonists like Meg “that gives girls permission and validation and freedom to be themselves beyond the really narrow stereotypes that have been given to them, especially in fantasy literature.”

  But are these kinds of stories formative? Do they, in fact, shape young people to act in ennobling ways?

  For author and blogger Sarah Bessey (Jesus Feminist), reading L’Engle coincided with when she and her parents first became Christians. No one else in the household was a reader, she told me, “so oftentimes I didn’t have anybody to talk about those things with.” She remembers reading A Wrinkle in Time “and feeling like it nearly broke my brain. But it just gave me such an expansive view of the universe and of physics and it seemed exciting and dangerous and had a lot of possibility to it.” She would go on to read the rest of the Time Quintet: “I remember the meditations that Madeleine had on naming: it left a big theological mark on me, even as a junior high kid. I remember feeling the power of those words. It really deeply connected with the new things we were learning as Christians—because we were still very new to our faith as a family—about things like the power of your tongue, the power of your speech, why what you say matters in your life, and the things that you fill your mouth with and your brain with and your soul with do show up in your life.”