by Sarah Arthur
More importantly, for Sarah, were the female protagonists. “It gave me permission to be smart,” she said. “For a lot of us Gen-X girls coming up, a lot of that literature was really new for us, and so finding strong female heroines—that were smart and interested and empowered, had agency—gave me permission, whether it was implicit or explicit. And I don’t know that I would be the person I am now if I hadn’t ingested a steady diet of all these fictional heroines who knew what they were doing.”
For Jana Riess, the formative power of Madeleine’s books came through a time of great personal pain. She was a teen when her father left the family: “He took my entire college savings, he basically took off and it was devastating. He left no warning, no forwarding address, he emptied out the bank account. It was a terrible kind of betrayal.” She recalls the family trying to rebuild after losing everything, including his income—which meant they were plunged into poverty; her mother was now a single parent trying to make ends meet. “One of the books I read was A House Like a Lotus . . . a story of forgiveness, a story of how a high school young woman has her mind opened through a relationship with an older mentor [Max]. And this mentor ends up betraying her. I read that book over and over again. It was instrumental in helping me to forgive my father.”
Several years later, when L’Engle came to give the commencement address at Wellesley College, Jana arranged to be her chaperone. “After this exhausting day where we’d picked her up at the airport and taken her to her book signing and then taken her to dinner, where she hadn’t had a minute to herself, I basically followed her into her room with her suitcase,” Jana recalled. “I’m sure that all she wanted was a moment to herself, but instead I said, ‘I wanted to tell you how much that particular book meant to me and has helped me to forgive an adult who betrayed me.’ And all she said—she kind of smiled and she said—‘I had a Max, too.’” Madeleine didn’t elaborate, but for Jana, “it was a meaningful moment for me to see the example of who she was and what she’d done with her life, and whatever betrayal had happened when she was young had not defined her.”
For believers who pray the same prayers week after week, who come to the Communion table expecting to be changed, we must claim that it is possible for lives to be rescripted. We must assert that it’s possible for habits and language to be reshaped by a different, more powerful story. The seeds for critiquing our behavior—indeed, for critiquing the tradition itself—are there inside the narrative we claim. The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn’t even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.
• • • •
I once heard a pastor contrast Ulysses’s actions with those of Orpheus. Son of the muse Calliope and the god Apollo, Orpheus was the greatest poet and musician of Greek legend. Like Ulysses, he too sailed with a ship’s crew past the Island of Sirens. But did he simply distribute the earplugs and hope for the best? No. The poet knew he could sing a more compelling song. He had a better story, a gift that would make the Sirens sound like the monsters they were. So as the ship passed the island, he played his lyre and told his tale. And the crew was so enchanted that not a man among them flung himself overboard.
Madeleine told a better story. This was her quest, to point others to the very same “light so lovely” that she herself had caught glimpses of through great literature as a child. Her stories were icons pointing to a source of truth beyond themselves and thus had formative potential for her readers.
But when, in her own spiritual formation, did she learn to call the source of truth by the name of Christ? At what point did her private enjoyment of God, while alone reading in her room, shift to communal worship with other believers?
Chapter Four
FAITH and SCIENCE
It was the scientists, with their questions, their awed rapture at the glory of the created universe, who helped to convert me.
Walking on Water
The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I attended a two-week arts camp at Adrian College in mid-Michigan. We were an eclectic bunch: angst-ridden poets, painters in tie-dye, nerdy novelists, the occasional photographer. None of us were angling for careers in science. But one clear evening we were told the college’s rooftop observatory would be open later that night for anyone who wanted a good view, through the telescope, of Saturn’s rings.
We showed up in force. Maybe it was excitement about a sanctioned late night out; maybe it was our longing for wonder. More likely it was the off-chance that a hand we hoped to hold might be available in the dark. Whatever the case, a line of maybe a hundred students slowly snaked its way up an uninspiring cinderblock stairwell toward the rooftop, each step lit overhead by ugly fluorescent lights and exit signs, all of us chattering at top volume about the usual nothings.
It was a long wait. Each student, we were told, would be given a minute to look through the telescope, and between each viewing the instrument’s operator had to readjust it for the next person. To those in line, it felt like we were stuck in the stairwell half the night. But then it was my turn. One moment I was giggling with a friend, the next I was being summoned forth into a darkened dome by the instructor, who helped me onto a platform so I could reach the lens of the huge telescope pointed at a rectangular opening in the ceiling.
“Hurry,” he said. “It’s moving.”
“What’s moving?” I peered into the telescope. I’d imagined those close-ups of Saturn taken by NASA orbiters, the ones depicting a gorgeous ringed planet suspended in space, unperturbed and still. Instead I saw, 746 million miles away, a tiny white oblong, slightly stretched, with cartoon-like rings. And it was moving. No, it was zooming. It was hurtling in a straight, unrelenting line across nothingness.
“The earth is moving,” the instructor said. “That’s why I have to keep adjusting the telescope.”
Suddenly my knees gave way. Underneath me the earth was spinning; it had always been spinning; we were improbably, impossibly clinging to a speck bombing through space. I was about to fall off.
He grabbed my arm. “Whoa, there! You okay?”
I nodded, speechless. He helped me off the platform. I stepped away, and it was someone else’s turn. But returning to the stairwell and the fluorescent lights and the nonsense banter would be impossible now.
How could I have thought any of it mattered, any of those small, petty, wasted obsessions and conversations? How could anything matter again except the stark reality that my small earth, which held everything I knew and loved, was just one tiny dot, like that cartoon oval, hurtling through nothing? And yet my Christian upbringing had taught me that God made it. And further, God loved it and cared about its ultimate end. That he created and loved every one of us, loved all the angst and nerdiness and longing crammed under the exit signs. That he cared about me.
I didn’t want to go back to the dorm then. I wanted to light a candle in a darkened sanctuary. I wanted to sing a hushed hymn under a vaulted, starlit sky. I wanted to write the story of such a cosmos, of such a God, forever and ever. Heading back to my room, surrounded by caterwauling peers—none of whom seemed half as awed as I did—I felt more small and alone, yet more significant and loved, than ever before.
Let’s just say it was a Madeleine kind of moment.
• • • •
“Wonder,” says Hope College chaplain Trygve Johnson, “is the prelude to worship.” No one understood that better than Madeleine herself. Her sense of wonder about the created universe began as a very young child, with one of her earliest memories:
I was visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage in north Florida. It must have been an unusually glorious night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake up the baby and show her the s
tars.” Someone came to my room, perhaps my father, and untucked the mosquito netting, picked me up, and carried me out onto the beach, into the night. And that was my first vision of night, of the glory of the stars, my first totally intuitive understanding that there is more to this world than the ordinary dailiness that makes up the small child’s world, and where, as grown-ups, we are often stuck.1
Ever afterward she would say, “When my faith falters, when I feel God’s absence, when I am moving through the night of the soul, if I can see a sky full of stars my heart always lifts.”2
Anyone familiar with both Madeleine’s fiction and her memoirs instantly recognizes in this early childhood experience the symbolic precursor to the “star-watching rock.” According to her granddaughter Charlotte, there’s no single rock near Crosswicks with that label; Madeleine used it to refer to any rock or outcropping from which you can watch the stars. Throughout Madeleine’s memoirs she describes hiking to such rocks for solace, to unwind, to reflect. On one occasion, after a carnival in which some of the children had been given loud, garish toy trumpets, the family went to a rock, where they “welcomed the arrival of each star with a blast of a trumpet.”3 They were surrounded by singing insects with whom they joined in chorus, “outsinging them with all the nursery rhymes and songs and hymns we could think of which had stars and alleluias in them.”4 There it is: wonder, the prelude to worship.
In Madeleine’s fiction, the star-watching rock, located in a field beyond the Murrys’ farmhouse, is not only the gateway to wonder but also the portal to participation in the cosmic battle between light and darkness. It’s even, as in A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) and An Acceptable Time (1989), the launch site for traveling to the past. In the opening pages of An Acceptable Time, Polly O’Keefe, Meg’s daughter, makes her way to the rock, where she’s startled to find the ever-angsty, boding-nogood Zachary Gray (who also appears, like Canon Tallis and Adam Eddington, in both the Austin and O’Keefe series). “It’s a wonderful place to lie and watch the stars,” she tells him, as if to assert the rock’s true purpose over and against whatever romantic agenda he may have. “It’s my mother’s favorite rock, from when she was a child.”5 When, a few pages later, the rock is where Polly’s time-traveling adventures begin, no one who knows Madeleine is surprised.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands,” says the psalmist in Psalm 19:1. Creation points to the Creator, and it’s this God whom we worship. But it’s also that same God with whom we have our biggest arguments, about whom we have our biggest questions. Does this God, in fact, love us? If so, why suffering? Why horrific brokenness and destruction, pain and death? Why such seeming abandonment? And why, oh why the flawed, awkward, insular, even at times hurtful community of people known as the church?
Madeleine may have grown up with an intuitive sense of God’s loving presence, but her journey from solitary to communal worship was not made overnight. When her father died far too young, when she was just seventeen, her foundations were shaken:
I had not encountered a theology as wild and strong as [Saint] Gregory’s when Father died. I had to struggle alone, and all I knew was that Father’s death caused me to ask questions for which I could find no answer, and I was living in a world which believed that all questions are answerable. I, too, believe that all questions are answerable, but not in scientific terms, or in the language of provable fact.6
After a troubling conversation with a cynical peer, who questioned whether Madeleine’s father did, in fact, still exist somewhere after death, she found herself affirming, or at least demanding, that we should not be abandoned by the God who made us. “I did feel, and passionately, that it wasn’t fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn’t intend to teach us the answers.”7
Her Anglican upbringing had taught her to stuff her emotions, to press on without help; so she finished college and began writing, began working in theater, began dating. It was a tumultuous, crowded time: she was constantly surrounded by apartment-mates or traveling with theater companies. Late at night, she describes in Two-Part Invention, she would slip in the back of the Church of the Ascension at the corner of Tenth and Fifth (it was open twenty-four hours), just sitting and thinking, “not so much to pray as to take time to be.”8 But this was the extent of her churchgoing at the time.
Eventually Madeleine met Hugh, who himself had little interest in church after a conservative Baptist upbringing in Oklahoma. They talked about everything, it seemed, except faith. “We were articulate about the theatre, about books, about music, and amazingly inarticulate about our feelings.”9 One gets the sense that this remained the case throughout their married life, including when it came to Madeleine’s insatiable theological curiosity.
It was after Hugh and Madeleine had married and settled in Goshen for that difficult decade of the 1950s—raising small children, running a general store, and struggling with her stalled publishing career—that her questions returned in force. The local Congregational minister (rather controversially, one could argue) not only asked her to direct the choir but to teach Sunday school. “I explained to the minister that I didn’t really believe in God, but I couldn’t live as though I didn’t believe in him,” Madeleine said in a 1979 interview for Christianity Today magazine. “I found life intolerable without God, so I lived as though I believed in God. I asked him, ‘Is that enough for you?’”10 Apparently, it was enough for him. She soon realized, through teaching teens, the inadequacy of trying to boil Christian belief down to a list of provable facts (trust me, sister, I’ve been there).
Her clergy friends also didn’t dismiss her cosmic questions. In well-meaning efforts—after exhausting their own repertoires of responses, I’m guessing—they suggested she read the German theologians she would later deride for putting her to sleep. Whenever she humorously retold this story (it became part of her regular set list, cropping up in multiple books and lectures), she almost never named which theologians, exactly, although Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and even philosopher Immanuel Kant are strong contenders. Madeleine fictionalized this experience in her 1982 novel A Severed Wasp featuring Katherine Vigneras (née Forrester, who had previously appeared in Madeleine’s debut novel, The Small Rain, 1945):
[Katherine] repeated her bedtime routine, warm bath, slow drying, a book—not the mystery she was currently enjoying, but philosophy; Kant; she never got very far with Kant; the long Germanic sentences bored her, so that her lids began to droop. It was Wolfi [the nickname for her good friend, a Cardinal] who had first suggested using Kant as a soporific, “or almost any German theologian. It is said that we German theologians are the deepest-down-divingest, longest-staying-underest, most-with-mud-coming-uppest, thinkers who ever lived.”11
Though Madeleine could laugh about it later, reading those theologians’ attempts to define God and faith according to reasoned argument rubbed her the wrong way. “I asked questions, cosmic questions, and the German theologians answered them all—and they were questions which should not have been answered in such a finite, laboratory-proof manner. I read their rigid answers, and I thought sadly, If I have to believe all this limiting of God, then I cannot be a Christian. And I wanted to be one.”12 Like her character Katherine, “more mud was the last thing she needed. Theology was not helping her now.”13
Meanwhile, she had begun taking an interest in the work of theoretical physicists. This part of her story, by the way, feels like the biggest non sequitur, and I’m not going to pretend it follows naturally from what we’ve understood about her so far. Was her interest sparked by the death of Albert Einstein in 1955 and the accompanying flurry of articles and commentary about his life and work?14 Whatever the case, this sudden obsession became a spiritual turning point. “Einstein wrote that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe and amazement at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burned-out candle,” Madeleine wrote years later.15 “I had found my theolog
ian!”
Reading Einstein and others, she said, “opened up a world where I could conceive of a loving God who really could note the fall of every sparrow and count the hairs on every head.”16 She began to realize that if the Being behind the universe not only created and keeps track of every last particle but also loves this small planet enough to have become one of us, then Christianity was a faith worth claiming.
Madeleine was especially captured by the notion of “particularity,” or what theologians sometimes called “the scandal of particularity”—that God chose a particular time (first-century Palestine) and a particular people (the Jews) and one particular man (Jesus of Nazareth) through which to enact the redemption of all things. “I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars,” Madeleine said. “I can understand God only through one specific particular, the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the ultimate particular, which gives me my understanding of the Creator and of the beauty of life. I believe that God loved us so much that he came to us as a human being, as one of us, to show us his love.”17
It would take many more years before Madeleine recognized that embedding oneself in a specific worshiping congregation, with all its faults and inadequacies, is one key way of affirming the Incarnation. “If I go to services with reasonable regularity,” she wrote in The Irrational Season, in 1977, “it is largely because I believe that if I am attempting to understand what it means to be Christian, this cannot be done in lofty isolation.”18 Worshiping God in the sanctuary of creation, under the vaulted sky, is powerful, yes. But we can’t simply settle for generalities, forever only worshiping at no place in particular. Despite our frustration and disenchantment with human beings, eventually we must also take the difficult step of claiming a specific Body of people, with its unique grammar and practices, on one specific patch of earth—for better or worse. “So I go to church,” she wrote, “not for any legalistic or moralistic reasons, but because I am a hungry sheep who needs to be fed; and for the same reason that I wear a wedding ring: a public witness of a private commitment.”19
