by Sarah Arthur
The scandal of particularity is what God’s love looks like in person. We are, none of us, alone.
• • • •
Picture a campfire under the stars. Picture a harried mom stirring soup over the flames, one of ten thousand moms in a thousand campgrounds across Middle America. There’s her husband battling tent poles (again) and their three complaining children, one of whom is perfecting the preteen eye-roll. It’s the middle of a ten-week road trip across the United States—which probably sounded like a good idea when they first imagined it from the comfort of their country farmhouse back in Connecticut; but now, most days, it feels like an ongoing exercise in rage management. The mom retains her sanity by a quick walk to the lavatories beyond the ring of firelight while everyone is finally eating. She glances up at the canopy of galaxies overhead. Her heart leaps. Waiting for her in the tent, after everyone has gone to bed, is Albert Einstein.
Okay, so Madeleine’s bedtime reading is not what I would choose on a family camping trip. By now we’ve confirmed that Madeleine was nothing if not entirely her own person. And insatiably curious. And, it turns out, this didn’t stop once she made the turn toward Christian faith. By the late 1950s, she was firmly on the path of lifelong self-education that was nothing short of astounding—reading not only Einstein but also Max Planck, a theoretical physicist, as well as astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, for whom her character Adam Eddington is named. And many other scientists too.
When Madeleine and Hugh finally decided, in 1959, to move the family back to New York City, they first embarked on a summer-long family camping trip across the United States, which she fictionalized in the 1963 Austin Family chronicle, The Moon by Night. Her cosmic questions were still there. But now she had scholarly companions who didn’t presume, like the German theologians did, to have all the answers. “In the evenings, in the tent, I read from the box of books I had brought with me: more Einstein; Planck, and his quantum theory; books on the macrocosmic world of astrophysics; books on the microcosmic world of particle physics. There I found ideas about the nature of being which stimulated and fascinated me.”20
This was, for her, an “adventure in theology,” a way to strengthen her belief “in a God who truly cared about every atom and subatom of his creation.”21 Partway through the trip, the names of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which popped into her mind, and a dim plot for A Wrinkle in Time began to form. When the family returned, she cranked out the manuscript in three months. It was, she famously claimed, her “rebuttal to the German theologians.” It was also her “affirmation of a universe in which I could take note of all the evil and unfairness and horror and yet believe in a loving Creator.”22
But the science in her books was not subsumed under this theological quest; indeed, her fans include many scientists who find her ideas compelling. People often asked Madeleine about her “great science background,” of which she claimed to have none. She wrote in Walking on Water, “It has been a surprise and a delight to me to discover that my friends who are scientists, my son-in-law, Peter, who is a theoretical chemist, my godson, John, who is an immunologist, find the science in my fantasies to be ‘real’ and have passed them around to their friends.”23 A quick probe into science’s response to Madeleine’s work, more than fifty years out, reveals an ongoing and robust discussion.
Some hypothesize, for instance, that her ideas about time travel and the fifth dimension in Wrinkle could work mathematically, given some big assumptions. “The book talks about folding space and it talks about wrinkles in time—the idea you can take the dimensions as they are and change their shape,” said astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd. To make that work, physicists use another dimension, the fifth dimension. “Adding another dimension potentially expands the realm of what’s possible. . . . That’s what Madeleine was getting at.” O’Dowd compares Madeleine to other contemporary writers of sci-fi: “It’s art meeting science or art inspiring science.”24
String theorists—physicists whose hypotheses allows for up to ten dimensions—posit that if time travel were possible, a wormhole is probably how it would happen. A wormhole is a connection between two points in space-time, a theory Madeleine uses as a narrative device in more than one book in the Time Quintet. Her depiction of tesseracts takes artistic licenses, but she gets credit for diving into a science that was only in its infancy at the time Wrinkle was written.25
Along the way, Madeleine admitted to being hopeless at lower math. (“Now, I understand that if I have nothing, and I multiply it by three, three somethings are not suddenly going to appear. But if I have three apples, and I multiply them by zero . . . why [are they] going to vanish”?26) When she discovered higher math, she said, she understood 0 x 3 to be “a philosophical, rather than an arithmetical problem”—which she then wrote about in her 1971 novel The Other Side of the Sun. Zero, she realized, was an annihilating power, able to “X” things in its path—a concept Madeleine continued to explore in A Wind in the Door (the 1973 sequel to Wrinkle). Demonic powers, or “Echthroi,” engage in “X-ing” as a way of obliterating each living thing’s created uniqueness, and Meg Murry learns that the only way to combat the Echthroi is by “Naming” what someone or something is, by stating its particularity out loud, by affirming that it’s a beloved and irreplaceable creation.
Incidentally, the process of writing Wind didn’t come easily. Madeleine claimed she had all the characters, but the story itself was not progressing in the direction she wanted. Then an old friend, who also happened to be a physician, sent her an article on mitochondria from The New England Journal of Medicine.27 “Did that article ever disturb my universe!” Madeleine exclaimed. “I had never before heard of mitochondria. But I read that article and I knew that my book wanted to go into a mitochondrion. So I had to learn cellular biology. I had to learn a lot more cellular biology than actually appears in the book so that the cellular biology that is there would be accurate.”28 It hadn’t been until the late 1960s that the concept of mitochondrial disease and symbiosis were understood, said cancer researcher Natalya Pavlova, a L’Engle fan. By the time Wind came out in 1973, the implications of those new discoveries were still reverberating. “It’s a very important [concept] in the book,” said Pavlova, “that little components need to work together in symbiosis in order to make the world possible.”29
“What appealed to me,” said astronaut Janice Voss, of Madeleine’s fiction, “was the sense that you just figure out what you need to do to solve the problem; and you use all the resources, and you pull all these interesting technologies together, whatever you can find, to solve the problem with the help of your family and friends.” Voss explained, “And it was that combination of really focused problem-solving and a supporting team that’s exactly what’s in our space program today, as far as I can tell.”30
For fantasy author Jeffrey Overstreet, the interaction of Madeleine’s characters is precisely where science blossoms into theology. “She puts into the world of these very ambitious, very intellectual children these illustrations of wild scientific concepts,” he told me, “and proves to you that there is no line between the physical world and the spiritual world, nor any division between the sacred and the secular. That what goes on in the nucleus of the atom is an illustration of what God is doing in the cosmos, and it’s an illustration of love and the way we should relate to other people.” He continued: “And then she illustrates in some of the most painful ways, especially in Wind in the Door, what happens when love breaks down at the cellular level.”
But then, Jeffrey explained, the implications expand to the macro level. “It’s an illustration of what happens in families, in churches, what’s happening in America right now—that sort of withdrawal from other people because it’s too risky. And it makes you vulnerable, and you put up your barriers, and then life starts breaking down.” This is why Madeleine’s heroes are so unique, he said (as quoted in the previous chapter). They don’t bring about change by force, by blunt confrontation, but by placing
themselves in a position of Christlike vulnerability. Love building things back up, from the cellular level, to restore the universe.
Somehow, a woman who had no formal training in either science or theology managed to bring the two into fruitful conversation. Rather than withdraw from either, out of uncertainty or fear, she pulled up more chairs at the table. And by doing so, she expanded our imagination of what God can do. “Madeleine-lightenment,” Jeffrey jokingly called it, and he’s right.
There’s a lesson in that legacy. We have work ahead.
• • • •
Newbery winner Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia), in her introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Wrinkle, wrote:
In our world, there are the scientifically minded that scoff at the stories told by the religious and the religiously inclined who refuse to accept the theories of modern science. The first group will wonder how a woman of Madeleine L’Engle’s intellect could possibly be a Christian, and the second will wonder how a real Christian could set such store by the words of Godless scientists. But Madeleine was, first of all, a searcher for truth, and so A Wrinkle in Time draws us into a new kind of thinking. Things are truly not simply what they seem in science or in religion. And if we graduate, as she did, from Newton to Einstein, we might discover that those two worlds are not as far apart as we imagined.31
Madeleine herself often said, “I’ve never seen any conflict between science and religion, because all science can do is enlarge our vision of God.”32 (I recently heard philosopher Peter Kreeft make a similar comment during his opening plenary at the 2017 C. S. Lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan: “No scientific discovery has ever refuted any Christian doctrine, ever, in the history of the world.”) The conflict between those camps is perhaps too often overblown in public discourse, to all our loss.
This is particularly true when it comes to questions of human origin. When Madeleine herself was asked about creationism versus evolution, she just laughed and said, “There is only one question worth asking, and that is, ‘Did God make it all?’ If the answer is yes, then why get so excited about it?”33 She then went on to explain her thoughts on evolution as a mode of creation, then concluded, “But if I should find out tomorrow that it all came about in a completely different way, that would have no effect on my faith, because my faith is not based on anything so peripheral. Thank God. If it were, I’d never have made it through the past year.”
And she’s right. None of us survives a tough season in life by exclaiming, “Well, at least I know God created the world in seven days!” or “At least he used evolution, by golly.” Rather, we cling to something far more essential, the love and mercy of God in Christ, which began before any worlds were made.
Scientists themselves are often the first to tell us that science can’t explain everything. Their discoveries are ever growing, expanding, fanning out like the universe itself (some theorists even posit an infinite number of universes); and yet even as new discoveries are made, science will always fall short of explaining what it’s all here for. Not just what each particle does, but why a particle in the first place? Why the grand design? Why the anthropic moment, when the universe somehow, improbably, became able to support human life? And where is all this headed anyway?
Likewise, on the religious side of things, the Bible is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of data—nor was it intended to be. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is a poem about God’s creation of the heavens and the earth; the second chapter (also about creation) is prose. These are not two separate, even conflicting, “accounts,” as they’re so often called—as if journalistic reporting was a thing in the ancient Near East. They’re two distinct literary forms meant to render a theological portrait—and what painter’s style looks exactly like another’s? Yet both are true in the sense that both are faithful to the character of God and God’s intent in creation. Their genres, to a great extent, limit what each can include: for instance, whatever is included in Genesis 1 must fit the repetitive pattern of the poem. But each genre also comes with strengths: for instance, poetry is memorable precisely because it’s repetitive—“And God saw that it was good.” This theological refrain about the goodness of creation becomes unforgettably seared in our minds by the power of poetic structure. The details, for this poet, of how God created are merely ancillary.34
Such clarity about genre doesn’t foreclose, however, on wondering about the Bible. In fifth grade I asked my pastor-father how dinosaurs could be possible, how the world could be so old when the Bible seems to indicate it’s so young. He said something like, “Well, in the psalms it says that a thousand years are like one day to God, and a day is like a thousand years. So, God’s way of marking time isn’t limited to the way we think of it.”35 Since no humans were present during the unfolding of creation, I began to wonder, perhaps the best way the writers could depict it was in terms we can understand: days, weeks. Perhaps these were metaphors for the passing of time. Obviously, God could create it all in six seconds if he wanted to. Or six literal days. But the scientific record seems to indicate a much longer process. Whatever the case, I (like Madeleine) concluded, God did it. He did it all.
This seemed a reasonable, even obvious, stance for Christians to adopt. So when I toured Wheaton College as a high school senior and saw a large Ice Age mastodon on display in the science department, I thought nothing of it. (“Perry,” it’s called, and it’s at least eleven thousand years old. The bones were uncovered nearby.) Of course Christians should celebrate the scientific discoveries from prehistory that expand our understanding of God’s limitless creativity.
What took me by surprise were the anti-scientific, indeed, anti-intellectual Christians I began encountering in small pockets of conservative evangelicalism. In fact, when I took a creation-evolution class, our professor—who wisely never told us what he thought about the role of evolution in creation, opting instead to let us think for ourselves—told us there were parents who wouldn’t send their kids to Wheaton because it didn’t teach young-earth creationism (which posits the earth was created in six literal days and is roughly six thousand years old). Once again: a Creator who is known more by what he can’t do than by what he can.
Maybe that’s why I eventually chose a roommate who was majoring in geology and minoring in art. Chloe was an outsider, like me, except her difference was not denominational but regional: she was from the Northeast, where there were so few evangelicals that she’d had to go to another town for youth group. (On one of our first meals in the dining hall, she looked around at the mass of students and said, “I didn’t even know there were this many Christians in the whole United States!”) Meanwhile, she seemed completely nonplussed by any controversy between faith and science; she just went on studying rocks that were billions of years old and praying enthusiastically and painting lilies on huge canvases, and none of that seemed weird.
As a geology major Chloe had an almost childlike sense of wonder about the created world: “Wow, look at the atomic structure of this particular mineral—isn’t God amazing?” I knew just enough science to know that I didn’t really know what she was saying, but I could grasp the wonder. It was what I had felt too when reading fiction as a child, when encountering a particularly vivid character or snippet of dialogue or metaphor. It’s what I’d felt looking at a distant planet zooming across the dark. It was this sense of wonder I was beginning to worry we’d be forced to grow out of, yet another line we weren’t supposed to cross.
It seems natural, now, that Chloe was so drawn to Madeleine L’Engle. And she made sure I was too. Her Christmas gift to me in 1992 was L’Engle’s Ladder of Angels, Bible stories retold by Madeleine and illustrated by children from around the world. It was Chloe’s way of saying, “Don’t lose that wonder. See? Madeleine hasn’t! And look what she’s doing.” Twenty-six years later, I glance along my bookshelves and Ladder of Angels is still there, right next to A Swiftly Tilting Planet and A Stone for a Pillow. Do you know how man
y books I’ve gotten rid of in twenty-six years? But these I’ve kept, a reminder to not abandon the unquenchable awe of the psalmist, the scientist, the child.
• • • •
When asked what would be missing from Christian conversations today without Madeleine’s influence, many of the people I interviewed for this book responded as Jana Riess did: “The fearless integration of science with fiction and the creative world.”
Jana went onto explain that “Madeleine came of age as a writer in a time of modernism when there was this tremendous divide between religion and science, at least in the eyes of many people who were religious. Those were not reconcilable differences.” Yet here was this Christian author who would throw some quantum physics into a novel. “That is a gift that few writers would have.”
Jana recalled that when Madeleine joined Jana and her friends for dinner during the Wellesley College visit in 1991, the seventy-two-year-old author didn’t simply dispense wisdom but expressed intense curiosity about all manner of topics. Jana’s overall impression was that “there’s so much that we don’t know about God and the universe, its ontological essence, who we are, why we’re here. There’s so much more that we don’t know than what we do. In Madeleine’s work you get a sense both of the love of God and the infinite care that God has, this very personal care for every human being,” Jana said. “But also a sense of humility, that we are not the end-all of creation; and when we think of something like a tesseract or just the constellations in the sky or quantum physics or all these things that she gets into in her books, it should be a very humbling experience.”
