by Sarah Arthur
I mean these words. I do not understand them, but I mean them. Perhaps one day I will find out what I mean. They are implicit in everything I write . . . They are behind everything, the cooking of meals, walking the dogs, talking with the girls. I may never find out with my intellectual self what I mean, but if I am given enough glimpses perhaps these will add up to enough so that my heart will understand. It does not; not yet.8
Still later, after Hugh died of cancer in 1986, Madeleine claimed, “When my husband died, we didn’t have any leftover garbage. We’d gone through the stuff. We were in a good place. And that made grief a lot easier. Still great grief, but very few regrets. And I feel very blessed because of that.”9 Even in the midst of that loss, Madeleine insisted on a kind of happy ending.
Her insistence that “all shall be well” might be yet another example of Madeleine attempting to manipulate the narrative of her life into the kind of story she preferred. Or rather, maybe it’s of a piece with her claim that God will not fail with any part of his creation: “For the happy ending,” she wrote in The Rock That Is Higher, “is intrinsic to the life of faith, central to all we do during all of our lives. If we cannot believe in it, we are desolate indeed. If we know, in the depths of our hearts, that God is going to succeed, with each one of us, with the entire universe, then our lives will be bright with laughter, love, and light.”10
A light so lovely, yet again. But, as she well knew, we must also reckon with the darkness.
• • • •
Madeleine was no denier of the existence of evil. In fact, one could argue that more than any other writer of children’s fiction, she named evil for what it is—a demonic presence at war with God—and empowered her characters to fight it. As L’Engle scholar Don Hettinga writes, “She recognizes that evil sometimes appears under the guise of good, that, as she repeatedly reminds readers, the devil often masquerades as an angel of light. In fact,” he adds, “the plots of the books in the Time Trilogy are built to some degree on that assumption.”11
Which of us, when reading A Wind in the Door (1973), for instance, doesn’t shiver at Meg Murry’s chance encounter with her sworn enemy, principal Mr. Jenkins, in a field behind the house at dusk—a Mr. Jenkins who, when startled, “rose up into the night like a great, flapping bird, [and] flew, screaming across the sky, became a rent, an emptiness, a slash of nothingness—“?12 He wasn’t Mr. Jenkins, of course; he was an “Echthroi,” a demonic projection, an image so creepy and startling that we forget we’re reading a children’s book.
“How many of us call the devil by name today?” Madeleine wrote in Walking on Water. “If we see God’s love manifested for us in the Incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, then we need to also recognize the malignant force that would try to destroy God’s love in a particular way, too.” Ever the student of literature, she argued, “The antagonist in a story or play is never vague or general; there is always a person behind the forces of evil; otherwise we will not take them seriously . . .”13
For Madeleine, the devil is real; evil has a personality; it’s gathering power across the universe; it’s actively at work to smother and obliterate the light. The battle between light and darkness is not some kind of abstract imbalance that needs to be recalibrated: it’s war.
Don Hettinga told me, “I can’t think of many other children’s novels published prior to Wrinkle—other than, of course, the Narnia series or, perhaps, something by George MacDonald—that so clearly delineated good and evil. Shortly after Wrinkle, though, we see more—Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain and Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Sequence, both appeared in the mid-sixties.” And by the mid-’90s, of course, Harry Potter had arrived at Hogwarts for one of the biggest showdowns between good and evil in all of recent literature. The enemy in J. K. Rowling’s series is referred to in whispers, by most characters, as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”; but Harry dares to say the enemy’s name aloud, Voldemort, and in that naming we hear echoes of Madeleine L’Engle again. Call evil what it is, Madeleine insisted. Even, and perhaps especially, for children.
Let’s not forget the Anglican-Episcopal tradition into which she was baptized. The baptismal rite from the 1892 edition of the Book of Common Prayer instructs the presiding minister to tell the parents of the child candidate (sternly, we can imagine, in a voice not unlike Mrs Which’s), “I demand therefore: Dost thou, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?” To which the (somewhat startled) parents are to answer, “I renounce them all; and, by God’s help, will endeavor not to follow, nor be led by them.” In keeping with those bold, vibrant words of the liturgy, Madeleine could dare to call evil what it was. She could look at something like nuclear war, for instance, and say, in effect, “But that is not of Christ. That’s evil. That’s Satan at work. And I renounce it.”
Ultimately, for Madeleine, the love of God in Christ is more powerful than evil and will outlast all things. “And the light shineth in the darkness,” says Mrs Who in that pivotal moment in A Wrinkle in Time; “and the darkness comprehended it not.”14 As we noted earlier, the quote is from the first chapter of John’s gospel (1:5)—“John who speaks most closely to my understanding,” Madeleine described him, “who helps put the mind in the heart to bring wholeness.”15 And Madeleine loved that word, comprehend, which extends also to the older meaning: to encompass, overtake, overcome. The darkness does not overcome the light but rather the reverse.
And how? “Jesus!” Charles Wallace replies, in that Sunday school answer to which those of us steeped in irony roll our eyes. But Madeleine was dead earnest.
Picture the bold minister again, glancing up at the congregation with glasses that look suspiciously like Mrs Who’s. He prays stridently from the 1892 baptismal rite: “Grant that this Child may have power and strength to have victory”—and everyone, even the people who slipped in the back late, strain to glimpse the baby’s round face—“and to triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh.” Wide-eyed, the parents and the people respond, “Amen.”
Dare we pray such prayers for today’s children? Dare we name aloud the enemy they’re up against? Dare we claim that God will not fail with any part of his creation? that in Christ, light and goodness eclipse darkness and evil, now and forever?
Dare we say with the congregation—with Madeleine herself—Amen?
• • • •
Madeleine’s detractors didn’t see her message this way. They charged her with dangerously misleading children by presenting a kind of yin-yang balance between light and dark.16 And certainly at times she spoke of darkness as a natural part of creation (God creates it in Genesis 1:4–5, after all), a good gift for our own rest and healing, even part of our own subconscious—her 1977 Wheaton College commencement address was about this very topic.17 But the natural darkness that God created is not the same as the spiritual darkness of evil that seeks to annihilate. Such nuance was lost on her critics, who relied heavily on special knowledge of New Age philosophy to base their arguments. Without insight into the occult, they claimed, it was possible that “in the minds of good but naïve Christian families the ground is being prepared to accept a spiritually disastrous philosophy.”18 They insisted that unless you knew this information, you didn’t have a true understanding of Scripture and would be easily deceived.
Let me say this frankly: such reliance on special wisdom sounds like a modern-day form of Gnosticism, an ancient Greek philosophy that seeped into the early church. Gnosis is Greek for “wisdom,” and Gnostics believed you couldn’t truly follow Jesus unless you had their secret knowledge of “higher things”—one of many heresies against which the apostle Paul may have been arguing in his letter to the Colossians and which was denounced by church leaders such as Saint Irenaeus in the second century.19
Gnosticism hasn’t gone away,
obviously; it’s just taken different forms. I once found myself on a twelve-hour drive with an old friend who fervently insisted that a certain conspiracy-theorist podcaster had the only correct interpretation of end times Scriptures—and that I was potentially in danger if I didn’t know about the podcaster, his books, and his teachings. I gently pushed back, asking my friend if he thought the podcaster’s knowledge was more powerful than the Holy Spirit, in whose name I was baptized and confirmed and whose presence Jesus promised his followers. After all, the resurrected Jesus told his disciples in Acts 1:7–8, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” The good news is not special insider information only available by joining some kind of exclusive club; by God’s grace it’s accessible to all.
“And it’s free,” I said. “How much does that guy charge you?”
It was a long twelve hours.
Not to dismiss the active presence of evil trying to twist our understanding (Madeleine certainly didn’t). But her detractors’ obsession with knowledge of the occult and the demonic raises the question of whether we really trust the power of Jesus to be stronger than the powers of darkness. Is the Holy Spirit really bound in a straightjacket? Does the Devil really deserve all this air time—more air time than Jesus? What happens to our souls when we spend so much energy focused in that direction? Madeleine said of one censor, “I truly feared for this woman. We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.”20
In the early 1990s the book Trojan Horse: How the New Age Movement Infiltrates the Church, by Brenda Scott and Samantha Smith, accused L’Engle of an insidious conspiracy under the guise of Christianity. The book was, in Madeleine’s estimation, a personal attack, a “character assassination” that left her devastated and defensive. And not being judgmental was a tremendous quandary for Madeleine. During the Q&A for her plenary “The Cosmic Questions” at the 1996 Festival of Faith and Writing, she reiterated:
We do tend to find what we look for. And not enough people are looking for Christ. I don’t understand Christians who are looking for hate. That is not Christlike. But, see, I have a real big problem here: How do I keep from being judgmental about people I think are judgmental? [audience laughter] But it does make me very sad. Because when I write something which I believe is an offering to God and it’s seen as wicked, I say, “What have I done wrong? Is it . . . is it really . . . is that what the book says?” But then I get enough affirmation from other people saying, “No, that’s not what the book says.” There’s something abroad today that frightens me that I’ve never seen before, in a group of people calling themselves Christians who want to put other Christians down, rather than uphold, teach, be witnesses.
Don Hettinga’s scholarly work Presenting Madeleine L’Engle came out shortly after Trojan Horse, and in it he affirmed the Christian themes in Madeleine’s writing. Madeleine, for her part, claimed that Don’s book “[gave] me back my life again.”21 He then came under attack himself in Claris Van Kuiken’s 1996 book Battle to Destroy Truth: Unveiling a Trail of Deception—an exhaustive account of Van Kuiken’s four-year battle with the pastor and elders of her local Christian Reformed Church of America over the church’s refusal to denounce what she felt was L’Engle’s anti-biblical theology.
An online description of Van Kuiken says, “For over 25 years, Mrs. Van Kuiken has been researching and exposing the many ways in which New Age/occult beliefs and practices are penetrating America, its churches and Christian schools—under the guise of being ‘Christian.’” It’s worth noting that by contrast, the apostle Paul—arguably the best educated of all the apostles—wrote to the Christians at Corinth, “And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified . . . so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Corinthians 2:1–5). Whenever someone insists on anything extra, proceed with caution.
In such experiences, compassion becomes yet another key Christian practice. I wrote to Don of Madeleine’s opponents, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to live inside an unjoyful reality where the power of Satan is so much stronger than the Holy Spirit, where the ramifications of Adam’s choice are more lasting than the ramifications of Jesus’s victory, and where the truth sets no one free.” Don wrote back, “I wished that these attackers could see Madeleine as a person; if they did, if they read her books with care or if they encountered her in real life, they would have discovered her to be a person of integrity and strong faith.” His graciousness reminded me that our first, most loving response to anyone with whom we disagree should be to pray for these brothers and sisters.
Don’s careful attention to Madeleine’s work, and her reciprocal gratitude, “pointed to the necessarily collective nature of our responses to unreason,” he told me. This is how we cling to the mercy and goodness of God: not alone, to be picked off by our own fears (if not by actual opponents), but together, as fellow believers who help to bear one another’s burdens when all feels dark. “Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by,” Madeleine wrote.22 We must not be so foolish as to dismiss the darkness: it’s real. And together we must cling to the truth that the light of Christ will have the last word. This is our communal hope.
• • • •
Evil isn’t just “out there,” in the forces that seek to deceive and bind. It’s in our own souls too. It’s here in our own fears and challenges, our sinful tendencies, our painful histories and relationships. “As we think about this vast, cosmic battle, it is far too easy to fall into dualism,” Madeleine wrote in And It Was Good, “to think of darkness and light battling each other from the beginning, as some of the eastern religions proclaim. But if God created everything and saw that it was good, then something must have happened to this good, to change and distort it.” She continued, “The problem is not from without; it rose from within. And we have within each of us some of this wrongness, and too often we refuse to see it, and don’t understand why we are not happy, nor why our faith seems a dim thing, nor why our prayers are like dead ashes.”23
I can’t help thinking of Meg’s paralyzing, powerful anger at her father, in Wrinkle, for rescuing her and Calvin but failing to save Charles Wallace, whom he left behind in the evil of the planet Camazotz. Meg may be temporarily safe on another planet, lovingly attended by the healing character called Aunt Beast, but the darkness of Camazotz is still there, in Meg’s own heart, in her fury at her father, in her terror at having left Charles Wallace alone, imprisoned, on a distant planet. We may wish to locate evil outside of ourselves, as something else to blame, when in fact it’s right here, corroding us from the inside out.
Throughout Madeleine’s own life, she knew this darkness, particularly in relationships, only too well. When her son Bion died in 1999, here was a story Madeleine couldn’t script the way she wanted it to be. Here was a painful chapter for which there was no resolution. No matter how she spun it, this would never be well.
Luci described it to me this way: “Her son Bion had this love/hate relationship with his mother. He was a very difficult person. One of the reasons I was able to be close to Madeleine was that Bion liked me and thought that I was a good influence on his mother.” Luci recalled, “Madeleine and I were together with Bion at the point of his death, right at the moment of his death. We were in the hospice room with him, and I think I was the last person to actually lift a glass of water with a straw in it for him to take a sip. And we listened to his breathing just diminish and diminish. And she said, ‘You know, a mother shouldn’t see her son die.’”
Madeleine’s granddaughter Charlotte concurs: “The grief over Bion’s death was her undoing. Absolutely. She was so sad and didn’t take joy in the same things in the same way. The grief contributed to cognitive decline which also makes things harder. He died of end-stage alcoholism. His liver failed. And it’s a really ugly death. We were all in denial about it. Not just her.” Charlotte described how, once the family had a diagnosis, they could make a way forward with some relief. Everyone except Madeleine.
“I don’t think it was anything she was able to accept,” Charlotte told me. “He was always Rob Austin for her, this golden, precocious boy with adorable language play. I don’t think there was a way for her to talk and write about that. And I think she really bumped up against privacy: how do you respect his privacy? How do you do this without exploiting your child?”
In one of the rare, high-profile public interviews Madeleine did after her son died (for PBS in 2000), she read aloud from her journal, “Bion’s death has ripped the fabric of the universe.” She then told her interviewer, Bob Abernethy, “In times when we are not particularly suffering we do not have enough time for God. We are too busy with other things. And then the intense suffering comes and we can’t be busy with other things. And then God comes into the equation. ‘Help.’ And we should never be afraid of crying out ‘Help’ . . . When there is no suffering, nothing happens.”24
I’m reminded of Mother Teresa’s painful letters in her posthumous collection Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta.” The collection was almost never published—not merely because she had requested that her writings remain private, but because they chart her fifty-year journey with a devastating sense of God’s absence, of continual darkness. It began almost as soon as Mother Teresa established the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in the mid-1940s, after which she would write to her archbishop, “Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold.—It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness.”25 A decade into this burden she experienced a strange turning point: “For the first time in this 11 years—I have come to love the darkness.—For I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.”26 For Mother Teresa, the pain never lifted. The journey would last, without reprieve, until her death half a century later.
