by Sarah Arthur
She recalled, “It was a horrible, horrible night. It was the darkest night of my life. And yet feeling that pain, allowing myself to feel that pain, that anger, that betrayal I felt by so many of the people who were supposed to take care of me . . . that was the beginning of healing.”
For Jessica, Wrinkle has been “the touchstone, again and again, in different phases. But to have it speak to me on that level at that moment . . . there was just something cosmic about it. So I feel like I, in some way, owe L’Engle my life.”
• • • •
“My daughter,” Dr. Murry tells Meg after they escape from Camazotz to the planet Ixchel without Charles Wallace, “I am not a Mrs Whatsit, a Mrs Who, or a Mrs Which . . . I am a human being, and a very fallible one. But I agree with Calvin. We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”1
It’s one of many places in Wrinkle where characters directly quote the Bible—in this case, Romans 8:28. Madeleine used the King James Version (KJV), her favorite—although it’s worth noting that other versions simply weren’t common back in the early ’60s. But since then, other versions translate Romans 8:28 as “all things God works for the good of those who love him.” This could be easily misread as saying that God manipulates circumstances on our behalf, which makes God out to be our personal magic genie. The KJV, however, suggests that no matter our circumstances, our love for God and trust in God’s calling become the twin lenses by which we are able to see God’s hand at work.
Our actual events, on the ground, haven’t changed. What has changed is us.
At that moment in Wrinkle, Meg is so angry at her father that she is “as much in the power of the Black Thing as Charles Wallace.”2 All she can see is terror and panic and loss. The only thing that will lift her out of that terror is her love for her little brother and for the father she feels has failed her. Her circumstances may not change, but she is part of a larger dance, the good cosmic design that God has created. This turnaround will not happen by her own power; she will need help from beyond herself—in this case, from a creature on Ixchel that she names “Aunt Beast.” It is in relinquishing control to a being who knows her, in many ways, better than she knows herself that Meg begins to heal.
As tempting as it is to think of Madeleine L’Engle as our very own Aunt Beast or even our Mrs Whatsit, Madeleine was, like Dr. Murry, a “human being, and a very fallible one.” Her journey was not always one of clarity or even peace. “My spiritual scales fluctuate wildly,” she wrote in The Irrational Season. “They are always on the heavy side, but there are days when I am able to travel light, and these days show me the way.”3 Those fluctuations were never wilder than when Madeleine was attempting to practice charity and empathy toward others, wrestling with the paradox of loving those we find it difficult to love.
In that same passage of The Irrational Season, she tells about worshiping alongside an acquaintance who regularly went to Communion before work every day and yet hated all people of Asian descent. “Surely within me there is an equal blindness,” she wrote, “something that I do not recognize in myself, that I justify without even realizing it. All right, brother. Let us be forgiven together, then.”4
All right, brother, we say to the angry relative at Thanksgiving. All right, sister, we say to the person on social media whose politics sound like a foreign language. All right, we say to our idols when they disappoint us. Let us be forgiven together, then. We will only make a way forward when we recognize that we too are flawed and wounded sojourners, that where we are now on the journey is not the end game.
As Madeleine said at the 1996 Festival of Faith and Writing, “We’re supposed to be such witnesses of Christ’s love that other people will want to know what makes us glow. And the minute we begin to hate, to put down, that light goes. I know that when I’m angry, I can feel my light flickering and dimming. It’s only when I’m willing to let go, and listen . . .”
Decades later, our fraught times demand of us these same daily practices of humility and patience—perhaps more urgently now than ever.
• • • •
Novelist Leif Enger got it right when he called Madeleine L’Engle “an apologist for joy.”5 For Madeleine, the great challenge of the life of faith was letting go of anger and fear and instead embracing joy—indeed, practicing joy as a spiritual discipline. And for many who knew her, this was the single greatest attribute they remember. Said Wrinkle film producer Catherine Hand, “Madeleine had this inner joy and faith in all of us, in the universe. That was what was so infectious about her, so inspiring.”
I’m reminded of Thomas Bona’s comment about Madeleine’s “joyful uncertainty.” I can’t think of a phrase more contrary to the vitriol we hear in cultural discourse today, particularly on social media, where everyone is certain, everyone is earnest, and no one seems particularly happy. Actual lives are at stake, we can’t forget. Real people are suffering. But if people of faith are called, as the apostle Paul says, to “mourn with those who mourn,” we are also called to “rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15). After all, wrote the ancient Israelite leader Nehemiah as his people returned from exile, “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).
Madeleine showed us how to rejoice in the smallest atom, the farthest galaxy, all the amazing works of our Creator—and also to rejoice in the creative tasks God has given us to do. We may not be certain about every detail. We may not find satisfying answers to our most haunting questions. We may never see the hoped-for reconciliation between ourselves and the loved ones we’ve failed—or who’ve failed us. But for my part, I’ll take joyful uncertainty over joyless certainty any day.
The fall of 2018 would’ve marked Madeleine’s one-hundredth birthday. She loved birthdays. She would not have wanted us to forget it. Celebration too is a spiritual discipline of joy. But we don’t inhabit some kind of eternal Pinterest board, surrounded by inspirational phrases and uncluttered homes and well-behaved children. That sounds just a little too much like Camazotz, actually. Rather, we allow ourselves—and the people we love—to inhabit the complex spaces of difficulty and struggle, because this is what it means to be human, to be individuals. The birthday girl, as much as we love her, is not always going to be the life of the party.
As Madeleine’s housemate Barbara told me, “Anyone with as rich and complex an inner life as Madeleine is bound to not just run around giggling all day. Life is complicated. It’s not simple. It’s a slog sometimes. The more we accept that—that there are great wellsprings of joy and whole rivers of sadness, and they’re all there. . . . And in order to make it through, there needs to be some awareness of that reality. You just keep on keeping on.”
In thousands of signed copies of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine wrote the same inscription: “Tesser well.” We are like Meg Murry. We’re all on a journey requiring transitions that aren’t particularly pleasant, traveling from places of familiarity to those of strangeness, from one season of life to another. And the fact is, we will tesser badly. We will get hurt. We will hurt others. Our very last tesser may be the hardest one of all. But Madeleine’s inscription is both inspirational—you can do this—and aspirational: someday, by God’s grace.
If we can take this to heart as individuals, we can take this to heart for a new generation. With each hourly headline we find ourselves thrust into what feels like entirely strange planets, sometimes flattened, sometimes lost in undiscernible fog. We don’t always keep a solid grip on each other’s hands. We fail to love. But in all this, Madeleine’s legacy isn’t merely something to remember with a sigh of nostalgia: it’s a call.
In Madeleine’s words, “We need to make people know that the good news is truly good news. I was chastised because I didn’t write for Christians. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t preach to the choir. I want the good news to spread. I want people to understand that what makes life wonderful and terrible and
bearable is God’s grace and love and laughter.’”6
We are, each of us, called to be icons in the world—not angry, glaring spotlights but, rather, windows through which Christ’s light shines. What the world hears as bad news must be made beautiful again, that resounding theme of redemption by a God who loved us enough to become one of us, in all our particularity. Even those who are hardest to love.
We worship a God who does not fail. He did not fail with Madeleine; God will not fail with us.
And that is good news.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Stephanie Smith and the team at Zondervan, not only for brainstorming this book with me but giving me the chance to write it.
To my college roommate, Chloe Couch Richards, for first introducing me to the grown-up works of Madeleine L’Engle and thus understanding me better than I understood myself.
Lisa Ann Cockrel for her enthusiasm, insights, and suggestions.
Charlotte Jones Voiklis for keeping Madeleine’s legacy alive for a new generation. Having you as a consultant and cheerleader for this project was pure grace.
All my interview subjects, who allowed me to fumble my way through the art of gleaning pertinent information without overly managing the conversation.
Erin Wasinger, for her research assistance and interview savvy: this couldn’t have happened without you. Tabitha Martin, who kept our house from disintegrating into a slovenly, unsanitary pit. My long-suffering family, including my parents and in-laws, who juggled childcare and other issues to make this book possible. What manuscript deadline would be complete without at least one child puking?
And finally, to my husband, Tom, whose love for Two-Part Invention is undimmed by my probe into L’Engle’s idealization of her otherwise less-than-easy marriage. Thank you for your unfailing love and support, especially in the making of this book.
You are lovely lights, all of you.
NOTES
Introduction
1.Madeleine L’Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob (New York: Convergent Books edition, 2017), 72.
2.Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Colorado Springs, CO: A Shaw Book published by WaterBrook Press, 1980, 1998, 2001), 191.
3.Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season (New York: Harper One, 1977), 113.
4.It wasn’t until I was in the final edits for this project that I found the quote that must’ve prompted this metaphor. In A Circle of Friends: Remembering Madeleine L’Engle, her goddaughter, Cornelia Moore, tells of visiting Madeleine after her stroke and “hearing her say with absolute certainty that during the time she was in a coma, she was a whale swimming with a pod of whales singing whale song hymns” (Circle of Friends, 20). Charlotte told me she remembers her grandmother saying something similar.
5.L’Engle, Walking, 140–41.
6.From the video recording of a Q&A with Madeleine L’Engle at the Veritas Forum, University of California Santa Barbara, Feb. 9, 1998, accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0AjelTAcMk.
Chapter 1: Icon and Iconoclast
1.Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. Reprint, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books, 1974), 78.
2.L’Engle, Walking, 45.
3.Madeleine L’Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (HarperSanFrancisco, 1988. Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 5.
4.Madeleine L’Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (New York: HarperOne, 1974. Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 138.
5.Madeleine L’Engle, “George MacDonald: Nourishment for a Private World” in More Than Words: Contemporary Writers on the Works That Shape Them, ed. Philip Yancey and James Calvin Schaap (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002), 152.
6.Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy, Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by her Granddaughters (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), 46.
7.L’Engle, Irrational Season, 100.
8.L’Engle, Great-Grandmother, part 2, chapter 4, Kindle edition.
9.Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet (New York: HarperOne, 1972. Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 21.
10.L’Engle, Quiet, 22.
11.L’Engle, More Than Words, 145.
12.From various tributes in A Circle of Friends: Remembering Madeleine L’Engle, ed. Katherine Kirkpatrick (A Circle of Friends publication, 2009), 65 and xvii, respectively.
13.Luci Shaw, “Madeleine L’Engle, Writer and Friend (1918–2007)” in A Circle of Friends, 25.
14.Cornelia Duryée Moore, “Madeleine L’Engle, Anam Chara” in A Circle of Friends, 16, 19.
15.Stephanie Cowell, “Supper with Madeleine” in A Circle of Friends, 71–73.
16.Various authors, A Circle of Friends, xx, 5, and 80–81.
17.For the history of Westmont College’s C. S. Lewis Wardrobe, see http://www.westmont.edu/_academics/departments/english/cs-lewis-wardrobe.html, accessed April 2018.
18.Cowell, A Circle of Friends, 74.
19.Madeleine L’Engle and Luci Shaw, Friends for the Journey (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 2003. First published by Vine Books, 1997), 20.
20.Leonard S. Marcus, Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), 198.
21.L’Engle, Quiet, 18.
22.L’Engle and Shaw, Friends for the Journey, 36.
23.Madeleine L’Engle, commencement address at Wheaton College, IL, May 1977, from the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Wheaton College Special Collections, Wheaton, IL.
24.L’Engle and Shaw, Friends for the Journey, 23.
25.Richard Beck, “Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 4: Reverse Perspective,” July 18, 2008, accessed May 5, 2018. http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2008/07/notes-on-theology-of-icons-part-4.html.
26.L’Engle Quiet, 18.
27.John 3:30.
Chapter 2: Sacred and Secular
1.Madeleine L’Engle deliberately spelled the names of the three “Mrs” without the usual period.
2.Marcus, Listening, 14.
3.Marcus, Listening, 62.
4.L’Engle, Walking, 63.
5.See “The Remarkable Influence of A Wrinkle in Time” by Natalie Escobar, Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2018, accessed May 5, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/remarkable-influence-wrinkle-in-time-180967509/.
6.From the video recording of a panel discussion held during Macmillan’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of A Wrinkle in Time, accessed March 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7tC4uHiRU.
7.See L’Engle, Quiet, 212.
8.Madeleine L’Engle, as quoted by Terry Mattingly in “Tesser Well, Madeleine L’Engle,” Sept. 12, 2007, accessed May 5, 2018. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tmatt/2007/09/tesser-well-madeleine-lengle/.
9.Claris Van Kuiken, “The Gospel of Madeleine L’Engle: More Than Just A Wrinkle in Time,” May 2017, accessed May 5, 2018. https://ingridschlueter.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/the-gospel-of-madeleine-lengle-4.pdf.
10.Van Kuiken, “The Gospel of Madeleine L’Engle.”
11.Madeleine L’Engle, as quoted by Douglas Martin in “Madeleine L’Engle, Author of the Classic A Wrinkle in Time, Is Dead at 88” in The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2007, accessed May 5, 2018. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/books/08lengle.html.
12.Duane W. H. Arnold and Robert Hudson, Beyond Belief: What the Martyrs Said to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 135.
13.Carole F. Chase, Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life (Colorado Springs, CO: A Shaw Book published by WaterBrook Press, 2001), 120.
14.Sara Zarr, from the preface to the 2016 edition of Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle (New York: Convergent Books, 2016), xii.
15.See sociologist Christian Smith’s assessment of the spirituality of young adults in his landmark National Study of Youth and Re
ligion from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), 165.
16.Amena Brown, interviewed on Christianity Today’s podcast The Calling, “Amena Brown: Art Doesn’t Need to be ‘Churchy’ to be Sacred,” Episode 58, Nov. 15, 2017, accessed January 2018. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/november-web-only/amena-brown-art-doesnt-need-to-be-churchy-to-be-sacre.html.
17.L’Engle, Walking, 27.
18.Madeleine L’Engle, And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (New York: Convergent Books, 1983), 45.
19.Madeleine L’Engle, “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?” speech presented to the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983, Kindle edition.
20.See, for example, C. S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory” from The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses.
21.This isn’t to say that Madeleine never mined back into history: she certainly did in her private reading, including the works of the Byzantine and Cappadocian Fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa and “his brilliant sister, Macrina” (Chase, Herself, 150).
22.Donald R. Hettinga, Presenting Madeleine L’Engle (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 18.
23.Hettinga, Presenting, 16.
24.Marcus, Listening, 116.
25.Marcus, Listening, 199.
26.Madeleine L’Engle, “Into Your Hands, O Lord, I Commend My Spirit” in The Best Spiritual Writing 1998, ed. Philip Zeliski (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 156–157.
27.Luci Shaw, A Circle of Friends, 30.
28.L’Engle, Best, 157.
29.Samantha Smith and Brenda Scott, Trojan Horse: How the New Age Movement Infiltrates the Church (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1993), 60.
30.Madeleine L’Engle, An Acceptable Time (New York: Square Fish/Macmillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 322.
31.L’Engle, Acceptable Time, 323.
