RIP, Madeleine L'Engle

I saw on Sheila's blog that Madeleine L'Engle had passed.

I wanted to write something here, but couldn't think of anything good - and I wanted to be home, with my copies of books she wrote, to take a few stories and quotations from them.

I only read 2 of her books - "A Wrinkle in Time" and the sequel (the one with the mitochondria and farandolae) - before the age of 20 or so. I didn't know of her as an essayist or a writer on faith until fairly recently.

But I did love "Wrinkle in Time" - not just for the language, not just for the concepts, but for the underlying worldview, I think.

Two of my favorite books of L'Engle's essays are "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art" and "The Rock that is Higher."

In "Walking on Water," she brings up a couple of concepts that I carry with me now, every day of my life: the idea of cosmos vs. chaos, and the idea of being "named."

...all art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos. At least all Christian art (by which I mean all true art, and I'll go deeper into this later) is cosmos in chaos. There's some modern art, in all disciplines, which is not; some artists look at the world around them and see chaos, and instead of discovering cosmos, they reproduce chaos, on canvas, in mysic, in words. As far as I can see, the reproduction of chaos is neither art, nor is it Christian.

I know there are perhaps things to quibble with there. I don't think you have to be a Christian (or even a Deist) to try to find the cosmos - the pattern, the meaning - in the universe. But I do agree that there are some (and probably not just confined to "modern" art) that only want to keep showing us the chaos, without any sense of cosmos.

It's interesting... that I should be reading these words again so close to the anniversary of September 11. (In fact, I just saw a bit on television of the firefighters of the 54th being interviewed, and footage of them carrying the remains of one of their men out of Ground Zero. And I found myself tearing up again, feeling both sad and angry for the monumental loss). You can look at that event and see the horror - the loss, the lives destroyed, the security shattered. Or, you can TRY (and I realize it's hard, especially for those who directly witnessed it) to look at it and see the thousands - millions - of Americans who rolled up their sleeves to donate blood (even if they knew that was an entirely symbolic gesture - and the first time needle-phobic I ever gave blood in my life was shortly after September 11, 2001). The people who comforted the fearful, who tried to console those who lost loved ones. The outpouring of artwork - maybe it wouldn't be called "art" by some, as it was entirely amateur-made - by people memorializing their loved ones or trying to make some sense out of what happened (I think, again, Sheila posted some photos of these).

Or you can see it as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need to be vigilant. That we need to define who and what we are, that we need to protect that which we hold dear.

But we (or at least I) can't look at the event and just shut down, just stop going forward, just say "This is how the world is." (As one of my friends said: "I prefer to think of God as not being in the towers falling, but of God being in what the people did to try to pick up the pieces afterward).

L'Engle also talks about the concept of being Named. Which, if I understand her meaning, is similar to being loved, being a part of God's creation - she also introduces the idea of Naming and being Named in "A Wind in the Door" (one of the Time Quartet novels). In it, at the very end...not to give too much away, but one character has to Name another character, a character who has done his best to make himself unlovable...and there's something very deep about it - realizing that we are at times pretty unlovable ourselves, and yet there are still those here on Earth (and, if you believe in it, Beyond) who would Name us and call us their own.

...the act of Naming is very closely connected with the act of loving, and hating is involved with unNaming - taking a person's name away, causing anyone to be an anonymous digit, annihilating the spirit.

When we are unNamed, we are broken; all around us we see fragmented, mutilated people. And the world offers little help for healing, for knitting up the "raveled sleeve of care."

I think she also is saying something about the anonymity many of us feel in modern society. I describe it as feeling "invisible."

Another, unrelated quotation that I find in my copy of "Walking on Water":

Children don't like anti-heroes. Neither do I. I don't think many peopl do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with anti-heroes for protagonists. I think we all want to be able to identify with the major character in a book - to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience. I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults, and so be given a glimpse of my own potential. There have been a few young-adult novels written recently with anti-heroes; from all reports they are not the books that are read and reread. We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with the sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination

(emphasis in the original). Again, some might quibble with this. But it's something I personally agree with. The books I tend to press on people are the ones with, as L'Engle says, protagonists I can admire despite their faults.

At any rate. (And I have not read all of her works, for that matter. I still have a goodly chunk of the Austins books to read, and also the other three Crosswicks journals (I read the one dealing with Spring). And I recently got a copy of her Genesis trilogy). I've re-read both the books I referred to above (Walking on Water and The Rock that is Higher) a number of times; they are books that I keep on hand for when I feel kind of beaten down by the world. Or when I feel that dark night of the soul opening up to me, when I wonder - how on Earth and beyond can there be a loving God when people are so evil to each other? Or when I feel like the odd woman out - I think I said once before I pretty much ALWAYS feel weird, because I'm a bit too theologically-liberal in some ways to run with a lot of the Christians around here, but I'm too much of a person of faith to run with many of the academics. Reading L'Engle (and also, C.S. Lewis, and to a lesser extent [merely because I have to think so hard while I am reading him] Chesterton) comforts me - makes me feel "less weird," and tends to assuage my doubts. And reminds me that God really doesn't want me to "check my brain at the door," which is what some flavors of Christianity (or at least the stereotypes of them) seem to suggest these days.

I am a little sad I never thought to write a letter to Ms. L'Engle; that I never wrote to thank her for what her writing has meant to me. (I am sure, however, that many others did the same; it seems that a great many people love her writing very deeply and that gives me hope). Her books - especially the books of essays on faith and life - are among the small number of books I re-read, and among the small number I'd take with me if I had to move, say, and could only take two boxes of books or so with me.