A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine was a true bridge builder; and if ever we’ve needed some, now is the time.

Philip Yancey, author, Vanishing Grace: Bringing Good News to a Deeply Divided World

Many thanks to Sarah for capturing the beauty and complexity of Madeleine L’Engle who influenced millions of readers around the world to always light candles in the darkness.

Catherine Hand, film producer, A Wrinkle in Time

Science and religion. Faith and fiction. The gift of both/and is the Madeleine L’Engle legacy I, and many a Christian creative, has benefitted from most, and Sarah Arthur’s A Light So Lovely takes a deep dive into the fullest meaning of L’Engle’s beautifully complex perspective, displayed in all of her work, but most famously in A Wrinkle in Time. Through Arthur’s insight, we see that L’Engle’s thinking makes room for the kind of wonder readers will want to hold on to.

Why do we humans insist on codifying who and what God is, and who He is in us? In A Light So Lovely, Arthur explores the ways in which Madeleine L’Engle repeatedly pushed against this tendency and, in doing so, created stories that revealed a God without limits, one who we could trust implicitly at any age, and share openly without apology.

Nikki Grimes, New York Times YA and children’s bestselling author

I’ve waited a long time for a book about Madeleine L’Engle’s spiritual legacy and A Light So Lovely was entirely worth the wait. In this book, Sarah Arthur explores L’Engle’s wide and generous spirituality with her bestselling books, her lectures, her public work, but wisely also with her relationships and her devoted readers’ (myself among them!) remembrances, all while placing her within the larger narrative of her time and place. A Light So Lovely beautifully and honestly illuminates one of the most important and creative writers of our time.

Sarah Bessey, author, Out of Sorts and Jesus Feminist

A compelling portrait of an author whose commitment to challenging our labels and categories, to bridging the imagined divide between sacred and secular, is as relevant today as ever.

Sara Zarr, YA author

What fun, and what a delight it is to gain these fresh and careful insights into the life of Madeleine L’Engle, literary icon and dear friend whose imagination and storytelling has become the stuff of legend! Through the narratives of the friends and family who knew and loved her, Sarah Arthur has used her vivid gifts of words and insights to bring Madeleine to life. Read, enjoy, and be enlarged by these stories.

Luci Shaw, author, Thumbprint in the Clay

This book has a secret. It’s a magic word—one so small you might overlook it. The word? And. It’s everywhere in this book, marking how Madeleine L’Engle reconciled what we have divided. Like L’Engle’s vision, Arthur’s book is for believers and unbelievers. Readers and writers. Fans of science fiction and romance. People of faith and people of science—and those who love both of those languages. Girls, boys, women, men—those in their forties and twenties, and who are also still five, capable of wide-eyed, childlike faith. This intimate introduction is so full of wisdom, it will rejuvenate newcomers to L’Engle’s work and her most faithful fans. I’m grateful for Arthur’s homage to a personal hero: It’s a joy to read and a reminder to live with wild imagination.

Jeffrey Overstreet, author, Auralia’s Colors and Through a Screen Darkly

An eminently readable, deeply lyrical, and thoroughly necessary examination of a literary luminary in the context of her faith. Arthur helps illuminate not just L’Engle’s own writings but the wider promise of the Anglican tradition.

Tara Isabella Burton

In A Light So Lovely, Sarah Arthur gives us the heart of Madeline L’Engle’s legacy, that the Christian life (like Christ’s life) is subversive and beautiful, and that hope is sometimes deceptively ordinary. We need this reminder now more than ever.

Brian Bantum, Associate Professor of Theology, Seattle Pacific University

Also by Sarah Arthur

Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide

The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us (with Erin F. Wasinger)

Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany

At the Still Point: A Literary Guide to Prayer in Ordinary Time

Mommy Time: 90 Devotions for New Moms

The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Post-Modern Youth Ministry

The One Year Coffee with God: 365 Devotions to Perk Up Your Day

Walking Through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Dating Mr. Darcy: The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sensible Romance

Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through The Hobbit

Walking with Frodo: A Devotional Journey through The Lord of the Rings

ZONDERVAN

A Light So Lovely

Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Arthur

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

Epub Edition June 2018 9780310353423

ISBN 978-0-310-35340-9 (softcover)

ISBN 978-0-310-35343-0 (audio)

ISBN 978-0-310-35342-3 (ebook)

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version. Public domain.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Jeff Miller | Faceout Studio

Cover photo: madeleinelengle.com

Interior design: Kait Lamphere

First printing June 2018 / Printed in the United States of America

Information about External Hyperlinks in this eBook

Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

For my young sons,

Micah and Sam.

May you tesser well.

I have never yet fully served a book.

But it is my present joy to try.

Madeleine L’Engle

CONTENTS

Foreword by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

Introduction

1 / Icon and Iconoclast

2 / Sacred and Secular

3 / Truth and Story

4 / Faith and Science

5 / Religion and Art

6 / Fact and Fiction

7 / Light in the Darkness

Epilogue: Tesser Well

Acknowledgments

Notes

Recommended Books

FOREWORD

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

The first time I spoke with Sarah, I cried. While it doesn’t take a great deal for me to have tears break the surface these days, as Sarah asked me questions and shared her thoughts about my grandmother, I knew I’d met someone with deep compassion, curiosity, and intellect. We talked about my grandmother’s life: her habits, milestones, and challenges, and what we each knew to be her impact on others. As we spoke, what moved me to tears was Sarah’s willingness to look at Madeleine and accept her as a full and flawed human being; an icon and iconoclast, not an idol.

In Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (a 1980 book that, as Sarah demonstrates, shook a generation of evangelical Christians with its expansive view of God’s love for all of creation), Madeleine warns that paradox is a trap for the lazy, and she challenges her readers to embrace both/and. Sarah takes on the challenge and structures her book as a series of what are commonly thought of as binary choices: sacred/ secular, faith/science, fact/fiction, and more.

A Light So Lovely explores what Madeleine L’Engle has meant to a generation or more of Christians who are searching for something that would restore their faith and who found that something in Madeleine’s language of wonder, hope, and joy, often to a rather extraordinary degree. The book combines interviews with artists and friends (and I’m sure I’m not the only one who cried during a conversation with Sarah), close readings and analyses of not just Madeleine’s works but of the changing Christian landscape of the past fifty years, and Sarah’s own memoir-like interventions and reflections that illustrate how the universal is grasped only in the particular.

The book not only (and beautifully) serves as a guide to Madeleine L’Engle’s spiritual legacy for Christians, it also (and intriguingly) can serve as a guide to evangelical Christian culture for the uninitiated. Although Madeleine’s religious upbringing and most of her practice was mainline, she found in a variety of religious communities, including evangelical circles, an audience of interlocutors that challenged and enriched her own theological understanding. For the reader whose only exposure to evangelical thought is the most recent flurry of news and analyses, looking at the conversations—sometimes friendly, sometimes vitriolic—that Madeleine and evangelicals engaged in over decades, and the ways in which her writing helped so many of the wavering, wounded, and wondering, is illuminating. Sarah looks at the heresy of universalism, the debates over science and religion, and the ways in which Madeleine’s themes of art and joy were received. Sarah’s discussion makes the stakes involved in those issues more legible, and I have a deeper understanding of and hope for the excavation of additional common ground.

Sarah likens the broad body of Madeleine’s work to a pod of whales, swimming together, communicating with each other, with the occasional one breaching the surface of the ocean. I love the metaphor, and believe it to be true. The cluster of messages that all of Madeleine’s books transmit include: you are loved, you matter, your questions are important, your joy fulfills a promise, fear not. This is indeed good news.

INTRODUCTION

We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

Walking on Water

Though I’ve always been a reader, it was my Wheaton College roommate, Chloe, who introduced me in a serious way to the works of Madeleine L’Engle. This was the early ’90s; Madeleine’s bestselling novel, A Wrinkle in Time, was already thirty years old; and while I’d heard of it as a teenager, I’d assumed it was purely science fiction, which wasn’t my genre. (I’m also pretty sure I’d read her 1965 novel, The Moon by Night, in junior high—I can still visualize the ’80s teen-romance edition—but I didn’t connect it with the author of Wrinkle at the time.) From Chloe I now learned that young-adult fiction wasn’t all L’Engle had written. I began to devour some of L’Engle’s nonfiction, including The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, as well as her landmark book on faith and art, Walking on Water. And I quickly realized here was an iconoclast: a Christian who spoke openly about Jesus yet was also a Newbery Medal winner, no less.

I can’t overstate the gift Madeleine was to this mainline evangelical. I was raised in small towns by a Presbyterian minister-father and a mother who was a public-school math teacher. Sometime in my elementary years my parents experienced a charismatic renewal that supercharged our faith. It made us curiously bilingual: we were mainliners, but we could speak evangelical. My engagement with more conservative strands of Christianity came through Christian concerts and camps and bookstores and radio stations; I wanted to be Amy Grant. But every day at 5:00 p.m., my parents would turn on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and that too was part of our Christian engagement with the world.

Then I arrived at Wheaton, where I encountered a small but vocal subset of students who insisted that the things of the world and the things of God were divided into strict binary categories. And God only worked through the latter. Thus, we could only believe this or that: only creation or evolution, only faith or science, only fact or fiction, only sacred or secular, only conservative or liberal, only Scripture or nothing, only, only, only. For the first time in my life I was being told—continually, fervently, bluntly—what God can’t do.

I was baffled. Was this the evangel, the good news?

Enter Madeleine. Here was a Christian author who could function quite unperturbedly from inside paradox, who dared to question the assumption that all things must be either/or. Why can’t it be both/and? What is this nonsense about secular? Why can’t God use those things if God wants to? Why can’t God speak through this or that person (if God can speak through a donkey, for instance)? Who says?

Our faith is a faith of vulnerability and hope, she wrote in A Stone for a Pillow, one of her Genesis commentaries, not a faith of suspicion and hate. When we are looking for other people to be wrong in order that we may prove ourselves right, then we are closing ourselves off from whatever unexpected surprises Christ may be ready to offer us. If we are willing to live by Scripture, we must be willing to live by paradox and contradiction and surprise.¹ I had found a Christian author who spoke my language of wonder, who somehow didn’t see things such as scientific discovery or artistic expression as threats to the gospel but rather windows by which we can see God’s light from new and exciting angles. Through her relentless, generous, prolific art and her obvious love for Christ, Madeleine managed to challenge the narrow, reactionary, oddly unjoyful posture of some believers to the extraordinary world God made—and to the extraordinary God who made it.

My English professors, I’m thankful to note, had a L’Engle-esque way of engaging paradox too. It was clear they had tremendous respect for her—indeed, to this day many of her papers are housed in the special collections of Wheaton’s Buswell Memorial Library. She was still a force, still writing. She made visits to campus, where at one point she signed several books for me. And the more I learned about her, the more I realized, like so many hundreds of thousands of readers, that I had found an icon. Not an idol whom one worships—as Madeleine herself would correct us—but a window, a person whose life and faith points beyond itself to Christ.

My first adult decade was spent in full-time youth ministry, during which I regularly wondered if I could better influence the next generation by writing middle-grade fiction myself rather than collecting parental permission slips for paintball. While reading Madeleine’s Crosswicks Journals—A Circle of Quiet, Two-Part Invention, and so on—I continued to feel an affinity with a writer who shared a love for the Anglican-Episcopal liturgy, for living in community, and who insisted on story as a vehicle for truth.

Eventually I shifted to a writing career and a seminary degree, regularly circling back to Madeleine’s Walking on Water, in which she called the act of writing a form of prayer. To be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are²—a description that named my experience of the creative process exactly. Even today, when I read in A Circle of Quiet about how tired she was as a mother of small children (like me) trying to balance a writing career (like me), I cry. At times it’s hard to tell where her influence leaves off and my own thinking begins.

• • • •

And I’m not alone. Time and again, as I traverse ever-widening, overlapping circles of writers and culture-makers, Madeleine’s name comes up as an author who changed the course of someone’s journey. In fact, as this project got underway, I began asking people, Can you point to a moment when Madeleine L’Engle influenced your vocation as an artist? Or saved your stumbling faith? Even saved your life? And the stories have come pouring in, stories of how Madeleine helped a new generation reclaim the light of Christ in an increasingly murky and polarized faith. Thus, central to each chapter of this project are interviews with such people as writer Sarah Bessey (Jesus Feminist), artist Makoto Fujimura (Culture Care),