Many years ago when I first started teaching my room was next to a man named Kris Riber. He and I were in the habit of reading aloud daily to our students, one of my favorite times of the day just as it was for several of my colleagues. We would talk about what we were reading and get ideas from each other about books we liked. One of my favorite books to read aloud was Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. One of his favorites was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.
We both decided to give the other's book a try. Neither of us were satisfied. Although I like a good fantasy story, science fiction, the genre of A Wrinkle in Time, was not my favorite. When Kris read Red Fern he told me each chapter was just another hunt, and he was always thinking, "Here we go again."
That was my introduction to Madeleine L'Engle, and I had not revisited her until I came across a couple of her memoirs in the Christianity section at McKays. I had seen quotes from her works in several other books I had read, and my curiosity was piqued.
There is something so satisfying to me about reading from an author who is so adept at their craft. L'Engle had a way of saying things that spoke to me in many ways. Although I seldom struggle with doubts of faith in God, it was certainly enlightening to hear her talk about them and to see the things that brought her back from the darkness she felt was trying to enfold her.
These books were written in 1970's but remain extremely relevant to the struggles we face today. Here are a few of my favorites quotes from the books:
On creativity:
The creative impulse, like love, can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher or librarian or parent can do, in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I’m concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.
On evil in the world (This is so relevant to us today.):
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up in a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We’ve come to the point where it’s irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven’t yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against.
On marriage vs living together (I could substitute "Phil and I" in this quote.):
I’m quite sure that Hugh and I would never have reached the relationship we have today if we hadn’t made promises. Perhaps we made them youthful, and blindly, not knowing all that was implied; but the very promises have been a saving grace.
On talking to a friend about the popularity of the occult:
I started gong to in high philosophical vein about what a snare and a delusion this is, and could see that he thought I wasn’t very bright.
Suddenly I said, “Hey, I think I know why astrology has such tremendous appeal. The year and month and day you are born matters. The very moment you are born matters. This gives people a sense of their own value as persons that the church hasn’t been giving them.”
“Now you’re cooking with gas,” he said.
To matter in the scheme of the cosmos: this is better theology than all our sociology. It is, in fact, all that God has promised to us: that we matter. That he cares.
On the need for community:
The Establishment [funny to see this very dated term once again] is not, thank God, the Pentagon, or corruption in the White House or governors’ palaces or small-town halls. It is not church buildings of any denomination. It is not organized groups, political parties, hierarchies, synods, councils, or whatever. It is simply the company of people who acknowledge that we cannot live in isolation, or by our own virtue, but need community and mystery, expressed in the small family, and then the larger families of village, church, city, country, globe.
On the comfort of the status quo and the need for revolution (change):
Because we are human, these communities tend to become rigid. They stop evolving, revolving, which is essential to their life, as is the revolution of the earth about the sun essential to the life of our planet, our full family and basic establishment. Hence, we must constantly be in a state of revolution, or we die. But revolution does not mean that the earth flings away from the sun into structureless chaos. As I understand the beauty of the earth’s dance around the sun, so also do I understand the constant revolution of the community of the Son.
But we forget, and our revolutions run down and die, like an old, windup phonograph.
My own forgetfulness, the gap between the real, revolutionary me and the less alive creature who pulls me back, is usually only too apparent.
(Oh, how I identify with this last sentence.)
On going to a museum and coming home to paint:
A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn’t diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent…When I hear a superb pianist, I can’t wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else.
I used the word “arrogant” about those verses. I take it back. I don’t think it’s arrogance at all. It is beauty crying out for more beauty.
On not remembering the name of a teacher who caused her great pain as a little girl (I think this whole section is so powerful and true.):
When she decided that I was neither bright nor attractive nor worth her attention, she excluded me, and this is the most terrible thing one human being can do to another. She ended up annihilating herself.
To annihilate. That is murder.
We kill each other in small ways all the time.
At O.S.U. we discussed dividing grades into sections according to so-called ability. Every teacher there was against it. Every teacher there believed that a student in the lowest group is rendered incapable of achieving simply by being placed in that group. “So I’m in the dumb group. That’s what they think of me. There’s no use trying, because they know I can’t do it.”
Murder.
I didn’t try to learn anything for the annihilating teacher for just these reasons.
I worry about this. I worry about it in myself. When I am angry or hurt, do I tend to exclude that person who has hurt me?
I said that a photograph could not be an icon. In one strange, austere way there are photographs of two people in my prayer book which are icons for me. I keep them there for that precise reason. They are people I would rather forget. They have brought into my life such bitterness and pain that my instinct is to wipe them out of my memory and my life.
And that is murder.
I had, through some miracle, already managed to understand this, when I came across these words of George MacDonald’s:
It may be infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.
On truth:
…a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of the truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint.
On seeking forgiveness:
We haven’t done a very good job of righting the wrongs of our parents or our peers, my generation. We can’t say to our children, here is a green and peaceful world we have prepared for you and your children: enjoy it. We can offer them only war and pollution and senility. And this is the time we decide, in our churches, that we’re so virtuous we don’t need to be forgiven: symbolically, iconically forgiven.
(She was struggling with changes in the Book of Common Prayer in her church liturgy which made confession before receiving communion optional.)
If the Lord’s table is the prototype of the family table, then, if I think in terms of the family table, I know that I cannot sit down to bread and wine until I’ve said I’m sorry, until reparations have been made, relations restored. When one of our children had done something particularly unworthy, if it had come out into the open before dinner, if there had been an “I’m sorry,” and there had been acceptance, and love, then would follow the happiest dinner possible, full of laughter and fun. If there was something still hidden, if one child, or as sometimes happens, one parent, was out of joint with the family and the world, that would destroy the atmosphere of the whole meal.
Only a human being can say I’m sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.
