About Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) Madeleine L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918. Her father was a journalist and mystery writer, her mother a classical pianist. She spent her formative years in New York City, attending private schools, spent a few years as a young teen at an English boarding school in France, and finished high school in Charleston, S.C. Early on she developed a passion for writing stories, poems and journals for herself. At Smith College, she studied English and took up acting. She graduated with honors, moved to New York to work in theatre. She made space to write and published her first two novels during these years—A Small Rain and Ilsa—before meeting Hugh Franklin, a stage and later television actor and her future husband. After her first child, Madeleine and Hugh moved to Connecticut to raise the family away from the city in a small village with more cows than people. Later, they moved back to NYC with three children, where she continued writing. She was deeply shaped by her worship in the Episcopal tradition, both at St. John the Divine cathedral and at All Angels’ Church. Her seventh book, A Wrinkle in Time, became her most acclaimed, winning the 1963 Newbery Award. She went on to write over 60 books for adults, children, and teens, in a range of genres: fiction, spiritual non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her book Walking on Water has been a kind of bible for Christian artists. Her Crosswicks Journals explore spirituality embedded in ordinary life. A major motion picture of A Wrinkle in Time will be released this March. Madeleine L’Engle lived, wrote, and spoke out of a profound faith in God, a great love for art, science, nature, and humanity, and a courage to openly integrate her faith with all aspects of her life, despite many questions, flaws and contradictions. With a capacious mind, she engaged a spacious universe indwelt by a gracious God. A Selection from the Writings of Madeleine L’Engle From: A Wrinkle in Time Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. Believing takes practice. I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be. Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. From: The Irrational Season When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this— and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head. From: Bright Evening Star Children of God, made in God’s image. How? Genesis gives no explanations, but we do know instinctively that it is not a physical image. God’s explanation is to send Jesus, the incarnate One, God enfleshed. Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine. A lover wants to love the beloved, not to wield power, but to love, hoping that love will be returned in the same way. When we are caught up in power we are not free, but in bondage to the power we have grasped. God is completely free because power has been laughingly thrown away in order that love may reign. The throwing away of power requires enormous power. And then the sun rose and Jesus was alive and terror fled and the Resurrection was an inner brightness as glorious as the outer brightness of the Transfiguration. And that light, inner and outer, began its journey around the earth, the solar systems, the furthest galaxies, light that is not power, but is wholly love. O Jesus, my Companion, my Guide upon the way, morning star to evening star—what wondrous love is this! God so loved the world that the Creator of it all came to be with us. Then, and now, and forever. Thank you. Amen. Alleluia. From: Weather of the Heart Annunciation After Annunciation To the impossible: Yes! This is the irrational season Enter and penetrate When love blooms bright and wild. O Spirit. Come and bless Had Mary been filled with reason This hour: the star is late. There’d have been no room for the child. Only the absurdity of love Can break the bonds of hate. From: Listening for Madeleine—an interview with Luci Shaw: Q: Do you see Madeleine belonging to a particular tradition of religious writers? A: She was a contemplative writer. She loved George MacDonald’s writings and his philosophy of life. Like him, she was a Universalist. She believed that in the end every human soul would be redeemed and “join the party” in heaven. Madeleine’s Universalism alarmed some conservative theologians. My feeling is that if it was a heresy, it was a wonderful heresy! [At Madeleine’s memorial service] the pastor told a funny story. He said that when Madeleine came to church there, she would always sit in one of the very last pews, directly under the light switches by the door. On days when she thought the congregation needed more spiritual enlightenment, Madeleine would reach up and switch on the lights. From: The Rock that Is Higher Story makes us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. It is we humans who either help bring about, or hinder the coming of the kingdom. We look at the world around us and it is a complex world, full of incomprehensible greed…irrationality, brutality, war, terrorism—but also self-sacrifice, honor, dignity, structure, meaning. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth. .