The Books: “Walking on Water : Reflections on Faith and Art” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Religion/Theology Bookshelf:

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art , by Madeleine L’Engle.

My least favorite of her religious books. Mainly because I disagree with her concerns. Or – not just that I disagree with them, that’s not it. It’s that I find her concerns annoying. She is very concerned with being a Christian AND being a writer. She sees “good art” as something from God, her God … and so she has to do all of these mental calesthenics in order to see art made by atheists, or Muslims, or whatever in the same light. Uhm, Madeleine? Chill out. That’s my view. I don’t care if you have no religion, I don’t care if you dance to the beat of the Wiccan drummer … if your art is good, that’s enough for me. She, because she is so involved in the Christian community, and runs workshops, does lectures, etc., – she is often confronted with hostility from fellow Christians towards art, artists, etc. I mean, her book A Wrinkle in Time is ALWAYS on those “books to be banned” lists, made up by unimaginative pissy prissy Christians. (Can you tell I can’t stand the type?) If you actually READ Wrinkle in Time … how could you … why are these people SO threatened by her?? Madeleine L’Engle is an active Christian, she writes books about it, she is a wonderful THINKER about theology (not in this book, but in her other books) … and yet, these Christian groups think she’s a bit too “different”, or “radical” … she doesn’t toe the line, she never says the word “Jesus” in her children’s books … she doesn’t make it clear that the characters are Christians … blah blah blah. These people are exclusionary idiots, and that book has been called “satanic”. Huh? Its theme is the healing power of love. How can these people … Oh forget it. Intolerance makes ME intolerant. The role of the artist in society has always been controversial, actors couldn’t be buried in proper graveyards, etc., etc., so there are definitely really interesting issues to contemplate here, but not in the way L’Engle does it. (heh heh. It’s okay, it’s her book, not mine … she can write what she wants … but I love to rant about it.) I am baffled and angered by anti-art Christians (obviously), and I try not to think about them too much because it would take over my life, and I actually want to have a nice life, and not spend my time getting pissed off at rigid boneheads. L’Engle’s husband was a very successful actor, and some bozo at a conference asked how he could call himself a Christian and still be on television. Mkay? We’re talking about STUPID PEOPLE and I try not to let STUPID PEOPLE into my life. I think the question: “How can you be on television and still be a Christian” is stupid enough to not warrant an answer. L’Engle is much more forgiving and tolerant, because she has much more contact with these idiots, so she DOES feel the need to answer these questions. This book is her way of telling the Christian idiots that it’s okay to be an artist as well as a Christian. That good art IS holy. I find a lot of this book annoying just in its premise. So that’s obviously a problem!!

However: she’s Madeleine L’Engle. My favorite. No matter what her premise, she’s still got some good points to make. One of the things I actually like about this book is it is chock-full of cool anecdotes about artists through the ages.

I’ve picked out a nice excerpt – one that doesn’t make me want to throw the book across the room.

Here, she describes writing her young adult novels – and how so often it is almost like the book writes itself, the book ends up teaching her lessons … she’s not in charge of it, even though she wrote the damn thing! So many good writers say the same thing, and I find it very interesting to hear these stories.

EXCERPT FROM Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art , by Madeleine L’Engle.

It is a joy to be allowed to be the servant of the work. And it is a humbling and exciting thing to know that my work knows more than I do. Throughout the years there have been proofs of this, but I think I began to understand it more fully as I worked on A Wrinkle in Time, my seventh book to be published, eleventh to be written. As I tried to serve it I began to comprehend something about listening to the work, about going where it shoved me. And so the long two years of rejection slips which followed were especially difficult; it wasn’t just that my work was being rejected; or, if it was, it meant that I had not even begun to serve the work.

While I was writing I’d given myself a crash course in physics, having managed in my schooling to avoid anything even remotely mathematical. I didn’t get interested because I was working on a story based on the theories of contemporary, post-Newtonian physics, but because post-Newtonian physics caused me to write a story. Abot a year before I started work on Wrinkle, I discovered that higher math is easier to understand than lower math, and in reading the works of the great mathematicians and physicists I was discovering theological insights I had not found in my deteremined efforts to read theology. The discovery of physics preceded the work on the book.

So it has been a surprise and a delight to me to discover that my friends who are scientists, my son-in-law Peter, who is a theoretical chemist, my godson, John, who is an immunologist, find the science in my fantasies to be “real,” and have passed them around to their friends. This is marvellous proof that my books know more than I know.

The fact that Wrinkle is deeply embedded in both theology and physics had little to do with me, and this puts me in my proper place as a servant struggling (never completely succeeding) to be faithful to the work, the work which slowly and gently tries to teach me some of what it knows. Sometimes it is years after a book is published that I discover what some of it meant. For instance, when I made the villain in Wrinkle a disembodied brain, It, that was just how the villain happened to look; I wasn’t consciously realizing that brain, when it is disengaged from the heart, turns vicious. (Conversely, the heart, when it is disengaged from the brain, can become sentimental and untruthful.)

It is nothing short of miraculous that I am so often given, during the composition of a story, just what I need at the very moment that I need it. Why did I blunder into the discovery of physics just as I was ready to write Wrinkle? Why did the names of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which come as we were driving along in the station wagon with our children?

When I was roughing out A Wind in the Door, trying to listen, I knew that something wasn’t working. I had the characters, Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin and their families; I had the cherubim, Progo; the three Mr. Jenkinses; and the snake. I couldn’t hear where it wanted me to go. And at that moment my physician friend, Pat, to whom the book is dedicated, gave me two articles from the New England Medical Journal, by Lewis Thomas, on mitochondria, those strange microcosmic creatures living their own liveds within our cells, using us as their host planet, but living independently of us, with their own DNA and RNA. And there was where the story wanted me to go, away from the macrocosm and into the microcosm. What made Pat, at that specific time, give me exactly what I needed — or what the book needed? Of course it didn’t come free; it never does. With the help of my elder daughter I gave myself a crash course in cellular biology, which science didn’t even exist when I was in school — and if it had existed, I’d probably have avoided it. Hard work, that crash course, but lots of fun.