Reviewed April 24, 2006.
Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1977.
I love
Madeleine L’Engle’s
books of meditative musings. This one
follows
the Christian calendar, beginning with Advent, and meditates on life
and love
and God and the things He does in the world.
I’ll quote
some of the gems
to give you an idea of what you find in this book.
In doing that, I’ll be blessed all over
again.
“My
protagonists, male and
female, are me. And so I must be able to
recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and
sixteen,
and twenty-two, and. . . . For,
after
all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I
have
been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to
and
occasionally beyond my present chronology.”
“But we rebel
against the
impossible. I sense a wish in some
professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him
comprehensible
to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he’s easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh
attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But
an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a
comprehensible God is
no more than an idol.”
“After all
these years I am
just beginning to understand the freedom that making a solemn vow
before God,
making a lifelong commitment to one person, gives each of us…. It is indeed a fearful gamble….
If I was not fulfilled by my relationship
with this particular man, I couldn’t look around for another. And vice versa. No
matter how rough the going got, neither of
us was going to opt out.”
“To marry is
the biggest risk
in human relations that a person can take…. If
we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not,
as many
people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to
move
into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent;
into
that love which is not possession but participation.”
“If I could
not hang my sins
on the cross I might tend to withdraw, to refuse responsibility because
I might
fail. If I could not hang my sins on the
cross, Hugh and I probably wouldn’t still be married.
And I would certainly never write a book.”
“I’ve learned
something else
about family and failure and promises: when
a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In
one way or another, we are all unfaithful
to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there
is. We do break our most solemn promises,
and sometimes
we break them when we don’t even realize it. If
a marriage has to be the pearly-pink perfection
suggested by
commercials for coffee or canned spaghetti sauce or laundry detergents,
it is
never going to work…. I can look at the
long years of my marriage with gratitude, and hope for many more, only
when I
accept our failures.”
“If our love
for each other
really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it;
it is
inclusive, never exclusive. If a
friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it
should be cut out, and quickly. I’ve had
that happen several times, so I know whereof I speak.”
“On the other
hand, we both
have rich, deep, abiding friendships which have nourished our marriage
and
helped it grow.”
“It is a free
relationship,
but it is built on promises. Like every
other couple we break our promises one way or another, but we take the
breaking
of the promises seriously; the fact that the promise has been broken
does not
make us permissive about breaking it again; instead, we try to mend. We have used an extraordinary amount of
glue.”
“No long-term
marriage is
made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so
hurt that
I thought my love would never recover. And
then, in the midst of near despair, something has
happened beneath
the surface. A bright little flashing
fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and
suddenly I am
returned to a state of love again—till next time. I’ve
learned that there will always be a next
time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won’t
stay
submerged. And each time something has
been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new
kind of
love has grown. The best I can ask for
is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will
continue to
grow. I can say no more than that this
is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our
failures
can be redeemed and blessed.”
“My young
friend who was
taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be
persuaded to
forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of
the joy of
the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But
it is a belief limited not only to the
more rigid sects. I know a number of
highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who
consider as a heresy
my faith that God’s loving concern for his creation will outlast all
our
willfulness and pride. No matter how
many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including
Satan, is
reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his
look of
love with a joyful response of love.
“Origen held
this belief and
was ultimately pronounced a heretic. Gregory
of Nyssa, affirming the same loving God, was made
a saint. Some people feel it to be heresy
because it
appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God.
But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom
to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride.
If the Word of God is the light of the world,
and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the
dark
corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be
given the
grace to respond with love—and of our own free will.
“The church
has always taught
that we must pay for our sins, that we shall be judged and punished
according
to our sinfulness. But I cannot believe
that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a
loving
parent. The entire purpose of loving
punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the
lesson. And the lesson is always love.
“It may take
more years than
we can count before Nero—for instance—has learned enough love to be
able to
look with joy into the loving eyes of a Christ who enfleshed himself
for a time
on earth as a Jew, but Nero’s punishments, no matter how terrible they
may be,
are lessons in love, and that love is greater than all his sick hate.”
“Easter
completes the circle
of blessing, and the joy of the completion remains, despite all the
attempts of
the powers of darkness to turn it into cursing.”
“A graduate
student wrote to
ask if my Christianity affects my novels, and I replied that it is the
other
way around. My writing affects my
Christianity. In a way one might say
that my stories keep converting me back to Christianity, from which I
am
constantly tempted to stray because the circle of blessing seems frayed
and
close to breaking, and my faith is so frail and flawed that I fall away
over
and over again from my God. There are
times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given
him
cause; but Easter is always the answer to My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me!”
“So it is
with all of
life. If our usual response to an
annoying situation is a curse, we’re likely to meet emergencies with a
curse. In the little events of daily
living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are
built up
out of ordinary things. And we learn to
bless first of all by being blessed. My
reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband,
my
children, my friends.”
“When I talk
about my books
knowing more than I do, I am not referring to something magic. Nor is it an easy way out which eliminates
the hard work of putting together a story. Writing
a book is work; it involves discipline, and
writing when I don’t
feel like writing. Robert Louis
Stevenson said that writing is ten percent inspiration, and ninety
percent
perspiration. The inspiration doesn’t
come before the perspiration; it’s usually the other way around. Inspiration comes during work, not before
it.”
“I am
convinced that each
work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has
its own
life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the
painter, and say, ‘Here I am: compose
me; or write me; or paint me’; and the job of the artist is to serve
the work. I have never served a work as I
would like to,
but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and
this
attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that
I know.”
“I know that
when I am most
monstrous, I am most in need of love. When
my temper flares out of bounds it is usually set off
by something
unimportant which is on top of a series of events over which I have no
control,
which have made me helpless, and thus caused me anguish and frustration. I am not lovable when I am enraged, although
it is when I most need love.
“One of our
children when he
was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty,
and
beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an
affirmation of love. And I would put my
arms
around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the
loving
small boy had returned.
“So God does
with me. I strike out at him in pain and
fear and he
holds me under the shadow of his wings. Sometimes
he appears to me to be so unreasonable that I
think I cannot
live with him, but I know that I cannot live without him.
He is my lover, father, mother, sister,
brother, friend, paramour, companion, my love, my all.”
“One reason
nearly half my
books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children
are
still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are
not yet
separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of
proof. I find that I agree with many
college-age kids who are rejecting the adult world—not those with bad
cases of
Peter Pantheism, but with those who understand that the most grownup of
us is
not very grownup at all; that the most mature of us is pretty immature;
that we
still have a vast amount to learn.”
“We have much
to be judged on
when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are
the
symptoms of our illness, and the result of our failures in love. In the evening of life we shall be judged on
love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not
for my
absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on
him to
come.
“But his love
is greater than
all our hate, and he will not rest until Judas has turned to him, until
Satan
has turned to him, until the dark has turned to him; until we can all,
all of
us without exception, freely return his look of love with love in our
own eyes
and hearts. And then, healed, whole,
complete but not finished, we will know the joy of being co-creators
with the
one to whom we call.
“Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus.”
Reviews of other books by Madeleine L'Engle:
A Circle of Quiet: The
Crosswicks Journals, Book 1
The Summer of the
Great-Grandmother:
The Crosswicks Journals, Book 2
Walking
on Water
Glimpses of Grace, with
Carole F. Chase
Madeleine L'Engle Herself:
Reflections on a Writing Life, with Carole F. Chase
A Wrinkle in
Time
A Wrinkle in Time audiobook
The Joys of Love
Copyright © 2006 Sondra Eklund. All
rights reserved.
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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund
