A Light So Lovely Read online

  A dozen years later, it’s been fascinating to circle back to some of those same writers and ask, “Who was the Madeleine you knew? What’s your favorite story about her? What were her quirks, her blind spots? What was her signature contribution to the way Christians talk about faith, story, art, and science today?” Remembrances by Philip Yancey and Luci Shaw, in particular—as well as Madeleine’s longtime housemate Barbara Braver (not a Chrysostom Society member, but a fine poet in her own right)—have seasoned this project with more than mere personal insights. They’ve helped us take the long view, to not settle for merely riding along with the contemporary pendulum swings of public vitriol. They encourage us to face our cultural moment the way Madeleine would have: resolutely, lovingly, with an ear for how God is calling us to engage the darkness in spite of our weaknesses—or even, like A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg Murry, because of them.

  Here’s the ultimate paradox: God uses imperfect people, in every generation, at each unique point in history, to accomplish his purposes. “My grace is sufficient for you,” God told the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “for my power is made perfect in weakness.” As the rhetoric on social media, in politics, and in social discourse increasingly polarizes us from one another, we aren’t allowed to have weaknesses: only power, only the correct ideas, only a bluster and bravado devoid of repentance. And yet that’s not how God chooses to act in the world. Born a helpless infant to poor Middle Eastern refugees, God in Christ took on our limitations; power became vulnerability; holiness touched the dirt and stench and darkness of humankind with relentless love. In the words of one of Madeleine’s favorite Bible verses, “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5 KJV).

  I now understand that Madeleine’s embrace of paradox was something unique and new—not just to me, but for an entire generation. For Madeleine, if paradox is at the heart of the gospel—what she called “the technical impossibility” that “Jesus of Nazareth was wholly man as well as wholly God”3—then we shouldn’t be surprised that paradox is precisely where God meets us in the rest of life too. She taught us that God can be at work in the sacred and secular, truth and story, fact and fiction, faith and science, religion and art—and we must not foreclose on how Christ will choose to work, nor through whom. The disciples were nothing if not surprised by this very thing (“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked the disciple Philip in John 1:46). And why, Madeleine would ask us, should we be any different?

  It’s astounding how a deep dive into the pantheon of her works only shows just how often, and consistently, the above themes echo throughout her life and writing. Each work is like a whale singing its whale song to the others, all together a kind of pod swimming in more or less the same pattern on the same trajectory.4 Every so often a whale breaches and earns public attention—most notably, of course, A Wrinkle in Time—but below the surface (and Madeleine loved to speak of what’s submerged in our subconscious, that massive iceberg), the work is among its thematic peers. One amongst a larger body. Part of a consistent whole.

  • • • •

  My chief task in writing this book not only has been to understand her way of thinking about the intersection of things like story and truth, art and religion, and so on, but also to locate her within a larger narrative. How did she shape the way people of faith today engage and discuss those things? If it weren’t for Madeleine, how would those conversations be different? What were her most lasting contributions?

  To that end, I’ve found it helpful to trace her journey through seven key movements, which provide the shape and structure of this book:

  Chapter One—We’ll survey her life and works as a whole, attempting to identify her spheres of influence, both as a cherished friend and mentor as well as a complex, flawed human being.

  Chapter Two—We’ll dive into her story where many readers do, with A Wrinkle in Time—a book that, like Madeleine herself, somehow bridges the often vastly different worlds of sacred and secular in American culture.

  Chapter Three—We’ll step back and trace her own spiritual formation as a child through the influence of great stories that gave her hints and glimpses of God’s truth.

  Chapter Four—We’ll track the life-changing impact of scientists on her conversion to Christianity when she was a youngish write-at-home mom.

  Chapter Five—We’ll chart her profound spiritual influence on others during her prolific middle age, particularly her continued assertion that artistic practice is a religious vocation.

  Chapter Six—We’ll make the difficult turn toward her personal challenges later in life—the loss of her son, among other things—and her troubling propensity to blur fact and fiction.

  Chapter Seven—Finally, we’ll identify the ways that Madeleine attempted to battle the darkness, especially in her own soul, and to cling with resolute desperation to the light.

  Through all of these movements I’ll continually circle back to the people who knew her, as well as to a new generation influenced by her journey. And I’ll ask the question: What does her story mean for us, now, in our own unique moment?

  • • • •

  Even when we take the ten-thousand-foot view, it’s hard to map the scope of Madeleine’s tremendous spiritual legacy, one that we’re only just now, roughly ten years after her death, beginning to grasp. My young sons are growing up in a time when cultural lines are being marked in the sand with both virtual and actual bullets (and yet, is our time any different than other episodes in human history?). Thus, I want my sons to develop L’Engle’s ability to embrace paradox, which allowed her to think and believe and say things that both fundamentalists and non-Christians alike insist are impossibilities. I want them to learn how to push their fellow Christians, in particular, to stop telling the world what God can’t do.

  Her most quotable statement is still urgently true: “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.”5 For a new generation that has known nothing but the highly contentious political and religious climate of contemporary American culture, embracing Jesus in paradox is nothing short of good news.

  And that’s the crux of this book. Madeleine was no stranger to the stresses and battles we find ourselves fighting every day, as Christians, as artists, as thinkers, as human beings. Indeed, she often claimed, “The idea of God is not easy at all. I mean, I have to hang on till my nails are bloody to keep believing in God . . . If I believe in God wholly and completely for two minutes every seven or eight weeks, I’m doing well.”6 This is an astounding statement. How do you put one foot in front of the other, much less produce a phenomenal corpus of literature, when the road seems so dark? How do you continue to affirm the presence and goodness of God? Those are the questions animating these pages.

  So let’s strike a match, light a candle. Let’s illuminate the life and legacy of this extraordinary woman such that we experience both the grace and the struggle that helped her shape a generation and beyond. Because ultimately it’s not her own light we’re drawn to, but the light of Christ she lifted up, however imperfectly, to the world. By knowing her better, we might better understand our own particular darknesses, in this unique chapter of American history, and how we’re called to be light-bearers too.

  Chapter One

  ICON and ICONOCLAST

  All of us who need icons—and I am convinced that all artists do—also need an iconoclast nearby.

  A Circle of Quiet

  Sitting on my desk is a signed copy of The Rock That Is Higher from one of L’Engle’s Wheaton College visits. That semester our chapel seating assignments were by first name. Not only was I smack in the middle of maybe seven rows of Sarahs, but also every girl in my balcony row was Sarah Elizabeth (apparently, our conservative parents thought they were being unique in a generation of hippies tha
t named children “River”). For fun we would lean over the balcony and call “Hey, Dave!” and watch several dozen guys in one section all turn and look. All those biblical names . . . we were drowning in unremarkableness.

  Into that mix came Madeleine L’Engle, a giantess in a great flapping dress of patchwork colors; I couldn’t even properly pronounce her name. If she spoke in chapel or gave a lecture in an English class, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is a tall woman sitting at a table in the bookstore blinking her large eyes like a wise and vigilant owl. She insisted on inscribing the book with my whole name, first and last, because, as one of her characters says in A Wind in the Door, “if your name isn’t known, then it’s a very lonely feeling.”1 Names and naming are of theological significance, Madeleine asserted: it’s “one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.”2 Naming is how we are known and seen in the world, not only by people, but by the God who knows us and makes us unique from one another.

  She signed a copy of her 1992 novel Certain Women for my mother as well—again, using my mother’s first and last name. There is nothing rushed about the handwriting. It’s careful, painstaking, elegant. There may have been a hundred people behind me in line, there may be a thousand stories of Madeleine encounters just like mine, but in that moment, one young woman and her mother mattered.

  • • • •

  If we are to understand Madeleine’s spiritual legacy, not merely her biography, we must begin with a brief sketch of her life.

  Madeleine L’Engle Camp, named for various forbears, was an only child, born in New York City on November 29, 1918, at the end of the Great War. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a war veteran and theater reviewer who also wrote potboiler mysteries; her mother, Madeleine Hall Barnett, a pianist. Her parents had been married for at least a decade by the time she came along, “and although I was a very much wanted baby,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “the pattern of their lives was already well established and a child was not part of that pattern.”3 It was, she often said, a lonely childhood.

  Her parents attended plays and operas in the evenings and thus slept in late and dined late—without Madeleine. “I remember my parents coming, night after night, to kiss me good night and goodbye in their evening clothes, Father often with his top hat, looking like a duke, I thought.”4 The only exception to these separate worlds was Sundays, when the family attended Episcopal worship services and dined together. While Madeleine knew she was loved, she became, by sheer circumstances, a solitary child whose closest human companions were a devoted Irish-Catholic housekeeper, Mary O’Connell (whom the family called “Mrs. O”), and books.

  Remember this. When you picture the confident celebrity who insisted on inscribing people’s full names—hundreds of names, all over the country, decade after decade—remember the small child eating supper alone in her room, reading.

  Her memoirs, such as A Circle of Quiet, tell how she bounced from school to school throughout childhood, including a miserable few years at an English-run Anglican boarding school in Switzerland, where her parents dropped her off without warning. Chapel services were required and decidedly boring—the only lasting benefit, she later claimed, being her daily exposure to the glorious language of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, “badly read by one of the mistresses.” Thankfully, her teachers “couldn’t quite ruin the language of the great poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”5

  While a student, she wrote and illustrated stories, as a coping strategy, when she should’ve been doing schoolwork—an author in the making. As her granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy, describe in Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters, Madeleine’s childhood journals emphasize her astonishing drive not merely to write for fun but to make a career of it. Inspired by Emily in L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon (one of her all-time favorite books), she wrote in her journal at age fifteen, “I, Madeleine L’Engle Camp, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the alpine path and write my name on the scroll of fame.”6

  It wasn’t until high school at Ashley Hall, back in the States, that she finally flourished among genuine friends and caring teachers, ultimately attending Smith College from 1937 to 1941. There she embarked on more earnest literary studies under the tutelage of such scholar-authors as Mary Ellen Chase. It was from Chase that Madeleine grasped “that anybody who was seriously considering writing as a profession must be completely familiar with the King James translation of the Bible, because the power of this great translation is the rock on which the English language stands.”7

  Madeleine’s father died in 1936, when she was just seventeen, of pneumonia complicated by gas-damaged lungs from WWI. Finding no comfort or community in the Episcopal churches she visited during that time, she eschewed organized religion and became, for lack of a better description, a deeply unhappy, deeply moral, artist-agnostic—who also happened to read the Bible because her writing professor at an otherwise irreligious college told her to.

  After college she seriously pursued a career in theater, which paid just enough for her to start writing novels on the side. She credited those earlier boarding-school days with the ability to write amidst communal chaos: “The result of this early lesson in concentration is that I can write anywhere, and I wrote my first novel on tour with a play, writing on trains, in dressing rooms, and in hotel bedrooms shared with three other girls.”8 In 1944 she met a tall, striking young actor named Hugh Franklin while touring with a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (he later became famous playing Dr. Charles Tyler on the television soap opera All My Children). Hugh was kind and unassuming and clearly liked her; and after various fits and starts, they married in 1946. Together they continued to live in New York City.

  Madeleine now dove into writing exclusively; her first novels—A Small Rain and Ilsa—came out in 1945 and 1946. By that point she had dismissed both her maiden name (Camp) and her married name (Franklin) as pen names, opting instead for “Madeleine L’Engle.” When she was with Hugh, however, they were known as the Franklins.

  Not long after they were married, the couple bought a farmhouse “of charming confusion” (as Madeleine often described it) that they named Crosswicks, in Goshen, Connecticut. They moved there full time in 1951 for nearly a decade, running the local general store and raising their young children: Josephine, Bion (named for Madeleine’s maternal grandfather), and their adoptive daughter, Maria, who joined the family in 1956. Madeleine often pointed to those years as her most difficult season: attempting to parent small kids, run a business, and maintain a writing career while receiving numerous rejections, all of which put more irons in the fire than she could attend with grace.

  She also found herself questing for spiritual answers, eventually making small but significant steps toward Christian faith and practice—a story we’ll explore in more depth as this book progresses. Suffice it to say, her spiritual journey cannot be teased out from her vocational trajectory as a writer, and neither were more uncertain than during that decade. When, on her fortieth birthday, she received yet another publishing rejection, she says, “I covered the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation.” But then, she realized, her “subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure.” So she uncovered the typewriter again. “In my journal I recorded this moment of decision, for that’s what it was. I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not.”9 She was meant—nay, called by a power beyond herself—to be a writer. “It’s easy to say you’re a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, then it is quite clear that it is not one’s own decision at all.”10

  Her season of publishing rejections ended with her sudden celebrity status upon being awarded the 1963 Newbery for Wrinkle. The family returned to New York City while keeping Crosswicks as a summer home. Madeleine was back in a Manhattan ap
artment once again; but instead of reading books alone in her room, or scribbling them on the side, she now wrote them for an audience of millions.

  • • • •

  From that point on, Madeleine’s career was marked by prodigious output: upwards of sixty titles, everything from middle-grade, young-adult (YA), and grown-up fiction, to poetry, memoir, and creative biblical commentary—including the occasional children’s picture book. And that doesn’t include her unpublished journals or letters, her numerous forewords, afterwords, or contributing essays. Nor does it include her many public addresses, several of which have been anthologized. (At one point while researching this project, I narrowed down my Madeleine-related interlibrary loan options to forty-seven. From seven hundred.) A quick survey of her works follows here, to help us get our bearings:

  Before the publication of Wrinkle she had a half dozen novels under her belt, scattered throughout the 1940s and 1950s, including the first in the Austin Family Chronicles (Meet the Austins, 1960). But once Wrinkle hit the shelves in 1962, she wrote whatever she wanted, roughly a title per year and in no particular order—an astonishing feat, considering the pressures of the publishing world to deliver more of the same winning series. In fact, A Wind in the Door, which directly follows the events of Wrinkle, didn’t appear for another eleven years, in 1973, with subsequent titles appearing even later: A Swiftly Tilting Planet in 1978, Many Waters in 1986, and An Acceptable Time in 1989. Together they are sometimes known as the Time Quintet.

  Novels featuring the Murrys (the original family of Wrinkle) and O’Keefes (descendants of Meg Murry and Calvin O’Keefe) became known as her “Kairos” line, or stories that blur the normal bounds of time and space. The Austin tales (of which The Moon by Night, 1964, was the first book she published after Wrinkle; and of which A Ring of Endless Light earned a Newbery Honor in 1981) were dubbed her “Chronos” line: that is, stories taking place in real time, in our world, with only hints of science fiction or magical realism. Sometimes she connected the Kairos and Chronos storylines through ancillary characters—yet another example of Madeleine refusing to be forced into either/or.