How do you look at the world? Is it black and white? Real or fiction? Changeable or set in it’s course? I recently ran across the obituary of one of my heroes and was even more saddened to find out that the article was more than a year old…
Madaline L’Engle had passed away.
Oh.
I first read ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ when I was in college, I was blown away. I’ve never read a story, much less a children’s book that did such a fine job of incorporating so many complex ideas. Quantum physics, characterizations from the book of Revelations, angels and faith? It was unimaginable. Not only had she done all of this seamlessly but she had written it so plainly that a sixth grader could follow along! As a Christian I’ve always been encouraged to live in a very black and white world. Not legalism per se but a very intellectual view of life, with all it’s pieces neatly laid out, unquestionable. But L’Engle dared to question. She found God in creation, in stories and in the hearts of little children. She was a questioner, a challenger and a seeker.
(She also wrote the most amazing book on faith and art that I’ve ever read.)
I know it sounds silly, but a part of me hurt to know that such a woman was no longer with us.
Like the elementary school teacher who first showed you a plastic model of the solar system or the time your mom first gave you a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. When your world grew bigger and you couldn’t wait to taste more, to discover. That’s a bit of what her books did for me. Like C.S. Lewis her faith played an integral part of her stories and was in fact something that she admits having no control over :
“If our lives are truly ‘hid with Christ in God,’ the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”
But unlike Lewis, L’Engle was with us, still sharing our story.
She chose to live in that strange place of uncertainty, where life and faith intermingle, contrast and wrestle. She wrote so well about struggle because she understood the very struggle that we all face, in no uncertian terms within our own lives.
She will be missed.
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
