A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time
Sarah Arthur
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Walking on Water”
“The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn’t even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.”
“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”
“Enter Madeleine. Here was a Christian author who could function quite unperturbedly from inside paradox, who dared to question the assumption that all things must be either/or. Why can’t it be both/and? What is this nonsense about “secular”? Why can’t God use those things if God wants to? Why can’t God speak through this or that person (if God can speak through a donkey, for instance)? Who says?”
“by Luci Shaw To the Edge: for Madeleine L'Engle Be with her now. She faces the ocean of unknowing, losing the sense of what her life has been, and soon will be no longer as she knew it, as we knew it with her. Lagging behind, we cannot join her on this nameless shore. Knots in her bones, flesh flaccid, the skin like paper, pigment gathering like ashes driven by a random wind, a heart that may still sing, interiorly - we cannot know - have pulled her far ahead of us, our pioneer. As we embrace her, her inner eyes embrace the universe.. She recognizes heaven with its innumerable stars - but not our faces. Be with her now, as you have sometimes been - a flare that blazes, then dulls, leaving only a bright blur in the memory. Hold her in the mystery that no one can describe but Lazarus, though he was dumb and didn't speak of it. Fog has rolled in, erasing definition at the edge. Walking to meet it, she hopes soon to see where the shore ends. She listens as the ocean breathes in and out in waves. She hears no other sound.”
“Sifting the real from fake news is a skillset some of us have only recently recognized as urgent. Facts are not only hotly contested in favor of various ideological fictions, but the fictions can be alarmingly persuasive and even harmful to real people on the ground. As a result, we've learned to approach everything with what my theology professor, J. Kameron Carter, called a "hermeneutics of suspicion" - something that communities of color have employed for centuries. Whom does this interpretation of events benefit? Why? What other voices also need amplifying?”
“Saint Clement of Rome Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant, we pray, that we might be grounded and settled in your truth by the coming of your Holy Spirit into our hearts. What we do not know, reveal to us; what is lacking within us, make complete; that which we do not know, confirm in us; and keep us blameless in your service, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“Picture the bold minister again, glancing up at the congregation with glasses that look suspiciously like Mrs. Who's. He prays stridently from the 1892 baptismal rite: "Grant that this Child may have power and strength to have victory" - and everyone, even the people who slipped in the back late, strain to glimpse the baby's round face - "and to triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh." Wide-eyed, the parents and the people respond, "Amen." Dare we pray such prayers for today's children? Dare we name aloud the enemy they're up against? Dare we claim that God will not fail with any part of his creation? that in Christ, light and goodness eclipse darkness and evil, now and forever? Dare we say with the congregation - with Madeleine herself - Amen?”
“Madeleine taught us that we don't abandon spiritual habits just because we're in a season of struggle and doubt. We keep attending to those practices, day in and day out. This is not the same as legalism, in which we obey certain commands in some misguided attempt to be on God's good side. Instead, it requires deep humility and trust to acknowledge, "I don't understand this right now. Everything feels dark and meaningless. But there's more going on than I understand; and somehow God has promised to show up in the midst of these daily habits. So here goes." Prayer, worship, reading Scripture, breaking bread in community, spiritual counsel, and conversation with spiritual friends: all those are ways we put one foot in front of the other, even in the dark. These are the ways we practice believing.”
“Madeleine describes her difficult decade of trying to write while parenting small kids - which, for many women writers, in particular, resonates powerfully. Freelancer Aleah Marsden told me, "She blessed my desire to pursue something outside of mothering in a way that didn't diminish either calling's importance. Yes, of course, I was to be the best mother I could be to the children entrusted to me. No, they didn't have to be the epicenter of my existence. Yes, my writing was a gift worth protecting and pursuing, and I would be a better human (and mother) for it. No, it didn't give me license to abandon the embodied work that came with the season of mothering young children,”
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Book Keywords:
critical-theory, children, funeral, poem, writers-on-writing, prayer, faith, child-baptism, fake-news, habits, motherhood, shaw
