At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the wind with its swiftness along its path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness

Madeleine L’Engle is my hero. I’ve read her books over and over and they have strongly influenced me.  I named my first truck—my first safe place from which to explore the world—after her. When I fought with a close friend, the exchange of a Madeleine L’Engle book helped soothe feelings and continue on. Twenty-five years after I began reading her books, I still return to L’Engle’s concepts regularly in my own thinking and writing. This year, A Wrinkle in Time turns 50 years old. I want to write about what her work has meant to me.

At first it was the science that drew me in. Tessering, mitochondria, farandolae, chordates, and echinoderms are just a few words I first learned from L’Engle. I remember asking a librarian if a tesseract was real, and the kindly librarian finding me some basic physics books. In Wrinkle, Charles Wallace explained dimensions and mathematical squares to me. L’Engle also introduced me to a completely new use of words through echthroi, kairos, and kything. I first read the phrase “a suspension of disbelief” in a L’Engle novel.

L’Engle’s approach to science, not as a bunch of stuff to be memorized, but as concepts that effect our lives, fascinated me and showed me an entirely new way to engage with science.

But ultimately, it wasn’t the science of L’Engle that made the biggest impact on me. Instead, it is her compassionate treatment of the human condition that I still contemplate. Inside her stories she provided a safe place from which to begin exploring complicated and painful events, and our actions and reactions to these events.

Terrible things happen to lovable characters in L’Engle’s books: children lose limbs, loved ones die, fathers leave their children. One of the most horrific scenes I’ve ever read is in a Madeleine L’Engle book. At first it is a joyful, happy scene: children enjoying a carnival ride while the parents watch. But the scene shifts to complete horror as the ride malfunctions, going faster and faster, eventually bursting into flames, killing the children.

L’Engle doesn’t avoid terrible events. But she does provide her characters, and her readers, tools to deal with them. Wisdom comes from grandfathers and uncles, from mothers and sisters and wives. Pain isn’t denied, but it isn’t allowed to rule, either.

The characters are complex: clergymen bully retired pianists, beautiful young woman manipulate trusting young men, world leaders threaten nuclear war, brothers rape sisters. Again, without denying how complex the world is, a strong belief in people, in family, and in life is clear in L’Engle’s stories. The recurring themes of love, the importance of small actions, the acceptance of differences, and authenticity of her books hugely affected my thinking about these concepts.

This blog is about the ordinary contradictions of life, and Madeleine L’Engle wrote about many ordinary contradictions. The following example is from A Ring of Endless Light, as the two characters are talking about authenticity:

Were you thinking about you?

No.

But you were really being you?

Yes.

So that’s a contradiction, isn’t it? You weren’t thinking about yourself at all. You were completely thrown out of yourself in concentration on Basil. And yet you were really being you.

I leaned my head against Adam’s shoulder. “Much more than when I’m all replete with very me.”

His right hand drew my head more comfortably against his shoulder. “So, when we’re thinking consciously about ourselves, we’re less ourselves than when were not being self-centered.”

I loved discussions such as this one about how to be you, how to be authentic. The dialog and the ideas rang true with twelve-year-old me, and they still do today. As an adolescent, ideas such as how to be authentic, and was it okay to be you, were an incredible escape from the uniformity my middle-school culture demanded and I failed to produce.

The concept that has stayed with me the longest is what L’Engle refers to as caring about the fall of the sparrow. I’ve since learned that “the fall of the sparrow” is a biblical phrase, but L’Engle’s meaning isn’t quite the classic theology meaning. Her idea is this (from The Arm of the Starfish):

It was what he always said,” Adam choked out, “about the fall of the sparrow. . . . If you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can’t pick and choose who’s going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody, and you’re stuck with it.

If we’re going to be compassionate human beings, we can’t pick and choose who we will be compassionate towards. I’ve thought about this concept over and over, applying it to events big and small. In my mind (I don’t know if L’Engle would have agreed with me), this concept applies to gay marriage, to endangered species, and to three-legged dogs, to give a few examples in a world of many. I do think there are limits to this concept, times when boundaries have to be placed. But the concept itself, and the framing of it within the book The Arm of the Starfish, touched me deeply.

L’Engle’s books, for all the terror, intrigue, and death, are greatly compassionate places. In world that struggles to be compassionate, her books are stars fighting against darkness.

All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness

Filed under: Existential, What I'm Reading