Rest

Many of us have places we retreat when we need some rejuventation--when, despite sleep and intravenous caffeine, our eyelids are still far too heavy.

I know people who go to the mountains, or the beach, to find their center, to readjust their vision. For my brother, Bach is one of those "places." For me it is certain writers and poets, including Madeleine L'Engle.

A huge majority of L'Engle's noteriety (sp?) comes from her award-winning book A Wrinkle in Time, which is a fabulous work. But I often find my rest in her book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.

She is a kindred spirit, and I will mourn the day I hear of her passing (she is in her late 80's, by my estimation). Finding a favorite quote from this book would be difficult, so I picked a good one somewhat at random:

To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all. I don't mean to water down Christianity into a vauge kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus--not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where he can and cannot be seen. We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch burnings and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken universe. We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men."