Madeleine L'Engle (1918--2007)

Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday, at the age of 88. I knew she was elderly and ailing, but it's a sad passing for me. Some of L'Engle's works have touched my life philosophically and spiritually. She was a great lady. If you haven't read her work, I recommend Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art for non-fiction and A Wrinkle in Time for fiction. Her Crosswicks journal set is pretty wonderful.

In honor of Madeleine L'Engle, here are a couple passages from Walking on Water that I have posted previously on this blog.

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When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable. Safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the Spirit.

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 vague 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.

(and one I haven't posted before:)

What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career. Several women have written to me to complain about A Swiftly Tilting Planet. They feel that I should not have allowed Meg Murry to give up a career by marrying Calvin, having children, and quietly helping her husband with his work behind the scenes. But if women are to be free to chose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg's choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics
Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.