walking on water

Madeleine L'Engle 1918-2007

i just found out my favorite children's author, an inspirational artist and lover of the Word and the written word, passed away on thursday. this woman was tenacious and brave and persevering, bold and brash, willing to say things and do things and write things most christians flinch at. She had to persevere through resubmission and resubmission and rejection after rejection before her most noted work was published. Wrinkle was banned by many conservative Christians when it first came out. and she wrote books for children she knew would be too complicated for adults-- someone who understood 'childlike faith'.

i read all of her books as an adult and they truly challenged me. they asked me to step out of the concrete, the rational, the evident, and see a world beyond. she mixed science and fantasy, the literal and the figurative worlds. every challenge met in the other realms brought wisdom and application to reality of everyday. meg and vicky and polly all asked me to look at God with new eyes, to see him and know him beyond the temporal, beyond my cultural goggles, beyond my narrow world view. they also, though young teenagers, taught me to love, to appreciate men in a pure light.

when i first arrived back in austin, texas, i raided every half price bookstore seeking my Madeleine collection. my top shelf is a shrine now! one book really challenged me, one she wrote on art and faith called, Walking on Water. it touched me deeply. for years i had squashed my "artist" because i didn't know how it fit in with my heart's call to serve the King of Kings; and she challenged me to do what intuitively i knew. i had to create. and it is worship to the Almighty to do so!

somewhere buried in my files in a letter to Madeleine i never sent. i wish i would have and i wish i could have met her. she wasn't perfect; she was human. but she was honest. i am so glad for that. i hope i can merit just an ounce of her forthrightness. thank you, God, for Madeleine. the world will miss her, but she must be walking on water seeing your face. and i leave you with a little something from her wit and wisdom...

Children are often better believers than we are. A young friend of mine who works in a day-care center one day overheard a little boy say, "I want to die," and he meant it. She swept him into her lap to try and find out what was wrong that he should feel and say such a thing ... Everything was wrong. His parents were drinking, fighting, screaming, throwing furniture. His anguish at the violence at home had focused into a terror that someone was going to come take him away in the night. My young friend said to him, "I'm going to fix that for you. I'm going to send four guardian angels, one to stand at each corner of your bed. They will spread their wings around you, and you will be enclosed in their love, and no one will be able to take you away."
The next morning when he came to the day-care center she hurried to him, asking, "How did it go last night?"
He responded very seriously, "I think we can cut down on the angel guard. One will be enough. The flapping of their wings kept me awake."