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A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

Book by Sarah Arthur · 6 quotes · Children, Motherhood, Writers On Writing

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A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time Quotes

“For her, the conflict was a theological problem, a serious error on the part of her fellow Christians. "There is a new and troublesome fear of the imagination - though without it, how can anyone believe in the Incarnation, the Power that created all of the galaxies willingly limiting itself to be one of us for love for us! And this fear is expressing itself in a new kind of book burning and witch-hunting.”

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“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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“For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.”

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“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.”

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“For believers who pray the same prayers week after week, who come to the Communion table expecting to be changed, we must claim that it is possible for lives to be rescripted. We must assert that it's possible for habits and language to be reshaped by a different, more powerful story. The seeds for critiquing our behavior, - indeed, for critiquing the tradition itself - are there inside the narrative we claim. 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.”

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“As we stare into the icon, the world we are looking into ishn't shrinking or vanishing. Rather, it is expanding and growing. I like to call this The Wardrobe Effect, borrowed from the scene in C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the children move into and through a small space (the Wardrobe) to emerge into this vast expansive space (Narnia). An icon is trying to create, via reverse perspective, this same effect upon us. Heaven is more real and larger than this world.”

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