I first came to Madeleine L’Engle’s work the way so many of us did—through her books for young readers. As a child of the seventies and a teenager of the eighties, my entrance into the wonderful world of independent reading coincided perfectly with her most prolific publishing years. Her stories were important to me for how they portrayed characters who were smart, who got along better with adults than with their peers, who liked reading and classical music and believed in the existence of a realm beyond what the eye could see. In other words, kids like me.
When I was an adult working toward a writing career, L’Engle’s words came back into my life when someone, knowing I desperately needed her perspective, presented me with a copy of Walking on Water. In it I found breathtaking contrast to the way I’d grown up hearing religious people talk about art, culture, and creativity. My Christian beliefs were formed in the context of a blue-jeans-and-guitars Jesus Movement church in San Francisco that was later touched by the sort of Evangelicalism that looked askance at popular music, most prime-time television, and any book you couldn’t find at the local Christian bookstore—anything that could fall into the category of the secular.
Secular. It’s a word that got a lot of airtime in the religious contexts of my youth. Secular meant don’t look, don’t read, don’t listen, don’t touch. It meant anything that came from outside the church as we defined it, anything made by non-Christians, unbelievers, the group of people identified by what they weren’t. They were “the world” and we were separate, in it but not of it, and we needed our own books, music, and movies (and bookstores and magazines and dentists and accountants and car dealers).
Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I don’t ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the church’s understanding of the God of the universe.
By the time I began to write, I knew there was something false about this compartmentalization, though I could not articulate it. And I knew I didn’t want to write for the religious market. Still, the “us” and “them” rhetoric around me planted seeds of doubt. By wanting to write as honestly as I could about human experience, was I on the wide path to destruction? Wouldn’t it be better to apply my intellectual capacities (limited though they are) toward building an unassailable apologetic for my faith so that I never had to fear not having an answer?
When I encountered Walking on Water and a few other books on the topic of art and faith and the faithful artist, it was like the sun dawned on a room whose contours had previously been flattened and grayed by fluorescent lights. I began a quest—one I’m still on today—to find out everything anyone had ever said about what it meant to hold your faith devoutly while also holding your art as devoutly, without one replacing the other. There had, of course, been others writing about this for decades and even centuries, but kids from eighties suburban youth groups weren’t reading Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene or Montaigne. We were reading Madeleine L’Engle. Who better to speak to a young writer about the possibilities for living a faith and a writing life with equal and interdependent vigor than the woman whose stories had filled my childhood and adolescence? Who better to grant me permission to be both believer and doubter?
In the very first chapter, L’Engle begins to articulate something I had felt innately but could never have explained: “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.” Though L’Engle goes on to explore numerous facets of the connection between art and faith, this is essentially the book’s thesis statement. And I think everyone knows this innately. We know, or at least we sense, when a work is created in bad faith, through the way it panders or degrades or thinks very little of its audience or offers certainty in response to the mysteries of the ineffable. As a reader, I want good religion. As a writer—even more than when I first began—I want to create in good faith.
How does one do this? L’Engle writes that the discipline of creation is “an effort toward wholeness.” In some ways this feels far more daunting than efforts toward income, audience, and critical success, which are things that we believe (falsely, for the most part) are within our control. They are about us, we think, what we do, how good and savvy and talented we are. Yet L’Engle insists over and over again in a hundred different ways that it is not about us, at least not in the way we think.
She knew this was a difficult thing to reckon with in 1980 when she first wrote it. How much more, now, do artists wrestle with the constant call to make our work about us—our platforms and presence and sales numbers and likes and followers? We, all of us, live in a culture that urges us to cultivate and curate idols of ourselves. This is true of the person working in a cubicle as much as it is for the artist, but it’s especially easy for those of us in public careers to be propelled away from wholeness rather than toward it, as we splinter off bits of ourselves to construct the idol versions.
When L’Engle asks toward the end of the book, “Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?” and essentially answers “Yes,” I connect it to this question of wholeness, of writing in good faith, and what “good religion” might look like for creative people of any tradition. L’Engle gives us more than a few hints: It looks like vulnerability. It looks like having the courage to let go of being right and of ideas we might have about our qualifications. It looks like a “rebuttal of death” and an openness to participate in wonder and joy as well as in pain and suffering.
For some of us from a Christian background, it looks like growing up out of a belief that the opposites of secular are clean and safe, and into an understanding that the sacred is all around us. L’Engle’s fiction is saturated in this idea of the sacred and mysterious being with us in the everyday, and the barrier between the visible and the invisible being thin, permeable. Her writing about writing and art brings us even more directly into that paradigm, where the artist is in an ongoing work of participating in God’s creation—beyond categories, beyond control, and even beyond time itself.
Since its publication, the ideas in Walking on Water have gained much wider acceptance in the church and been expanded upon by spiritual writers who have come after. The culture wars have been fought, and some are still fighting the same old battles over what’s acceptable to represent in art, what is good and true, and what might cause the weaker brother to stumble. Meanwhile, an ever-growing group of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and performing artists have left the war and put their energy instead into doing their work with as much excellence as they can, living their faith with as much honesty and humility as they can muster, and embracing mystery with as much passion as possible.
I think L’Engle would be very happy about this (while at the same time perhaps appalled that science and religion are still at war in many corners). The world she envisioned and brought to the page, in both her fiction and nonfiction, is born of a deeply held faith that the universe itself is an act of love and therefore the world is worth loving. “God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us,” she wrote, “and to co-create with God is our human calling.” This is good religion, not only for the artist but also for anyone else who would choose to believe.