Many years ago during my season as a young mother, I felt a deep longing for older women mentors. If those mentors were writers, all the better. Unfortunately, I didn’t know other wordsmiths at the time and felt isolated by my longing for people who could speak to me about art, faith, and the importance of family.
Fortunately, I one day stumbled upon Madeleine L’Engle’s Crosswicks journals, written from her great farmhouse “of charming confusion” in Connecticut. As the Newbery Award winner of A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle was just the person I needed. When I read those books all those years ago with four small sons tumbling around my feet and my eyes curiously gazing at the world outside my small home, I felt as if I had just sat down in an overstuffed chair across from the renowned writer in her Crosswicks living room and began to soak in her years of wise living and engaged intellect. She spoke back to me through those pages, assuring me I wasn’t alone as I felt this deep inward desire to both raise a family with devotion and care—and write.
Here I am in 2018, reminded once again of this woman’s influence on so many people, and the arts in general, as I soak up Madeleine’s life through a new biography written by Sarah Arthur: A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle. In fact, after reading the biography, I recently returned to those journals and found myself once again contentedly entrenched in Madeleine’s inspiring life of the mind and soul, flipping through the pages to see many of my old highlighted passages continuing to speak to me today.
In our age when stark lines divide our country by labeling people “right” or “left,” conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, Sarah Arthur’s biography is a welcome read for anyone weary of the divisions. Through interviews with family and friends as well as writers and thinkers influenced by L’Engle, the book paints a picture of a complicated but fascinating woman and brilliant author who managed to straddle both the sacred and secular in her writing and personal life.
In a time when the church is divided among itself, and most certainly divided from the secular world, L’Engle’s most quotable statement loudly resounds: “We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by loudly telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” In a way so few can manage it today, L’Engle embraced paradox.
The book offers a multifaceted glimpse of L’Engle’s life: her friendships, her passion for science, writing successes and struggles, and her efforts at juggling the demands of a career and family. One of my favorite Madeleine stories, recounted in both A Circle of Quiet and A Light so Lovely, deals with the painful rejection of one of her novels received on her fortieth birthday. After receiving the news of the rejection, Madeleine made an abrupt decision to quit writing, certain the rejection was a sign from heaven she should stop. “I covered the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation.”
But her quitting only lasted briefly—until she realized she was forming a novel in her head about failure. “In my journal I recorded this moment of decision, for that’s what it was. I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not.” She went on to say, “It’s easy to say you’re a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, then it is quite clear that it is not one’s own decision at all.”
Madeleine’s books would go on to sell in the tens of millions and continue to sell today. For anyone who has felt like quitting their passion, L’Engle’s experience serves as an encouragement. We must continue to create even when the accolades and successes are absent.
In the pages of A Light so Lovely, Arthur also highlights the rare and poignant friendship between poet Luci Shaw and Madeleine. The friendship between these two women displays the ability to befriend others outside your circle of commonality. As an evangelical Christian, Luci Shaw found herself disagreeing with Madeleine, a liturgical Christian, on occasions. Sometimes after one of these disagreements during an editing session when they finally reached an understanding, the two women would spontaneously stand and sing the doxology.
We all need like-minded friends in both mind and spirit—and we all need friends to show us the world through different eyes.
In a timely, pointed question to us all, Sarah Arthur asks, “What would it look like to have friendships with those who are not like us, wherein we learn to argue well and lovingly—and yet at the end of the day we can still be friends? This is a lost art in our culture, particularly as we create ever narrower, taller, insular silos on social media, cut off from opposing viewpoints.”
A Light so Lovely speaks to us in our unique time period and to all those in our population worn down by the darkness encroaching on us, longing for the perfect friend, wrestling with how to gracefully navigate the sacred/secular divide.The book will resonate with writers, readers, and anyone interested in a discussion about L’Engle’s rich life. The book is now available for purchase here.