I just pulled up to the grocery store on Friday afternoon when NPR did a little report on the death of Madeline L'Engle, most notably the author of A Wrinkle in Time. I did my shopping, got back in my car and cried a little bit. I confess I never read Wrinkle, but what I have read, and read yearly, is Glimpses of Grace, a daily devotional composed of L'Engle's writings, and through it she became very dear to me. I'm taking this tiny bit of virtual real estate and letting it be a memorial for such a prolific and passionate writer. Some of my favorite quotes:
“It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as the artist; he works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter; feel another human hand or the velvet of a puppy's ear; taste food prepared and offered in love; smell—oh, so many things: food, sewers, each other, flowers, books new-mown grass, dirt...
Here, in the offerings of creation, the oblations of story and song, are our glimpses of truth.”
“If we look at the makeup of the word disaster, dis-aster, we see dis, which means separation, and aster, which means star. So dis-aster is separation from the stars. Such separation is disaster indeed. When we are separated from the stars, the sea, each other, we are in danger of being separated from God...The house of God is not a safe place. It is a cross where time and eternity meet, and where we are—or should be—challenged to live more vulnerably, more interdependently. Where, even with light streaming in rainbow colours through the windows, we can listen to the stars.”
“When we deny our wholeness, when we repress part of ourselves, when we are afraid of our own darkness, then the dark turns against us, turns on us, becomes evil. Just as the intellect when it is not informed by the heart becomes vicious, so the intuition, the subconscious, when it is forcibly held below the surface, becomes wild, and until we look at it and call it by name, our own name, it can devour us.”
“We were bought with a price, and what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us.”
“In a world where we're brainwashed by the media into thinking that life should be easy and painless and reasonable, it is not easy or painless or reasonable to be a Christian—that is, to be one who actually dares to believe that the power that created all the galaxies, all the stars in their courses, limited that power to the powerlessness of an ordinary human baby.
That's not reasonable.
It is equally unreasonable to believe that this ordinary baby grew into a man who was totally human and simultaneously totally divine. Who was, as the Athanasian Creed affirms, totally incomprehensible.”
“I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is; I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities; I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the world “Christian” means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of “how those Christians love one another”?”
“Oh I am in awe of the maker of galaxies and geese, stars and starfish, mercury and men (male and female). Sometimes it is rapturous awe; sometimes it is the numinous dread Jacob felt. Sometimes it is the humble awe of knowing that ultimately I belong to God, to the Maker whose thumb print is on each one of us. And that is blessing.”
“The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us. All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves.”
“Cardinal Suhard says, “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
“And then there is a time in which to be, simply to be, that time in which God quietly tells us who we are and who he wants us to be. It is then that God can take our emptiness and fill it up with what he wants, and drain away the business with which we inevitably get involved in the dailiness of human living.”
“It is a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted.”
Hands down the best devotional I've ever done. I love to learn though living and not scripture alone. L'Engle had a deep, intimate, profoundly personal and real relationship with God; I hope the same for myself.
