One of the unfortunate things about real life is that you can’t put it on pause while you do other things. It’s been a crazy busy summer—the busiest in my nearly-five years in Grand Lake, which is saying something—and it’s stayed busy rather longer than usual; on top of that, I have some major personal/professional things going on, taking up a lot of my time. All of which is to say, for the last several months, real life hasn’t been leaving much room for any thought that isn’t in some way work-related. Which is a bummer.Still, I’m getting back to this—for a while; there will be another hiatus coming in a month or two—and glad to be doing it. Truth to tell, I’ve had the time for a few weeks now; it’s just been a matter of getting back on the bicycle. It always helps when you get a push . . .Before I get to the push, though, I can’t start blogging again without noting the death of Madeleine L’Engle. Late to the party, I know, as she died on September 6, but I can’t let that go unremarked. As Heather McDougal of Cabinet of Wonders says, there was a great deal of power and beauty in her books, and for me, she was one of the writers (along with Tolkien, primarily) who taught me the connection between the two—how beauty is a far higher and deeper and more perilous thing than we realize. I know that, from a Christian perspective, L’Engle had some problematic aspects to her theology, and I acknowledge the points of criticism Sally Thomas raises in First Things (note: this article is subscriber-only until the end of 2007; just one of many excellent reasons to subscribe to FT); still, whatever may have been fuzzy around the edges of L’Engle’s vision, the power of that vision came from the great truth at its core, and for that, she is worthy of all honor. In the end, I can give her much the same encomium as Thomas does:
I was captivated by the notion that there was such a thing as evil and, conversely, that there was such a thing as good. The idea, further, that even the weak and the flawed were called to the battle—that there even was a battle—roused something in my imagination that years of Sunday School had somehow failed to touch. What these novels provided me with was something I cannot remember having possessed before I encountered them: a religious imagination. Perhaps I should have been reading them through the lens of the Bible; instead, as a teenager, I turned anew to the Bible with these stories alive in my mind. The novels themselves were not the gospel, and I don’t think I ever mistook them as such. But they awakened my mind to the idea of a universe in which, even in distant galaxies, God is praised in the familiar words of the Psalms, as the creatures on Uriel sing: Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein. . . . Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord.