The story of young Meg Murray, a social misfit who, along with her younger brother Charles Wallace and friend Calvin, embarks on an adventure across time and space in search of her captured father. Though this unique coming-of-age fantasy story won a Newberry Medal and bore significant Christian overtones, it was a banned^[1] book for a time in Christian circles for its supposed promotion of the occult. But L’Engle’s work has never fit the mold of straightforward Christian art. 

Born in the autumn of 1918^[2], L’Engle was the only child of artistic parents, her mother employed as a pianist for the opera and her father a foreign correspondent. With both parents often absent, her childhood was a solitary one. To ease this loneliness, she developed a voracious appetite for stories, a pastime which quickly grew into a lifeline. It was during this time that L’Engle fell in love with Bible stories in particular, and she credits these experiences as enabling her to meet God first as “the Great Storyteller.” In an interview^[3], she recalls:

“So I started out with a God of love, and my parents thought I might enjoy the Bible because it had good stories in it. Nobody told me it was a moral book—it isn’t—it’s a wonderful storybook about unqualified people. And I think that was a very good start. I didn’t have a lot of dogma to unlearn.”

Reading the Bible primarily as story made an impact on L’Engle. She would come to saving faith years later, but considers the power of narrative as providing the foundation that faith would be built upon. Instead of seeing scripture as fact to be wielded, it was truth as a vehicle to deeper meaning. There is a transcendent quality to story, L’Engle argues: a universal language that brings what is beyond our ken closer than explanation allows. Contrary to common perception, truth and fact are not synonyms. In her acceptance speech for the Margaret Edwards Award in 1998, she explains, 

“Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts.”^[4] (emphasis mine)

We understand this intrinsically. What reader hasn’t experienced story as a gateway to a richer understanding of our world, our ethics, ourselves? We cheer for characters, feel our hearts lurch at their certain peril, and, no matter how the tale ends, know we are somehow stronger for it. Stories stick with us in a way plain instruction cannot. Classics such as the Aenid and Illiad, Aesop’s fables and Beowulf possess their legacy because they partake in a conversation that surpasses the confines of time and place. It’s not surprising that Jesus spoke in parables about the kingdom of heaven throughout his ministry. Truth and the kingdom of heaven, L’Engle claims, are part of a reality that lies beyond the limits of fact and fiction. We agree to facts, but we ascend to truth. Fact is static; truth is rife with energy. 

But how do we stay engaged in this long conversation? And how can it feed our spirituality? Perhaps the strongest impulse in L’Engle’s spiritual philosophy is her insistence on ‘keeping open’, in regards to both faith and creativity. In a talk for The Veritas Forum, L’Engle points to an instance that exemplifies this principle:

“One time I was speaking at a university bookstore and at the end of the day a young man said to me, ‘I really like what you’ve been saying, but I haven’t read any of your books because I hear they’re very religious.’ Well, all my little red flags of warning unfurled and began blowing very wildly in the wind and I said, ‘What do you mean by religious?’ Khomeini was alive then. ‘Khomeini’s religious, Jerry Falwell’s religious! What do you mean by religious?’ And then I heard myself say: ‘My religion is subject to change without notice.’ And that is true. If it is not, it is dead. If I’m not open to God’s revelation, which may shake me to the core, my religion is dead.”^[5]

Such broad statements had a tendency to land L’Engle in hot water with the more fundamentalist (or, as she deemed fundamentalist literalists, ‘fundalits’) crowd. Accusations abounded of universalism and a flippant religiosity. Lest she be misunderstood to be reducing Jesus to an equality among other gods, L’Engle confronted this criticism head on in her book on Christian creativity entitled Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art: 

“I don’t mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohommad all being more or less equal to Jesus—not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where He can and cannot be seen! We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where He is and where He is not . . .

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.”

L’Engle’s belief, then, is more nuanced than it appears. To keep open is not to cast away truth claims, but rather to allow God to define the truths we claim. This is a costly surrender, one that may ‘shake [us] to the core.’ But such an utter reliance on and trust in God rather than our own expectations results in greater humility: humility like a child. This humility is what Jesus encourages in Matthew 18:2-4. Unless we “turn and become like children, [we] can never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Becoming like a child inevitably reawakens our sense of wonder. “Children,” L’Engle says in her first memoir A Circle of Quiet, “still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security.” It’s easier to relax into ambiguity when you are yet untainted by an abuse of category.

Like one of her literary heroes, George MacDonald, L’Engle wrote many children’s novels, such as the Meet The Austins series. The Austins series is loosely tied to what is called the Time Quintet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time), and both series contain heady scientific ideas in their respective narratives. While one may have found it unconventional at the time to weave quantum mechanics into a kid’s book, Wrinkle’s Meg Murray and company employ a tesseract to travel across dimensions, while Vicki of Meet The Austins takes a strong interest in astronomy. Scientific theory is also explored in the microbiological sense in A Wind in the Door, as our heroes journey deep into the heart of mitochondria. L’Engle received a bevy of critique for this, too, as these themes were seen as taking a side in the war between creationism and evolution. But, L’Engle insists, if we are serious about keeping open, then we must trust God to reveal Himself how He chooses and not how we expect. And if Psalm 19 is true, that the “heavens declare the glory of God and the earth showeth His handiwork,” we can trust that the Lord is the Lord of scientific revelation, too. L’Engle expounds:

“During the question-and-answer period after a talk, a college student rose in the audience and commented with some surprise, ‘You don’t seem to feel any conflict between science and religion.’ I tried to explain. Of course not. Why should there be a conflict? All that the new discoveries of science can do is to enlarge our knowledge of the magnitude and glory of God’s creation.” If our hearts are grounded in the One who made them, we have no reason to fear the winds of change and doubt. In humility, we can relinquish control and give God glory despite our lack of understanding."

Thus, the struggle between faith and doubt is a theme which underpins the breadth of L’Engle’s work, from her Crosswicks memoirs to her adult novels and spiritual writings. While the mainstream Christian perspective holds doubt as the opposite of faith, L’Engle encourages the contrary. Doubt, in her view, is merely the catalyst toward deeper faith. With that in mind, we can approach such spiritual ambiguity in two ways: we can fear it and seek platitudes to satisfy our need for quick answers, or we can, as Rainer Maria Rilke put it, ‘live the questions’ and trust God to lead us into green pastures. In one of her memorable interviews, L’Engle presents doubt as a principle means to preserving our humility before God:

“The value of doubt is to keep you open to God’s revelations. If you don’t doubt, you don’t change. You don’t ask questions. You stay stuck wherever you were. If you have to have finite answers to infinite questions, you’re not going to move… Faith is not reasonable. Faith is marvelous.”^[6]

Perhaps the reason why L’Engle’s work refuses to abide by the typical Christian fashion is this simple insistence on staying open, her spiritual beliefs naturally effusing into her writing both in style and form. Just as story seems to speak to a reality beyond our perception, so, too, the writing process can stretch us in ways we can’t predict. Sometimes the words come to us almost predestined and we become mere stenographers for the craft rather than the captains of its fate as we suppose. And when we finally see the finished work, we find that it’s something greater than us and are humbled to have somehow acted as a conduit for truth’s great conversation. But submission is required. 

In Walking on Water, L’Engle marries creativity and faith by likening the response of the Christian artist to Mary’s surrender in the Magnificat:  

“Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’ And the artist either says ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’ and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.”

She continues: “If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,’ then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, ‘Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.'”

This idea hums through all of L’Engle’s work and is further testified by her reliant faith. We cannot hope to feed the lake if our levies remain impenetrable. And yet to lower these defenses, to stay open, requires trust and obedience, surrender and reliance. “Truth is deeper and wider and much more demanding than many people would like,” L’Engle says in A Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, “but Jesus promised that it would set us free.”