"Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once," and other Madelein L'Engle quotes (Part 1)

Madelein L’Engle (1918-2007) authored over 40 books, including A Wrinkle In Time and all of its sequels.  I still recall my 3^rd grade teacher reading those to us, and being mesmerized by the way they stimulated my imagination.  Her writing reflected her deep Christian faith, a love of science, and a curiosity to ask many questions. I was privileged to hear her give the Commencement Address to my graduating class at Wheaton College in 1977.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from her writings.  Let me know which ones resonate with you.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once.

The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.

Believing takes practice.

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

I love, therefore I am vulnerable.

It's 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.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his mighty actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

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. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.

Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth.

Love is the one surprise.

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

To be continued…

Let me know which of these speak to you.

We Believe So Well

As our conversation swells

And our patience somehow lingers

And accusing fingers shout about
 insensitivity

Don't we oscillate so well

Within our fundamental boundaries

While fiery foundries melt us down

And kill tranquility

But we believe so well

Don't we tell ourselves

Don't we take exclusive pride

That we abide so far from hell?

We might laugh together

But don't we cry alone

For the ashes and the dust

We've swept beneath the Holy throne

As our hidden candor dies

And our realism falters

And the altars of our hearts close up
in insecurity

We believe that all is well

We perceive ourselves as unshaken

While standing on the precipice

Of what will never be

But we believe so well

Don't we tell ourselves

Don't we take exclusive pride

That we abide so far from hell?

We might laugh together

But don't we cry alone

For the ashes and the dust

We've swept beneath the Holy throne

Written by Mark Heard © 1984 Kenwood Music

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"I write to discover what I know," and more Flannery O'Connor quotes (Part 2)

This is the second in a two part series on quotes from American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964). An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Here are some more of my favorite quotes from her (there were others in my previous post). Let me know which ones resonate with you.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism.

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you fell you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

Grace changes us and change is painful.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Sickness is more instructive than a long trip to Europe.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

The only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

Not sentimental love but true Charity is what is hard and endures.

As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.

I write to discover what I know.

Thoughts?