Glass Houses

A Sunday Amen

Southend-on-sea, 1962, with my Mum and Nana | Beautiful, strong examples of great suffering, blooming flowers and tremendous faith.

On the road traveling to see my mum and brother tomorrow - hence a late Sunday Amen…

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I adore Madeleine L’Engle’s work. Like C.S. Lewis, she had a beautiful imagination and wrote for children. They expressed great suffering, loss, exploration and victory in their writing.

L’Engle was a practicing Universalist, believing in universal salvation and reconciliation to God.

As David Fisher, a bishop and professor of philosophy has put it, "In the final analysis, the question of salvation is always an inquiry into the balancing of human free will with God's mercy and forgiveness."

Arguments aside, what I like about Madeleine L’Engle is the way her mind expanded galaxies. The way her parents didn’t know what to do with her when she was growing up as they tried school after school. Her depth and willingness to explore science and Christianity and combine them in a genius manner. Her rebellious nature, as shown in the controversial children’s book “A Wrinkle In Time,” a science fiction novel about the struggle between good and evil, published in 1962, was rejected by at least 26 publishers. In L’Engle’s words, it was “too different” due to it having a female hero as a lead character (unheard of at the time). Dealing frankly with the problem of evil, it was too difficult for children… so “was it a children’s or an adults’ book?” These were the ponderings. The story depicts an authoritarian dystopia on another planet. Some people thought it too Christian, while others thought it wasn’t Christian enough.

A Wrinkle in Time won the coveted Newbery Medal in 1963. A tale filled with magic, mystery and adventure at the core, it’s the heartwarming quest of a girl wanting nothing more than to find her father, a government scientist who disappears after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract. L’Engle was inspired after reading several texts about quantum physics. My only daughter, a high school math teacher, regarded this book as one of her favorites.

Some pastors worked hard to ban the book, while one of the leading Christian publishers recommended it as one of the top ten Christian fiction stories of all time for teenagers.

Later in life, L’Engle, who wrote more than 60 books for adults and children, reflected on how suffering had taught her. She said her "lonely solitude," as a child, taught her about the "world of the imagination."

In 2021, I picked up a book called The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems, a vulnerable journey of unpublished works that were found in storage after L’Engle passed. I am only at the tip of discovery. This collection has been a timely gift.

Illuminated, fragile glass. Shattered. Flowers on the table. A Rock beneath my feet. I feel every word.

Light, Hope, Love.

This is so good:

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I build my house of shining glass

of crystal prisms light and clear,

delicate.

The wind blows..

Sets my room to singing.

The sun’s bright rays are not held back but pour their radiance through the rooms in sparkles of delight.

And what, you ask, of rain

that leaves blurred muddy streaks across translucent purity?

What, you ask, of the throwers of stones?

Glass shatters, breaks, sharp fragments pierce my flesh., darken with blood.

The wind tinkles brittle splinters

of shivered crystal.

The stones crash through.

But never mind.

My house.

My lovely shining 

fragile broken house

is filled with flowers

and founded on a rock.

People In Glass Houses - Madeleine L’Engle

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