Since Thanksgiving, I’ve become reacquainted with an old friend. We first met when I was a chubby, awkward sixth grader. As was her custom Miss Keagan, our battle-axe of a teacher no one ever messed with, handed out book orders and gave her recommendations. I listened carefully.
“She said A Wrinkle in Time is really good,” I reported to Mom, who taught with and respected Miss Keagan, and usually let me order a few of her co-worker’s favorites.
Mom filled out the order and put fifty cents in my hand. A few weeks later, the book arrived, and began one of the grand adventures of my young life. With Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which – I traveled the universe by means of tesseract. Through the characters, I met their creator, author Madeleine L’Engle. Her books – and she wrote many – were about misfit children, who liked thinking and reading more than sports, and coped with unpopularity by clinging power of family love and standing firm on truth. Her writings were a crutch during my excruciatingly painful junior high years. I read and reread them until I found my feet in high school. Ever after, whenever my direction faltered in this world, I visited her universe to reset my compass.
So at Thanksgiving, when I saw a book by Madeleine L’Engle in my daughter and new son’s small library, I pulled Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art off the shelf and started reading. Once again, I connected with L’Engle, this time woman to woman, writer to writer. Reading her observations about writing and art, visualizing the stories she told, I found myself. Almost, it seemed, her thoughts were mine, her conclusions about what it means to be a Christian doing art so similar to mine that our beliefs were a shared existence.
I can’t cite pages and quotations, because I couldn’t underline and put exclamation marks in the margins of a book that isn’t mine. (Which means I must order my own copy soon, along with new copies of A Wrinkle in Time and the other books in the series so I can write in them.) But here is one quote that struck such a strong chord the day I read it, after a long and hard struggle with the Different Dream Parenting manuscript, I marked it with a Post-It flag:
So we must daily keep things wound:that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.
If you are an artist of any sort – writer, musician, painter, sculptor, or actor – this book will speak to you. It will encourage you, challenge your thinking, and energize your work. It needs to be on your bookshelf, in the gap between your books on craft and your books on faith. Because in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, the two meet in strength and power and truth. It’s one of the few books I will read more than once because it’s worth a double portion of my remaining time on earth.
It’s that good. Don’t miss out!
