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Madeleine L'Engle's journey has taken her to a rather peculiar array of roadside stops. How many Christian writers speak both from the pages of Ms. magazine and Today's Christian Woman, are invited to speak both by the Library of Congress and the Gaithers' Praise Gathering, and serve as writer-in-residence for Victoria magazine and for Regent University?
For L'Engle, the price of writing candidly as a Christian to such diverse audiences has been steep. She has been perceived as too worldly by some conservative Christian audiences and too dogmatically Christian by some secular audiences. But it is L'Engle's Christian critics who have been by far the most vocal.
Ministers preach sermons against her; books and articles denounce her and any Christians who evaluate her work favorably or even evenly; librarians in Christian schools and churches handle her books as though they carried dangerous heresies, sometimes relegating them to back shelves where patrons must ask specifically for them, and sometimes banning them altogether.
One source of the confusion lies in L'Engle's refusal to be pigeonholed, her resistance to using evangelically correct language. Then there is her frequent declaration that her religion is subject to change without notice. And the legalistic amid her audience are given pause by her assertion that she is not a Christian writer but rather "a writer who is struggling to be a Christian."
But if L'Engle's books seem always to be making someone angry, how are we to understand her popularity? Who are those people lining up at book-signings?
The answer, I think, is that the very unpredictability that some readers find unsettling also accounts for L'Engle's appeal. The Crosswicks Journals, for example, first published in the 1970s and recently reissued, capture the imagination of readers who are wrestling with the same midlife questions that preoccupied L'Engle when she wrote the journals. It is not hard to understand how the tenacious and fiercely independent voice of those volumes led the editors of Ms. to include L'Engle as a representative of what the publication then termed new female "Spiritual Explorers."
Nor does one have to squint too hard to picture the readers of Glimpses of Grace, a daybook of excerpts from L'Engle's writing, standing in line at our hypothetical book-signing. While some may be Ms. subscribers, it seems likely that more than a few of them would raise a skeptical eyebrow at the mention of feminism before returning to a perusal of Today's Christian Woman or, perhaps, Victoria. For Glimpses of Grace, Carole F. Chase, author of an appreciative consideration of L'Engle's life and work, has put together 366 brief selections of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
Chase structures the selections topically so that each day's entry connects thematically with the previous one. However, lest April or any other month become the cruelest one, she cycles again and again through L'Engle's typical themes: human freedom, identity, pain, temptation, grace, doubt, death, faith, love, and mystery, establishing a pattern of affirmation so that the effect of moving through the meditations is ultimately uplifting. That, of course, is a pattern that we might expect. Devotional books are supposed to be uplifting.
But despite its uplifting tone, there is something about the book that is troubling. Perhaps it is the academic critic in me that wants to worry about selections ripped out of their contexts and offered as touchstones of meaning. Such a technique is particularly problematic when the quotations are taken from fiction. Suddenly the values and authority structures established by the author as she created the narrative have vanished. In this brave new world of narrative democracy, all characters speak with equal authority and seem to represent the author. Sandy and Dennys Murray appear as credible as Charles Wallace or Meg Murray. Polly O'Keefe and Zachary Gray are suddenly on equal moral footing. In fact, any bit player can claim equal billing with one of L'Engle's narrative stars or with L'Engle herself from her nonfictional propositions.
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