Christianity Today

I don't think we know how to worship.

We don't. At our best we must amuse the angels enormously. I read last summer that scientists are closer to the creationists now—that there does seem evidence for a beginning to the universe. This has upset other scientists. I don't see why it should. Galileo upset the establishment enormously. Jesus upset the establishment. Galileo did nothing to change the nature of God. He only changed human thinking. That was threatening. We get things organized and we don't want to rethink them.

We five in a Newtonian, Euclidian world. Your desk for all practical purposes has to be flat and firm. We know it's a mass of swirling atoms. If we knew how we could put our fingers through it. But for you to work on it, it's got to be Euclidian.

Contemporary physics is really mystical. It accepts that time is a creature, created, that it has a beginning, that it has an end. Timelessness is, in fact, still a concept of time. Eternity and timelessness aren't the same thing. The two words I like are kairos and chronos. We live in chronology. Kairos is eternity, which has nothing whatever to do with time. An artist is free to know kairos. The person who prays is free to know kairos. We are literally free from time.

Time seems to be fluid, right?

Yes. Yes. It is fluid, it can expand. Sometimes I do more in a day than it's possible to do. Another day I'll work just as hard and I won't get nearly as much done. The mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland says that he quarreled with time last May and ever since then time won't do anything for him. Lewis Carroll was right. Time is a creature we can work with. Time can work against us or for us. Eternity, in which we will live ultimately, has nothing to do with time at all. It isn't endless time. It isn't time going on and on and on. It's a quality that we don't know, because we are in chronos. But we have these fleeting glimpses of kairos.

Time is fluid. What about space?

They don't exist without each other. Time exists only when there is matter in motion. If I knew how, I could close my eyes now and move to my star-watching rock in Connecticut.

Perhaps when we dream, our concept of space is altered.

In the Bible, God often calls men when they're sleeping.

The Wind in the Door deals with space, right?

One of the whole points in the book is that to God there's no difference between a farandole and a galaxy. Size is not what matters.

In Wrinkle you dealt with time.

And in Planet I'm back to time.

Well, there I think you've combined the two.

Yes, maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Time. Space. Time and space.

The two have come together in an unusual way. Space is radically different when time changes.

Time and space acting on each other. After we first exploded the atom bomb here, many of the physicists who worked on that were converted. Pollock became an Episcopal priest. More and more, scientists are turning back to the church. That's a wonderful thing. Science should help us enlarge our vision: never change it, never diminish it, but enlarge it.

God doesn't need protection?

No. And the establishment feels it must protect God.

Yet God was always shattering images of himself. He did the unpredictable, as with Jonah.

We've built up an image of God—a comfortable God. It must be shattered.

God shatters it by various means.

All kinds of means. Always particular means, like Galileo, for instance.

Or your neighbor next door?

Yes, the greatest shattering of all being with Jesus.

Because who would have thought that God would do such a thing?

Born in a stable. Born of a virgin. Died on a cross. Nothing that anybody had been brought up to expect. Totally, totally shattered.

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Madeline L'Engle died Thursday, September 6, of natural causes.

Our sister publications Books & Culture, Christian History & Biography, and Re:generation have more on L'Engle and her spiritual journey.