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The Irrational Season
Madeleine L'Engle
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eBook - ePub
The Irrational Season
Madeleine L'Engle
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About This Book
The bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time contemplates the true meaning of faith in the third installment of her series of memoirs. Upon her death, the New York Times hailed Madeleine L'Engle as "an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation." L'Engle has long captivated and provoked readers by exploring the intersection of science and religion in her work. In this intimate memoir, the award-winning author uncovers how her spiritual convictions inform and enrich the everyday. The Irrational Season follows the liturgical year from one Advent to the next, with L'Engle reflecting on the changing seasons in her own life as a writer, wife, mother, and global citizen. Unafraid to discuss controversial topics and address challenging questions, L'Engle writes from the heart in this compelling chronicle of her spiritual quest to renew and refresh her faith in an ever-changing world and her ever-changing personhood. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Madeleine L'Engle including rare images from the author's estate.
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1 ⊠The Night Is Far Spent
New York.
Two oâclock in the morning. A thin, chill November rain is falling. I stand at the dining-room window, holding a comforting mug of hot bouillon, and look out at the never-wholly-asleep city. A taxi moves slowly along West End Avenue. A young woman walks down the middle of 105th Street with a very large Great Dane. My Irish setter is asleep in the bedroom; he knows that it is much too early to get up.
I enjoy these occasional spells of nocturnal wakefulness, and I am never awake alone. Across West End Avenue there is an apartment building where the eleventh-floor windows are always lit, no matter what time it is. This night, in another building, someone is studying by a single light bulb suspended from the ceiling. The Hudson River is visible through television aerials and between two tall apartment buildings on Riverside Drive. Ours is a restricted view, but it is a view, nevertheless, and I love it. There is a small ship, a freighter, I think, moving slowly along the dark water, its lights both warmly greeting and mysterious. What looks like a star grows brighter and reveals itself to be a plane coming in to land at La Guardia; but there is a star left behind in the wake of the plane, a pale city star.
I sip hot bouillon and feel relaxed and at peace at this beginning of a new yearâa new year for me. I have had another birthday, and this is always like opening a brand-new journal to the first page, or putting a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter as I start a new book; it is all ahead of me, clear and bright, the first smudges and mistakes not yet made. I know that they will come, and soonâI donât think Iâve ever typed a full page without making at least one error; however, beginnings are always exciting and full of hope.
The beginning of my personal new year comes as the Christian Churchâs new year, Advent, begins, the four weeks before Christmas. The Jewish New Year is over; it is not yet time for the secular New Year or the Buddhist New Year; the academic year is already well started. Has there ever been a culture or a religion where there has not been a special day to mark the beginning of a new year? I still function more in terms of the academic year than any other, and probably will continue to do so even when we no longer have children in school or college.
A new year can begin only because the old year ends. In northern climates this is especially apparent. As rain turns to snow, puddles to ice, the sun rises later and sets earlier; and each day it climbs less high in the sky. One time when I went with my children to the planetarium I was fascinated to hear the lecturer say that the primitive people used to watch the sun drop lower on the horizon in great terror, because they were afraid that one day it was going to go so low that it would never rise again; they would be left in unremitting night. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a terror of great darkness would fall upon them. And then, just as it seemed that there would never be another dawn, the sun would start to come back; each day it would rise higher, set later.
Somewhere in the depths of our unconsciousness we share that primordial fear, and when there is the first indication that the days are going to lengthen, our hearts, too, lift with relief. The end has not come: joy! and so a new year makes its birth known.
In the Christian Church these weeks leading up to Christmas, this dark beginning of our new year, is also traditionally the time of thinking of the last things, of the âeschaton,â the end.
The night is far spent. The day is at hand.
That day when all nights will be spent, when time will end: we all know itâs coming. Scientists know it, and tell us the various ways that it could happen, but as of now they arenât predicting when. Various religious groups have predicted the end of the world off and on for hundreds of years. Whenever one of these groups tells us that Doomsday is going to come at midnight on a certain day, I always feel a little queasy. Maybe this time theyâre right. It has to happen sometime.
It was a long time before I could begin to think of this ending of all known things, all matter, the stars in their courses, music, laughter, sunrise, daisies and dynasties, starfish and stars, suns and chrysanthemums, as being in any way something to look forward to with joy and hope. It was a long time before I could turn my thoughts to the eschaton without terror. Long before Iâd heard about the atom bomb or the hydrogen bomb, or fission or fusion, I feared the end of the world in much the same way that I fear a nuclear holocaust. And the description of the last day in the New Testament sounds very much like atomic devastation: âThe present sky and earth are reserved for fire.⊠The Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, and the earth and all that it contains will be burned up.â
A nuclear holocaust would probably mean the end of human life on planet earth, but not the rest of the solar system, or the galaxy, or any of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe. And nuclear warfare would be manâs pride and folly rather than Godâs anger.
The end of the world in the eschatological sense has nothing to do with pride or anger and it is not just the end of this one planet, but of all planets, all solar systems, all galaxies.
And what then? Is that it? Annihilation?
No. Annihilation might follow an intergalactic nuclear battle, but annihilation is the opposite of what the eschaton is about. It is not nearly so much a going as a coming, an ending as a beginning. It is the redemption, not the destruction, of Creation. Weâve heard the phrases so often and from so many denominations that theyâve become distorted until the meaning is nearly bled from them:
The Second Coming. The Coming of the Kingdom.
What does that mean?
My son-in-law Alan was asked once by a pious woman if our feet would be wafted from the earth, at the time of the Second Coming, before Jesusâs feet touched ground. Ouch. That kind of literalism is not what itâs about.
For the simple fact is that we are not capable of knowing what itâs about. The Coming of the Kingdom is creation coming to be what it was meant to be, the joy and glory of all creation working together with the Creator. In literal language none of it makes much sense, and I can only go once again to my adolescent analogy of the planet on which all sentient life was sightless. If nobody could see, other senses would take over, and everybody would get along perfectly well. But if you tried to explain the joy of sight to anybody on that planet you couldnât do it. Nobody could understand something so glorious and so totally out of an eyeless frame of reference. Multiply that gap between a blind planet and a seeing one a billion times and weâll still be far from understanding the difference between creation, now, and creation in the fullness of the kingdom. But I am slowly learning that it is something to be awaited with joy and not terror.
When I try to grasp the nature of the universe with my conscious mind, my humanly limited intellectual powers, I grope blindly. I come closer to understanding with the language of the heart, sipping hot bouillon and relaxing, standing by the dining-room window where I can no longer sit on the window sill because of our accumulation of plantsâcoleus and Swedish Ivy and ferns and alligator pears and philodendron and anything else we can coax to grow in the polluted air of the cityâthan when I think with mind alone.
The night is far spent. The day is at hand.
Yes. Itâs nearly three oâclock in the morning. But Iâm not ready to go back to bed yet. Iâll be sorry when the alarm goes off in the morning. Meanwhile, I want to stay here a little longer.
Before I can contemplate the end I have to think about the beginning, and no one is very certain about the beginning, that moment when God created the universe out of sheer joie de vivre. There are three conflicting theories of the creation of the universe. First, thereâs the big-bang theory. Once upon a time all matter was One, an incredibly compact mass of unmeasurable compression. And suddenlyâand the cosmologists donât know whyâit burst asunder and particles of it flew out wildly and eventually became galaxies, and within the galaxies suns, and planets, and planetary satellites like our moon. And all these fragments of the original Oneness are still flying out, out, out intoâwhat? farther and farther away from each other (how lonely outer space must be), so that the distances between galaxies are becoming greater and greater âŠ
Then thereâs the theory of continuous creation. In the vast hydrogen clouds all over the universe, stars are constantly being born, as stars are constantly dying. Itâs an attractive theory, but where did those hydrogen clouds come from in the first place?
And then thereâs the flux theory: once upon a time all mat...