This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Madeleine L’Engle’s now famous, A Wrinkle in Time. I remember being one of those enthralled readers when I was in elementary school. I have just finished re-reading the book. So many of her passages had etched themselves into my young imagination. For instance, I will never forget the sensation I had as I read of the near death of Meg and her being nursed back to health by Aunt Beast.
It is instructive to remember that Wrinkle nearly went unpublished. The number of publishers that shrugged it off as untenable for the market is legendary. Though the numbers vary, L’Engle herself said it was around twenty eight. She routinely kept the rejection letters with her so that when a publisher would approach her after her stardom and say something like, “I wish we had the opportunity to publish you,” she would thumb through her stack on the spot and say, “Oh, but you did, and here is the rejection letter …”
To be sure, the genre was confounding. On the one hand it was early science fiction, a work that reflected her interest in physics and the sciences. How else would she develop the ideas of bending space and tessering? But that was not the troublesome aspect for publishers. Their problem was with her thinly veiled religious ideas. I can now see their point. Wrinkle is what we would call in Christian literature an apologetic. It makes the case for faith in its own popular terms.
In a cross between Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, L’Engle wove together themes of estrangement, reconciliation, redemption, evil, moral courage and the ultimate power of love. All in two hundred short pages.
If she was influenced by the whole Christian tradition and authors like Baum, Lewis and J.R. Tolkien, she was also an antecedent for fantasy epic dramas we now take as part and parcel of the cultural mainstream – The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter. All of these fantasy thrillers deal with the epic struggle between good and evil, forces of light and darkness, powers visible and invisible. They are mythological in scope and content.
Like L’Engle this genre of literature plays at the intersection of science, magic, and human darkness and transcendence. But she is really more closely aligned with the likes of a Lewis. Wrinkle was a sci-fi apologetic, the stuff that kept publishers sweating and fellow authors guessing.
Those who neither sweat nor guess are the continuing generations of young readers who encounter Wrinkle for the first time. It is for them as fresh as it was for me. And if they happen to catch her not-so-deeply concealed themes, that would, I am certain, bring a smile to an author who bristled at the suggestion that she wrote children’s books. She just wrote, said L’Engle, and if it happened to work for children, well, then it did.
We have one of the most awesome vacation Bible schools I’ve ever seen and I’ve been around. It has nothing to do with me. I’m just here and all these gifted people create this event that takes place during the mornings of a week in summer. It feels like a full blown camp, what with all the arts, music, drama and the rest. The kids are enthralled, something I was not when I was younger.
When I talk about terror of VBS I am not talking about my terror as a young person. You could say that I was terrified I would be bored to death, have to go to the craft room and make one more pot holder, sit through a coma-inducing lesson around long tables in the heat of summer with fans blowing on us. God no.
But that is not the terror I have in mind. Know that Broadway Christian Church has one of the premier programs to include children with disabilities in the life of the church. It’s called All God’s Children. This particularly includes young people on the autistic spectrum. We do that well.
So on the first day of VBS when the organized chaos of registering was followed by the very stimulating opening a familiar face appeared with his aid – one of the boys who participates in All God’s Children. He is blind and is on the autistic spectrum. He needs one-on-one para attention. And he sat on a bench surrounded by all this activity and noise and wept. He was terrified.
We don’t normally affiliate church with terror, though it has been a place of terror for some for different reasons. Some have been abused there. Some have felt rejection there. Some learned how to hate others there. For now we’ll pretend those are the exceptions.
But this young man, surrounded by people who actually are skilled in assisting him, providing cues and focus, was flying blind in a storm. And those of us who sat with him felt a shadow of the helplessness that he did. That’s when the thick isolation of his condition fell out of the sky and broke in pieces around me. What is it like to live in that world, his world, when what should be joyful is terrifying?
We all have limits as to what we can do, offer and help. We do our best. Sometimes no amount of skill or knowledge or training can take the worst away. We can minimize it, to be sure and that makes a difference. But ever so often all we bring is love and empty hands. Surely, Oh God, that is enough. It has to be. And today, right now, I will believe that.
Wow, all in the same day.
First I helped my daughter who has autism with some of her practical needs (she is living independently in her own apartment, working part time, yeh!). She pays for her meager accommodations, utilities and essentials with her part time wages and help from SSI. Food stamps has augmented her tiny budget. A personal assistant (funded through the state) helps with independent living skills. She was so proud to buy my burrito at Taco Bell yesterday. Treating Dad to lunch!
Then I dropped by my aged mother-in-law’s apartment. She and her family were solid working class all their lives. She doesn’t have much more than Social Security to live on but it gets her by. She was going blind with cataracts and needed surgery in the worst way and didn’t know how she could possibly afford it. But the surgery was covered by Medicare and her little supplemental policy to cover the balance. But she needed new glasses and didn’t know how she could cover them. Surprise – she just discovered that they were also covered. She can see again.
I am so thankful that I live in a compassionate society in which we all contribute in ways that care for those who need it most. There was a time that we left such people on the ash heap. Not now. In the same way that evil or vice can take on collective or social form, so can virtue. What a pleasure it is for me, personally, to do my share, contribute in the tiny ways I can, so that all may flourish in a republic that possesses untold resources.
Sarah Lund, a “Priscilla” of Broadway Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), ordained here over twelve years ago, made an important appearance at the church of Trayvon Martin and his family the Sunday after the Zimmerman verdict was released. Read about it here.
I just received a rebate through my health care provider for the year 2012. The reason is that my provider company did not meet the 80/20 rule set in motion by the Affordable Care Act. What that aspect of the law does is to define how much of your health care premiums must be used for actual patient care in one form or another. 80% must be used in direct service to the patient. If it is less than that the company is enjoying that over 20% margin as more sheer profit. My company didn’t meet that. They had to repay the difference.
As our health care premiums skyrocketed upward the company realized even more profit – money not directed toward patient care.
You know all those limits on hospital stays in which you the patient were pushed out the hospital door before you felt ready to do go? Remember that procedure the insurance company blocked because they said it was too expensive? Do you recall how your doctor had to do fancy footwork just to get payment for you by rescheduling his/her payment? In my health care company all that took place while they still couldn’t designate at least 80% of premiums to direct patient care.
That’s why the Affordable Care Act has that provision, to insure that the patient, the customer, is not exploited. And that’s why I got a rebate – along with all the other clients like myself. That particular provision is long overdue in our system in which roughly 85% of Americans are covered by private insurance. I’m happy for it.
Drift like a manatee:
rolling over, sinking down
sipping air, slurping algae
smiling as the shapes above
call you a wonder, a leftover
from a prehistoric past
even a mermaid
when your fins disturb the surface
casting your lugubrious spell
As I finish the recent biography of Madeleine L’Engle by Leonard Marcus, Remembering Madeleine, I pass on one of his most interesting observations, found in the introduction. He identified the way in which Madeleine, as the prototypical Renaissance woman, often drew on literature to strengthen her own points in her writing. Here are just a few:
George MacDonald: “The Son of god suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”
Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce the visible. Rather, it makes visible.”
Toynbee: “We are a sick society because we have refused to accept death and infinity.”
Ruskin: “The cursed animosity of inanimate objects.”
T.S. Eliot: “Dare to disturb the universe.”
But then were her own numerous turns of phrase:
“I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.”
“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”
“The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt if it has much fun.”
In Genesis 4 we hear the story of the unimaginable; brother kills brother. It is an act of envy, jealousy and pure selfishness. And after Cain took the life of his brother, Abel, he shuttered himself up in denial and avoidance, as though he could hide his transgression. The story, however unpleasant, is a universal one, reflecting the human nature that gave rise to it in the first place.
In the story the hiding of Cain is unmasked through a question. Where is your brother? Cain’s response has become legendary: Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer is implied: Of course you are and your ignorance of this has created the tragedy of murder. You did not know him as your brother or that you were to be his keeper. The wild truth is made in one fell swoop by the Holy voice: I hear your brother’s blood crying from the ground! In other words, you may deny it, but his life’s blood will not allow that. If these are silent even the blood will cry out.
With the acquittal of George Zimmerman we have re-experienced the ancient and universal story. Brother has taken the life of the brother. In the courses of self-protection and denial his guilt was denied. No one may stand in judgment with certainty, of course, but the circumstances surrounding the event leave his innocence in severe doubt. What is left in even more doubt is any presumption of fairness or lack of discrimination.We have said, in words or decisions, that we are not our brother’s keeper. But his blood still cries out from the ground.
One of the unusual aspects of the story is the way that Cain’s despondency leads to some modicum of divine grace or protection. Cain fears that his life will be in jeopardy as those seeking revenge will attempt to slay him. It is a well-founded fear. Reprisal murders are common. If the system won’t balance the scales we will take that into our own hands.
So the Holy One marks the forehead of Cain, a simultaneous verdict and protection. He is “a marked man” insofar as his guilt is made public – worn on the most visible aspect of the body, the face. But the mark somehow carries a promise of divine protection. Those who seek vengeance will experience punishment equal to seven-fold. In other words, retaliation only generates more of the same. As opposed to “closure” it keeps the wound open and wounds more, even wounds the soul of the one doing the wounding.
Cain then wanders the earth, the truth told in his face and as protection is strangely carved into the same truth. He is destined to be a stranger, a wanderer, never at home with himself or others.
George Zimmerman, like so many of us in different ways, will carry just such a mark. It will accompany him into his waste places and, though technically free, will survive as an invisible ankle bracelet as he remains forever tethered to what has happened. Also like the rest of us we can hope that somewhere in the mystery of God he will find redemption, his mark absorbed into the marks that score the body of Christ, the signs of the suffering God, ever taking the wounds of the many into the one sacred body of the universe.
vitalwholeness 