L’Engle on rebellion and obedience

walking-on-water.JPGI read writers on writing generally in two (recurring) seasons of my life: either when I am trying to jumpstart the writing life after a period of concentrating elsewhere, or when I am bogged down in the worries and labor of said writing life and wondering again if I am cut out for this. Today finds the Midwest turning cooler as we tilt toward the end of the year—the sugar maples are just beginning to color but the English walnuts are already bare—and I am in the latter mood. So I have selected as an antidote, in tribute to her recent death, Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.

I’m not sure if I have read this in its entirety before now, though I have often recommended the familiar chapters. I read portions of her non-fiction work in college and then later explored her fiction, and no longer recall exactly what I was reading when I realized she was a kindred spirit. At any rate, I am reading through this again as a sort of “writing devotional,” considering a section every day and isolating one or two points that I must metabolize for the health of my craft. I intend to share some of these insights with you over the next week or two.

Here, then, is the thought-provoking question with which she begins her discussion:

Why is it that I, who have spent my life writing, struggling to be a better artist, and struggling also to be a better Christian, should feel rebellious when I am called a Christian artist?

I think I understand this. I don’t hide my religion but I don’t want to be explained away by it. I resent that others are just “artists” but I am a “Christian artist,” as though that label identifies a different purpose or source of my work that any other artist’s purpose or source. I feel about it the same as I would feel if someone called me a “woman artist,” as though the definition of artist is inherently male and I must be distinguished from the norm because of my gender. And yet, being female and holding to a Christocentric worldview both have, in fact, a role to play in what and how I write. So the label “Christian artist” is at once accurate and deceptive, perceptive and dismissive; and also, probably, immutable. With L’Engle, I need to get over it.

It is interesting that she moves from discussing her “rebellious” feelings about being a Christian artist to discussing art as an act of obedience. In the context of the Incarnation, in which the Virgin Mary obediently accepts her role as birth-giver to Jesus, L’Engle writes:

The artist must be obedient to the work…I believe that each work of art, whether of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’ And the artist either says, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

When people ask me if I have kids, I say, no, I have books. L’Engle’s analogy resonates; for a writer carries a work many months, produces it with great travail (all the while swearing she will never do this again!) and then takes one look at the beautiful thing lying in her hands and happily tells her publisher to send another contract. And a book is, in a sense, an incarnation of a concept. Many writers feel their characters and plots exist outside of them, and their job is just to tell the pre-existent story, to put the flesh on the bones so they can introduce that story to others. I am struggling even now to do that with my novel, and no one around here is putting up with me belting out the Magnificat! Perhaps I have the wrong attitude about to whom the story belongs.

L’Engle continues a few pages later:

[Mary] was obedient, and the artist, too, must be obedient to the command of the work, knowing that this involves long hours of research, of throwing out a month’s work, of going back to the beginning, or, sometimes, scrapping the whole thing. The artist, like Mary, is free to say no. When a shoddy novel is published the writer is rejecting the obedient response, taking the easy way out. But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.

The “easy” novel is the “shoddy” novel? Ouch. See, that’s my problem with my current big project. I have an idea what I need to do with my novel, but I don’t yet understand what it means—not because I’m writing a clever novel but because I still am not listening. I am afraid of where it will take me, and I want the process to be easy. (Where did I get the idea that being a novelist was a piece of cake?) So I work on it by “waiting for inspiration” instead of writing and revising and revising and revising.

Our rebellious Christian artist has something to say about that, too:

Someone wrote, ‘The principal part of faith is patience,’ and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it.

I need to get out of the way, start listening, and become a servant of the work.

Anyone else want to admit this? Here in the chilly Midwestern October, I could use some company.

10. October 2007 by Mindy
Categories: On writing | 3 comments

Comments (3)