This book is a well-intentioned discussion on Christians, art, Christian art, and art by Christians and such, but it really lacks coherency. A Goodreads reviewer put it well when he describes the book as “like listening to your erudite upper-class grandmother wax poetic about faith in relatively bland, indefinite terms while she sips chamomile tea on a rattan chair in an immaculately kept garden.” It’s a peek inside her faith and what she believes is the Christian artist’s duty but comes out as muddled as the content of a box of Fiddle Faddle.
Still, there’s much good to consider for writers and human beings in what she writes.
An example:
“I need not belabour the point that to retain our childlike openness does not mean to be childish. Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and . . . and . . . and . . .
If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.”
I’ve heard many, many others talk of this quality, particularly writers who want to connect with younger children. Those who do it best are those who have kept that childlike part of them as they grew older. This may be why I struggle, as I was kinda born old.
There are other things, however, that L’Engle says that are jumbled and nonsensical (cue the image of the erudite upper-class grandmother).
She claims, in passing, for example, that NASA astronauts heard a program of “nostalgic music” while in space and thanked Mission Control for sending it to them. Mission Control, she says, confessed they didn’t know what the astronauts were talking about. Research discovered the program they’d heard was broadcast on the radio in the 1930s.
She accepts this anecdote on faith, stating:
“How do you explain it? You don’t. Nor can you explain it away. It happened. And I give it the same kind of awed faith that I do the Annunciation or the Ascension: there is much that we cannot understand, but our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates it.”
Now I put a lot of stock in faith. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have faith in modern prophets, continued revelation, additional scripture, and many other things that many Christians – likely L’Engle included – would find incredulous (in fact, L’Engle says for modern “mysics,” she looks not to religion but to science).
And maybe I’m being unfair to L’Engle. One of the scientists she quotes, Dr. Freiderich Dessauer, says this, as quoted in her book:
“Man is a creature who depends entirely on revelation. In all his intellectual endeavor, he should always listen, always be intent to hear and see. He should not strive to superimpose the structures of his own mind, his systems of thought upon reality . . . At the beginning of all spiritual endeavor stands humility, and he who loses it can achieve no other heights than the heights of disillusionment.”
But even if we have faith like unto a mustard seed, that faith must start with something. Because despite what she believes about this NASA episode, as far as I can tell it did not happen, or at least is not documented in a way easily found on the Internet (Aha! You may claim: That’s where faith comes in!)
Faith also tells me that if NASA astronauts had heard a broadcast from the 1930s still inexplicably bouncing around between the Earth and the Moon, it would be documented somewhere. God provides scripture, prophets, individual revelation (if Dessauer and L’Engle’s interpretation of Dessauer holds true). And note how I say “provides,” as my “Mormon” theology dictates.
Other eerie “space music” is heavily documented, viz:
It is true that the Apollo 10 astronauts did hear something they could not quite explain cutting through the crackle in their headsets when they were on the far side of the moon. It is true too that they called it “music,” though only in the way a whale call is described as a song because of its rising and falling tones. (In the transcript, command module pilot John Young describes what they’re hearing as “a whistling sound,” and lunar module pilot Gene Cernan imitates it as “whoooooo,” which is not exactly the kind of song you wind up getting stuck in your head and singing all day).
Video in this CNN story reproduces eerie “space music” but what they offer is not what the lunar astronauts heard, but rather this:
What was the music? Interference picked up when two radios in close proximity on the spacecraft were turned on at the same time.
We can still have faith in the miraculous; getting to the Moon, “Neat” as Bender Bending Rodriguez would say. That took a lot of faith, particularly in the 1960s. But sometimes faith swings in tandem with Occam’s Razor.
I’ll keep reading L’Engle’s book. Maybe there’s a prize at the bottom of this particular box.
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