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As the mother of ten children eight adopted , four step-children and 17 grandchildren, I find relating to this burgeoning family an important part of my life. Raising this large family under rather primitive conditions in the hinterland of Brazil i. I wrote "Prayers of Faith: After 50 years of service to the Christian community as a missionary, writer, editor and publisher, I find myself currently involved in church, community and family. I wrote my first book, "Travels of Faith," to try explain to friends and relatives in the U.
My third book, "Adventures of Faith: On Learning to Walk on Water" explores my spiritual journey of learning and musing on many issues tearing the Christian community asunder. I founded a small publishing house in Brazil in and then after getting my master's at Fuller Seminary and being the editor of the academic journal "Missiology" for 5 years, I began another small publishing venture here in the States.
Hope Publishing House has now brought out over titles in the past 28 years.
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On Learning to Trust God Jul 10, I found I had to be in the mood to pick this up. But--when I was in the mood and picked it up, I always--always--found something that struck a chord with me. Even it was just one sentence or one thought, there would be a connection, and generally one that applied to something I was struggling with regarding my art at that very time.
I also really appreciated L'Engle's honesty, the way she views art for art's sake, even as she sees it a means of worship. So all in all, I am very glad I read this, and very glad I bought my own copy. I have a feeling it's something I'll turn to many times in my life as I follow my artistic journey. This author had many valid points and able to reflect on Christianity and art. He must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices.
The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words L'Engle, Madeline, This author had many valid points and able to reflect on Christianity and art. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words L'Engle, Madeline, p. He was past middle age when God called him to lead his children out of Egypt and he stuttered. He was reluctant and unwilling and he couldn't control his temper. He saw the bush that didn't consume by the fire. He spoke with God on Mt. Sinai, face glowed with such brilliant light that people could not bear look at him.
Therefore, God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear His glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think we did the jobs ourselves. We will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own. This was the icing on the cake for me as a writer, "an artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world Vision keeps breaking through and must find means of expression p. There is a living soul that needs this story!
May 09, D. Dutcher rated it it was ok. This book is 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. This means some of you absolutely will love this book, and others will squirm and fidget because they hate tea. It isn't a bad book by any means, and it's good to see L'Engle engage faith, albeit elliptically. It's more about intuition and sentiment than a hard look at the Chr This book is 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 more about intuition and sentiment than a hard look at the Christian and art.
It's not that correct either; bad religion has made plenty of good art; the gnostic William Blake is one example. I also think if you can see the Incarnation in secular and Christian works, it might just be you seeing something the author didn't intend. But this isn't a work really for those of us who want nuts and bolts; it's feeling, sentiment, and poetry, and for people who enjoy such, it's fine at doing that.
I tend to not connect with L'Engle, but this book, like all her rest, seem tailor made for sensitive, intelligent young women with a religious, non-dogmatic bent, and you'll probably enjoy it far better if you are one.
Men would probably connect better with someone like G. Chesterton; "The Ethics of Elfland" in Orthodoxy makes a good contrast in styles between the two. Madeleine L'Engle writes about her art and the art of being a "Christian" writer. I took my 4th-8th grade students to hear her speak in St.
Andrews Episcopal School and have been a life-long fan. She was forceful, opinionated, not patient with these kids and absolutely compelling. It was interesting to read that she kept working notebooks of quotes from authors, words, ideas, etc. She also rewrote her books and believed that discipline was a large part of the Madeleine L'Engle writes about her art and the art of being a "Christian" writer. She also rewrote her books and believed that discipline was a large part of the creative process. Aug 10, Laura rated it it was amazing. The pleasure of this book is not just L'Engle's style, which is warm and inviting.
The ideas here are big. In the past, creativity may have been easily dismissed, or thought of as something I do when I have time. This book challenges me and this notion. This book, along with "Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts", answers many of the questions and struggles that I have had as an 'artist' who became a Christian. She knows a lot about both, as her husband was an actor. A fascinating and thought provoking read. Even when I disagreed with her conclusions, like when she talks about gendered language, her questions and observations are usually on point and worth mulling over.
This is a book designed to stretch the mind with thoughts on the creative process, what that has to do with faith, and a vocabulary that will knock you off your feet proving her point on the dangers of a shallow vocabulary. I loved her thesis: And I loved the ins A fascinating and thought provoking read. And I loved the insights on her writing process.
I found myself underlining and bracketing paragraphs, making notes in the margins in the first half of the book. As the book went on, I felt that, though there are nuggets of wisdom tucked into the pages, L'Engle's style leaned toward the meandering. She didn't ramble, it was just that the stories and anecdotes she used to illustrate her points tended to be on the lengthy side, and I felt it was a circuitous journey to her main point at times. I confess to skimming some later chapters, but it's I found myself underlining and bracketing paragraphs, making notes in the margins in the first half of the book.
I confess to skimming some later chapters, but it's overall a worthwhile read. Jun 10, Lmichelleb rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book was a slow simmer for me, and has nurtured and encouraged my soul, watering places I didn't even know we're thirsty. L'Engle insightfully asks the hard questions about who we are, why we must create, and how to submit to the work given us.
Deep, life-giving words here, recommended to all, not just artistic types! I spend a lot of time thinking about how I arrived at writing novels for the Christian market. I contemplate often what it means to be a Christian and a writer and how those two parts of me collide. Walking on Water helped me process a lot of those wonderings. This book made me cry. Most things do these days, but still. As someone who doesn't necessarily identify primarily as an artist, it was deeply relevant to me; one of the most profound yet simple unfoldings I've ever read of what it means to be a Christian in a dark, broken, confusing, and yet somehow still beautiful world.
You won't be sorry. Following Christ has This book made me cry. Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love. May 12, Rebecca rated it really liked it. I reread this after reading it over 15 years ago as a first-year student in college. In fact, I reread the same copy and had a nice little dialogue with my naive-yet-earnest year-old self who desperately wanted to understand faith, writing and the creative process, and who underlined far more passages about angels and Jesus than I thought possible.
L'engle's insights on the nature of the creative process hold up well and resonate with my faith identity even now, so much so I reread this after reading it over 15 years ago as a first-year student in college. L'engle's insights on the nature of the creative process hold up well and resonate with my faith identity even now, so much so that I was astounded to see how many of her concepts I echo to my classes almost verbatim.
I had no idea how much L'engle's perspective had seeped into my very bones and informed my own way of understanding how art is made.
Is it a perfect book? L'engle's got some misguided ideas about the virtues of the generic male pronoun, which are beyond my understanding and frankly offensive to me as a woman writer trying to find my identity in a patriarchal world. She's also not a fan of abstract art, of art that maintains chaos instead of making "cosmos out of chaos," yet I think representing chaos is its own form of justice.
But she makes both of these points and moves on, thank God. These relatively minor qualms aside, L'engle helped me understand why the Christian faith, in particular, is one that I find so meaningful, especially when it comes to explaining the mystery of writing. It's the idea of incarnation, of Word-made-flesh, of God-becoming-human, of creation out of the deep that makes me stick to the religion of my childhood and turn to it when I'm trying to wrestle the divine from the ether and onto the page. Some of my favorite passages: If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.
If it's good art -- and there the questions start coming, questions which it would be simpler to evade" The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually" If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopwork words, we are setting ourselves up for a takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles -- we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than 'the way things are'" And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos" As long as anybody cares, it may be possible for something to be done about it; there are still choices open to us; all doors are not closed.
Nov 17, Ron Vitale rated it really liked it. I remember that I liked it and that there was a calmness and creative spark about her work of fiction that comforted me and pulled me in. Reading L'Engle's "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art" hit home to some of the more intimate parts of my personality and my creativity.
Why do I write? What am I trying to accomplish? How do I see God or not in my work. Although L'Engle's religious beliefs and mine differ significantly in certain areas, I could relate to the sanctity of art and of its importance in the world around us. Even more so with the most recent attacks in Paris, Beirut and Kenya. Written in , there's a certain charm in reading L'Engle write about her typewriter and the work that she does and how she sees the world. In a time before social media and the internet, her thoughts on those "porno theaters" and secular television are a faint memory of a past which the world has moved on from in such a short span.
Today in the 24 hour news cycle, immediacy of selfies and egocentric orgasmic additions of our treasured self-importance, I wonder what L'Engle would think. But when I strip away the generational differences between us and focus on the art, she and I are on the same page. Her talk of the struggle of writing, the work and the tremendous amount of time it takes to hone one's craft and to become a good writer spoke to me.
Hearing strangers ask her about "her writing hobby" and how they didn't see writing as true work, made me smile. L'Engle and I could be kindred spirits in that regard. And in the early section of the book, she sows such gems of wisdom that I could not get enough. Is it we that are creating the masterpiece of art or, as I believe, we need to get out of the way and check our egos at the door, and let the art come forth on its own. Art is Godlike to me because we are creators in that respect, and as sacrilegious as that might seem, I do believe that there is a speck of God in art yes, I'm tipping my hat to Hindu influences here.
When I write, I want to get at the truth about life, people, experiences or the human condition. My whole point in writing is to share what I've seen to help others. Some might say "so what? As L'Engle, the act of writing is sacred to me.
A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first books I remember reading as a kid, one of the first books I truly loved. The book is also filled with some great concepts for helping the artist to reconnect or remain connected to creativity. It's the idea of incarnation, of Word-made-flesh, of God-becoming-human, of creation out of the deep that makes me stick to the religion of my childhood and turn to it when I'm trying to wrestle the divine from the ether and onto the page. The visions I see, the experiences I've lived, the intuitive glimpses of dream-like beauty that I so desperately want to jump up and down and share with the world, are my art and worth creating. L'engle's got some misguided ideas about the virtues of the generic male pronoun, which are beyond my understanding and frankly offensive to me as a woman writer trying to find my identity in a patriarchal world. That following morning I drove around looking for work and a home. Nov 17, Ron Vitale rated it really liked it.
I struggle to become a better writer and, little by little, I am becoming better, but it's for a purpose. The visions I see, the experiences I've lived, the intuitive glimpses of dream-like beauty that I so desperately want to jump up and down and share with the world, are my art and worth creating. L'Engle's book is filled with great passages that I mentally applauded. Yes, she and I differ in how we express our religious beliefs, but that's what made me love this book even more. I could compare her beliefs with my own and use them as a touchstone to test the waters of where I stand now at my current age and in a world of terror and barbarism.
Even more than ever, we need art in today's world. Art that challenges, wakes us up, causes us to question and, at times, to unsettle us. If you're a writer and wondering about why you write, I recommend that you pick up L'Engles book. There's a lot of matter here and, when you close your eyes, will you have the faith to walk across the water with your art or not? When each of us stares at the blank page, that question has often gone through my mind.
So far, thankfully, I've taken the leap of faith. An excellent book to the very end. I really like how the author emphasis that an artist must do the work, to trust and let go of the need to control. This is a book that I would like to own and refer to often. So much I can relate to especially the difficulty of the work, the vulnerability of being a creative. Oct 26, Sheila rated it it was amazing Shelves: We learn to appreciate the art of the world around us and to care for its artists, whether or not they are believers. We learn to see the underlying hand of God in creation, and in the creations of his creatures.
We see glimpses of glory as children. Then we grow out of them. Best of all, from my point of view, the author reminds readers that faith invites questions and should never fear them or else it's not quite faith. I received a copy from Blogging for Books. I offer my honest review. Apr 14, Jeff Wofford rated it it was amazing. No Christian artist could possibly fail to receive edification, enjoyment, and encouragement from this wise exploration of faith and the creative calling. The writing itself, first of all, is of the highest order.
Each word, each phrase, each sentence is positively musical, rippling with sonic resonance and semantic force. Yet there is no pretension; it's poetry in the guise of mere conversation. Here is a good writer. A more rambling book you will seldom find. It is very nearly stream-of-consciou No Christian artist could possibly fail to receive edification, enjoyment, and encouragement from this wise exploration of faith and the creative calling. It is very nearly stream-of-consciousness, with idea following idea often with no clear plan or intention. Take, for example, this paragraph appearing in a discourse on the modern legalism around masculine and feminine pronouns p.
Perhaps it is this background which has made me assume casually that of course I am not excluded when anyone refers to a novelist—or anyone else—as he or him. My closest woman friend is a physician, and so is my daughter-in-law. Not all women have been as fortunate as I have been. When my books were being rejected during the fifties it was not because of my sex, it was because the editors did not like what I was writing. What, I ask you, does the mention of the physician and daughter-in-law, followed by an observation on being "fortunate", have to do with the rest of the paragraph?
Neither these women nor this good fortunate are mentioned again. They are a fleeting thought, recorded as thought and not for purpose. Two paragraphs later we have left the question of feminist pronoun rules for the topic of how war corrupts language, where we remain for much of the rest of the chapter, a chapter which concludes with, "There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation" p.
There's a powerful and brilliant statement, worthy of deep reflection—and yet you see that it has only the most cursory connection either to feminist pronoun usage, wartime language corruption, or any of the other meandering ideas the chapter has touched on. This is to some degree a fault. It makes the book more exhausting; one must work to keep up with L'Engle, must really concentrate. It makes the reading a bit less motivating because although each moment on the ride is beautiful, there is little sense of trajectory, of where we're going, of what might be gained by continuing to read.
It's likely, too, that the meandering is unintentional, a product of a ramshackle process of production. Elsewhere she admits, "Granted, much of my nonfiction work is lifted directly from my journals" p. This volume is nonfiction, and much of it reads like a journal. Yet the meandering is not without its charm. Her destinations are chaotic but lovely and potent.
Paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, she chooses to say what happens to come to mind; thankfully, what happens to come is continually brilliant, provocative, inspiring, wise, and helpful. The last three chapters fall into a more orderly and deliberate flow, and these are particularly illuminating and enjoyable because they explain both the background to the writing of many of her books and also the creative and spiritual implications of those backgrounds.
If you've ever hoped a really good author would brave the vulnerability to expose how she came to write what she wrote—both the wild inspirations and the dogged discipline of the craft—your hopes are met here. Despite the book's largely shambolic structure, its themes and thesis come through unmistakably.
There is no "Christian truth", no "safe truth": Children possess an imaginative openness that adults tragically lose but artists must reclaim. The artist like the believer; indeed like Christ himself must give up control, surrender to the will of the Father, and die to be reborn. Yet surrender and faith do not discount work: Throughout the book we are fed this rich food, worthy of deep contemplation.
L'Engle has an uneasy relationship with the rational world of the intellect on the one hand and the illogical or supra-logical world of the imagination. She explains that her books often carry substantial scientific themes that she researches diligently and learns well. From all of her writing we see she is no fool. And yet in this book she will say, "When I was a small child, visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage, I used to go down the winding stairs without touching them" p. She goes on to explain that she believed, and still believes, that she indeed possessed some childlike miraculous ability to levitate —she herself doesn't use the word—while traveling down these particular stairs, an ability she had lost by age I don't suppose I will go so far as to directly dispute that a young Madeleine L'Engle floated down her grandmother's stairs, but it's certainly a questionable notion.
More importantly, its appearance in this book marks a particular theme, the theme of wild openness to the supra-rational, the miraculous, imagination merging with reality. This is not a safe theme. That is part of her point, part of her agenda in advancing it.
But in our age irrational thinking, even madness, are so pervasive, so normal, that wild openness to sheer undirected "believing" is always fraught with danger and often positively destructive both to individuals and societies. She wrote in , deep in the modernist period in which reductionist empiricism threatened to quash so much of what makes us human, including the domain of the spirit.
Now in a post-modernist period her calls for deliberate transcendence of reason are less needed and less helpful. A young Christian artist must read this work, accepting its unification of faith and creativity and its annihilation of boundaries in truth. He must be fully mindful of her contrast between logic, discipline, and order on the one hand and miracle, imagination, and abandonment of control on the other. Christian artists old and young will appreciate the explorations of a brilliant, faithful, restless, and wise mind, the glimpses into the creative processes of a master, and the challenges and encouragements to faith and craft, or the unification thereof—perhaps "faithcraft"?
Mar 05, Leslie rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is a book I come back to over and over since I first read it. I think it's a must-read for everyone, whether you consider yourself and "artist" or not. Madeliene L'Engle who I've read and loved so much now that I feel like she's a friend, I want to meet her in heaven has a beautifully rambly, conversational approach in this book, and because of it so much of who she is surfaces.
It's like you just followed her around for a week and experienced her life and thoughts, and the truths that sh This is a book I come back to over and over since I first read it. It's like you just followed her around for a week and experienced her life and thoughts, and the truths that she has learned over a lifetime of creating and following God flow out of her naturally, like breathing. One of my favorite take-aways in this book is the concept that "Christian" art doesn't really exist.
Instead, L'Engle frames the world in terms of art and non-art or at least good art and bad art , and posits that good, true art is also, by virtue of being true art, Christian; while bad art, no matter who does it, is not. This theme come sup several times. Another theme I love is her exploration of the artist as a listener, as a co-creator. She talks about her writing--as well as the work of composers, painters, dancers, and all artists--as an act of giving birth, being willing to do the work to communicate and give flesh to something outside yourself that wants to be expressed, to be told, to be given to the world.
This, she concludes, is why many artists are able to write and create what better than their own ability truly allows, in ways that communicates what is beyond them. Aug 14, H. Anne Stoj rated it it was amazing Shelves: I'm not big on reading books on writing particularly on how to write, which this isn't.
Reading books about faith is always a little hard as it was something I did when I was younger and little insane. A friend recommended this to me years ago now and it much like Mere Christianity which I still haven't finished took me probably a year to read as I would pick it up and put it down and pick it up again. I wish that I'd read this when I was younger and belonged to a church that pretty much sai I'm not big on reading books on writing particularly on how to write, which this isn't. I wish that I'd read this when I was younger and belonged to a church that pretty much said any art except Christian art was wrong.