Madeleine Lengle - The rock that is higher: story as truth

I imagine that almost every foreword for a Madeleine LEngle book could open with the story of how the writer first encountered A Wrinkle in Time. I could tell you that same story because I did read the well-loved and oft-read book when I was young, and I loved it (a heroine with glasses? finally!). But it wasnt until I was older, until I was a woman in the very middle of her lifeyears of marriage, four kids, minivan, mortgageand trying to write books about how I experience and encounter God that I adopted Madeleine LEngle as my own patron saint. Let me tell you why.

I happened across her nonfiction memoir quartet called The Crosswicks Journals while in the midst of what LEngle referred to as my own tired thirities, and for the first time in my life as a writer, I felt deeply seen and understood. I felt like I saw my lifeas a woman and a writerand I wept with the relief of it.

Oh, we didnt have much in common on paper, of course. Madeleine was Episcopalian; Im as low-church and sloppy happy-clappy as you can get. She lived in Manhattan and Connecticut; I live in western Canada between the ocean and the mountains. She was married to an actor; my husband is in the restoration business. She wrote effortlessly about Bach while I had Johnny Cash on AM radio. She was wise in matters of astrophysics, and the extent of my knowledge in that field derived mostly from the BBC television show Doctor Who. We were from different times, different contexts, different generations, entirely different stories.

And yet.

Here was a woman who was writing not in spite of her life but because of and in the midst of her life. She wasnt isolating her prose from her real walking-around life; theology was woven into every story of her family history and her time as an actress and her travels. Her encounters with God were as real and present in the woods as in her friendships and her church. There was a seamlessness to her life, all of it woven together, that deeply spoke to me. She was confirmation and invitation at the same time: God was not separate from my life but fully incarnated with my life. It turns out that every moment was a testimony of what I really thought and believed and hoped about God. There was no separate compartment for God-talk; God was speaking in marriage and mothering, community and friendship, tragedy and sorrow, joy and beauty alike.

More than a year ago now, I was in a devastating car accident. My recovery time has been slow and fitful, physically and emotionally. It was during this recovery that I was introduced to the powerful book you are holding in your hands right now. The Rock That Is Higher was written by Madeleine LEngle in the aftermath of her own life-changing car accident. And yet this isnt a memoir of her recovery: It is a book about her seminal belief that story is truth, that what is true is often more real than mere facts. Its about the ways that storiesScripture, myth, our own lifes narrativeall lead us to the rock that is higher in our lives. To her, the story in which we find ourselves is always a story with and in God. These were the words I desperately needed as I recovered. I needed to be reminded of home, of truth, of family, of Gods love, of joy and creativity and resurrection present in the story I was living in that very moment.

As she writes early in the book, Who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident? I found each chapter immensely healing: I didnt need facts and charts and formulas and edicts at that moment; I needed story. She tells a glorious story of God rooted right in the middle of a tragedy. Her words are wise and generous, true and sometimes daring (shes never shy about giving our sacred cows a firm shoveall while smiling in our direction), redemptive and reorienting.

One thing that Madeleine LEngle has given to me through her work is an abiding sense of curiosity and wonder about the God hiding in plain sight, in the midst of right-now life. She never tames the mystery of God but revels in the cloud of unknowing even as she encounters God in hospitality and music, friendship and hospitals. She showed me how to find the pillar of fire in the night to light my own path toward healing. I closed the last page feeling more like myself, more steadied on the rock that is higher, than I had felt in a long time.