Madeleine L’Engle - Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

This classic helps me define and live out what it means to be a Christian writer, communicator, and artist.

G LORIA G AITHER, singer and songwriter

LEngle has the unique ability to look at her faith, her art, and her culture in an open-minded yet wholly biblical manner. Putting her knowledge within the context of her family, her heart, and her imagination, she has given us a book full of depth and insight into the creative Christian mind.

A NDREW O SENGA, musician and recording artist, The Normals

Walking on Water guides the wandering artist back to the Savior and says, There, youve come home again where you belong!

P ATRICIA H ICKMAN, author of Katrinas Wings

Madeleine LEngle has put into words what music would say if it had a voice. We have been created by the master artist, and in return we must create art that directs others to him. The book has encouraged, refreshed, and renewed my vision for my art and my purpose.

M ICAH W ATSON, musician and recording artist, No Apples for Adam

A book through which all thinking Christians can gain a better understanding of the specialized vocation that artists have.

Provident Book Finder

Readers will find here in satisfying abundance [LEngles] laconic wisdom, real-life anecdotes, candid self-revelations, and respect for mystery.

Christianity Today

A book to linger over, to mark up, to talk with as one reads. A book to share with other persons who love God and love literature.To hear from Madeleine LEngle herself about her faith and her art is no small privilege.

Christianity and Literature

Profound.

Cahill & Company

Anyone interested in the profession of writing or other professions in the arts shouldnt miss this book. A delightful journey into the world of the Christian artist.

Librarians World

I first came to Madeleine LEngles work the way so many of us didthrough her books for young readers. As a child of the seventies and a teenager of the eighties, my entrance into the wonderful world of independent reading coincided perfectly with her most prolific publishing years. Her stories were important to me for how they portrayed characters who were smart, who got along better with adults than with their peers, who liked reading and classical music and believed in the existence of a realm beyond what the eye could see. In other words, kids like me.

When I was an adult working toward a writing career, LEngles words came back into my life when someone, knowing I desperately needed her perspective, presented me with a copy of Walking on Water. In it I found breathtaking contrast to the way Id grown up hearing religious people talk about art, culture, and creativity. My Christian beliefs were formed in the context of a blue-jeans-and-guitars Jesus Movement church in San Francisco that was later touched by the sort of Evangelicalism that looked askance at popular music, most prime-time television, and any book you couldnt find at the local Christian bookstoreanything that could fall into the category of the secular.

Secular. Its a word that got a lot of airtime in the religious contexts of my youth. Secular meant dont look, dont read, dont listen, dont touch. It meant anything that came from outside the church as we defined it, anything made by non-Christians, unbelievers, the group of people identified by what they werent. They were the world and we were separate, in it but not of it, and we needed our own books, music, and movies (and bookstores and magazines and dentists and accountants and car dealers).

Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I dont ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the churchs understanding of the God of the universe.

By the time I began to write, I knew there was something false about this compartmentalization, though I could not articulate it. And I knew I didnt want to write for the religious market. Still, the us and them rhetoric around me planted seeds of doubt. By wanting to write as honestly as I could about human experience, was I on the wide path to destruction? Wouldnt it be better to apply my intellectual capacities (limited though they are) toward building an unassailable apologetic for my faith so that I never had to fear not having an answer?