L'Engle's books always have much depth and perspective. I love the concept of finding the "cosmos in the chaos" that she explores in this book.

Perfectly well done but wrong book at the wrong time for me. I grappled long ago with the addressed concern of Christianity & art, so L'Engle's grappling did not hold up well for me. I also have no attachment to her fiction, which probably colored my depth of interest in her opinion.

Lovely

There are two ways you can go with a book like this, one that makes sweeping comments about topics as broad as art and faith (specifically Christianity). The writing can ring with absolute truth, or it can seem embarrassingly overreaching and out-of-touch in its generalizations. This book contained a generous helping of each.

Many of L'Engle's reflections on faith were valuable to me, and I loved when she included specific examples from her own life and work throughout the book. If this were an ebook, I would have highlighted the heck out of it, but alas, I can't bring myself to mark up hard copy books any more, even ones I own (since I tend to pass them on when I'm done anyway). So I will have to hope that some of the insights and anecdotes stick with me, as they were really excellent.

On the other hand, this 1980 book came across as dated at times, with L'Engle's insistence that there is nothing wrong with using "he" as a generic pronoun (women just have to learn that it includes them too!) and her description of anything that contained more sex than she approved of as a "porno." At times the book was more process than result, in the sense that L'Engle made pronouncements in the early chapters (all art is Christian) that she contradicted in later chapters.

L'Engle uses quotations throughout for which, by her own admission, she sometimes doesn't know the author and almost never knows the source. (She seems to frown on technology, but what a difference Google would have made for her if it had been invented then!) This was slightly irritating, but what was more irritating was her occasional reference to some research study or event that sounded totally made up, and for which she also provided no sources. It's hard to take seriously a theological exposition based on an amazing thing that you seem to remember hearing about one time so it must have happened.

Final verdict: There's a lot of good here, and you might find it really useful, or it might drive you up the wall. If you're willing to mine for seeds of truth, it's worth a read.

Walking on Water is essentially a meditation on what it means to be a Christian artist; L’Engle argues throughout that to be an artist is to die to self and serve the piece of art, and that all art that aims to tell the truth will point to Christ (because Christ is truth). While I disagree with L’Engle in some major and minor points (some of her feelings on race, gender, and sexuality have not aged well), she paints a beautiful picture of both God and art that I very much enjoyed. The book does get repetitive as well, at points, but it’s a quick read, and there is much here to resonate with, regardless of one’s opinion regarding the divine.

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 17-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.

My main assessment? 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? No. 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:

"Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. 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" (14).

"I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, 'Here I am. Enflesh me" (18).

"Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been still-born" (34).

"We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually" (38).

"We cannot Name or be Named without language. 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'" (39).

"Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos" (46).

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation" (50).

"And as Christians we are not meant to be less human than other people, but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human" (59).

"The artist must be open to the wider truths, the shadow side, the strange worlds beyond time" (80).

“The painters and writers who see the abuse and misuse of freedom and cry out for justice for the helpless poor, the defenseless old, give me more hope; as long as anybody cares, all is not lost. 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. As long as anybody cares it is an icon of God’s caring, and we know that light is stronger than the dark” (104).

“Despite our inability to control circumstances, we are given the gift of being free to respond to them in our own way, creatively or destructively” (105).

“We need the prayers of words, yes; the words are the path to contemplation; but the deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence” (128).

“The creative artist is one who carries within him[/her] the wound of transcendence” (129).

“…the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world” (143).

“Ultimately, when you are writing, you stop thinking and write what you hear” (149).

“In prayer, in the creative process, these two parts of ourselves, the mind and the heart, the intellect and the intuition, the conscious and the subconscious mind, stop fighting each other and collaborate” (162).