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A review by bookabecca
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle
4.0
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).
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).