I just read Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. She was one intelligent, well-read woman, but I can also imagine sitting down to a cup of coffee with her and talking about the ways faith and art overlap, intertwine, are one and the same.

In a chapter where she explored the discipline necessary for good art to come forth, she talked about listening. First she outlined the schedule she lived by which included prayer and Bible reading at the beginning and end of the day. She wrote all morning, then often had lunch with friends. That sounds like quite a lot of structure to me. In the afternoons she was more flexible and included walks, research, more writing or time just being. She said, “I try to take time to let go, to listen, in much the same way that I listen when I’m writing. This is praying time, and the act of listening in prayer is the same act as listening in writing.”

I love that because in some tiny little way I experience that sometimes too. If I get quiet and listen and pay attention I open the door to good ideas, to messages, to voices that wish to speak. Sounds a little nutsy I know, but if you write, you probably know what I’m talking about. I won’t claim that all of my ideas come from God, but my writing as a whole piece does.

She also talks about the relationship between creativity and wholeness (healing) and mourns the fact that children are born with great creativity only to have it taken out of them by the “real world.” It’s an interesting and freeing book to read if you want to break out of a place in which being a person of faith seems to mean having only one right answer for each question and if you realize that faith and doubt are not opposites. “The answer is found in love and not in answers.” A Wrinkle in Time is based on that theme, when the main character’s father is healed by love and freed from great danger and evil.

I get the sense that the author was a completely honest person, not afraid to speak her mind and be vulnerable to others. The fact that her husband was a soap opera actor much of his career we will not hold against her.