Icons of the True

Reflections on Faith and Art

The last few months have been tough. There was hemorrhaging, critical blood loss, and being so weak I could barely walk around my house. There have been blood transfusions and iron infusions and there are still more interventions to come. I’m feeling much stronger now, hence finally writing something here for the first time since March, but the experience has taken a toll. As I told my priest, “I’m not very good at suffering.” His response, heartening and daunting in equal measure, was, “In order to get good at suffering, one has to suffer.”

There is much I hope to write about this in the future, including on the dimension of faith, but today I want to tell you about how, in some of the toughest moments, when I felt hopeless and scared and lonely, my mind often dragged me out of the situation and propelled me to places I have never been in reality, places that strictly speaking don’t exist, but which nevertheless are deeply real to me. In these moments I left behind hospital rooms and crunched through a forest swathed in snow on my way to Cair Paravel, I crept along the moonlit corridors of Hogwarts in search of the heir of Slytherin, and I ambled down the shady lanes of the Shire on my way for a drink at The Green Dragon.

Fantasy literature has been dear to me since I was a child. It offered me places to escape cruelty and violence, places where I could imagine being welcomed instead of shunned. Back then it felt life-saving and in the last few months it has felt sanity-saving. I am grateful to have a mental landscape built up by a lifetime of reading these kinds of books. Good fantasy is vivifying; it restores us and allows us to return to our own world and the challenges therein with a little more courage and a lot more hope.

One of the books I most cherished as a child was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. It has space and time travel involving a tesseract; a big, loving family; and magic of the most miraculous kind. It is a beloved classic of the genre and while I didn’t have the words to express it as a child, now I know I loved the way it blended science with fantasy to express a sacramental view of the world. There was real, frightening evil for the characters to face, but there was also deep love and true goodness. Things mattered. In this way, well-written fantasy shows us worlds of ontological fullness, worlds that are inherently subversive to the mentality of the modern age.

Earlier this year, I read Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art by Madeleine L’Engle and I’ve been wanting to write about it ever since. In it, L’Engle delves into the restorative, transcendant power of not just fantasy literature, but art of all kinds. In a series of thoughtful, heart-touching essays, she explores the artist’s role as sub-creator, arguing that the artist’s essential task is to put chaos into order in a way that ultimately affirms meaning. By resisting the forces of nihilism that prevail in our current era, L’Engle believes that creating true art is a profoundly rebellious act. The artist, always sensing the perfection beyond our mundane reality, pulls back the veil to offer us a glimpse of the Garden, letting us catch sight of the wholeness - and holiness - we are all called to remember. (This is at the heart of what I want to do with my theory of skoliogeography.)

In one chapter of Walking on Water, L’Engle likens artistic inspiration to an echo of the Annunciation. When artists die to the self and move beyond their ego to submit to forces far beyond themselves, they are “at work in a condition of complete and total faith.” In this way, what they create is often more wise, more full of meaning, than the artist is even able to comprehend. I know I have certainly felt this way when writing in moments of pure flow, that I am not creating anything, but merely channeling it. As L’Engle observes, “When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist.”

One of the consequences of being human in the wake of the Fall, argues L’Engle, is our collective amnesia. None of us can fully remember our true selves or the miracle of what we are ultimately called to be. In L’Engle’s eyes one of the most fundamental roles of the artist is to remind us of exactly this. Citing Jung, she says, “we are far more than the part of ourselves we can know and one of the most crippling errors of the twentieth-century culture has been our tendency to limit ourselves to our intellect.” After all, “to know” once signified something deeper and more ineffable than to simply grasp something by the intellect, which is only the starting point of cognition.

“Stories,” L’Engle writes, “no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact icons.” For L’Engle, wholeness – and holiness – is ultimately what the Christian artist seeks. Throughout the book L’Engle uses the idea of ‘walking on water,’ referencing the incident in the Gospels, to describe the way the artist must remember “the glorious things we have forgotten,” the awe-inspiring miracles that remind us of what we are capable of with faith. Ultimately, L’Engle contends that stories and music and poems and paintings can shake us free from our hidebound perception so that once again we can see the world the way we did as children, as something radiant with the working of God.

I will give the last word to L’Engle: “We are hurt; we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space. We all have glimpes of glory as children, and as we grow up we forget them or are taught to think we made them up; they couldn’t possibly have been real because to most of us who are grown up, reality is like radium and can be borne only in very small quantities. But we are meant to be real and to see and recognize the real. We are all more than we know.”