A FAITH BEYOND REASON: JOURNEYS WITH A WRINKLE IN TIME
To this day, I’m not sure what compelled me to purchase Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a rather ugly yellow book with an eerie marble-like centaur on its cover. My best guess is that, at 10 years old, I was giddy with the freedom of being able to decide how to spend my money but faced with the limited fiction offerings of my camp’s tuck shop. Its strangeness was still off-putting, and it subsequently collected dust for a year before I actually read it, but when I did, I was so enchanted by the way its author opened up the world to me that I resolved to call my first-born daughter Madeleine. Thirty-some years later, I have just read A Wrinkle in Time with the author’s 11-year-old namesake, and it has given me pause to think about why and how the book shaped my faith and how I hope it will shape my daughters’ faith.
While I was no stranger to fantasy and sci-fi when I first read A Wrinkle in Time, the novel opened up my imagination in a different and profound way. In many books that take characters from our world to another, there is a threshold — a wardrobe, a rabbit hole, a train platform — something that marks the end of the real world and the beginning of the alternate one. Those stories can foster imagination, but they always seem to place it as something other, something not real. A Wrinkle in Time feels more wonderous to me because there is no strict separation between our world and the other worlds: tessering to Uriel or Camazotz is simply travel, hyperbolically extended as it may be, and the other worlds are presented as continuous with our own. We are assured that the inhabitants of these worlds live in the same universe and under the dominion of the same God. Indeed, the fantastical beings of Uriel sing praises to God with the words of Isaiah 42: “Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth.” (1) The magic of this book lies not in the “what ifs” that are born purely of the human imagination but the “could bes” of a universe of God’s creation that we do not fully know.
A Wrinkle in Time is what my undergraduate children’s literature professor called “a good bad book.” It should be no surprise that this book was rejected 26 times before being accepted for publication — who would ever think that peppering a book for children with quotes from The Tempest, Latin phrases, and references to theoretical mathematics was a good idea? What child would actually want to read such a pretentious piece of writing? Yet it also won the Newberry Medal, which recognizes outstanding children’s literature. While the novel contains many allusions and theoretical concepts that most children would not understand or recognize, children are used to navigating a world that was not built for them. At the same time, they are open and curious. L’Engle respects her child readers enough to present them with possibilities and acknowledges their agency as readers who can deal with the uncertainty of not understanding everything.
When I teach the novel as a literature professor, I explore how it presents different ways of knowing and the impossibilities of full understanding. A simplistic view of the uncertainty and unknown in A Wrinkle in Time might equate this idea with blind faith, but this view misses the depths of the conversation on what faith is that the book inspires. The novel encourages us to make peace with the human limits of understanding while at the same time recognizing that there are different ways of knowing which are all worthy of exploration. Those who are named as fighting the darkness that has shadowed Earth in the book — Jesus, da Vinci, Pasteur — represent faith, art, and science. These differing approaches aren’t pit against each other as our culture so often does but framed as simply different means of encountering and reflecting the goodness of God.
The novel delights in science as a means of knowing and experiencing the universe God has created. L’Engle does not bring Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace to different worlds through vague gestures of magic but through exploring concepts of space and time from theoretical physics. But while we have the epitome of scientific rationality in the Murrays with their multiple PhDs, the novel does not reflect our world’s view of reason as the highest means of knowing; instead it explores its limitations. When explaining concepts rooted in Einstein’s theory of relativity, Mr. Murray articulates that “We can know this, but it’s far more than we can understand with our puny little brains.” (2) Knowing and understanding are not the same thing, and we are reminded that we “don’t have to understand things for them to be.” (3)
Meg’s experience with Aunt Beast similarly interrogates the primacy of empirical knowledge that is so often aligned with sight. Meg is initially repulsed by Aunt Beast because she sees her as ugly, but her trust in her sight as the only way to understand the world blinds her to who Aunt Beast is. Aunt Beast shows wisdom and a keen awareness of her world despite not understanding “what this means, to see.” (4) Instead, Aunt Beast paraphrases 2 Corinthians 4:18 and shows Meg there is more to the world: “We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are see are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.” (5) This allusion reminds us that our focus on science and empirical knowledge, valuable as it may be, should not supplant our focus on the spiritual.
Post-enlightenment thinking so often paints empirical knowledge as the only form of truth, which, when applied to our understanding of God can be limiting and ultimately misleading. By juxtaposing other ways of knowing in a world beyond the boundaries of our planet, L’Engle opens up the vastness of God and his creation. God invites himself to be known, and if we explore him through all the capacities that we have — through rational thought, through feeling, through art, through stories, through creation, through relationship, through imagination — we will get to know him. But we will also never understand him fully, and we must dwell in some of that uncertainty, confronted by the limitations of our human experience.
A faith in God that is curious but accepts the limits of our understanding is humbling, particularly for those of us who may find some of our identity in our intellect, who want to have certainty and confidence. But it is ultimately the kind of approach to God that I have found to be resilient and rewarding. This fall, I have repeatedly returned to Mark 10:15 where Jesus speaks of the importance of receiving “the kingdom of God as a little child.” What it means to be like a child has prompted many interpretations over the years, but as I think about A Wrinkle in Time, it seems to me that part of what it means to be a child before God is to want to know him yet to trust him enough to be comfortable with not understanding everything.
While it has been many years since I first read A Wrinkle in Time as a child, this year, I had the privilege of experiencing it anew as I read it with my elder daughter. I had gifted her a beautiful copy for her 10th birthday, which, like mine, sat on the shelf for a year. So I took it into my own hands and suggested we read the novel together. The further we got, the more adamant she became that we make time for it.
These evening reading sessions begat some of the best discussions I have had with my daughter about the beliefs I hold most dear. We have had thoughtful discussions about how faith and science shape our understanding of the world. When I asked her what she learned from the novel, she responded, “science and God can be part of the same thing.” She understands, as I hope I have encouraged her to do, that faith and reason are not opposing viewpoints but complementary ones that help us to understand our world and our part in it.
We can strive to know God’s word through science, art, literature, and theology, but we also must be filled with awe and accepting of mystery. What we do know, and what A Wrinkle in Time reminds us, is that God is so big, he is so good, and we are so, so loved. We don’t need to understand everything perfectly — and it is risky to think that we could. We may, like Meg, feel small and unimportant, but in being ourselves and loving others, we are participating in the grand work of the God of the universe.
L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time, 1962, Square Fish, 2007, p. 77.
A Wrinkle in Time, p. 185
A Wrinkle in Time, p. 29
A Wrinkle in Time, p. 199
A Wrinkle in Time, p. 205
