SITTING ON RUINS WITH MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S WALKING ON WATER: REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND ART
“Often we forget that [God] has a special gift for each one of us, because we tend to weigh and measure such gifts with the coin of the world’s marketplace…The widow’s mite and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are both ‘living mysteries,’ both witness to lives which affirm the loving presence of God.” This is the profound pronouncement of Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art. And these words will become a prescient accompaniment to an important chapter in my life.
We never know when our lives will be indelibly changed for the better, or the worse, on a most ordinary day in an unremarkable place. For me, it was the summer of 2018 as I sat across from a friend and university colleague in a crowded bagel shop where the air hung heavy with the smell of toasted bread and the competing din of voices. She talked about the group of university students she would be leading on a two-week European tour in May 2019 as part of their humanities requirement. Pausing, she looked down at her sandwich, and then blurted, “I want you to be part of the four required faculty on this trip.” At this unexpected invitation, I felt the urge to scream simultaneously “Yes” and “No.” This was an incredible opportunity to enrich myself and build student relationships with the travel costs covered. But I was also terrified because I had never traveled abroad and had recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune inflammatory disease, whose prognosis and treatment were frightening and uncertain. After a week of conversations and prayer, I accepted.
The itinerary for the 16-day tour would start by flying from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Frankfurt, Germany, and then a connecting flight to Madrid. After two days in Madrid, we would make a day trip via bus to Toledo, then take a train the following day to Barcelona. On Day 7, we would fly to Italy, spending three days in Florence then a day trip to Assisi en route to Rome. Greece would be our destination on Day 13, where we would divide the remaining time between Delphi and Athens. Three countries, eight cities, numerous planes, trains, and buses — oh my.
An essential part of the student experience was the academic preparation. As one of the tour faculty, I would team-teach the humanities “prep” course that spring semester, covering relevant history, philosophy, literature, and the arts. As we worked to compile a syllabus, I wanted students to read about the arts through a spiritual lens as we were a Christian liberal arts institution. In my search for a text that could be our guide, I discovered Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water. I would like to say that my choice came from extensive knowledge of her theological viewpoints, but it came merely via Google with the entered search terms of “faith” and “art.” I further confess that before 2019 my only familiarity with L’Engle was through her novel A Wrinkle in Time. As an infrequent reader of speculative fiction, I thought L’Engle had little to offer me. How wrong I was.
The prep class met weekly on Thursday mornings starting in January. As students worked through scholarly articles and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, they also read L’Engle’s book, reflecting on it through class discussions and writing prompts. Her words challenged students to expand their limited definitions of what constituted “Christian” art.
To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all…We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch burnings and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom. … There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
Meanwhile, fears and vulnerability coursed through me. I chose not to reveal to the students, many of whom were seasoned international travelers, that this was my first trip abroad. I didn’t know how to explain, or even if it would be appropriate to explain, to these 20 year olds how certain aspects of my life had been limited by my mother’s mental illness, then later by the demands and financial exigencies that marriage and child rearing brought, or what it was like to have back pain and stiffness come on seemingly overnight at age 30 and then be misdiagnosed for almost two decades with treatments and surgeries that never addressed the root of the problem. But when I read these words in Walking on Water, I felt them speak directly to my soul — “The moment of inspiration does not come to someone who lolls around expecting the gift to be free. It is no giveaway. It is the pearl for which we have to pay a great price.” I copied this quote onto a yellow index card and propped it on my bedroom dresser. At moments when the anxiety threatened to overtake me, I would hold the card in my hand as a tactile symbol of prayer. On another yellow card, I wrote, “The Lord opened this door for me to walk through.” That was my statement of faith. I still couldn’t figure out how I was going to overcome the physical and emotional challenges that would not only get me to Europe but let me be a role model and leader to students. Yet, I kept leaning into L’Engle’s wisdom — “There is much that we cannot understand, but our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates it.”
But whenever I would start to feel more confident in God’s sustaining grace, something would knock me over again. In another of her memoirs, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, L’Engle writes, “It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.” I was finding that this “good” classification must be something we arrive at later, as I was not recognizing any benefits in real time. First came a measles outbreak as anti-vaccination rhetoric was leaving us exposed to once mitigated diseases. I again thought about the dangers of putting myself into weeks of crowded, enclosed travel situations. Then, Rachel Held Evans, a giant in the faith to whom I looked for wisdom and direction, died unexpectedly at age 37, two weeks before our departure day, catapulting me into a full-blown crisis of faith. I rejected the fundamentalist teachings of my childhood that equated tragedies with God’s providence and “higher ways.” I refused the platitude that God “took” her because her work was done. Rachel’s work was not finished. Prayer warriors all over the world prayed for her recovery from the sudden onset of a mysterious illness, and yet she died. If their prayers couldn’t save her, then I saw no way forward in trusting God to protect me. I carried this uncertainty with me as I boarded the airplane.
As expected, the hours spent strapped in a narrow seat proved difficult. My back and neck protested, and except for two 30-minute naps, I remained awake on the overnight flight. But I also experienced the wonder of watching the sun set as we left the east coast of the United States only to see it miraculously rising a short time later as we crossed over Iceland. In Walking on Water, L’Engle frequently reminds us of our humble position in God’s universe, not unlike God’s schooling of Job. “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. … If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.”
In addition to the magnificence of soaring through the sky, each city offered glorious sights, sounds, smells, and tastes— the art at Madrid’s Prado and Reina Sofía museums and an authentic dish of paella; the pristine azure of the Mediterranean Sea in Barcelona and my first taste of huevos rotos, a culinary match made in heaven; a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto in Florence, the city of opera’s birth, and marble sculptures viewed between eating cones of gelato; the majestical persistence of the ancient fountains of Rome and the ruins at Delphi and Athens.
And there was intense pain. I anticipated that my problems would come from all the walking, and indeed it was hard. I need to walk with a short stride to not stress my sacroiliac joints. Combining that with an athletic tour guide and young students, I struggled in the back of our 36-person procession, the “cow’s tail” as my grandmother would have said, trying not to lose sight of them. Several panicked times I did get separated. But what ended up being the most problematic was standing. The cumulative effect on my feet meant that they throbbed at night, the pain vibrating so that I was surprised that my feet appeared still. I took the maximum dosage of ibuprofen and rubbed them with creams. Overnight, they improved, but then the next day of standing in lines and gazing at exhibits without places to sit whipped them again into a pain-filled frenzy.
The exquisite beauty and the extraordinary experiences mostly balanced out the hardships, but occasionally I hit a wall. Rome was one of those moments. After two hours standing in line to enter the Colosseum then a long tour, tears streamed down my face. The guide then led us to some adjacent ruins, and despite what was acceptable, I couldn’t stand it and sat down on the first flat-surfaced outcropping I could find. Water from the morning rain soaked the seat of my pants, and I didn’t care. I imagined that my future memoir would be titled, Sitting on Ruins. One of the other faculty members on the trip was struggling as well. She had received her own life-changing diagnosis before the trip — multiple sclerosis. The day in Rome shredded her as well, and in a sudden downpour, we abandoned the group. She was in worse shape, so I helped her up some steep steps and hailed my first European cab that propelled us on a death-defying sprint to the hotel.
What truly sustained me were the sacred experiences and my unofficial role as spiritual shepherdess of the group. At the Catedral Primada Santa María in Toledo, Spain, I showed students how to light prayer candles. In La Sagrada Familia, the Barcelona cathedral that Gaudi began in 1882 and was still under construction, the window colors spoke to me about God’s creative glory in a way that defies words. When visiting the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, I again encouraged the students to take the time to pray as well as study Giotto’s frescos. That city also housed the Basilica of Saint Clare, where the remains of St. Clare are interred. A follower of St. Francis, Clare ministered with him in 13th century Assisi and established an order, known as the Poor Clares, because of their care for the poor and downtrodden. I noticed a small wooden prayer box mounted on the wall with blank slips of paper. A sign indicated that the Clares Sisters would pray for all requests. I scribbled my need for healing and pushed it through the narrow slot.
The Clares’ emphasis on humility contrasted with our next spiritual stop — the Vatican. St. Peter’s Basilica spoke of glory on a lavish scale, but the irreverent noise and push of the crowds viewing Michelangelo’s Pietà and jostling inside the Sistine Chapel denied me the transcendent spiritual experience I longed for. When I finally stood in Athens peering up toward the Parthenon, I didn’t know how I could make that climb. But step by step, on uneven and slippery stones, I crept. I wanted to give a Pentecostal-like shout when I took that last painful step. Gathered at the top, our group listened as the tour guide pointed out what could be seen from this impressive vista, including Mars Hill. I remembered the exuberant sermon that the Apostle Paul had preached from there as recorded in Acts 17. It begins, “Athenians, I notice that you are very religious in every way…” I assembled the students and read it aloud from my phone as we stood among the ruins.
One night, L'Engle dreamed that a friend reached a hand into a fireplace and came away with a living coal, and yet did not seem burned. Reflecting on this, she wrote, “It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned. … We are suspicious of grace.”
Unearned and unexpected grace indeed abounded on that trip, especially in our singing. Throughout the long bus rides, students and faculty played favorite pieces over the sound system, and we sang along in a robust collective. For some reason, Queen was especially popular, so “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” reverberated as we sped by signs written in many languages. The moment I will never forget is cuing up “Jolene” on my phone as our band of weary travelers climbed onto the final bus bound for the Athens airport where we would start our 12-hour journey home. Dolly Parton is celebrated throughout the world, but for those of us from a university in East Tennessee at 4:30 a.m. in Greece, she was our patron saint, and we sang this secular song as a sacred hymn, as in one accord. I think L'Engle would approve.
