Walking on Water (10 page)

Scripture is full of dreams; Joseph was no exception. And God often called people when they were asleep (Samuel, for instance) because in sleep we have let down our defense mechanisms. Pilate's wife, Claudia, told him not to execute Jesus because she had been warned about him in a dream, and I often wonder if he regretted not listening to her. Peter thought he was dreaming when the angels unlocked the gates and led him out of prison. If we are close to our angels, the dream world and the waking world will not be far apart.

In the creative act we can experience the same freedom we know in dreams. This happens as I write a story. I am bound by neither time nor space. I
know
those distant galaxies to which Meg Murry went with Charles Wallace and Calvin. I live in seventeenth-century Portugal with Mariana Alcoforado. But this freedom comes only when, as in a dream, I do not feel that I have to dictate and control what happens. I dream, sometimes, that I am in a beautiful white city I have never seen in “real” life, but I believe in it. I also believe in the planet Uriel, with its beautiful flying creatures, and also in that other planet where are found the unicorn hatching-grounds.

When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

Small children, knowing this freedom, do things which, to adults living in the grown-up world, are impossible. They see things which grown-up eyes cannot see. They hear things which fall on deaf ears with their parents. And they believe the things they do and see and hear. And when, eager and unprepared, they describe these marvellous things, they are told, by kindly and reasonable and well-meaning parents, that they have vivid imaginations. Less understanding adults tell the children that whatever it is they think they have done or seen or heard is impossible. Some children are told to stop telling lies. Some are even punished.

We grow up and forget. Peter didn't remember that he had forgotten how to walk on water, and so he walked—until he remembered—and then he got frightened and sank, and Jesus took him by the hand and pulled him out of the water and told him that he lacked faith.

Children are taught fear early: fear of water, fear of fire. Not that parents aren't right to warn; too many little ones have drowned, have been burned, because of careless parents. But there's a fine line between essential prudence for the child's sake and the destruction of creativity. Allowing the child a certain amount of solitude in a reasonably safe environment (no environment in this world is totally safe) is allowing the child's imagination to grow and develop, so that the child may ultimately learn how to be mature. Traherne says, “We do not ignore maturity. Maturity consists in
not
losing the past while fully living in the present with a prudent awareness of the possibilities of the future.”

I was lucky as a child in being given a lot of solitude. Some of this was happenstance because of my father's illness and my lack of siblings. But it did provide me with an atmosphere in which imagination could flourish. And nobody told me it was childish to believe in angels. And so I was able to do a few impossible things.

For instance: when I was a small child, visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage, I used to go down the winding stairs without touching them. This was a special joy to me. I think I went up the regular way, but I came down without touching. Perhaps it was because I was so used to thinking things over in solitude that it never occurred to me to tell anybody about this marvellous thing, and because I never told it, nobody told me it was impossible.

When I was twelve we went to Europe to live, hoping the air of the Alps might help my father's lungs. I was fourteen when we returned, and went to stay with my grandmother at the beach. The first thing I did when I found myself alone was to go to the top of the stairs. And I could no longer go down them without touching. I had forgotten how.

Did I, in fact, ever go down those winding stairs without touching them? I am convinced that I did. And during the years enough people have timidly told me of “impossible” things they have done that I am convinced that the impossible is open to far more people than we realize—mostly because we are fearful of being ridiculed if we talk about it. Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman's compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice.

Choice is an essential ingredient of fiction and drama. A protagonist must not simply be acted upon, he must act, by making a choice, a decision to do this rather than that. A series of mistaken choices throughout the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on our planet.

All the Faust stories are studies in the results of choice. Dostoyevsky's story of the Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov
is one of the most brilliant pieces of Christian writing that I know, and one of the most frightening, because the Grand Inquisitor, like many dictators, is plausible; he wants people to be happy; he does not want them to suffer; the church, because of the great love it has for humanity, has done its best to reverse all the damage caused by Jesus, with his terrible promise of the truth that will make us free. We do not want to be free, the Grand Inquisitor assures Jesus. We want these stones to be turned into bread.

Why would God give the gift of freedom to creatures who are not ready for it, who have kept making wrong choices for thousands and thousands of years—ever since Eve listened to the snake? Freedom is a mistake, we might well agree with the Grand Inquisitor as we drive through the slums of any of our great cities, where buildings are gutted by tenants who are so frustrated by lack of heat in winter, no hot water ever, and sometimes no water at all, that they resort to burning the buildings in order to get relocated. Or buildings gutted by landlords (not
all
landlords are vicious and greedy) who cannot afford to heat them at the present price of oil or to keep the water hot, and in desperation burn the building for the insurance money and get out. If all our freedom has done is build up our financially bankrupt, corrupt, tottering cities, what good is it?

Neither philosophy nor theology helps me much here. 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 the light is stronger than the dark.

I am encouraged by the young people who express their caring by giving several years of their lives to the Peace Corps or Vista or Food for the Hungry, who shun shoddy workmanship, who are building their own furniture, making pottery, doing needlework in a striving for that excellence we have lost by some of our choices.

I do not decry all that technology has given us. In the “olden days” I would have died in childbirth with both Josephine and Bion, and I am glad to be here in this alarming and disastrous and marvellous world. Western civilization may be on the decline, but a civilization which has produced Bach and Rembrandt and Dostoyevsky (to limit myself to three favourites) cannot be tossed aside as worthless.

Bach, who, in terms of the evolutionary process, is as close to us in time as last night—Bach will always pull me back and give me the courage to accept that what our free will is meant to do is to help God to write the story.

What if?

What if—the basis of all story. The small child asks all the what ifs. All of life is story, story unravelling and revealing meaning. 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. As far as we know, even the higher animals (with the exception, perhaps, of the dolphin) do not have this consciousness, not necessarily self-consciousness, but consciousness of having a part in the story.

And the story involves what seems to the closed mind to be impossible—another reason for disbelieving it. But, as Christians, we may choose to live by most glorious impossibles. Or not to live, which is why in the churches, by and large, the impossibles, the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and walkings on water and raisings from the dead, are ignored or glossed over.

I see my young friends groping back towards a less restricted view of time and space, though sometimes in frighteningly faddish ways. True contemplation is sought through drugs, which can never produce it. Séances and trips in the astral body are on the increase, and the church condemns and draws back. But if we do not offer a groping generation the real thing, they will look for it elsewhere, or they will fall, as George Tyrrell observed, for the garbage of any superstition.

It is not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe twenty-four hours a day all that I want to believe. I stray, and then my stories pull me back if I listen to them carefully. I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.

Remembering the lovely things we have for-gotten is one of the reasons for all art. Surely the customs officer Rousseau
knew
those jungles he painted. And Marlowe, having Satan cry out,

knew hell himself, for we know the terrible things as well as the beautiful. Bach, setting down the soprano and alto duet in the 78th Cantata, knew such heavenly joy that it is shared by all who hear the music. In the act of creation our logical, prove-it-to-me minds relax; we begin to understand anew all that we understood as children, when we saw wee folk under the leaves or walked down the stairs without touching. But this understanding is—or should be—greater than the child's because we understand in the light of all that we have learned and experienced in growing up.

George Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”

Despite this wadding, the artist in the moment of creation does hear the tiny beating of the squirrel heart and does indeed die to self on the other side of silence, where he retains the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns. The great artists never lose this quality which the world would limit to children. And along with this “wadding with stupidity” comes the denigration of children's books and the writers of children's books. A year or so before she invited me to come to the conference on Ayia Napa, Dr. Marion van Horne asked me to give a talk on Christian children's books. A large part of my job was to give a definition of what, in fact, makes a Christian children's book.

Such a definition would seem to be a simple task, but it is not. It used to be answered the easy way: how many times is Jesus mentioned? But that doesn't work. Jesus may be mentioned on every page in a book that is for neither children nor Christian. It perturbs me to observe in how many contemporary novels “Oh, Christ!” and “Je
sus!
” are spattered over the pages, side by side with the four-letter words.

So the use of the name of Jesus is no criterion. And the fact that “Christian” stories are still
story
further complicates things, for story touches on the realm of art, and art itself is looked on as something unfit for the real world. There's another
New Yorker
cartoon that shows a woman opening the door of her house to a friend. We look through the door, and in the back of the house a man is writing at a typewriter, with a large manuscript piled on the desk beside him. The friend asks, “Has your husband found a job yet? Or is he still writing?”

A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings. When told, she was duly impressed and remarked, “And to think, most people would have had to work so hard for that.” I choked over my tea, not wanting to laugh in her face.

A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied that she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, “Oh, I didn't mean your
hobby.
”

So it is not only the church that fobs off art as untrue or unreal, and art for children is the most looked-down-on of all.

Whether a story is to be marketed for grownups or for children, the writer writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack reality. There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the writer's need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if it is totally honest and unself-pitying, then it will have the valid ring of truth. If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable, and not out of the writer's need, then it is apt to be unbelievable, and what is unbelievable can often be shocking and even pornographic—and this includes some recent children's books.

The world wants to shove us into what it considers the appropriate pigeonhole. I do not like to be labelled as a “Christian children's writer” because I fear that this will shove me even further into the pigeonhole which began to be prepared for me when
A Wrinkle in Time
won the Newbery medal. If I am so labelled, then the implication is that I am to be read only by children, and Christian children at that. Though the chief reason that
Wrinkle
was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children's book; it won a medal for children's books. Therefore, I am a children's writer, and that is all I'm allowed to be.

But I'm a writer. That's enough of a definition. (I infinitely prefer to say that I am a Christian than to mention any denomination, for such pigeonholing is fragmenting, in religion as in art.) So. I am a Christian. I am a writer. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grownups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten. Because I am a struggling human being; trying to make sense out of the meaninglessness of much of life in this century and daily searching for revelatory truth in Scripture, it's highly unlikely that I'll ever want to write novels of pessimism or porno, no matter how realistic my work. But I don't want to be shut in, labelled, the key turned, so that I am not able to grow and develop, as a Christian, as a writer. I want that freedom which is a large part of the Christian promise, and I don't want any kind of label to diminish that freedom. It is sad and ironic to have to admit that it does.

To write a story is an act of Naming; in reading about a protagonist I can grow along with, I myself am more named. And we live in a world which would reduce us to our social-security numbers. Area codes, zip codes, credit-card codes, all take precedence over our names. Our signatures already mean so little that it wouldn't be a surprise if, sometime in the near future, we, like prisoners, are known only by our numbers.

But that is not how it was meant to be. Coleridge writes,

The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, said they, the name of God may be upon it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to man. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of as to give his precious blood for it; therefore, despise it not.

The name of God is so awe-full, so unpronounceable, that it has never been used by any of his creatures. Indeed, it is said that if, inadvertently, the great and terrible name of God should be spoken, the universe would explode. The letters
YHWH
are a jumble of Hebrew consonants, and a better translation than “Jehovah” is “The Lord.”

But we, the creatures, are named, and our names are part of our wholeness. It used to be a moment of great importance when someone said, “Oh, don't call me Mrs. X. Call me Anne—or Katherine. Alex or John. My name is a gift which I offer to you.”

Now the name is taken automatically—grabbed away. On television programs, the interviewer immediately calls whoever he is interviewing—head of state, composer, scientist—by the first name.

I love the rare moments when I am permitted to offer my name to someone. And I love the letters which begin “Dear Madeleine,” because the writers feel that I have already given the gift of the name through the books. And I remember times when I have been given a name—and to be given a name is an act of intimacy as powerful as any act of love.

A French priest, conducting a retreat, said,

To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeonhole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to be able to become better. We must dare to love in a world that does not know how to love.

We are to be children of the light, and we are meant to walk in the light, and we have been groping along in the darkness. The creative act helps us to emerge into the light, that awful light which the disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, and which the Hebrew children saw on the face of Moses when he had been talking with God on Mount Sinai.

If we are blind and foolish, so were the disciples. They simply failed to understand what the light was about—these three disciples who were closest to him. They wanted to trap Jesus, Elijah, and Moses in tabernacles, tame them, pigeonhole and label them, as all of us human beings have continued to do ever since.

It seems that more than ever the compulsion today is to identify, to reduce someone to what is on the label. To identify is to control, to limit. To love is to call by name and so open the wide gates of creativity. But we forget names and turn to labels; there are many familiar ones today, such as:

And the list could go on and on and on…

If we are pigeonholed and labeled we are unnamed.

Last spring I was briefly in Jerusalem as the guest of the publishers who were bringing out a book of illustrations of the Old Testament by children all over the world, wonderful people who asked me to write the text to go with the pictures, and who knew me by name. During my stay, in which I was driven about the countryside to see as many Old Testament sites and sights as possible, I was entirely within the Jewish community. To my surprise, several times I heard, in times of stress or irritation, “Oh, Christ!”

So, I repeat, the number of times the name of Jesus is invoked has little or nothing to do with whether or not a book is Christian. But before I struggle further with what is or is not a Christian children's book, I think it's important to ask: What is a children's book?

Added to the assumption that if you don't have enough talent to write for adults, you might try writing a book for children, is the further insult that if you really work hard and discover that you have more talent than you thought you had, you might advance enough to write a book for adults.

If you are not good enough to write a book for adults, you are certainly not good enough to write a book for children. I had written and published several “regular” novels before I dared try my hand at a children's novel. (I say “regular” novel because I was gently told by a friend that today the word
adult
in front of
novel
means porno.)

And that's just another example of pigeonholing.

Nancy Berkowitz, long a great friend of children's books and their writers, told me last year that I'd given her the best definition of a children's book that she'd heard. Having completely forgotten ever giving such a definition, I asked eagerly, “What was it?”