I picked up The Irrational Season on a whim off the library shelf, and it’s been a wonderful read for me. In fact, I’m going to have to purchase a copy so that I can underline and asterisk to my heart’s content (even though my husband is making jokes about me reading books on how to be irrational…).

This is the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s 4-part autobiography, The Crosswicks Journals. I’ve only read the fourth one before, so it seems I’m moving backwards through them. In this one, L’Engle works her way reflectively through the liturgical year, exploring the connections between inner and outer spiritual seasons. She confronts some tough questions — about suffering, disillusionment with the institutional church, confusion and difficulty in understanding scripture or knowing God, sexuality and marriage, and even bouts of atheism, which she describes as “a virulent virus, put into the world by the Evil One for our destruction, and I come down with it as on occasion I come down with the flu.” (That’s just one example of an honesty that I trusted and needed.) Her poetry is woven in throughout the book, and I found many gems. Here’s one example (warning, by the way — this is a long post):

Sometimes in this groping dark of knowing my not-knowing
I am exhausted with the struggle to believe in you, O God.
Your ways are not our ways. You sent evil angels to the Egyptians
and killed countless babies in order that Pharoah –
whose heart was hardened by you (that worries me, Lord)
might be slow to let the Hebrew children go.
You turned back the waters of the Red Sea
and your Chosen People went through on dry land
and the Egyptians were drowned, men with wives and children,
young men with mothers and fathers (your ways are not our ways),
and there was much rejoicing, and the angels laughed and sang
and you stopped them, saying, “How can you laugh
when my children are drowning?”

When your people reached Mount Sinai you warned Moses
not to let any of them near you lest you break forth and kill them.
You are love — if you are God — and you command us to love,
yet you yourself turn men to evil, and you wipe out nations
with one sweep of the hand — the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites –
gone, gone, all gone. Sometimes it seems that any means will do.
And yet — all these things are but stories told about you by fallen man,
and they are part of the story — for your ways are not our ways –
but they are not the whole story. You are our author,
and we try to listen and set down what you say, but we all suffer
from faulty hearing and we get the words wrong.

One small enormous thing: you came to us as one of us
and lived with us and died for us and descended into hell for us
and burst out into life for us — :
and now do you hold Pharoah in your arms?

(She doesn’t give titles of her poems, but the ones I’ve been able to track down reveal that she quotes only excerpts. I’m assuming this is a fragment too and therefore okay to quote here.)

There were several aspects of the book that particularly spoke to me. I very much like her way of talking about marriage without stereotyping roles. I appreciated her willingness to struggle, and to be honest about her struggles (which invariably get her somewhere, and don’t stall out in self-pity). I liked her discussions of community, of art, of her own writing life, of the different ways of knowing. She writes in the 1970’s, but much of what she observes about the idolization of rationality and the breakdown of community have come to full fruition.

But I think that what I needed most to read was her insistence that we need to be whole people. She compares us to Mercury with its extremes of hot and cold, its “sunside and nightside.” We have our conscious, rational minds, and we have our unconscious. She writes,

The unconscious aspect of the personality is anything but inert, and this is why it is so fearsome… When we limit ourselves to our ego-consciousness, then we close off that part of us which is capable of true prayer, poetry, painting, music. When we embrace the monster it may indeed devour us, and this is the genuine risk. It may also turn out to be the handsome prince or the beautiful princess for whom we have been waiting all these years.

It is only when we recognize and call by name all that we have relegated to the dark side of Mercury, to the deep black waters of the subconscious mind, that we have any hope of wholeness.

There are times in this book that L’Engle sounds like a universalist. Lewis was accused of universalism, and at times when I was reading Buechner back in the fall I felt uneasy about the same thing. All I can conclude is that brilliant minds trying to give full consideration to God’s grace are going to sound like universalists at times — and maybe God himself is less exclusive than our “sunside” will recognize when we see him face to face.

I’m really enjoying Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, and trying not to read it too quickly. Today I read her commentary on some works of art.

L’Engle writes, “Christian graphic art has often tended to make my affirmation of Jesus Christ as Lord almost impossible, for far too often he is depicted as a tubercular goy, effeminate and self-pitying.” (She doesn’t mince words, does she?) But she goes on to describe a visit to the Church of the Chora in Istanbul that excited her because its art offered an alternative. It made me curious.

Here’s the Church of the Chora. It was converted into a mosque in the 16th century by the Ottoman rulers (about whom we’re learning in history right now), but it’s been a museum since 1948:

She describes her experience of stepping over the threshold and being immediately confronted by

a slightly more than life-size mosaic of the head of Christ, looking at us with a gaze of indescribable power. It was a fierce face, nothing weak about it, and I knew that if this man had turned such a look on me and told me to take up my bed and walk, I would not have dared not to obey. And whatever he told me to do, I would have been able to do.

But the scene she’d gone expressly to see was the fresco over the altar. Here’s her commentary:

I stood there, trembling with joy, as I looked at this magnificent painting of the harrowing of hell. In the center is the figure of Jesus striding through hell, a figure of immense virility and power. With one strong hand he is grasping Adam, with the other, Eve, and wresting them out of the power of hell. The gates to hell, which he has trampled down and destroyed forever, are in cross form, the same cross on which he died.

I don’t know much about iconic art (right term?), and as a lifelong Protestant I don’t have any experience of the role it plays in worship. But I can imagine that sitting among ancient pictures like these regularly must be a powerful experience.

First, they’re ancient… They give a true sense of antiquity, of the generations that have lived and worshiped before. This church was built originally in the early 5th century, rebuilt around 1080, then modified for the last time two centuries later. The artwork inside (there’s plenty more) was created between 1315 and 1321.

Second, the painstaking work involved in the creation of works like this testifies to the great worthiness of their subjects. Frescos are made by painting on wet plaster, mosaics by affixing tiny fragments of stone or glass. To create the kind of detail in these pictures, their artists worked long and patiently, guided by a vision of the final product that only they could see.

Last, these pictures have an effect similar to hymns. Both forms involve packing a great deal of theology into a fairly rigid, condensed form. Accordingly, they pack a punch! They remind me of Daniel’s dreams in the Bible, or some of the prophetic visions, in which layers of meaning speak from a single visual idea. I feel thankful for this book that raised my curiosity.