Her joy, rage, mirth, and disappointment are pinned into place with her regular, irresistible return to Creation, Collapse, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection. She speaks to God as brashly and fearfully as a child who dares to shout at her parent before bursting into tears. Others cobble amusing little sketches of the absurd habits of selfishness, or glee, or fear, or comfort. Her experiences shout loudly to our current world.īut L’Engle’s poems also bear the time signature of sacred rhythms: many follow liturgical seasons, or lectionary readings, or high water marks of living, like births, weddings, baptisms, deaths. And after all, she was born at the tail-end of World War I, during the 1918 flu pandemic, a child during the ’29 crash, a teenager during the Depression, a young woman during World War II, a mother in the tumult of the 50’s and 60’s, a grieving widow as the Information Age picked up steam. There is nothing controllable about life on this planet, her words seem to shriek no family recipe to follow carefully that will alleviate the cosmic chaos.
What voice can sound clearly through the chaos? We live in a moment aching for the holy iconoclasm of the poetry of Madeleine L’Engle.īest known for novels, the late writer Madeleine L’Engle – born in a year much talked-about lately, 1918 – showed a knack for discomforting the comfortable and soothing the overheated, displayed well in The Ordering of Love: The New & Collected Poems of Madeleine L’Engle.
Even for people who don’t avoid the awkward or painful, this year has been a chaotic overthrow of everyday simplicity. For many people around the world, last December – despite weariness or tight budgets or influenza – was one of the last waypoints of normalcy.
Then we stare open-mouthed at the news when natural disasters erupt in December, scissors halted halfway through the Snoopy wrapping paper. At Christmas, we mumble, “round yon virgin, mother and Child,” so that young hearers don’t whisper loudly, “what’s a virgin?” We don’t know what to do with the truly awful passage about Herod ordering the slaughter of Bethlehem’s toddler boys, so we skip it. We begin to see them as the point instead of as a waypoint. Habits are sly: sometimes, we’re lulled into the off-key sense that traditions are a way of controlling a season. Before the rumblings began to emerge around New Years’ (stories dripping out slowly from halfway around the world) before awareness of trouble somewhere became the startling realization that trouble was here – we could indulge ourselves in becoming blasé about tradition.
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