We'll Miss You, Magical Madeline

I remember reading my first Madeline L'Engle book and being absolutely captured by it's depth, its playfulness and its incredible ability to connect the world of fantasy and intrigue with the issues of my life...and this was a children's book? It was the summer between my junior and senior years at Baylor, and I was taking several summer school classes so I could graduate a semester early in December. I remember distinctly glorying in the fact that I had the ability to take a Children's Literature class in fulfillment of my education degree requirements...I mean really...read a few picture books, a few pop-ups, throw in a teen reader or two and this would be the easiest coup of college credits since that pansy genetics course...OK, I never really took genetics...my roommate was Pre-Med and he agonized over that one, but I did have a stressful bowling class one semester...picking up those 6-10 spares can be brutal. Anyway, the reality was that Children's Literature was not the cake-walk I had planned on, in fact, it was actually fascinating work reading the Newberry and Caldecott winners down through the years...very few of which I had actually read growing up. So I was cruising along, zipping through the reading lists when I came to the assignment of Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. I wasn't a half a page in when I realized that I was being pulled into a story in a way I had not experienced before. I would read The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings a few years later, but this journey into the fantastical and magical was new for me...and it occurred to me as I read that I never really considered this a children's book. I would read many more of her writings in the years that ensued, but A Wrinkle In Time has always been a marker for me in the way I began to look for and search out narrative...and not just in books, but in movies, in plays, in music, in poetry...and in my faith. Because for Madeline, there seemed to be a natural, powerful connection between the mystical and the practical, the ethereal and the mundane, between the sacred and the secular...so that they were often indistinguishable. With the Harry Potter madness of the last decade, many readers young and old were directed back to Madeline's works as a groundbreaking foray into the genre and conceptual structure of challenging, edifying, and episodic fantasy literature for children.

So the news of her death today at the age of 88 came with a paradoxical sadness that one of the great writers of our time would no longer be writing for us, but also with the immense gratitude that I had the opportunity for her writing to help shape who I am and how I go about writing my own story and my own magical journey...

I suspect you are sitting and telling stories to the angels tonight, Madeline L'Engle, and I know they are equally as delighted to be hearing your tales firsthand as we have been to have that privilege here on earth for the last 50 years. You finally got to experience your own passageway through the Wrinkle in Time...But you will be missed...This Pling is for you...

Pling...Pling...

dg