Free Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle

paean of praise in the Ninth Symphony if he had not had to endure the dark closing in of deafness? As I look through his work chronologically, there’s no denying that it deepens and strengthens along with the deafness. Could Milton have seen all that he sees in
Paradise Lost
if he had not been blind? It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.
    My mother’s long life had more than its fair share of pain and tragedy. One time, after something difficult had happened, one of her childhood friends came to give comfort and help. Instead of which, she burst into tears and sobbed out, “I envy you! I envy you! You’ve had a terrible life, but you’ve
lived
!”
    I look back at my mother’s life and I see suffering deepening and strengthening it. In some people I have also seen it destroy. Pain is not always creative; received wrongly, it can lead to alcoholism and madness and suicide. Nevertheless, without it we do not grow.
    —
    Demetrios Capetenakis says, “One must really be brave to choose love or writing as one’s guides, because they may lead one to the space in which the meaning of our life is hidden—and who can say that this space may not be the land of death.”
    Even to the Christian this land of death is dark and frightening. No matter how deep the faith, we each have to walk the lonesome valley; we each have to walk it all alone. The world tempts us to draw back, tempts us to believe we will not have to take this test. We are tempted to try to avoid not only our own suffering but also that of our fellow human beings, the suffering of the world, which is part of our own suffering. But if we draw back from it (and we are free to do so), Kafka reminds us that “it may be that this very holding back is the one evil you could have avoided.”
    The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
    —
    We are hurt; we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space. We all have glimpses of glory as children, and as we grow up we forget them or are taught to think we made them up; they couldn’t possibly have been real because to most of us who are grown up, reality is like radium and can be borne only in very small quantities.
    But we are meant to be real and to see and recognize the real. We are all more than we know, and that wondrous reality, that wholeness, holiness, is there for all of us, not the qualified only.
    I am glad that in the communion of my church we are baptized as infants, because this emphasizes that the gift of death to this world and birth into the kingdom of God is, in fact, gift—it is nothing we have earned, or even, as infants, chosen. It is God’s freely bestowed love.
    Juan Carlos Ortiz, a priest in South America, uses this baptismal formula: “I kill you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve and please him.”
    It is baptism itself that I am talking about, not “immersion” or “splashing.” My husband, being properly submerged in the First Baptist Church when he was ten, experienced the same undeserved glory that I did, who was baptized before the age of reason. It is the gift that matters. It is death, and life.
    It is as radical as that, and it is gift. Through no virtue of our own we are made dead to the old and alive in the new.
    And for each one of us there is a special gift, the way in which we may best serve and please the Lord, whose love is so overflowing. And gifts should never be thought of quantitatively. One of the holiest women I have ever