Free Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle Page A

known did little with her life in terms of worldly success; her gift was that of bringing laughter with her wherever she went, no matter how dark or grievous the occasion. Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.
    In the Koran it is written, “He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.”

I am grateful that I started writing at a very early age, before I realized what a daring thing it is to do, to set down words on paper, to attempt to tell a story, create characters. We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.
    With God, even a rich man can enter the narrow gate to heaven. Earthbound as we are, even we can walk on water.
    Paul certainly wasn’t qualified to talk about love, Paul who had persecuted so many Christians as ruthlessly as possible; and yet his poem on love in 1 Corinthians has shattering power. It is not a vague, genial sense of well-being that it offers us but a particular, painful, birth-giving love. How to translate that one word which is the key word?
Charity
long ago lost its original meaning and has come to mean a cold, dutiful giving. And
love
is now almost entirely limited to the narrower forms of sex. Canon Tallis suggests that perhaps for our day the best translation of
love
is the name of Jesus, and that will tell us everything about love we need to know.
    It is a listening, unself-conscious love, and many artists who are incapable of this in their daily living are able to find it as they listen to their work, that work which binds our wounds and heals us and helps us toward wholeness.
    —
    When I was a child my parents loved me not because I was good but because I was Madeleine, their child. I loved them, and I wanted to please them, but their love of me did not have to be earned.
    Neither does the love of God. We are loved because we are his children, because we
are.
The more we feel that we ought to be loved because it is our due or because we deserve it, the less we will truly feel the need of God’s love; the less implicit will be our trust; the less will we cry out,
Abba!
    Dostoyevsky writes, in
Crime and Punishment,
Then Christ will say to us, “Come you as well, Come drunkards, come weaklings, come forth ye children of shame….” And he will say to us, “Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark, but come ye also.” And the wise men and those of understanding will say: “O Lord, why do you receive these men?” And he will say, “This is why I receive them, O ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.” And he will hold out his hands to us and we shall fall down before him…and we shall weep…and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all things!…Lord, thy kingdom come.
    The root word of
humility
is
humus,
earth; to be
human,
too, comes from the same word; and the parables of Jesus which show the kind of humility he is seeking in us are often earthy, such as the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the parable of the seed and the sower, and the parable of the prodigal son. We all have within us that same lack of humility as the workers who worked in the heat of the day and resented those who got equal pay for shorter hours of work, and we all understand the lack of humility in the elder son who was offended by his father’s humble forgiveness.
    King Lear’s humbleness at the end of his play is all the more moving because it has been born of the pain caused by his arrogance.
    And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God’s children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.
    —
    The disciples, like the rest of us, did not deserve God’s love, nor their Master’s. How must Jesus have felt when he was forced to realize