Luci Shaw — Madeleine L'Engle

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“We enriched each other.” Luci Shaw speaks with Nate about her rich friendship with Madeleine L'Engle and how they made one another better writers and better followers of Jesus.

Show Notes + Transcript

Nate: Lucy, we get to talk about your friend today. How did you first come to meet Madeline?

Luci: Well, Madeleine and I met originally at Wheaton College at a conference on, on literature, and she was a speaker and I was a speaker, and so we just happened to connect at that, at that time, and we discovered we had a lot in common.

Madeline had just written a couple of poems that she wanted published. So, since my husband and I had just started the publishing company, Harold Shaw Publishers, I asked Madeline if she would like us to publish her poetry. Which is one of the things we had planned to do, was publish poetry people of faith. So, we did. We published two of her books. One was called A Cry Like a Bell. And the other one was Oh, I can't even remember the name of it. But this was very early on. And we discovered the more we talked, the more we found we had in common. 

We loved Bach. We loved the music of Bach. We had a number of common friends. That was way back when. 

Nate: Now, was this before she'd written Wrinkle in Time?

Luci: She had written A Wrinkle in Time.

Nate: And then you two went on to write some books together.

Luci: That's right, yeah, we had our publishing company, and we were trying to publish, books by people of faith who had a literary bent. Anyway, that was the beginning of a really fruitful friendship. We found that, though Madeline had a number of people who were devoted to her and looked up to her, she didn't have many colleagues who were sort of meeting her at the friendship level, not just the sort of worshipful level that she had managed to accumulate.

So, the first book that we did together, I asked her to write a book on faith, how faith and literature work together. So she, at one point, handed me this very untidy typescript. Piles and piles of typed notes and possible chapter headings and so on.

So I had to just take the whole thing, pull it apart, I emptied my dining room, got the table out of the way, and started making piles. of different ideas that would flow together. We called it the Weather of the Heart. 

She needed someone who could sort of say, Madeline, you can't say that. You know, that's... not orthodox. We'll have to talk through that one. So, we did. We did a lot of discussion. She came from a very liberal background in New York City. I came from a very conservative background. And we sort of met in the middle and discovered that we loved each other's works. And we learned a lot from each other and through each other.

Nate: What did you learn from her? 

Luci: I learned to be a lot more open about what faith in God was all about. That you didn't have formulas by which to describe your faith. That this was a freeing thing, that the Holy Spirit of God could work in different ways. We just enjoyed each other's experiences with the Spirit of God. We shared so much. We found that working together was truly an act of worship to God. 

I remember after working through an entire manuscript, The Weather of the Heart, we finished all the copy editing and so on, we spontaneously stood to our feet and sang the doxology, "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow." 

Nate: What do you want people to remember about her?

Luci: I want them to remember that she loved God with all her heart. That she wanted to be God's child and servant. And I think that what I could bring to her was a sense that God was larger than either her understanding or my understanding of God. That God was so magnificent and so wide, in the ways we could reach to God through the Holy Spirit.

So it was a very Trinitarian friendship. She loved Jesus, and you know, the fact that God was both Jesus and also the Divine Creator of the world. 

Nate: How did you see her work influence people spiritually?

Luci: I think she asked a lot of questions that people had. People you know, had a lot of questions because God is knowable through various ways, but not always easily understood. And because Madeline had a very great respect for the Bible and for Holy Scripture, and she realized that, throughout Scripture, God speaks to us through metaphors.

God spoke to Moses with the Ten Commandments, but also through acts of grace and love. It was, an ongoing, free flowing relationship that God wants to have with us as his children, as his followers, and both Madeline and I wanted to have that characterize our life and our writing.

Nate: Mm-Hmm. . Do you miss her?

Luci: I miss her a lot. I think I was the only true friend she had at the level where we could be honest, really honest with each other. We rescued each other several times. 

Once she was in California speaking at a conference and she became very ill and was hospitalized. And I was living in the state of Washington. And she phoned me and she said, can you come down and be with me? So I went down to the hospital in Santa Cruz and spent three weeks. I lived in a motel nearby, and came in and spent time with her, telling jokes, writing things together, just conversing at the deepest level about what our lives were meant to be, and what was truly significant and important for us to believe and to do with our writing. 

And of course, I was a poet. She's a fiction writer. And sort of, we met in the middle, which was a really good place. We enriched each other at that wonderful level. 

I also got to know her family. I spent quite a bit of time visiting New York and staying with her in her apartment on the Upper West Side.

Most days we would walk over to the cathedral, Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And go to communion there at noon.

And that was the sort of thing that we were able to join in wholeheartedly with no reservations. But also, when we had questions, we were able to share our questions with each other and search what the great theologians had to say and what Scripture had to say about topics and about themes.

When we had doubts, when we had huge questions about what God was doing in the world. We could share those with each other and pray together. We did a lot of praying. 

Nate: Sounds like a really special friendship that you two had. What was the role she filled for you?

Luci: She filled for me a challenge. She would ask me to move beyond my evangelical faith and open up to various other questions about who we were to be in the world, how we were to reflect the Holy Spirit's wide ranging creativity in the world.

So we can be part of that flow of creativity that comes through the Holy Spirit into the created world.

Nate: What was she like as a person?

Luci: Well, she was quite-- she was, pretty strong minded. Yeah, she didn't suffer fools gladly, but she was very loving to peopl...