We just finished reading "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle. We really enjoyed it and found many stimulating ideas to ponder in this wonderful book. It has been about thirteen years since I had read it and Caleb had read it before but we had never enjoyed it together. We started watching the movie version of it tonight and I can tell that I am going to dislike it so I should probably write about it now. It's disturbing to watch timeless and beautiful ideas get thrust aside for the sake of being politically correct and relevant to popular culture. Plus, I know that they are going to take all references to God out of it- and there were many! Some of the scriptures alluded to were Isaiah 42:10-12, John 1:5, Romans 8:28 and 30, 2 Corinthians 4:18 and 1 Corinthians 1:25-28. There were also references to The Gettysburg Address, The Declaration of Independence, the Periodic Table, plus several higher math and science concepts such as particle physics and theoretical geometry. (I really don't know what I am talking about but we made some connections with our beginning study of chemistry, atoms, elements and so on...)
We have been down the rabbit hole and through the wardrobe but this is the first book that we have read that gave some scientific information about time travel. Meg, the main character, is the daughter of a physicist that has gone missing during a top-secret experiment that has to do with a tesseract. She and her brother Charles Wallace as well as their friend Calvin must tesser, or wrinkle, through time and space to rescue their father from the terrible IT on the planet of Camazotz.
Major ideas to ponder:
1. God chooses the foolish to confound the wise.
The main character, Meg, who is awkward and flawed, is ultimately called upon to save her younger brother, Charles Wallace. It's not her brilliant father or the noble Calvin. It is stubborn and difficult Meg who must overcome the darkness with only the power of love within her.
2. Great ideas come from God and defeat the darkness of sin.
"O you must know them, dear, " said Mrs. Whatsit.
Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not."
"Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!"
"Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. THey've been lights for us to see by."
"Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?"
"And Shakespeare, " Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!"
Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrabdt and St. Francis!"
This made me think of a poem we read this week:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
From A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
3. Love conquers the darkness.
At the end, when Meg must fight IT with the one thing that she has and IT doesn't, she realizes that it is love. It is love for her brother and not the hatred of IT that conquers the darkness and frees Charles Wallace.
My only quibble was the passage where they talk about the great thinkers of our world and how they have fought against the darkness. I questioned Jesus being put on the same level as Bach & co. and so I did some research on L'Engle to see exactly where she stands. What I found was quite inspiring. She says, "I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars. I can understand God only through one specific particular, the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the ultimate particular, which gives me my understanding of the Creator and of the beauty of life. I believe that God loved us so much that he came to us as a human being, as one of us, to show us his love."
Amen.
And lastly, on her inspiration for A Wrinkle in Time:
".....Then I discovered higher math—physics, which is easier than lower math. But higher math asks questions that don't have simple answers. Reading Einstein and Eddington, for example, opened up a world where I could conceive of a loving God who really could note the fall of every sparrow and count the hairs on every head. A book that had enormous theological influence on me was The Limitations of Science. In writing Wrinkle I was writing about the universe in which I could love and be loved by a creating God."
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