Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections

by Madeleine L'Engle, Carole F. Chase, Carole F. Chase (With), Madeleine L'Engle (Introduction)

Overview

For half a century, Madeleine L'Engle has spun magic with words, touching millions of lives and earning a devoted readership with her award-winning fiction, candid reflections on her personal and family life and graceful meditations on faith. Now, Glimpses of Grace captures the essence of L'Engle's literary gift in one unprecedented volume.

Ranging freely throughout L'Engle's remarkable lifework of more than 40 volumes of fiction and nonfiction, adventure stories, family dramas, autobiography and religious commentary, editor Carole P. Chase has collected evocative passages and arranged them as daily readings that offer illuminating bits of wisdom, provocative insight, and, above all, engaging and intelligent daily inspiration. With enduring power and resonance, each of these 366 rich selections speaks to the simple joys and sorrows of daily life and the deepest questions of the human heart and spirit, while reflecting the exhilarating artistry of one of the most spiritually alive and articulate storytellers of this century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060652814
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/29/1997
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	440,855
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.38(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Madeline L'Engle, the popular author of many books for children and adults, has interspersed her writing and teaching career with raising three children, maintaining an apartment in New York and a farmhouse of charming confusion which is called "Crosswicks."

Date of Birth:

January 12, 1918

Date of Death:

September 6, 2007

Place of Birth:

New York, NY

Place of Death:

Litchfield, CT

Education:

Smith College, 1941

Read an Excerpt

January

First Glimpse of God's Glory

But we rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

I don't want that kind of God.

What kind of God, then?

One time, when I was little more than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors, where I had my first look at the stars.

It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to have said, "Let's wake the baby and show her the stars." The night sky, the constant rolling of breakers against the shore, the stupendous light of the stars, all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small child's world which was all that I had known thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation; I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension, beyond any human comprehension.

I had been taught to say my prayers at night: Our Father, and a long string of God-blesses, and it was that first showing of thegalaxies which gave me an awareness that the God I spoke to at bedtime was extraordinary and not just a bigger and better combination of the grownup powers of my mother and father.

This early experience was freeing, rather than daunting, and since it was the first, it has been the foundation for all other such glimpses of glory. And it is probably why the sound of the ocean and the sight of the stars give me more healing, more whole-ing, than anything else.

Creation'God's Canvas

It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as the artist; he works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter; feel another human hand or the velvet of a puppy's ear; taste food prepared and offered in love; smell'oh, so many things: food, sewers, each other, flowers, books, new-mown grass, dirt . . .

Here, in the offerings of creation, the oblations of story and song, are our glimpses of truth.

Winter Solstice

A new year can begin only because the old year ends. In northern climates this is especially apparent. As rain turns to snow, puddles to ice, the sun rises later and sets earlier; and each day it climbs less high in the sky. One time when I went with my children to the planetarium I was fascinated to hear the lecturer say that the primitive people used to watch the sun drop lower on the horizon in great terror, because they were afraid that one day it was going to go so low that it would never rise again; they would be left in unremitting night. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a terror of great darkness would fall upon them. And then, just as it seemed that there would never be another dawn, the sun would start to come back; each day it would rise higher, set later.

Somewhere in the depths of our unconsciousness we share that primordial fear, and when there is the first indication that the days are going to lengthen, our hearts, too, lift with relief. The end has not come: joy! and so a new year makes its birth known.

The Mystery of the Word Made Flesh I

There is no more beautiful witness to the mystery of the word made flesh than a baby's naked body. I remember with sensory clarity sitting with one of my babies on my lap and running my hand over the incredibly pure smoothness of the bare back and thinking that any mother, holding her child thus, must have at least an echo of what it is like to be Mary; that in touching the particular created matter, flesh, of our child, we are touching the Incarnation. Alan, holding his daughter on his lap, running his hand over her bare back with the same tactile appreciation with which I had touched my children, made a similar remark.

Once, when I was in the hospital, the smooth and beautiful white back of the woman in the bed next to mine, a young woman dying of cancer, was a stabbing and bitter reminder of the ultimate end of all matter.But not just our human bodies: all matter: the stars in their courses: everything: the end of time.

The Mystery of the Word Made Flesh II

How marvelous is the ritual of the Holy Mysteries, the Eucharist, where we joyfully eat Love! For me, one of the most potent phrases in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is "in the mystery of the Word made flesh . . ." It is a mystery that cannot be understood in terms of provable fact or the jargon of the media. Mystery, unlike magic, can be understood only mythically.When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

Starry Skies'Icon for Epiphany

When Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," he did us no favor, but further fragmented us, making us limit ourselves to... Glimpses of Grace. Copyright © by Madeleine L'Engle. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.