ontology | (no subject)

Today I came online to discover that Madeleine L'Engle has died.

And I wept.

Is it silly, is it possible to love someone whom you have never met, who has never met you?

I don't think that I have ever felt so deeply and personally connected to a writer's work as I am to hers. As I wrote some time ago, "There are some writers, you know, who you love to read, and maybe you live in their books sometimes, and maybe they mean something -- but then there are other writers whose writings are bits of you -- they're writers of your heart and they get into your soul and take roost there gently and irrevocably, and something about them is like being home, except it's a home you didn't know was home and it turns out it's more widely and fully home than the house you're living in." Madeleine L'Engle was one of those writers to me.

I wrote in March of how I read her memoir Two-Part Invention and how it changed -- not my life, but some impossible-to-measure area in my soul. Her books have always had a way of doing that to me. After I read Two-Part Invention she became real to me, a person, not simply a writer of books I have loved. I don't have very many heroes, because it is difficult to find public people who are exemplary in many areas of their lives, and who have some sort of personal resonance with me, but Madeleine L'Engle is a hero to me. She was dealt much tragedy and discouragement in her life, yet in her writing, in her stories and in her memoirs, the thing that I see most is joy. And love. And I am sure that she is rejoicing with the angels now, in the company of her beloved Hugh and her mother and father and those heroes of her own that she wrote so lovingly about. (There is a poem she wrote about this, which I wish I could share with you, but it will have to wait until I can get The Irrational Season out of the library again.)

Thank you, Madeleine, for making God beautiful to me, for teaching me of the wonders of the universe, for widening my gaze. You have lived, and long, and well. I only wish I could have met you in this life, but we shall meet in God's country someday.