The Ecthroi have x-ed.

This will possibly be a schmaltzy post. Feel free to skip.

Madeleine L’Engle passed away on the 6th, and I called/posted a great deal about it when I found out about that Friday. I hadn’t thought about her in ages -- not since the dreadful TV movie version of A Wrinkle In Time with that boy from the Ring as Charles Wallace, and I confessed to Bryan that if you had asked me on the 5th if she were alive, I would not have had an answer for you.

Hearing that she had died, though, affected me more than I thought it would. I started to tear up, and I tried to remember what her books meant to me that her passing should affect me so.

Someone gave me A Wrinkle In Time because I’d already read it before middle school where I had to reread it twice for classes. I remember decorating my 4th grade reading folder with characters from various books and the seraphim from A Wind in the Door was one of them.

I was always so anxious for the characters because L’Engle’s sequels never occur directly after one another. A few years separate the first two, and then Meg’s married by the third. I remember being shocked by that when I first read it – not the marriage -- that time could pass so swiftly and things could actually change for the characters. I would have this mixture of dread while wanting to know what had happened to them.

Anyway.

Her characters also had flaws and not flaws that only served as plot points that once resolved were never displayed again (I’m looking at you, Edmund and Eustace. Damn, I don’t know when this blog became my forum for C. S. Lewis bashing. I like his books, too. I swear.): Meg has her insecurities about not being as smart as the rest of her family, and while part of the first book does revolve around her overcoming that insecurity to defeat IT, it’s not something that just disappears. She struggles with it in the other books.

The tributes on NPR and CNN make a lot out of L’Engle’s use of a heroine in a science-fiction story. What impressed me the most, though, was how L’Engle conveys her faith in a science-fiction story. Christ is mentioned in the first one; the Ecthroi are said to be fallen angels; Many Waters happens during around the Flood story. Among these elements, she mixes science-fiction and fantasy, and she doesn’t treat science as antagonistic to faith. It doesn't stop characters from entering a fantastic world or a highly moral one; it propels them ever forward into those places. I don’t remember encountering that perspective before: that science wasn't an enemy of religion.

Similarly, and just as revolutionary for me, is the scene where Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace are looking at the stars, and … I think Mrs Whatsit compares or says the stars are people who brought light into the world and fought, knowingly or not, against the Darkness. Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace begin listing people – first Jesus and then artists, scientists, Buddha, Mohammed.

I remember being struck by that thought as well: that regardless of religious differences or even of belief, we can all take part in bringing light into the world. (That might sound disingenuous, but what do you want? I was in the fourth grade.)Sadly, it is that same sentiment that others object to and that gets A Wrinkle in Time banned. But the servants of IT cannot blot out L’Engle’s light. She fought against the Darkness, and her light continues to shine for others.