Read Online Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle - Free Book Online

bracelet, and particularly a small, silver wicker basket, which we opened with extreme care, for within it was the baby Moses. The basket was the basket of bulrushes in which Moses’ mother put him in the river, that he might be found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Edward would hold this tiny metal baby, less than a centimeter long, and look at it wonderingly, and every night he would say, “He will grow up to be a great prince.”
    The child himself will know when it is time to let this safe routine go, when holding the soft corner of the favourite blanket is no longer needed for sleep, when the most dearly loved stuffed animal can stay in the toy chest. It is a mistake for the parent to try too abruptly to break the pattern. Most children will let it go when the right time comes. But there are other and less creative familiarities which remain with us and dull our perceptions. When we lose waking up in the morning as though each day was going to be full of adventure, joys, and dangers, and wake up instead to the alarm clock (as most of us must, and how lovely those rare nights when we look at the clock and don’t have to set the alarm) and the daily grind, and mutter about TGIF, we lose the newborn quality of belief which is so lovely in the child. It may be less lovely in the artist; it can occasionally be infuriating; but without it there is no impulse to rush to the canvas to set down that extraordinary smile, to catch the melody in the intricacies of a fugue, to reach out to life and then see Hamlet pull back, and wonder why.
    —
    Along with reawakening the sense of newness, Bach’s music points me to wholeness, a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, which we seldom glimpse, but which we are intended to know. It is no coincidence that the root word of
whole, health, heal, holy,
is
hale
(as in
hale and hearty
). If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy.
    The marvellous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. We don’t become holy by acquiring merit badges and Brownie points. It has nothing to do with virtue or job descriptions or morality. It is nothing we can
do
in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received. We do not have to be qualified to be holy. We do not have to be qualified to be whole, or healed.
    The fact that I am not qualified was rammed into me early, and though this hurt, it was salutary. As a small child I was lonely not only because I was an only child in a big city but also because I was slightly lame, extremely introverted, and anything but popular at school. There was no question in my mind that I was anything but whole, that I did not measure up to the standards of my peers or teachers. And so, intuitively, I turned to writing as a way of groping towards wholeness. I wrote vast quantities of short stories and poetry; I painted and played the piano. I lived far too much in an interior world, but I did learn that I didn’t have to be qualified according to the world’s standards in order to write my stories. It was far more likely my total
lack
of qualifications that turned me to story to search for meaning and truth, to ask those eternal questions: Why? What is it all about? Does my life have any meaning? Does anybody care?
    To try to find the answers to these questions, I not only wrote but also read omnivorously, anything I could get my hands on—fairy tales, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, the story of Tobias and the angel, Gideon and the angel. Very early in my life the Bible taught me to care about angels. I also read about dreams in the Bible, and so I took dreams seriously. I read and reread and reread
Emily of New Moon,
by L. M. Montgomery, author of the more famous stories about
Anne of Green Gables.
I liked the Anne stories, but especially I loved Emily, because she, too, wanted to be a writer, a real writer; she, too, walked to the beat of a different drummer; she had a