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

taught about it, and I’m grateful that I was able to read the Book with the same wonder and joy with which I read
The Ice Princess
or
The Tempest
or about E. Nesbitt’s Psammead, that disagreeable and enchanting creature who would have been no surprise to Abraham or Sarah. In Isaiah I read about those dragons who honour him because he gives “waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, to give drink to his people.” So it was no surprise to me to read about a mediaeval dragon who was a great pet in the palace; he helped heat water, and on cold winter nights he got into every bed in the palace, by turn, breathing out just enough warmth to take off the chill and make the sheets toasty to get into.
    I had an aunt who worried that I lived in an unreal world. But what is real? In the Bible we are constantly being given glimpses of a reality quite different from that taught in school, even in Sunday school. And these glimpses are not given to the qualified; there’s the marvel. It may be that the qualified feel no need of them.
    —
    We are all asked to do more than we can do. Every hero and heroine of the Bible does more than he would have thought it possible to do, from Gideon to Esther to Mary. Jacob, one of my favourite characters, certainly wasn’t qualified. He was a liar and a cheat, and yet he was given the extraordinary vision of angels and archangels ascending and descending a ladder which reached from earth to heaven.
    In the first chapter of John’s gospel, Nathanael was given a glimpse of what Jacob saw, or a promise of it, and he wasn’t qualified, either. He was narrow-minded and unimaginative, and when Philip told him that Jesus of Nazareth was the one they sought, his rather cynical response was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” And yet it was to Nathanael that Jesus promised the vision of angels and archangels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.
    In the novels and stories which have always meant the most to me, and to which, as both child and adult, I return and return, I find the same thing: the unqualified younger son finishes the quest where the qualified elder brothers fail because they think they can do it themselves. In
Twelfth Night,
Viola, a young, unqualified girl, ends up solving all the tangled problems and marrying the duke. The Macbeths bring disaster on themselves and others because they take things into their own hands; they think they have a
right
to do what they need to do in order for Macbeth to get the crown; they listen to the witches, and they fall for the three temptations of power—temptations which have been the same since Satan offered them to Jesus in the wilderness. King Lear moves into tragedy when he assumes that he has a right to be loved by his daughters and when he tries to compare their love quantitatively.
    Moses wasn’t qualified (as I run over my favourite characters in both Old and New Testaments, I can’t find one who was in any worldly way qualified to do the job which was nevertheless accomplished); Moses was past middle age when God called him to lead his children out of Egypt, and he spoke with a stutter. He was reluctant and unwilling, and he couldn’t control his temper. But he saw the bush that burned and was not consumed. He spoke with God in the cloud on Mount Sinai, and afterwards his face glowed with such brilliant light that the people could not bear to look at him.
    In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.
    —
    It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness. Could Beethoven have written that glorious