"A pointer to...deeper sources of wisdom"

This review of the Library of America collection of Madeleine L’Engle reflects on her "Moral Reasoning in an Acceptable Time":

.... Whether or not her characters experience something as overtly supernatural as time or space travel, L’Engle’s concern lies not merely with the social and developmental struggles faced by teenagers, but with their spiritual lives. Just as Meg must learn to love in A Wrinkle in Time and the volumes of the earlier quartet, her daughter Polly O’Keefe must learn forgiveness in the later quartet. The final book, An Acceptable Time, culminates with Polly forgiving the offenses of a young man described as having been “out of [his] mind with self.” A wise elder character tells him, in language echoing Scripture: “Ultimately you will die to this life.” This unapologetically religious stance, along with L’Engle’s willingness to combine genres, kill characters, and quote difficult literature, doubtless accounts for both the enduring success of her works and their initial difficulty in finding a publisher, with A Wrinkle in Time famously having been rejected more than twenty times.

On these matters L’Engle’s Christianity is both overtly present—among L’Engle’s frequent quotations are many drawn from Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and Christian mystics—and diffused throughout the imagery and symbol systems of the novels. ....

In this, L’Engle aligns closely with Tolkien and his associates among the Inklings. ....

For all L’Engle’s explicit spirituality, her works show a greater comfort with the Modern Moral Order than one might expect from a writer so often associated with the antimodern Inklings. For all her explicit Christianity, L’Engle also endorses a modern, liberal form of the religion. This is illustrated most infamously in A Wrinkle in Time as the protagonists list those who have made the greatest contributions against the powers of a darkness, a list that begins with Jesus Christ and continues to Leonard da Vinci, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, Buddha, and Copernicus. L’Engle features clerics in more than one novel (themselves somewhat non-modern figures by virtue of their role), but their wisdom tends to favor modern dogma, as when Bishop Colubra of An Acceptable Time blandly asserts that “yesterday’s heresy becomes tomorrow’s dogma.”

Ultimately the spiritual values L’Engle aims at tend toward those that are uncontroversial in the Modern Moral Order: A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door endorse love over hate, Dragons in the Waters challenges greed and environmental destruction, and An Acceptable Time provides a lesson against selfishness. ....

In contrast with her character’s banal pronouncements about tolerance, kindness, and consent, the traditional Christian language L’Engle weaves throughout these books stands out with all the more clarity. When Bishop Colubra quotes the psalmist—“O Lord, I make my prayer to you in an acceptable time”—or the hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” the strength and richness of the traditional language makes his own modern vocabulary seem facile by contrast. It is no coincidence that the strongest of these eight novels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, featuring the most vivid and emotionally satisfying characters in the sequence, is structured and saturated with the language of L’Engle’s version of the ancient prayer “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” ....

If L’Engle finally lacks the moral and imaginative resources to escape the linguistic confines of the Modern Moral Order, her work nonetheless points young readers to a treasury of richer language, both in classic literature and the hymns and prayers of the ancient Christian church. Maybe, for young readers already fostering a suspicion that the modern project may not be all it claims to be, she can serve as a pointer to these deeper sources of wisdom. A person could do worse. (more)

Moral Reasoning in an Acceptable Time | The Russell Kirk Center