Walking on Water

For all the reading I do, I rarely recommend books on this blog. But today I'm doing that. and maybe I'll start doing it more often.

First of all, a hearty THANK YOU to my friend Lauren for recommending this book to me. Honestly. I think it will remain a very very dear thing to me for the rest of my life, which is an intense thing to say about a book that I only just started reading this morning and am only pages away from finishing (and it says something that I'm so excited by it that I can't even wait until the last page is done to talk about it on here and encourage others to read it too).

Really though - if you are at all interested in the power of the imagination, in art, in creating, in the Creator God, in philosophy, in child-like faith, or in the miraculous-impossible-universe-expanding love of Jesus, then you NEED to read this book. not should. NEED. I feel blessed to have read "Walking on Water" as someone interested in writing and interested in learning how to know God more through my work.

L'Engle reflects on a million different things in her book, but her perspective about the reality of our imagination is fresh (yes, I truly believe that, even for a thirty-year-old book) and glorifying. I've dog-earred countless pages in this book, highlighted so many things....(future blog posts will surely arise from some of this stuff). My brain is reeling from this book. L'Engle continually looks at the art of story telling and its massive importance in Christianity. Why is it that we "grow up" and are told not to believe in stories, when Jesus relies so heavily on them? When dreams are so present in the Bible? When angels are so gorgeous and important and terrifying and real? The pages of this book are bathed in the most beautiful expressions and pleas not to ignore our imagination, but to let it spur us into creative beings - that is who God made us to be.

I could post a zillion different incredible things from this book, but here is a neat little excerpt that has stuck with me about the role of the artist as a servant:

If the work comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, "Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."
(page 23)