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    Miracle on 10th Street: And Other Christmas Writings
    Miracle on 10th Street: And Other Christmas Writings
    Miracle on 10th Street: And Other Christmas Writings
    Ebook216 pages2 hours

    Miracle on 10th Street: And Other Christmas Writings

    By Madeleine L'Engle, Diana Butler Bass and Lindsay Lackey

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    About this ebook

    Celebrate the season with this beautiful and inspiring collection of thoughtful reflections on Christmas from the bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time.
     
    For more than seventy years, Madeleine L’Engle’s writing have delighted and inspired readers. In her stories, essays, poems, journal entries, and letters, she returned again and again to the beauty of Christmas, illuminating the holiday with her singular insight and imagination. Miracle on 10th Street includes excerpts from her most cherished works, reflecting on Advent, Incarnation, Epiphany, mystery, and redemption. In these pages, L’Engle points to the marvels and curiosities that fill everyday life. And, as always, she shows herself to be a one-woman force for celebration—fully believing that delight and wonder must mark the life of anyone who sees God’s love at work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherConvergent Books
    Release dateOct 29, 2019
    ISBN9781524759339
    Author

    Madeleine L'Engle

    Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) was the Newbery Medal-winning author of more than 60 books, including the much-loved A Wrinkle in Time. Born in 1918, L'Engle grew up in New York City, Switzerland, South Carolina and Massachusetts. Her father was a reporter and her mother had studied to be a pianist, and their house was always full of musicians and theater people. L'Engle graduated cum laude from Smith College, then returned to New York to work in the theater. While touring with a play, she wrote her first book, The Small Rain, originally published in 1945. She met her future husband, Hugh Franklin, when they both appeared in The Cherry Orchard. Upon becoming Mrs. Franklin, L'Engle gave up the stage in favor of the typewriter. In the years her three children were growing up, she wrote four more novels. Hugh Franklin temporarily retired from the theater, and the family moved to western Connecticut and for ten years ran a general store. Her book Meet the Austins, an American Library Association Notable Children's Book of 1960, was based on this experience. Her science fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time was awarded the 1963 Newbery Medal. Two companion novels, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (a Newbery Honor book), complete what has come to be known as The Time Trilogy, a series that continues to grow in popularity with a new generation of readers. Her 1980 book A Ring of Endless Light won the Newbery Honor. L'Engle passed away in 2007 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

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    • 4/5

      Jul 15, 2020

      Excellent choice for fans of L'Engle. A mixture of stories and meditations.

    Book preview

    Miracle on 10th Street - Madeleine L'Engle

    ADVENT

    Advent is not a time to declare, but to listen, to listen to whatever God may want to tell us through the singing of the stars, the quickening of a baby, the gallantry of a dying man.

    —from Redeeming All Brokenness

    O Oriens

    O come, O come Emmanuel

    within this fragile vessel here to dwell.

    O Child conceived by heaven’s power

    give me thy strength: it is the hour.

    O come, thou Wisdom from on high;

    like any babe at life you cry;

    for me, like any mother, birth

    was hard, O light of earth.

    O come, O come, thou Lord of might,

    whose birth came hastily at night,

    born in a stable, in blood and pain

    is this the king who comes to reign?

    O come, thou Rod of Jesse’s stem,

    the stars will be thy diadem.

    How can the infinite finite be?

    Why choose, child, to be born of me?

    O come, thou key of David, come,

    open the door to my heart-home.

    I cannot love thee as a king—

    so fragile and so small a thing.

    O come, thou Day-spring from on high:

    I saw the signs that marked the sky.

    I heard the beat of angels’ wings

    I saw the shepherds and the kings.

    O come, Desire of nations, be

    simply a human child to me.

    Let me not weep that you are born.

    The night is gone. Now gleams the morn.

    Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel,

    God’s Son, God’s Self, with us to dwell.

    Redeeming All Brokenness

    As we move into Advent we are called to listen, something we seldom take time to do in this frenetic world of over-activity. But waiting for birth, waiting for death—these are listening times, when the normal distractions of life have lost their power to take us away from God’s call to center in Christ.

    During Advent we are traditionally called to contemplate death, judgment, hell, and heaven. To give birth to a baby is also a kind of death—death to the incredible intimacy of carrying a child, death to old ways of life and birth into new—and it is as strange for the parents as for the baby. Judgment: John of the Cross says that in the evening of life we shall be judged on love; not on our accomplishments, not on our successes and failures in the worldly sense, but solely on love.

    Once again, as happened during the past nearly two thousand years, predictions are being made of the time of this Second Coming, which, Jesus emphasized, even the angels in heaven do not know. But we human creatures, who are a little lower than the angels, too frequently try to set ourselves above them with our predictions and our arrogant assumption of knowledge which God hid even from the angels. Advent is not a time to declare, but to listen, to listen to whatever God may want to tell us through the singing of the stars, the quickening of a baby, the gallantry of a dying man.

    Listen. Quietly. Humbly. Without arrogance.

    In the first verse of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, we sing, Word of God, our flesh that fashioned with the fire of life impassioned, and the marvelous mystery of incarnation shines. Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh, goes one of my favorite propers, for it is indeed the mystery by which we live, give birth, watch death.

    When the Second Person of the Trinity entered the virgin’s womb and prepared to be born as a human baby (a particular baby, Jesus of Nazareth), his death was inevitable.

    It is only after we have been enabled to say, Be it unto me according to your Word, that we can accept the paradoxes of Christianity. Christ comes to live with us, bringing an incredible promise of God’s love, but never are we promised that there will be no pain, no suffering, no death, but rather that these very griefs are the road to love and eternal life.

    In Advent we prepare for the coming of all Love, that love which will redeem all the brokenness, wrongness, hardnesses of heart which have afflicted us.

    Born once

    Born once.

    That’s enough.

    Jesus was born once,

    for us.

    That’s enough. That’s love.

    Love is once for all

    for all of us.

    Jesus will come

    He who was once born.

    He will come when he will

    Love is once for all

    For all. That’s enough.

    Life—A Gift

    These are very special weeks, these weeks before Christmas, weeks of quiet waiting, weeks of remembering forty years of Christmasses with Hugh, or earlier Christmasses with my parents, weeks of affirmation that life is a gift and that what we have had we will always have, and that despite the change and decay in all around we see we do have a part to play in the future.

    Time and Space Turned Upside Down

    Advent. That time of waiting, waiting even more trembling and terrible than the waiting between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

    But what are we waiting for? Why? We’re not waiting, as we so often are taught as children, for Christmas, for the baby Jesus to be born in a stable in Bethlehem. We’re waiting for something that has not happened yet, that has never happened before, something totally new. We know only what the end of this waiting has been called throughout the centuries: The Second Coming.

    What is it, the coming of Christ in glory? The return of Christ to the earth? What’s it going to be like? We don’t know. We don’t know anything about this event that is new, that has never before happened.

    But, being human and therefore curious, we want to know. We want to know so badly that sometimes we think we do know, and that can sometimes lead to danger and even evil. Whenever we want to know something before its true time, we get into trouble. We’ve never learned how to wait. We’re impatient creatures. Our impatience, our unwillingness to wait, is all through our stories, from Adam and Eve on.

    The only thing I know about the Second Coming is that it is going to happen because of God’s love. God made the universe out of love; the Word shouted all things joyfully into being because of love. The Second Coming, whenever it happens and whatever it means, will also be because of love.

    —

    We express what we believe in icons, which are creative, or idols, which are destructive. But what is a constructive icon?

    Icons break time and space. One of my favorite icons is Reblev’s famous picture of the Trinity, the three heavenly angels who came to visit Abraham and Sarah sitting at a table in front of the tent. On the table is the meal that has been prepared for the heavenly visitors, and what is this meal? We look at the table and see chalice and paten, the bread and the wine. Time and space turned upside down. Here, three thousand years before the birth of Christ, is the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; here, three thousand years before Jesus came into time for us, is the body and the blood.

    So what could be an icon of the Second Coming? I think of Creation itself, and how little the astrophysicists know about it. It does seem that there was, indeed, a moment of Creation, when something, so subatomically tiny as to be almost nothing at all, suddenly opened up to become everything. How long did it take? There wasn’t any time before the beginning. Time began with the beginning. Time will end at the ending, at the Second Coming.

    On a rare, clear night I look at the stars. According to present knowledge, all the stars are rushing away from each other at speeds impossible for us to conceive. Are they going to keep on, getting further and further away, more and more separate? Or is there going to be a point at which the procedure is reversed, and they start coming together again? Nobody knows.

    The metaphor that has come to me is birth. Our ordinary (oh, no, they’re not ordinary at all—they’re extraordinary) human births. Right now I am like the unborn baby in the womb, knowing nothing except the comforting warmth of the amniotic fluid in which I swim, the comforting nourishment entering my body from a source I cannot see or understand. My whole being comes from an unseen, unknown nurturer. By that nurturer I am totally loved and protected, and that love is forever. It does not end when I am precipitated out of the safe waters of the womb into the unsafe world. It will not end when I breathe my last, mortal breath. That love manifested itself joyously in the creation of the universe, became particular for us in Jesus, and will show itself most gloriously in the Second Coming. We need not fear.

    There are many tough questions for which we have no finite, cut-and-dried answers. Even Jesus did not answer all our questions! But he came, because of that love which casts out fear. He came, and he will come again.

    Even so, come Lord Jesus!

    Coming, ready or not!

    Luke 14:32

    Coming, ready or not!

    The children freeze in their hiding places

    waiting to be found.

    They are ready.

    When the time for the banquet came,

    he sent his servant to say

    to those who had been invited,

    Coming, ready or not!

    The old woman in the nursing home

    mumbles what she can remember

    of old prayers & hymns.

    She is ready.

    Come along; everything is ready now.

    But all alike started to make excuses.

    Coming, ready or not!

    The executive planning a meeting

    shouting for lists & faxes

    isn’t ready to be ready

    not yet.

    The first said, "I have bought a

    piece of land and must go and

    see it. Please accept my apologies."

    Coming, ready or not!

    Am I ready to be ready?

    Can I put it all down

    all the burdens

    all the needs of love

    is getting ready to be ready

    ready enough?

    Yet another said, "I have just got

    married and so am unable to come."

    Another said, "I have bought five

    yoke of oxen and am on my way to try

    them out. Please accept my apologies."

    Coming, ready or not?

    Drop it all. Let it go.

    Let’s go!

    Ready!

    Advent, 1971

    When will he come

    and how will he come

    and will there be warnings

    and will there be thunders

    and rumbles of armies

    coming before him

    and banners and trumpets

    When will he come

    and how will he come

    and will we be ready

    O woe to you people

    you sleep through the thunder

    you heed not the warnings

    the fires and the drownings

    the earthquakes and stormings

    and ignorant armies

    and dark closing on you

    the song birds are falling

    the sea birds are dying

    no fish now are leaping

    the children are choking

    in air not for breathing

    the aged are gasping

    with no one to tend them

    a bright star has blazed forth

    and no one has seen it

    and no one has wakened

    Forever’s Start

    The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At the winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark. The sun does die. And then, to our amazement, the Son will rise again.

    Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come

    In your fearful innocence.

    We fumble in the far-spent night

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