Read an Excerpt From A Light So Lovely and Learn More About Madeleine L'Engle

If we need icons, we also, Madeleine insisted, “need an iconoclast close by”—someone who takes our precious little idols—those ideas we think we understand, those cherished convictions—and smashes them. It was her own husband, Hugh, she claimed, who played this role for her, often critiquing her first drafts so incisively that she stormed off in a rage. But there were others, friends and colleagues, whose way of seeing the world were not like hers. For Madeleine, one of those friends was Luci Shaw.

I’ve known Luci myself for well over a decade, ever since I first picked up her poetry collection Polishing the Petoskey Stone when I lived in Petoskey, Michigan, and then all but stalked her at the 2004 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. In the picture I took of us that year, she’s smiling sheepishly while I suppress whoops of excitement: “I’m a rabid fan! I can’t believe I get to meet you in person!” Then later, as I was curating the literary guides to prayer for Paraclete Press, we corresponded regularly: “Can I reprint this poem? How about that one? And that one?” When it came to my Christmas collection, Light Upon Light, I dubbed her the Patron Saint of Advent. She, meanwhile, endured all this graciously, the epitome of poetic generosity.

When I was approached about writing this book, there was absolutely no question: I had to set up an interview with Luci. She responded to my query immediately: “I’d love to talk to you about Madeleine, in all her complexity!” Finding the time was another thing: not only was there a three-hour time difference between Michigan and the state of Washington, but at almost eighty-nine, Luci is impressively busy, maintaining a rigorous publishing and speaking schedule that reminds me of, well, Madeleine. But finally we connected.

As Luci tells it, she and Madeleine met in the ’70s at Wheaton College, where Madeleine was invited by the English faculty to speak at a conference on the arts. Luci was also a presenter. “Wheaton invited her to come,” Luci explained, “and it was a bit of a risk. Because at that point it was—and Wheaton still is—very conservative; and some of her ideas sort of wandered beyond the usual boundaries of faith and belief. She had a wildly imaginative mind and sometimes that took her into territory that Wheaton might have considered dangerous.”

Meanwhile, the only Wheaton College Madeleine had ever heard of was in Massachusetts. When the letter detailing her visit arrived, she discovered that this particular Wheaton was in the Midwest—and a premier Christian college, no less. “Someone explained to me that Wheaton was Evangelical. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.” (Pause while the rest of us attempt to comprehend a time when someone in the United States could reach their fifties without ever hearing the word evangelical.) In typical Madeleine fashion, she went anyway—rather like a tourist on safari, or so I picture her—and to her own surprise, she found a new spiritual home. As Madeleine later told the Wheaton class of 1977 in her commencement address (she had just spoken at Smith College the day before), “Although Smith is my alma mater and I love it, I was not as at home there as I am with you. Nor could I say the same words there that I can say to you today. Because here at Wheaton, I’m able to be openly a Christian among Christians.”

It was at Wheaton, she claimed, that she learned a more spontaneous way of praying beyond merely reciting the prescripted language of the Book of Common Prayer. And it was at Wheaton that she met Luci. They hit it off immediately. “We both loved the color green,” Luci told me, chuckling. “We both loved baroque music, we both loved Bach, we both would play the Bach fugues.” These may sound like trifles, but to Madeleine—raised among New York’s musicians and literati—it must have signaled someone with a shared culture. And, needless to say, they were both writers. Luci and her husband Harold had just started a new literary publishing company, Harold Shaw Publishers.

“We were hoping to focus on literary biographies, poetry, literary criticism, that sort of thing,” Luci explained to me about those early years, “‘literature for thoughtful Christians.’ Madeleine told me that she’d written two books of poetry, and they both went out of print (I don’t know why). I said, we would love to publish those books, and if you’ve got more recent poems that aren’t in those books, we’d love to add those to the number of poems that have gone out of print. She was delighted. So we did that. It was our first project with her. It was called The Weather of the Heart.” Luci would go on to work with Madeleine, as her editor and sometimes coauthor, on at least eleven books, including one about their decades-long friendship called Friends for the Journey.

But it was during one July visit to Wheaton, in 1977, that the two authors became very close. “Her granddaughter Léna was involved in a bad car accident,” Luci told me, “and her life was in danger. Madeleine and I went for a long walk in a park and sat down and prayed together for Léna. She recovered. When we were able to pray together over something so pressing and so life-and-death, that cemented us.” Roughly a decade later, both of their husbands died of cancer in the same year. “We did a lot of talking over the phone and catching up and understanding what we were going through,” Luci recalled. “That brought us very close together.”

This didn’t stop them from disagreements, however, particularly over theology. Luci had been raised in an extremely conservative Christian home and church; needless to say, Madeleine had not. “One of the great things about my relationship with Madeleine,” Luci said, “was that we sparred a lot around ideas and truths. We never quarreled, but we had long discussions in which she would take one position and I would take the other; and we nearly always ended up in the middle.” Luci tells of editing sessions in which she would exclaim, “Madeleine, you can’t say that to evangelicals!” But then, after Madeleine had explained and defended herself, Luci would conclude, “You must say that, exactly that way.”

“Sometimes when we were involved in editing something and we had a strong disagreement, we’d come to the point when we understood each other, and then we’d stand up and sing the Doxology, almost spontaneously,” Luci told me. I picture them seated at a paper-strewn dining table in Madeleine’s New York apartment, late afternoon sun flooding the room, surrounded by cats and empty tea cups. And then suddenly these two literary giants—well, one an almost-giant in a flowing dress and the other a petite Brit with twinkling eyes—rise and belt out a hymn.

Luci captured it well when she wrote to Madeleine, in Friends for the Journey, “And you, on your part, can make radical theological statements with which I may disagree, but again, because of our bond of love we accept each other for who we are, flawed and failing, but always truth-seeking.”

Do you feel it, the quiver of longing? I’m guessing I’m not the only one who knows firsthand just how rare, how valuable, such a grace-filled, truth-seeking kind of friend is. Not an idol, not a mentor or spiritual director: a friend.

What would it look like to have friendships with those who are not like us, wherein we learn to argue well and lovingly—and yet at the end of the day we can still be friends? This is a lost art in our culture, particularly as we create ever narrower, taller, insular silos on social media, cut off from opposing viewpoints. With a mere click of a button we can “unfriend” and “unfollow” those with whom we disagree, and meanwhile we learn to studiously avoid those difficult topics at Thanksgiving dinner that could disrupt the false unity a sentimental holiday too often cultivates. False unity is no healthier than silos of like-mindedness.

We need iconoclasts, mentors, and friends that push us, that challenge our narrowness and yet still affirm our humanity. What would it mean to meet in person, on purpose, in good faith, with someone whose perspective is vastly different than ours? To argue face-to-face without rancor, without demeaning the humanity of the other? What would it mean to allow yourself to acknowledge areas where you might, in fact, agree? Or even more, to allow yourself at times to be persuaded—if not wholly to the other person’s perspective—at least to meet halfway? This is what it means to live life with those who don’t insist that everything, including our own persons, be either/or. Rather, we can be both/and.

This is the rare gift that Luci and Madeleine gave to each other. And we, in turn, are the beneficiaries.