Bright Evening Star Read online

  Copyright © 1997 by Crosswicks, Ltd.

  Foreword copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  convergentbooks.com

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

  Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Shaw Books, an imprint of Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 1997.

  Scripture credits are located on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: L’Engle, Madeleine, author.

  Title: Bright evening star : mysteries of the Incarnation / Madeleine L’Engle.

  Description: New York : Crown Publishing Group, 2018. | Originally published: Wheaton, Ill. : H. Shaw, c1997.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024661 (print) | LCCN 2018029550 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524759292 (e-book) | ISBN 9781524759285 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Biography. | Incarnation—Meditations. | L’Engle, Madeleine. | Christian biography.

  Classification: LCC BT301.3 (ebook) | LCC BT301.3 .L46 2018 (print) | DDC 232/.1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018024661

  ISBN 9781524759285

  Ebook ISBN 9781524759292

  Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright

  v5.3.2

  ep

  To Colin and Maura, Nancy and Albert, Kay and Jimmy, Charlene and Bobby, Sally, and Joan, and all who have been christs for me

  From The New Zealand Prayer Book

  O thou most holy and beloved, my companion, my Guide upon the way, my bright evening star.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Addie Zierman

  Chapter 1: A Sky Full of Children

  Chapter 2: Beyond the Silver Hairbrush

  Chapter 3: The Divine Interference

  Chapter 4: King James’s Imagination

  Chapter 5: A Horse Named Humphrey

  Chapter 6: Who Knew Him?

  Chapter 7: Fifty Billion Galaxies

  Chapter 8: Do You Want to Be Made Whole?

  Chapter 9: Keeping Track of It All

  Chapter 10: The Faith of Jesus

  Chapter 11: I Was Blind, and Now I See

  Chapter 12: My Bright Evening Star

  Reader's Guide by Lindsay Lackey

  Scripture Credits

  Foreword

  I was introduced to the work of Madeleine L’Engle by a brilliant creative writing professor at my small midwestern Christian college fifteen years ago.

  When she assigned L’Engle’s Walking on Water, the professor, Judy Hougen, said, “Sometimes Madeleine writes things that are a little…out there. When you come across those parts, don’t get hung up. Just say to yourself, Ha ha. Oh, that Madeleine, and keep reading.” She said Oh, that Madeleine endearingly, as though talking about a wacky but lovable aunt who has visions of glory and also, occasionally, food on her chin.

  Judy understood who we were, this room full of wide-eyed Christian college undergrads. She knew that our fledgling faith had hatched in the incubator of the evangelical subculture, bright with belief, warm with certainty. She understood that she was taking us into new territory, and she gave us a way to move through the discomfort. Ha ha. Oh, that Madeleine.

  I don’t know about the others, but my professor had me pegged. There wasn’t a book on Christian apologetics that I hadn’t read. I could tell you exactly where the ruins of Noah’s ark were sitting and the specifics of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Logically, Jesus Christ had to be either a liar or a lunatic or the Lord that he claimed to be. I could explain, in detail, why the only correct choice was Lord.

  I’d spent hours honing a defense for Creationism, which I wrote in tiny print on the back of a simple ten-question quiz on evolution. I think I also added caveats to each of those ten questions. “How old is the earth?” became “How old is the earth, according to evolutionists?” I was a real treat.

  As Madeleine herself wrote, “The problem was that all my education taught me not to believe in the impossible.” I loved apologetics because they made God make sense. If archaeologists had found the Shroud of Turin, then some key things about Jesus’ life could be proven. And if Jesus could be proven, then maybe this whole story could be possible. Possible that a virgin might conceive and that this baby might be God himself—dead and buried and raised to defeat death forever.

  I had come to this Christian college because I wanted more of this kind of certainty. The required Bible classes seemed to me like a backstage pass to the answers I needed. By day, I would learn exactly why my beliefs were right. By night, I would have impromptu dorm room worship sessions with my roomies and my future youth-pastor husband. This was the picture I had in my mind, anyway, when I signed the papers and sent in the deposit.

  But, of course, this is not really how it shook out. My roommates were kind of mean. The ministry majors were a little pretentious. Bible classes were, it must be said, boring. And even though I taped dozens of Scripture verses to the cinder-block wall next to my bottom bunk and fervently invoked the powerful name of Jesus before bedtime, I had brutal and terrifying nightmares every night for nearly a year.

  Rather than nourishing and growing my faith like the super-incubator I wanted it to be, Christian college exposed the darkness I didn’t want to see. Christians could be cruel. Theology could take you only so far. The nightmares could come and come and come no matter how desperately you believed that God could stop them.

  My poet-professor Judy knew this would happen to us. She didn’t know how or when, but she knew that a faith made up entirely of certainty and clear-cut answers would never survive an inexplicable world.

  So she gave us Madeleine L’Engle. She gave us a primer on mystery.

  I recently came across my copy of Walking on Water, its college bookstore bar code sticker still stuck to the back. Sure enough, among the underlines and starred passages, there is the occasional Ha ha. Oh, that Madeleine inked in the margin.

  But things have changed in the past decade and a half. The books of apologetics grew dusty on my shelves and eventually migrated to the donation box. The works of Madeleine L’Engle, among others, took their place on my bookshelves and in my own canon of faith literature. Lines that made me dismiss Madeleine as a doddering old aunt when I was a college freshman feel like a sharp inhale of hope to me now.

  When I opened Walking on Water all those years ago, I didn’t know that I was holding the words that would save my faith when the certainty faltered and failed. That it wouldn’t be the Shroud of Turin or the Dead Sea Scrolls that would sustain me in the seasons of doubt but art, story, mystery, and wonder.

  As Madeleine writes, “Perhaps it takes moving through a good deal of chronology to know how thin the world of facts is, how rich the unprovable love which made it all.” Or, in other words, it takes time to get comfortable with mystery.

  At Christmast
ime, we get a gift. The world opens, just slightly, to the possibility of mystery.

  We haul pine trees indoors and string lights across the darkness. We tell our children stories about Santa Claus, who is, of course, a paradox himself—not a fact, clearly…but a kind of deep truth just the same.

  The virgin conceives and gives birth to God made flesh. The angels rend the sky open with their light and invite the mangiest among us to see the baby king, and in doing so, to see the face of Love.

  Christ comes here, to this tiny planet, in a universe of expanding galaxies. He comes wrapped in swaddling clothes and mystery, hidden from the harsh light of pomp and popularity. It is a fitting birth for a paradoxical God—the all-powerful God who gave power away. The Creator of innumerable galaxies who loves us each with a fierce particularity. The God who does not change but whom we continue to see differently as science and chronology change our perspective.

  This is the God who defeated death by dying, who is everywhere and right here, who “is with us because of a love beyond our comprehension” and can be known only “through our own love.”

  Certainty, it turns out, can take us only so far. It fails us eventually, and when it does, it doesn’t mean that the story is false. It just means that we need a different vehicle for the rest of the journey.

  If you find yourself on the other side of certainty this season, do not despair. This is the exact right place to be. In this place, Jesus ceases to be the proof and becomes something more: the Bright Evening Star, leading you forward into the mysterious dark. “I do not understand the Incarnation,” Madeleine L’Engle writes. “I rejoice in it.”

  I am happy to pass along these dear words to you the way my professor gave them to me: Oh, that Madeleine. Consider this your primer on mystery.

  Take these words as the gift they are: an invitation to an impossible, unprovable love—which, in the end, is the only kind that matters.

  —Addie Zierman

  1

  A SKY FULL OF CHILDREN

  I walk out onto the deck of my cottage, looking up at the great river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky. A sliver of a moon hangs in the southwest, with the evening star gently in the curve.

  Evening. Evening of this day. Evening of the century. Evening of my own life.

  I look at the stars and wonder. How old is the universe? All kinds of estimates have been made and, as far as we can tell, not one is accurate. All we know is that once upon a time or, rather, once before time, Christ called everything into being in a great breath of creativity—waters, land, green growing things, birds and beasts, and finally human creatures—the beginning, the genesis, not in ordinary earth days; the Bible makes it quite clear that God’s time is different from our time. A thousand years for us is no more than the blink of an eye to God. But in God’s good time the universe came into being, opening up from a tiny flower of nothingness to great clouds of hydrogen gas to swirling galaxies. In God’s good time came solar systems and planets and ultimately this planet on which I stand on this autumn evening as the earth makes its graceful dance around the sun. It takes one earth day, one earth night, to make a full turn, part of the intricate pattern of the universe. And God called it good, very good.

  A sky full of God’s children! Each galaxy, each star, each living creature, every particle and sub-atomic particle of creation, we are all children of the Maker. From a sub-atomic particle with a life span of a few seconds, to a galaxy with a life span of billions of years, to us human creatures somewhere in the middle in size and age, we are made in God’s image, male and female, and we are, as Christ promised us, God’s children by adoption and grace.

  * * *

  —

  Children of God, made in God’s image. How? Genesis gives no explanations, but we do know instinctively that it is not a physical image. God’s explanation is to send Jesus, the incarnate One, God enfleshed. Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine.

  Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image. Jesus, as Paul reminds us, was the firstborn of many brethren.

  I stand on the deck of my cottage, looking at a sky full of God’s children, knowing that I am one of many brethren, and sistren, too, and that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

  Bathed in this love, I go into the cottage and to bed.

  * * *

  —

  Small, beloved child.

  I am probably less than two years old, sitting in my grandmother’s lap. We are on the porch at the beach house. Her old green rocking chair creaks back and forth as she rocks me. A white coquina ramp runs east from the porch steps, across the green and prickly scrub, onto the beach. At the foot of the ramp the sand is soft and deep, for the tides do not reach this high and it gets wet only when it rains. Near the ocean the sand is firm and patterned by the wavelets which flow and ebb with the tides. Above the water the stars are brilliant. The high dunes on which the cottage stands are part of a wide, still wild world, but I feel safe, held in my grandmother’s strong arms. She has a high, sweet voice, and she winds the deeper safety of her words into the soft night air as she sings and rocks, sings and rocks.

  Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me.

  Bless thy little lamb tonight.

  Through the darkness be thou near me.

  Keep me safe till morning light.

  Jesus, the Christ, Maker of the Universe. Thank you, Jesus, for being born for me. For being part of my life, always.

  Was there a moment, known only to God, when all the stars held their breath, when the galaxies paused in their dance for a fraction of a second, and the Word, who had called it all into being, went with all his love into the womb of a young girl, and the universe started to breathe again, and the ancient harmonies resumed their song, and the angels clapped their hands for joy?

  Power. Greater power than we can imagine, abandoned, as the Word knew the powerlessness of the unborn child, still unformed, taking up almost no space in the great ocean of amniotic fluid, unseeing, unhearing, unknowing. Slowly growing, as any human embryo grows, arms and legs and a head, eyes, mouth, nose, slowly swimming into life until the ocean in the womb is no longer large enough, and it is time for birth.

  My awareness of this momentous event of the birth of Jesus was known to me only in metaphor when I was a child.

  I grew up in New York, the only child of older parents, most of whose friends worked in the world of the arts, who were singers, dancers, actors. At Christmastime my parents held open house on Sunday evenings, and a dozen or more people gathered around the piano, and the apartment was full of music, and theology was sung into my heart.

  Joy to the world! the Lord is come….

  While shepherds watched their flocks by night…

  And glory shone around….

  Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.

  The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head….

  Let nothing you dismay….

  O tidings of comfort and joy…

  O come, let us adore Him….

  * * *

  Hark! the herald angels sing,

  “Glory to the newborn King!”

  Thank you, thank you!

  My prayers at night started with thanks, thanks to Jesus for being part of our lives. Prayers of sorrow for anything I had done wrong during the day. Prayers of comfort and immediate forgiv
eness.

  My parents taught me a God of love, yet a demanding God who expected me to be honorable and truthful but who also allowed me to ask questions.

  Why was there war? My birth had come shortly after the end of what used to be called the Great War, and all my life I had heard people talking about the war and power; it was the most righteous and powerful nations who won the terrible war. But why was there war at all?

  Why were my father’s lungs burned with mustard gas?

  Are the Germans bad? Why do we call them Huns?

  Do they believe in Jesus, too?

  Does God love them?

  Yes. God loves. God is love.

  God loves us even when we do wrong, but God does not love the wrong we do.

  My parents tried to answer me honestly and reasonably. We went to church together on Sunday. I did not go to Sunday school because my father’s work as a drama and music critic kept him up late, so we went to the eleven o’clock service, and I was nourished by the great words of the Anglican liturgy, even when I didn’t understand them, and leaned against my mother and daydreamed.

  Sometimes the words of the minister would slip into my mind. Jesus left heaven and came to save us.

  Save us from what? I wondered.

  From our sinfulness. We are all born full of sin.

  At Sunday dinner I asked my parents, “Are we all born full of sin?”

  “We are all born full of possibilities of all kinds,” my father said. “What we do with them is what counts.”

  “What about war? Is war sin?”

  My father’s mouth tightened. “It seems that it is inevitable.” And then he started to cough and had to stop talking.

  If Jesus was born two thousand years ago to save us, why haven’t more things changed? Why is there still hate and misunderstanding?