Miracle on 10th Street Read online

  Copyright © 1998 by Harold Shaw Publishers

  Foreword copyright © 2019 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2019 by Penguin Random House LLC

  All rights reserved.

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

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

  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 1998.

  Some previously published pieces have been shortened, reformatted, retitled, or in other ways altered in order to suit the nature of this book. The reader may wish to note that some of Madeleine L’Engle’s selections included here contain ideas also appearing in The Irrational Season.

  Portions of this book have been previously published in Wintersong: Christmas Readings by Madeleine L’Engle and Luci Shaw. Copyright © 1996 by Harold Shaw Publishers.

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Permissions credits are located on this page.

  ISBN 9781524759322

  Ebook ISBN 9781524759339

  Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebook

  Compiled by Lil Copan and Miriam Minderman

  Cover design: Jessie Sayward Bright

  Cover images: (New York City scenes) Bridgeman Images

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Diana Butler Bass

  Advent

  O Oriens

  Redeeming All Brokenness

  Born once

  Life—A Gift

  Time and Space Turned Upside Down

  Coming, ready or not!

  Advent, 1971

  Forever’s Start

  Hush!

  Incarnation

  The first coming

  Transfiguration

  What Have We Done to Christmas?

  Story

  Creed

  In Human Flesh

  This birth has death forevermore confused

  Impossible Things

  Maker of the galaxies

  A Galaxy, a Baby

  That Newness

  Epiphany

  Miracle on 10th Street

  Summer’s End

  Calling, Calling

  A Thanksgiving Weekend

  A child’s prayer

  That Tiny Flame

  Crosswicks: An Old Pattern

  The glory

  Into the darkest hour

  An Open Window

  The Eve of Epiphany

  An Offering of Love

  Making worlds: a child’s prayer

  The Light of the Stars

  An Icon of Creation

  A Deepening Vision

  Revealing Structure

  A Promise of Spring

  “Anesthetics”

  One king’s epiphany

  Glorious Mystery

  The ordinary so extraordinary

  The Glorious Mystery

  This tiny baby

  Falling into Sentimentality

  January: With My Own Eyes

  O Simplicitas

  The promise of his birth

  Mary speaks

  More Than We Can Do

  The Furthest Reaches of Time and Space

  Atomic Furnaces

  Soaring

  Wonderful Mix of Creation

  This Extraordinary Birth

  After annunciation

  The Bethlehem explosion

  The Other Side of Reason

  The birth of wonder

  Redemption

  The first-born light

  The Wise Men

  Annunciation

  Opposing Parallels: A Journal Entry

  Bearer of Love

  O Sapientia

  A Time of Hope

  A Full House: An Austin Family Story

  Christmas Gifts

  Tree at Christmas

  Royal Alchemy

  Joy

  For Dana

  Saying Yes

  Joyful in the newness of the heart

  A Winter’s Walk

  The Gift of Christ

  Moving Toward Lent

  All Heaven with its power

  Prayers for Peace

  Celebration

  Love’s incarnate birth

  Most amazing Word

  First coming

  Gratitude

  Such Smallness

  A Call to Jury Duty

  Eighty-second Street

  Homemade Decorations

  Chamonix

  The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas: An Austin Family Story

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide by Lindsay Lackey

  About the Author

  Although this collection of seasonal writings is named Miracle on 10th Street after one of its pieces, an alternative title easily could be Observe and Contemplate. In these pages, Madeleine L’Engle captures the spiritual heart of Christmas—an invitation to gaze into the miraculous presence of God in and with and through the world.

  Miracle on 10th Street testifies to the Incarnation not with difficult theological words or philosophical arguments, but with the sort of poetry readers of Madeleine L’Engle surely expect. But something else happens in this collection as well: L’Engle does not merely explain the Incarnation, but she actually guides us into it with the skill of a spiritual director and the insight of a mystic. In her poem “Love’s incarnate birth,” she invites us to “Observe and contemplate. Make real. Bring to be.”

  Over the years, much has been made of L’Engle’s deep affection for the Christian understanding of Incarnation—the belief that Jesus was born as God in flesh—the theological touchstone of the church seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Indeed, the Incarnation is often mentioned as the foundation of Anglican spirituality, the religious tradition that shaped L’Engle’s life as a member of the Episcopal Church. Anglicans are best described as a Christmas people, those whose faith and devotion witness to Immanuel, God-with-us, the incarnate Love in the world. That presence can be discovered in all creatures—the great and the small—and in each home and hearth and in every field and forest. A Christmas people are not particularly interested in a distant or regal God. Instead, the emphasis is on “with-ness,” a quotidian God. The Incarnation draws the heart toward finding the divine everywhere and at all times. Those formed in this spirit trust that the everyday world is sacred. Anglicanism believes in a k
ing who finds a stable and manger the most suitable of birthplaces, and who fetes his friends by serving up a simple meal of bread and wine. This is, more than anything else, a homey faith, a spirituality of humanness and hospitality.

  This is the very thing we do not do in December—with the busyness of the days and an almost dulled familiarity with the holiday. We have come to take Christmas for granted. In a sense, we are all like Sister Egg, the nun in the short story “Transfiguration,” who cannot explain to a homeless man why Christmas should be merry. We have lost its language, its mystery. We have forgotten how to see this season, one shaped by the paradoxes of dark and light. But L’Engle never scolds or chastises readers to remember the true meaning of Christmas. Instead, she calls us to attend and reflect upon the commonplace of December days. Go beyond the planning and parties and presents and even the church services. Go deeper, pay attention: Observe and contemplate.

  The entire season from Advent through Epiphany is, in effect, an invitation to “mindfulness.” Winter gives us the opportunity to see the structure of the world more clearly, in the same way practicing mindfulness does. I am not sure if the word mindful was readily available to L’Engle in the 1970s and 1980s when most of these selections were written. As I read these pages, however, the phrase “a mindful Christmas” wormed its way into my imagination. For, despite the currency of the term (and my fear that L’Engle might eschew the term as jargon), these essays and poems draw us to a new awareness of holiness all around, and bid us to wonder. Could we truly experience Christmas mindfully, living this holy season attentive to the presence of God-with-us? Can we practice Incarnation?

  Practice Incarnation. What an amazing possibility! To this, Madeleine L’Engle brings her prodigious spiritual imagination and storytelling power. Her vision of Incarnation is not merely a moment’s wonder at the baby in the manger. Rather, Incarnation extends from the smallest particle of physics to the splendor of the universe. It is the presence of Love that created the cosmos, and came to dwell with us. We encounter it in prayer and silence; we encounter it in joy and pain. The mindfulness of this season is not an escape from words, but wrestling with the Word that inhabits the world in its radiant beauty and, most surprisingly, even its maddening injustice.

  We awaken to the enfleshed God by grasping the three spiritual elements of the Christmas story—the vast and cosmic; the intimate and homey; and the invisible and hidden. In the pages that follow, there are paeans to galaxies and stars, glory, angels, seraphim, and all of creation. However, for L’Engle, this is not a distant wonder, but the stars themselves interweave with the most intimate of all human experiences—childbirth. Why? Because the same creative power—Love—makes both galaxies and babies. Incarnation teaches that all is of a piece.

  “All is of a piece” is the heart of mystical experience. Too often, we think of mysticism as a way to abandon the world. But the greatest practitioners of mystical spirituality know that it actually moves us back into the world. In this book, Madeleine L’Engle’s luminous prose directs us toward mundane things: preparing for a holiday feast, struggling with fears of illness and death, worries of injustice and war, jury duty, bad weather, and memories of childhood and of parents who have passed away. In all these spaces, God shows up, unexpected and sometimes uninvited, and even the most improbable moments turn toward the hope of rebirth. God is present from cosmic expanse to the chambers of our hearts, but we do not notice because the sacred is obscured under our distractions, fears, and despair. We need to look again. Observe and contemplate. If we risk to gaze deeply, a numinous revelation awaits: “O Maker of the galaxies, Creator of each star, You rule the mountains & the seas, And yet—oh, here you are!”

  Here you are! God of the stars; God dwelling in hearts and homes; and God-who-seems-absent. God is here.

  Miracle on 10th Street invites us to mind the season: God-with-us, and the breathtaking possibility of practicing Incarnation. We can be a Christmas people.

  —Diana Butler Bass

  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.