I’ve decided to do something different with Monday’s with Madeleine. Before, I was reading through the pages of Madeleine L’Engle: Herself and writing about her quotes as I went, but now I think I’m going to pick a random quote from her books — these will be mainly with her nonfiction works — and write about those as they pertain to my life and thoughts. So, early this morning, I was flipping through her book Walking On Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, and came across this quote:
We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love. —pg. 67
I have never been good at loving. In the traditional sense of loving your family — yes. But it is not in my nature to love with abandon. I have never been much of a giver, a sacrificer, a lover. For a long time, I had only been concerned with myself, what was going on in my life, what would I do next. It had not been in my nature to think of others before thinking of myself, and it was a thought process I wasn’t aware of until I met my cousin, Emily, at 17. I didn’t realize how selfish, self-absorbed, self-seeking I was until she began gathering up examples and pointing them out to me. It was a raw awakening. She used to say I was made of plastic.
In many ways, I can still be all of those things, the difference is that I’m aware of them now and can shove them aside when they crop up like weeds in my life to make things difficult. Of course, I don’t always get all of them pulled out. I’ll miss a patch here and there, and whether or not someone points it out to me, I know they are still there, and the worst part is that sometimes I don’t want to pull them out. Sometimes I just want to let the weeds stay there where they can grow larger and more can grow around them. I would like to say that these weeds grow in me as a way to hide some sort of fear I have at opening myself up to others, but sometimes I wonder if the weeds just aren’t pure callousness. If maybe there isn’t something in me still hard and plastic.
I had the idea the other day that maybe I had too many thoughts, that maybe I allowed myself to think too much. I used to believe that a person could never have too many words in their head, but now I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think so much that I can’t hear God over the static of my own mind. I know things would be a lot easier on me if I prayed, if I thought to ask for things I needed, but sometimes I can’t feel the starvation of my own heart from the stubbornness of my brain. I have trained it so doggedly to daydream, fantasize, brainstorm, manipulate, counteract the things in my life that don’t go my way so that I can’t accept things for how they are, leaving me incapable of really seeing people. A lot of the time, I see what I want to see, hear what I want to hear, think what I want to think, believe what I want to believe. It makes me wonder if anything in my life is honest, or if it is all just a layer of dust covering up what I only think is underneath its skin.
The problem I have in dissecting this, writing it out in plain view for both my heart and mind to see, is that I won’t know how to act on it. I won’t know how to clean myself of the grime that so much thinking and not enough seeing can do to cover you up, so that no one else can see you clearly either. When I read Madeleine’s words, I feel hopeful and sure that someday I can be the person she writes about, but today I have to wonder what I am truly capable of. Is God calling me, but I’m just not hearing Him because I’m too comfortable where I am, and if that’s the case, what is in the contents of my comfort that I can’t seem to let go of?
