Introducing Small Wonders season 4
16:39 Share

Hey, John Dixon, you're about to hear the first episode of a new season of Small Wonders, one of the other podcasts in the Undeceptions Network, hosted by my good friend, Dr. Laurel Moffat. Each episode, Laurel offers a piercing look into something seemingly ordinary. And unlike me, she knows how to make her case briefly.

She beautifully explores how even the most mundane things can be restorative and even wonder-filled. I'm a big fan, so to celebrate the new season, we thought we'd drop the first episode into your Undeceptions feed. But please make sure you go over and follow the show in your podcast app as well.

By the way, the team and I are working pretty hard on the next season of Undeceptions. It's coming soon. Until then, enjoy Small Wonders, an Undeceptions podcast. Small Wonders with Laurel Moffat. I've loved books and reading for as long as I have known how to read. My first experience as a reader with some autonomy was at the Baton Rouge Public Library on Goodwood Boulevard.

I would have been around seven or eight when I got my own library card and borrowed some books for the first time. I remember the quiet of the place, the hush, the feel of the refrigerated air as we stepped inside the library out of the blanket of South Louisiana heat. There were so many books, each one of them a little world a writer had created that I could enter.

I had a hard time deciding on which ones to borrow, but determined that the appropriate cap on my borrowing would be the number of books I could carry in my arms. I carried the books and my new library card to the front desk of the library and counted them with the librarian. There were 13 books. The late fee for a late book was five cents a day.

It sounds like nothing now, but for a kid in the early 80s with no pocket money, it was a lot. I read them all. I was a hungry reader. I read whatever I could get my hands on. Almost exclusively, I read for fun. Books and reading were an escape for me. But when I was 12, I found the books of Madeline L'Engle, and something in my reading changed. ♪

Le Ingle is best known for her book, A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Award in 1963. This novel turned the page on her own writing career, from one filled with rejection letters to those of acceptance. And in that book, as with many of her others, she explores in no particular order the nature of good and evil, separation and loss, falling in love,

the threat of death and the downward rip of fear, the existence of God, repentance, forgiveness, the nature of time and the question of time travel, friendship, the desire for home and belonging of family, and the nature of love, which has at its roots the love of God. In short, she wrote about what it is like to be human.

And in reading her books, I found that I was not reading merely for fun or to escape my life, but in some way to understand it. In finding her books, I found stories, most of them written decades earlier, that spoke to my own experience of childhood and adolescence and made some sense of it. This wasn't because she had experienced just what I had experienced or that I had had experiences that mirrored hers.

Or that the settings or the characters were similar to the people and places I was familiar with. I lived in the South, whereas her settings were often cities and small towns in the Northeast United States. Or in places overseas, the characters were far more cosmopolitan than I was. But through all this difference, there was somehow something in the books that spoke to my experience of being a kid in South Louisiana and made some sense of it.

Her writing did not talk down to me as a young reader, but managed to lift me up, to look around at the complexity of things and survey them from a place of stillness. She seemed to understand what it was like to be a kid, a teenager, to understand what it felt like to not have much in your control other than your own heart and mind, and even then, not always those. I loved her books. I read them and I reread them.

And as a result, I loved her. I loved her so much that when I was 13, I wrote her a letter. As I remember it, I poured out my heart to her about having to move from Louisiana to Georgia. It was late summer. The school year hadn't yet started. I remember being nervous about starting a new school and sad that we had moved so far away from my hometown. I was nervous about the year ahead. At least that's what I remember writing to her.

I put the letter in an envelope, wrote an address in New York in the middle, licked a stamp, and pressed it into the top right corner, walked it to the mailbox, and lifted the red metal flag on its side to signal to the mailman that there was an outgoing piece of mail. And then the year began. A new school, a new city. A couple of months later, as summer had turned into fall, a letter arrived in our mailbox addressed to me.

Postmark, New York City. The letter was typed on cream paper and at the bottom it was signed, Madeline L'Engle. She had written me back. I saved her letter. I put it with my collection of precious things and I put within my mind and my heart something I've carried with me ever since I was 13 that I wrote to Madeline L'Engle and she wrote back. I've also carried this, the wonder that the words we put down

whether in ink on paper or in dots on a screen, or those we speak into the air or down phone lines or in texts, have such power. Words can connect us and they can also divide us, and through them we can speak into and touch one another's lives. How did Madeleine L'Engle's words that she wrote in the 1940s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s

somehow reach into my childhood and adolescence and help me make some sense of it. And also this: How is it that a young teenager could write a faltering letter to an accomplished writer and that writer would take the time to reply? There was such honor in her reply. Seven years after I wrote to her, when I was 21, some friends and I drove through the night from Lookout Mountain, Georgia to Michigan to attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College.

Madeline Lingle delivered the keynote address. She spoke on writing, the difficulty of pain, faith, death, sin, heaven, the existence of God. And in her address, she spoke about why we read and why we write. She said, we read stories and we write stories because we ask the big questions to which there are no finite answers.

And we tell stories about people who give us our best answers in the way that they live and work out their lives and treat other people and try to find the truth. I think this is what I was drawn to in her writing. Characters who are grappling with big questions and trying to live well in the world as they did so. And she also said that she had written a wrinkle in time out of her theology and her love of God and her questions, such as,

Why did God make us as we are? Why did God give us the terrible and dangerous gift of free will? How do we find out what is our will and what is God's will? Perhaps it was these questions that drew me into her books, not only the characters who were grappling with them. Perhaps I wasn't looking for an escape for myself or an explanation of myself, but a place in which I could ask those questions that were far bigger than myself, and yet, without asking them,

I'd never know myself. In 1973, the year before I was born, L'Engle had written on her approach in her writing to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, and also this: that the "only standard to be used in judging a children's book is, is it a good book? If a children's book is not good enough for all of us, it is not good enough for children."

From her writing, I gather it is these deep and serious questions about God and our lives as human that is the thing that is good enough and important enough to broach in literature, both for children and adults. After she spoke, I thought about going up to her. I could have said, "I wrote to you. You wouldn't remember, but you wrote back, but I didn't." It was enough then and enough now that she wrote to me at all. I was worth a reply. I was worth her time.

Not because I was famous or accomplished or important, just because I was a person who had written to her. And what's more, a child who had written to her. Somehow, mysteriously, her words had reached me through the pages of her books. They encouraged me. And then, my words reached her through the mysterious workings of the United States Postal Service. This was the wonderful thing to me, and it remains so.

I held on to her letter for many years, but after three moves of country and many more of house, I lost it. All I have now is the memory of it. The memory that I had written to her and she had written to me. And even that is slipping away a bit. Life is busy, and the thing that I had once treasured, first her letter, then the memory of it, has faded.

Until one day, a few weeks ago, when I was standing outside the Archives and Special Collections Library at Wheaton College. It was so quiet, hushed. I was reminded once again of how much I love libraries. On a wall outside the library were flyers for all the writers and theologians whose papers are held in the archives there. And among the rows and rows of faces was one I quickly recognized, Madeline Lee Ingle.

What was she doing here? Her words had found me when I was young, and then my young words had found her in her old age. And here were her words again in my middle age, housed on the other side of the wall where I stood looking at a leaflet with her face and name on it, and a description of the collection, manuscripts, biographical material, and correspondence. Correspondence. I wrote to her, and she wrote back.

If you liked what you heard, please subscribe to Small Wonders with Laurel Moffat. This is a two-part episode and part two of The Library drops next week. It's a beautiful, beautiful story. See ya. An Undeceptions Podcast.