Circling to Resurrection

Madeleine L'Engle writes about the realm of imagination taking us beyond obvious death into truth. Revelation reveals through vision life after life after death. Story is where characters meet me.

Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir A Circle of Quiet feels like a stream of consciousness, but it circles around deceptively quiet ideas of being (ontology), story, the writer’s response to the world, and reality. I’m 80% of the way through the ebook, and so far she hasn’t mentioned the Resurrection explicitly. Yet she states she cannot believe in mortal death being our end.

“My intellect is convinced that any idea of the person’s continuing and growing after death is absurd; logic goes no further than dust to dust. Images, in the literary sense of the word, take me much further.”

Revelation is a literary piece. It uses fantastical images to convey a truth about life after life after death; it’s a challenge to those of us who broach it. (I will return soon to N.T. Wright’s study guide on it.)

Brain Science Behind Story

Many suggest that because Revelation is fantastical in appearance, it’s simply a fabrication, a nicely crafted lie to soothe our fears. But as L’Engle points out, the emphasis on the material, on logic and what we can sense through our five senses, limits us. Belief only in the material creates a prison that dismisses mysterious or supernatural experiences as brain farts or imagination, as if imagination arises from random neural activity that deceives the person’s consciousness.

Lisa Cron in Story Genius explores the brain science behind story.

Side note: I’ve recently signed up for Plottr’s Writing Craft Book Club with its inaugural 6-week study of Story Genius. To say I’m challenging my reading cognition is a bit of an understatement. But it’s leading me back to my Resurrection trilogy.

Why do humans tell each other stories? Cron explains that story evolved to help us survive: to anticipate and navigate the future, as well as the complex social world of relationships. Yet story emerges from imagination. How then can an evolutionary adaptation help us if it only deceives or is based on random neural activity but not grounded in truth?

L’Engle’s literary images — the creatures of her imagination crafted into story — allow her and her readers to predict a future that we in our mortal, material bodies cannot see. Revelation provides a rich tapestry that shows us what will occur in the far, far future. Or perhaps it’s the near future. We cannot know; just as we cannot know definitively and with absolute certainty what happens to us after death. Although a few have died and returned to tell us what they experienced, because of the Western world’s emphasis on the material, their experiences are waved away as so much dying neuronal delusions. But are they?

Writing Is Mysterious

L’Engle decries the trend towards certainty. Yes, the brain craves certainty, but mystery is what excites us. Mystery entices us to take risks, to enter a story that will help us navigate our problems and see our future self beyond death as something to be celebrated not denied.

In November 2019, I wrote a play about the Resurrection. In the year that followed, a trilogy barged into my consciousness; the main character appeared and informed me that her story would begin with her death via a doctor killing her. Oh, sorry, medical assistance in death or MAiD as it’s called in Canada. I was not happy. I want nothing to do with Canada’s descent into the evil of espousing killing as health care, of streamlining murdering disabled while stalling on providing them livable social support and effective health care. But my main character was adamant. Her story would begin with her death by doctor. To understand why she ended up there, at the start of the trilogy, I had to delve into her story. All of my delving came from my imagination…maybe…is a main character that appears out of nowhere a creature of my imagination? Is what I learn about her or him a figment of my creativity?

“we can travel in the direction which will lead us to that place where we may find out who we really are.”

Writing a story sets me on the path the characters tell me to go.

L’Engle shares how A Wrinkle in Time began. She, her husband, and children had been driving across the USA on a 10-week camping trip when “suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which…But why did those names come to me just then, and from where? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Lately, I decided that the characters who come to me are other human beings who’ve lived, maybe died, maybe in a coma, who seek out a writer who can hear them, who will tell their story. But I’m not leashed by them. I, too, have my own ideas. They and me come together, hand in hand, to write a novel.

“I was also quite consciously writing my own affirmation of a universe which is created by a power of love.”

One year, a man appeared to me, he stated his name, and commanded me to write his story. The strength of his character challenged me. Although I researched settings, explored his character, spent time understanding his background, interviewed people to learn more about the facts of his experiences, he drove the story. In contrast, the Resurrection trilogy begins with the woman telling me how she will die, but leaving the rest to me to figure out; yet she also ends up…well, that would be spoiling the ending now, wouldn’t it?

When I build the outline after I’ve done all the research, character and setting building, and a rough sketch of the story, I try to steer it to that “affirmation of universe” created by love. Sometimes, though, all I see is darkness; when I’m in that space, I resonate with a particular character’s futile struggle against the darkness; instead of me trying to resolve it into hope, we create together an ending that thrashes the idea of a universe created by the “power of love.”

As I read A Circle of Quiet, feeling L’Engle’s strong mind and gentle writing enfolding me, I realize that my novels that end in death, destruction, or hopeful darkness do so not because the Creator of the universe wills us to live in despair, abandoned and destructed — or is not love — but because human beings have created it. Seeking to understand the why behind it is why I craft stories hand in hand with the characters who show up.