“and I kept reading”

Madeleine L’Engle:

[A Wrinkle in Time] came to me out of my theological grapplings. We were living in a small, dairy-farm village, with more cows than people. We were very active in the local Congregational church where no images or symbols of any kind were allowed. I was asking a lot of questions about God, particularly about the Incarnation, and unfortunately my minister friends answered my questions, which did not have answers, giving me proofs of the Incarnation, which cannot be proven. I was struggling to find out what kind of God I believed in, what I believed about the Incarnation, and I wasn’t finding it in church. And for some reason, I have no idea why, I picked up a book about Einstein, who said that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the creation of the universe, is “as good as a burnt-out candle.” I had found my theologian!

Now, I knew nothing about science; I had avoided science all through school. And suddenly I plunged into the new sciences. For me, the modern mystics are the physicists, particularly the subatomic or quantum mechanics physicists who deal with the nature of being, the nature of the universe—what this incredible wonder that God made is like. It’s so much more enormous, so much greater, so much more beautiful than the limited, anthropocentric, “planet-centric” universe that I was hearing about in church. In this new world of physics I was finding a God of infinite love, and creativity, and imagination, and wonder, and I kept reading.