Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle

his hand, looking at its radiance, and I wondered at him because he was not burned.
    It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.
    But a child rejoices in presents!
    —
    Finley Eversole, in
The Politics of Creativity,
writes,
In our society, at the age of five, 90 percent of the population measures “high creativity.” By the age of seven, the figure has dropped to 10 percent. And the percentage of adults with high creativity is only two percent! Our creativity is destroyed not through the use of outside force, but through criticism, innuendo…
    by the dirty devices of this world. So we are diminished, and we forget that we are more than we know. The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity.
    Those of us who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us; it is not easy to keep a child’s high creativity in these late years of the twentieth century.
    —
    It would be only too easy to blame all the dirty devices on the secular world. Some of them, alas, come from the churches, in the form of well-meaning distortions which once sprang from something creative, but which have been changed until they have become destructive.
    Truth, for instance: we all want truth, that truth which Jesus promised would make us free. But where do we find it? How could it have happened that even in the church
story
has been lost as a vehicle of truth? Early in our corruption we are taught that fiction is not true. Too many people apologize when they are caught enjoying a book of fiction; they are afraid that it will be considered a waste of time and that they ought to be reading a biography or a book of information on how to pot plants. Is
Jane Eyre
not true? Did Conrad, turning to the writing of fiction in his sixties, not search there for truth? Was Melville, writing about the sea and the great conflict between a man and a whale, not delving for a deeper truth than we can find in any number of how-to books?
    And Shakespeare and all the other dramatists before and after him! Are they not revealers of truth? Why then, in some evangelical colleges where I have lectured, are there “Speech Departments,” and the students produce and act in plays, but the department cannot be called “theatre,” because theatre is wicked and not true?
    I have been married to an actor for thirty-four years, and I know him to be a man of total integrity who could not possibly live a life of untruth. I have witnessed his widening knowledge of truth as he has grappled with the characters he has depicted on the stage.
    At two colleges during the past year, colleges widely separated geographically, earnest young women have asked me, “How does your husband reconcile being on television with being a Christian?”
    My reply is an analogy, a story. I tell them of one time when our children were young and the play my husband was in was closing, and he would shortly be out of work.
    He came home from the theatre one night with the script of a new play in which he had been offered a juicy role. He gave it to me to read, and when I had finished, I simply handed it back to him. He nodded. “I wouldn’t want the kids to see me in this. I’m not going to take it.”
    We needed money for rent and food and clothes for our growing children. Hugh needed a job. But the criterion he used was: Would I want the kids to see me in this?
    If he didn’t care about truth and integrity, what the kids saw him in wouldn’t matter.
    Perhaps this is an insight into Christian art.
    If we try to follow in Jesus’ way, what the children see us in
does
matter. Jesus told his friends and disciples