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Lewis Festival Scholar Series
"Do your stories influence your Christianity?" Lena Roy Ep. 3 LFSS Season 7
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Welcome to the c.s. lewis festival scholar series. I'm your host, david krause. As part of this growing podcast series, we're taking a look at the 2024 CS Lewis Festival, featuring a unique group of speakers and authors delving into the theme the Seeker and the Storytellers. And who are the seekers and storytellers? C.S. lewis, Madeleine Lingle and Thomas Merton. All three were 20th century seekers whose moral imagination and spiritual quest were transformed by reading great books. All three went on to become renowned authors, poets and storytellers of faith, whose works are widely influential today. This podcast is on. Madeline Lengel, author of one of the all time classics, A Wrinkle in Time, the Seeker Madeleine l' Engle becomes the storyteller. One of the questions at the festival was, did her Christianity affect her stories or did her stories affect her Christianity? This podcast delves into that question and much, much more, featuring someone who knew her not just as a friend, but as a grandmother. Lena Roy, who along with her sister, Charlotte Jones Voecklis, wrote the biography Becoming Madeline, Lena delves into the writing process and what they discovered along the way. For more information on the annual CS Lewis Festival each September at the renowned Great Lakes center for the Arts, please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org in Petoskey, Michigan. Now enjoy Laina's fascinating talk, Creativity as Incarnation, Madeleine l' Engle and Writing Towards Hope.
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Thank you, everybody. And it's just really amazing to be here in this very special place in Northern Michigan and then just thinking of. And then to follow Sarah and Sophronia and Sarah and their friendship. And Sarah giving me the best parts or helping me remember the best parts of Christianity. And Sophronia really helping me embrace my love of solitude and my love of talking really deeply and not making small talk. So I am very, very grateful to both of you. I do have this all written. I'm going to try to look up, but I'm also. Are we ready to get personal? We ready to go, you know, to get a little deep and vulnerable? Okay. All right, Cool. When Sarah asked me to be part of this conference, I didn't know what I was signing myself up for. I said yes, of course, because it was Sarah. And because I'm passionate about creativity as an instrument of joy and proud to be Madeline l' Engle's queen granddaughter. And I love Sophronia, too, and Charlotte, and I love any excuses for sleepovers and being with friends. But it wasn't until Sarah asked me to provide a title for my talk that I had A terrible case of self doubt, realizing I would have to dive into not only Madeline's writing, but also her particular brand of Christianity and belief. I can talk about her writing. I'm a reader and a writing teacher and a writer myself. But am I qualified to talk about her Christian faith? I've spent my summer both as a scholar and spiritual seeker and reminded myself that for Madeleine, her writing and her faith were one and the same. I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around. My stories affect my Christianity. Restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck and pull this straying sinner to an odd faith. So what do I have to talk to you about? Obviously, I turned towards rereading Walking on Water. My grandmother's voice was loud and clear. She even starts the book, reluctant to write it, questioning her own qualifications. Her dear friend Lucy Shaw had challenged her to write a book about being a Christian writer. And she, of course, was resistant to that nomenclature. But then she realized the very vehemence of my reaction meant that perhaps I should listen to what I am being called to do. She was 61 when she wrote those words, just a few years older than I am now. I am being called Sarah. You're calling me to both rediscover her and rediscover myself. She reminds me that my grandmother, not Sarah as it is for me, her spiritual growth was a slow process and and not a road to Damascus experience. Okay. One way I understand her writing in her faith is by looking at the central theme of hope in all of her writing. She herself needed stories and ways to restore her faith in a loving universe. Yes, she can write about despair, the dark night of the soul, but she had this hunger to always bring it back to some kind of triumph of love and faith. She was desperate not to fall into the traps of misanthropy or cynicism. She aspired to curiosity and optimism. And I am always grappling with my writing and faith, and perhaps that is the only qualification I need. But that didn't stop me from freaking out. But then two things happened. One, Charlotte reminded me of grand short story A Sign for a Sparrow. And two, I learned we have sparrows. Sparrows nesting in the eaves over my library. Perhaps I was being called to meditate on the symbolism of the sparrow. It worked. And I'll just share with you the parable of the sparrow from Luke 12:6 7. Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies, yet not one of them is forgotten by God indeed. The very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows. I grew up in an Episcopal seminary and Madeleine was very close with my father, an Episcopalian priest. I attended church at least three times a week until I turned 16. My father and grandmother both shared a rather open cosmology which was Christian at its core, but they didn't believe you needed to be Christian to be loved. And to be loved is to be saved. Open communion, open heaven. They both worked hard at believing that God's light lives in all of us and that it is us who get in the way. We are clouded by fear and self centeredness. Sounds easy, doesn't it? All we have to do is rid ourselves of fear and self centeredness. Ha ha. And they both said that secondhand faith, the faith of your parents or your grandparents, wasn't faith at all. Which sent me on a decades long and never ending faith journey. And yes, I'm grateful there are no easy answers. I've been preparing for this talk ever since that moment of panic this spring when Sarah asked for a title that Self Centered fear threatened to take over. I took a deep breath and focused on humility and even excised my first published novel from my bio. Publishing a book was, after all, not part of my qualification for talking to you about my grandmother. I returned again and again to this passage in Walking on Water. This one. If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Kain Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an annunciation by Frank Chabijo, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the words of a sermon by John Donne, Creativity as Incarnation, the parable of the Sparrow. If incarnation is the essential tenet of Christianity, that Christ is God made flesh, then God has to be everywhere in the creative process and in everyone. So it is not limited to only Christians. Oh wait, no, no. Yes. Okay. There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred. And that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. When I was on the verge of adolescence and starting to question my relationship with God and this whole notion of prayer, my dad told me that praying can simply be finding joy and passion in everyday life. Being authentic, like the bird quote with Thomas Merton, just all over that. The problem is, is that is at that age I didn't know how to be authentic. Being liked and approved of by others was more important than finding myself or finding communion with God. But I remember both he and Gran would have their spiritual advisees if they were depressed or sad. Making cookies. The incarnation is in all types of creativity and joyful connection to something larger than ourselves, like making cookies. You just have to look for the signs and sometimes you have to create them for yourselves. And then I was in tears as I came to the end of rereading Walking on Water because it is there that she recounts the accident I had during the summer blackout of 1977. Just a few weeks after my ninth birthday, I felt I almost. I got hit by a truck and was in a coma for two weeks. And they didn't think I was going to make it. I felt her love for me shoot through my heart. Not only the me when I was nine, but the me now. And I knew there was no difference. Her despair was palpable. She was out of town at a conference, maybe something like this, and I had been hit by a car, was in a coma, and nobody was sure that I would make it. She was only getting information piecemeal. But signs from God kept coming to her piecemeal as well. Whether it was a card that fell out of her journal, the right scriptural passage when she opened her Bible, and a call to ask for prayers to the sisters at St. Hilda's being the only call to get through, etc. And I woke up from my coma 10 days. The two deepest lessons were Lena's uncomplaining acceptance and her mother's loving courage. And if only we could hold on to uncomplaining acceptance and loving courage. But Gran knew that acceptance and faith had to be part of an ongoing conversation with God, which only comes when you are willing to be on a journey. I may have lost that as a teen and young adult, but this is surely what I have been seeking and recommitting to daily for the past 30 years. Ten years after writing Walking on Water, Madeline wrote the Rock that is Higher in that she used her writing about story as truth and incarnation, as a way to climb out of her own despair. Now it was she who was in a terrible car accident, ending up in the ICU across the country, 3,000 miles away from friends and family. At 71, she still didn't have the answers. She is telling me us that we need to learn over and over and over again the lessons of uncomplaining acceptance and loving courage. When she was the age I am now 56, I was only six years old and she had already become the spiritual seeker I would know and love for the rest of my life. She was already Madeleine L'. Engle. She had been the librarian at the Cathedral of St John the Divine for over 10 years and had been spiritually mentored by Canon west for just as long. She was receiving fan and love letters regarding both A Circle of Quiet and A Wind in the door. At 6, I was fascinated by what my grandmother was like before she was a grown up. What was she like as a girl, a teenager, a young adult? My sister Charlotte and I had the wonderful opportunity to write about those years in becoming Madeline. Here we go. Book brag. Book brag. And we had so much fun writing it. There we go. Yay. Now. But now I get to explore through this conference, how she kept becoming. She famously said that she was every age she had ever been, and at the age of 56, she was still teaching us to be full of joy and whooping. Now, I have to do an aside here, because joy and Whooping was our shorthand version of a quote from Shakespeare's as yous Like It. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. And most wonderful, wonderful. And after that, out of all whooping at 56, she was already a dizzying definition of success. She had raised three children, had two grandchildren, and later would have three more, had written 30 books, traveled around the world, had a disciplined writing schedule, and accepted invitations to speak. Speak everywhere from libraries and schools to church basements to the pulpit. As a child, it was easy to see her magic and be enthralled by her success as a teen and young adult. I thought success was about how many books you published. And until recently, a small but loud part of myself still believed that. Yet the most important part of her magic was in her ability to grow and to surrender to joy and love. Oh, wait, Okay. And so Story helped me learn to love. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully. She talks about listening to our characters or whatever we are writing about, opening ourselves up to co create with something higher than our egos. And this. This is what calls to me. Now. I am sorely tempted to slowly take you through her childhood, teen and young adult years, because that is what I know best and what I am most comfortable speaking about. And indeed, you can read about those years in becoming Madeline. And what I truly understand now that I'm older, is that we are always becoming. If we are lucky and open and present, we are always learning. Still bear with me as I take you on a whirlwind tour with Madeline as the protagonist of her own story. Madeline was born 10 days after the Great War ended in 1918, the first 11 years of her life in New York City. The adults were having a grand old time. Her father, Charles, was hoping he would maintain his earlier success as a journalist and novelist. And her mother, Madeline was a classically trained pianist. I also just. We have a slide in here about. Wait. Oh, you got that one. Okay. All right. So we have a slide in here about Charles. Just skip. Okay. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Where am I? Her parents taught her the ecstasy of artistic discipline. She watched her father get blissfully lost in the flow of work on his typewriter, proud and amazed that he was writing the world as he saw it. Her mother practiced the piano for hours daily. However, her parents also taught her the agony of being an artist. She watched her father struggle with his failures to publish, coupled with his alcoholism. And her mother was too shy to play the piano in public. Family legend has it that she turned down an opportunity to play with George Gershwin and always regretted it. Madeline was determined to be published and a famous author. She has diary after diary entry stating this willingness. Intending this, she said she knew she was a writer the first time she held a pencil and wrote a story about a little gurl, an illustrated odyssey. Her first book was a book of poetry called Peter Thinks. And what of Religion? She did not grow up going to church. At least her parents weren't a part of a congregation in New York City, although they had both grown up in Episcopalian households and knew the Bible intimately. Madeline was enthralled by the Bible stories and equated them with the lessons she was learning in fairy tales. That there is truth in story. When I was a child, nobody told me that I should read the Bible piously. So I read it. Just as I read Hans Christian Anderson and George McDonald in books of Fairy Tales, I read it a story, great story about fascinating and complex people called by God to do amazing things. I'm going to get you on track with those slides. You keep going. Yes, but it's fair, right? No. Oh, I don't. I'm confused there. This is the next one. This is what? Oh, thank you for bearing with me. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. In the aftermath of the stark market crash and the depression in America, the small family decided to move across the ocean to the French alps. Madeline was 12 years old and thrilled about the adventure. What she didn't expect, however, was to be told they were going on a picnic and then to be dropped off at a boarding school in Switzerland, she became the lost princess in her narrative. She was miserable, save for two things, her writing and her piano practice. And after two years, the family moved to Florida, where her mother's family was from, and she was sent to Ashley hall in Charleston, South Carolina, where she finally felt accepted by others and understood by her teachers. One of the ways she made friends was through the discovery of acting and playwriting. She wrote skits she and her classmates could perform, which led to that joy and whooping I mentioned earlier. This, of course, followed into her years at Smith College and as a young playwright in New York City, where she lucked out into becoming the secretary and lauded understudy in productions led by Eva Legallion, who was one of the biggest stars on Broadway at the time and a great, nearly forgotten advocate for regional and repertory theater. Look her up or ask Charlotte or me about her later. Yet Madeline was shaken by a second world war and by broken friendships and relationships. She had often told Charlotte and me that she had been around the block, or so to speak, before she met our grandfather. But that, my friends, is the topic for another talk, or at least another book. In her plays, she was trying to understand the subtext between her characters, but she also kept writing fiction. She was working on her first novel, the Small Rain. And I'm just going to show you pictures of her, like, so, her headshots. I think the middle one is her friend. That's Eva. And then Madeline and Maria and then Madeline and Murray. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Because she's a. Was a piano player. Say the name of this actress again who we're supposed to voodoo. Eva Legallion. She was the Taylor Swift of her time, for sure. So, yeah, so. But I'm going to quote the Small Rain. It's a strange thing how you can love somebody, how you can be eaten up inside with needing them, and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it. And neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you. And it goes on and on, this desperate need. And only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other. So that was her first novel, and it was published in 1945 when she was only 27. And then she met the actor Hugh Franklin, who needed her as she needed him, and they got married when she was 28. Baby came when she was 29, and it was a difficult pregnancy. They bought an old farmhouse in Goshen Connecticut, and decided to move up there permanently when she was 32. Hugh deciding that he was never gonna be able to make it as full leading man. It was the beginning of a new decade, the 1950s, and it was time to grow up and leave the theater life, raise a family, be serious folk. Instead, she had another difficult pregnancy and felt caught between the part of herself that wanted to be a homemaker and crave family, and the part of herself that was a writer and craved success, which at that time meant publishing everything she submitted and earning money. Hugh was gone long hours, first working at a radio station and taking over the general store. How could she both be homemaker and a writer? They were both full time jobs and she constantly felt like a failure. She needed community and became a member of the local Congregational church, eventually leading the choir. But part of her was deeply lonely. How could she nourish her soul? She felt she wasn't good at being a homemaker or a writer. She imagined that all the women in her community seemed happy and fulfilled as homemakers. Why couldn't she be? Would she still matter? Would she still be loved if she never published anything again? I imagine her taking comfort in the Parable of the Sparrow as a reminder that she was loved no matter what. Even though her publishing ambitions weren't fully realized throughout the 50s, despite publishing two books in that decade. Hello. She wrote and wrote and wrote. It's always so funny to me. I was a failure. She. She was always writing and it was a way of being in her journal. She was having conversations with herself, with other writers, with God. Charlotte recently compiled her lost short story manuscripts from the 1940s and 50s into a beautiful book called the Moment of Tenderness. And through these stories, we can see the buildup to her opus A Wrinkle in Time. She also read voraciously and started reading the Bible more deeply. After all, understanding scripture at 36 is different than understanding it at 16. She added German theologians to help her understand. She found them wanting. Where was the hope and joy in whooping? She became very interested in science and the visionaries of science fiction and fantasy and how it can help us understand the world. C.S. lewis published the lion, the Witch and the wardrobe in 1950. I expect that she read it at some point during that decade as it is a perfect example of the storytelling she appreciated with its essential thrust of love and hopefulness. Now, I was also blown away by this quote of hers. I often seek theological insights in reading science fiction because this is a genre eminently suited to explorations. Of the nature of the Creator and creation. I'm never surprised when I discover that one of my favorite science fiction writers is Christian, because to think about worlds and other galaxies and other modes of being is a theological enterprise. She was fertilizing the seeds of her faith by listening to the world around her and writing her way towards hope. She didn't like everything she was hearing, of course. There was a sense of complacency and conformity she found disturbing, especially with the Cold War and the rise of McCarthyism. Would the red Scare come to Goshen? Indeed it did, and she and Hugh and other couples were denounced from the pulpit. Fortunately, the pastor was eventually replaced, but it shook her and my grandfather to the core. One of the stories that Charlotte rescued from that decade is called A Sign for a Sparrow. It opens on a clear morning on Earth in a dystopian future. Climate change has ravaged our planet and people are exploring space the way people explored the seas and Oceans in the 1500s. Our protagonist, Ross, is a cryptographer and is being brought along on mission to another planet in hopes of recolonizing. He has been studying the patterns from cosmic rays and has an impossible hope that there might be signs of intelligent life. He has to believe this. He is leaving behind a wife and their new baby on an earth where only 1 in 10 babies survive. They cling to their faith and belong to a dwindling religious group contemptuously called by the other religions, the Godders. Okay, so that's. That's not the right slide. It was not an easy religion, but nothing worth anything Rob thought was easy. And wanting religion to be all cozy and comfortable was like trying to get back into the womb again. And before the journey, Rob prays. Oh, God, if you are care for us, be great enough to comprehend the small. Do not forget thy sparrows. Once on the mission, Rob gets closest to Bill, the doctor, who is an atheist and, funnily enough, reminds him most of his priest. Bill is the one to point out that recolonization has the potential to be a moral dilemma and maybe futile. The journey is long and weeks behind schedule. They think they are going to fail. The crew, restless and anxious, decide to enact a human sacrifice to the gods to help them get closer to their promised land. This enrages Bill, and Rob can't help but make comparisons to Moses and the Golden Calf. Bill challenges Rob to ask God for a sign, and if there isn't one, then he bets Rob will give up on God once the planet comes into focus. Rob has to Stay behind to try and interpret whatever messages are coming through. But Bill gets to experience extraterrestrial beings who really are far more intelligent than humans. They're about 2 billion years beyond us. They've evolved into the form of birds, rather like enormous sparrows. But no churches. Rob. I asked them. They didn't even seem to understand what a church was. Sorry about your bet. I haven't lost it yet. No. A race as highly developed as theirs and no churches, and you're still a godder. Where's your sign, Rob? And at first I was confused. How is finding an advanced race of being not a sign? But back to Moses. God revealed his name to Moses. Yahweh. I am. Bill wants Rob to have a sign of equal value. Madeleine wanted to be grown up and not get back in the womb again. But she also wanted a sign that her suffering in her life, not just the 50s decade, mattered, that she mattered. So she wrote in a sign for Rob, the last words of the story are God's words. The beings have learned more code from Bill and Rob is translating. And this is how the story ends. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. So that those are the last words of her story are God's words. Madeline wrote signs into her stories. Beautiful, isn't it? An alien planet 2 billion years ahead of us, whose inhabitants remember enormous sparrows who don't even need church because the Word was God. When we are in our darkest moments, there is God. You can all see how a wrinkle in time was born from the political climate of the 50s, the personal attacks on her and Hugh, the authority theologians she was reading and rejecting, and parts of this story. Once the Mrs. W splashed into her head on a road trip across the American Southwest with her family, she furiously wrote in three months, the first draft of her hymn of praise to God. That's what she called it, a wrinkle in time. And she rewrote it and rewrote it and it almost never got published. But it was just what the world needed. A message of hope, love, bravery and independence triumphing over conformity and safety and dependence. It is transformative and it especially transformed her. She listened to the book, got out of her own way and co created with God to serve the work. In 1960, Madeline and family had moved back to New York City. She sent her children to school at the nearby St Hilda's and St Hughes, and it was there that she met Canon Edward west and struck up a friendship with him. He was both chaplain at the school and a canon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He would go on to become her beloved spiritual advisor and make appearances in several of her books. She won the Newbery Award for Wrinkle in Time and began being invited to speak and teach creative writing at conferences all over the world. Her dream had come true. She was finally being recognized as a successful writer and her dance card was overflowing. But she also needed a quiet space for work. Canon west told her to use the cathedral's library as an office space. This friendship was paramount to her continuing her faith journey. Remember, she went to church in Goshen more to be part of a community than to foster her spirituality. Her friendship with Canon west catapulted her into a much more grounded spiritual practice. She was finally having the deep spiritual conversations that she had only had been having in her journals and with the writer she was reading. Conversations with him both challenged and deepened her faith. And the Parable of the Sparrow isn't only about self compassion. It's also about the compassion we need to have for other people, even those who would denounce us from pulpits. Oh, here's a picture of her with Canon West. The she's older. There were a lot of flowers in her hair. She's always full of joy and whooping. That's her 70th birthday. Do you love them? So in 1965, in Arm of the Starfish, she writes, if you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow, you can't pick and choose who is going to be the sparrow. It's everybody and you're stuck with it. By the time she was my age, she and Cannon west were lecturing and holding public conversations together. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, she wrote and published prolifically, even writing some narratives, braiding memoir and theology together, which you know is a Crosswick's journals, giving hope to writers of all ages that you are a writer if you write, period. It's not about being published, but a way of exploring the world of finding God. A Sign for a Sparrow shows us this. A Wrinkle in Time shows us this. An arm of a starfish. All of her books writing is as much an act of faith as going to church. But boy, did she go to church. She loved Eden's song at St. John the Divine and split her time there between there and St. Michael's for a while. And then by the time my grandfather had died and Charlotte and I were living with her, she was going to All Angels, a church that had a lot of artists and wounded people from more fundamentalist backgrounds. She felt that she was needed there, that she could be of service, being in community with those who are learning the power of story, not Literalism I did have this as a slide, but it's not there. So here, this important literalism kills the stories of Jesus and comes close to killing us. Literalism makes no demands of us, asks of us, no. Faith does not cause us to grow. Story pushes and shoves us and then helps us out of the mud puddle. Yet Gran also sacrificed something of herself by becoming a public figure, which is why the act of writing was just as important, if not more. As she aged, she still grappled with acceptance and courage. She still longed for authenticity even as others projected their hopes and dreams onto her Persona. I take heart in the sparrow story and the sparrows on my roof as I struggle with my own writing and place in the world. My teenage self would not consider me successful. After all, I only have three children and two published books under my belt, and I may never publish again. But I am engaged in my life and I am still a writer because that is how I make sense of the world. It is my learning style. The other day I asked Sarah to put my first book Edges back into my bio. There it is. Leaving it out started to feel less like humility. I was like thinking of Thomas Merton burning his stuff and more like ingratitude for my own faith journey. Writing that novel had kept me in conversation with my higher power. I'm going to quote meet myself. Well, the question is, what do you want to believe? Do you want to live in a world where things are possible or in one where they aren't? That is the world I want to live in, where things are possible. And writing helps me make peace with myself and aspire for compassion and curiosity for others in this polarized and violent society. Writing and faith have led me to my vocation as a writing instructor and program developer for kids and teens. In art, we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten. We are able to walk on water. We speak to the angels who call us. We move unfettered among the stars. Now, one of my favorite musicians is post punk rocker Nick Cave. Has anybody heard of Nick Cave? Okay, a couple of people all right. He also happens to be Christian, and his faith has helped him get through the tragic death of two of his sons separately. One. One fell off a cliff at age 15 and the other one, I think was an OD at 31. I'm not sure. And Madeline would definitely be in conversation with him. Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard earned, makes demands of us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that this is so. And if anybody wants to subscribe to Net Caves like that, he has. He has. He actually will answer anybody's. Anybody's question, anybody at all. And he has an email list called the Red Hand Files, which I get. I just love it. Anyway, he so I feel a profound sense of responsibility to share my joyful approach to writing with kids and teens because I've witnessed the profound effect it has on them becoming both creative and critical thinkers. Creativity is incarnation. What Madeline came around to in Walking on Water, even if she grappled with her own qualifications, was that. No, that's not it. A Christian's children's book must have an ultimately affirmative view of life, but that people who call themselves Christians aren't the only ones who can write them. Now, here's a quote from her, and I'm almost done. I promise. The Bible is not the only book in which I will look for and find truth. There is much to inspire me to widen my understanding of the Creator in the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky. There are important insights into the nature of God in the sacred books of other religions. Oh, one more paragraph. And yes, there are sparrows on the roof over my library. They serve as a reminder to me of my grandmother and to continue having conversations with my higher power about acceptance and courage and to continue to be in conversation with all of my intersecting communities like this one, and with Sarah and Sopronia. So I thank everyone. Thank you for letting me be here.
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Thank you, Laina, for your moving talk on your grandmother, Madeline Langley. This entire podcast has been made possible by the C.S. lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan and its generous sponsors. To learn more, please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.