It was good we had a relaxing weekend, because over the past week a variety of obligations have come up that have eaten up my computer time. But I did want to make some notes about Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention before I turn it back in to the library. I picked it up after repeated references to L’Engle by Pentimento and Embretheliel, and am so glad I did. What a different perspective I have on it now than I did when I first read it, as a high school student nosing through my mother’s books. I wonder, though, how much of it sank into my unconscious, and helped formed my understanding of marriage.

I was struck first by the tone – no long rants, no unsavory details. (Admittedly, she does deride the dehumanizing, synthetic quality of modern life, with its objects of planned obsolescence: “I don’t want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.”) Reading the book was like a mini marriage retreat. L’Engle mentions her youthful naivete as an aspiring actress and some of the struggles she had finding a suitable husband, as well as a rocky patch during her courtship with her eventual husband, but she doesn’t dwell on the difficulties she may have had in her marriage. Instead she shares some of her memories, small glimpses into a well-lived life, marked by rich friendships and appreciated experiences. She acknowledges peaks and valleys, but keeps her focus on reassessing what made her marriage a happy one, juxtaposing their early years with her thoughts and prayers by the bedside of her dying husband.

What did make their marriage happy? Both were in positions to be tempted by other offers. They spent a lot of time apart. They struggled early on with money. But it sounds like Hugh and Madeleine both were caring, independent people who respected each other as well as the commitment they had made. They both were aware of the possibilities of betrayal and of growing apart, and so made sacrifices to protect their relationship and made clear even to their children that their marriage needed nurturing. She had her kids make their own breakfasts so that she could stay up late and greet Hugh after performances.  Telling her children that their father needs her more than they do – at ages 7-12 - seemed bold at first to me but, as she remarks, it is a gift to children to have parents who love each other.

Hugh and Madeleine made time to spend together, but they also valued each other’s independence. She quotes Chekhov, “If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.” She mentions that she didn’t feel she had to give Hugh all her burdens, and he likely kept some of his difficulties to himself. She also emphasizes the importance of quiet communion: the need to be alone with each other, the need to spend an hour listening together to a Mozart sonata or walking, learning to live in the “Cloud of unknowing”: of God’s mystery, of the next hour, of observing the oneness of creation seen in the image of lovers, of learning that each thing that happens makes a difference everywhere

I can think of relationships where one person in the couple acts as a vampire, sucking the life from the other by being too needy, too possessive. I wonder about the health of relationships in which the wife makes herself a slave to her husband, probably with the best of intentions, but how can she be his helpmeet if she has made herself his doormat? I wonder if there is a risk of being so focused on the salvation of their souls on the part of these subservient wives that they forget to be present in the moment to their husbands, and allow their husbands to suffer spiritually by not offering them opportunities for self-sacrifice? (How’s that for convoluted reasoning? I’m really not trying to say be a difficult wife so that your husband can grow spiritually…)

I think part of what I’m getting at relates to what L’Engle describes so well as the incarnational aspects of marriage: caring for her husband’s dying body, making love with the pressure of fingertips, delighting in being present together, recognizing the Word made present in flesh through the powerful responses to touch. As Hugh is dying, his things and things they have collected make present memories, illustrating the need to touch a thing. Even the house they love, Crosswicks, becomes an emblem of the incarnational aspects of their love, in the experience of rootedness they feel there, and in their connection to people and places. She writes:

“A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.”

This companionate marriage exists when couples are equally yoked, aware of the need be present to each other, appreciative of the others gift of self, not only taking, not only giving. My husband is frequently reminding me to let other people be generous, not to turn down offers of assistance, but to accept them graciously.


Perhaps frequent separations such as Hugh and Madeleine survived while he was acting and she was giving lectures, force the growth of those other ways of love. After my husband returned from deployment, we had our reunion honeymoon with plenty of fireworks, but it also seems like we’ve settled into a closer relationship than what we had before. Greater confidence in each other? Months of corresponding at a deeper level than “Can you pick up the kids after soccer?” Greater devotion to being attentive to each other during the time we have together? All of these experiences have moved our marriage into a good place for the time being. With the kids moving into adolescence, difficult times lie ahead, but recalling L’Engle’s eloquent reminders to be fully present to others, to be aware that nothing is more important than love, will assist us in the years ahead.

At the end of the book, as she watches her husband suffer multiple setbacks, L’Engle reflects on cancer as a result of consequences – not a punishment – but the effect of choices. She hopes that Hugh’s doctors can be willing to fail – to let him die when all ordinary means are exhausted. She suggests that doctors, like artists and actors and parents and married couples, must live with the risk of failure or betrayal.  After discussing the decision not to prolong artificially Hugh’s life, she writes, “I think of Lady Julian.”Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in these things? Wit it well: Love was his meaning.”

After Hugh passes away, L'Engle realizes she does not feel empty like a nutshell, but overfull of memories. And she closes by recalling the poetry of Conrad Aiken that Hugh recited before proposing: “Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread.” A lovely expression of deep, abiding love.


Some other of her notable observations:

“Coldness of heart has never been (or should never have been) a Christian attribute. It was coldness and hardness of heart that angered Jesus. . . . I remember George MacDonald’s writing that it may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder, because the latter may be the impulse of a moment of heat, whereas lack of forgiveness is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart.” (This thrust an icy dagger of self-knowledge in my heart, as I am guilty of turning a cold shoulder and maintaining a freezing silence when offended. Luckily for me, my husband and I, in our 15th year (!) of marriage (not even half of L’Engle’s 40), are learning to recognize the idiosyncrasies that mark our personalities, and as L’Engle writes, they “become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.”


“There have been times when we have misunderstood each other, demanded too much of each other, been insensitive to the other’s needs. I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen. The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.” Certainly true -- the deployment we just came through was a desert, which was followed by an oasis, and then a rocky patch, and now we in another oasis period, one perhaps less flowery than the first but more lush, richer. Cooler nights, ironically, helped melt my most recent bout of iciness.

Along the same lines, she quotes Yeats:

“But Love has pitched her mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.”

“The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. . . I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.”


“I have read and read and am still wide awake. When I am in bed with Hugh I can lie close to him, my foot touching him, or my hand against him, and be able to relax. When I am alone the night is darker and the wind less friendly. Our marriage has seemed to settle and develop this year into something much warmer and deeper. It is much more quiet and I think this is the way it is going to have to go on growing.”


On imagination and survival:


“How could I live, endure this summer, without imagination? How can anyone even begin to have an incarnational view of the universe without an incredible leap of the imagination? That God cares for us, every single one of us, so deeply that all power is willing to come to us, to be with us, takes all the imagination with which we have been endowed. And how could I get through this summer without affirming the worth and dignity of human beings? Isn’t that what the incarnation was about?”

On marriage as a new creation:


“I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are ‘we’ and ‘us,’ a new creature born at the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive ‘we’ remains. And most growth has come during times of trial. Trial by fire.”

On her optimism, in the face of tragedies:


“. . . God is not going to fail with Creation, no matter how abominably we human beings abuse free will, no matter how we keep our own self-interest in mind rather than the working out of a Grand Unified Theory. We talk about how God can come into ‘the flame of incandescent terror’ and purify even the most terrible anguish.” . . . Teaching a course in techniques of fiction involves sharing, no matter how indirectly, one’s attitude toward the human endeavor. Maritain wrote that ‘fiction differs from every other art in one respect: it concerns the conduct of life itself.’ Thus any discussion of the writing of fiction is theological, even if God is never mentioned.”


“Prayer is love and love is never wasted.”


“Lady Julian of Norwich wrote: ‘He said not ‘Thou shalt not be troubled, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed,’ but He said, “thou shalt not be overcome.’ It is God’s will that we take heed to these words, that we may be ever mighty in faithful trust in weal and woe.” Faithful in the small things as well as the great.