A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

L’Engle, Madeleine.  A Wrinkle in Time.  1962.  New York: Laurel-Leaf, 1976.

Though I review all the nonfiction books I read, I write about only a little about fiction.  Sometimes a fiction book hits so many areas of interest to me that I want to write about it.  A Wrinkle in Time is one.  It’s a classic, award-winning novel.  It’s a children’s or young adult book, and one is never too old for a good kid’s book.  It’s science fiction.  It’s informed by author Madeleine L’Engle’s Christian faith.

Margaret (Meg) Murphy is an awkward girl who doesn’t fit in.  Her family is unusual, too.  Her father is missing, though Meg stubbornly clings to hope that he will come home.  Her mother is a scientists, caring but somewhat unconventional.  Two of her brothers, twins, are pretty normal, if a little rough, and the third, the youngest, is a genius and most people find him unpleasantly odd.

Meg, her genius baby brother Charles Wallace and Calvin O’Keefe (an older, popular boy who keeps his oddness better wrapped) are pulled into an adventure in space by three creatures, seeming witches, aliens and more.  On another planet, they rescue Meg’s father and almost succumb to the powerful mind that rules the planet.  It is the things Meg dislikes most about herself that allows her to prevail.

A Wrinkle in Time is an adventure.  It is also a parable.  Part of the message is Christian.  The universe is God’s creation for His glory, and good creatures acknowledge and worship Him.  Yet there is evil, and Earth is infected with it.  Love overcomes evil.

It is tempting to see a political message.  On the world Meg visits, Camazotz, a single being rules all, taking responsibility for every decision, instilling uniformity so that everybody has the same things.  It is not hard to see this as a parallel to a communist state, where the government controls and distributes all resources.  It sounds like the nanny state as well, where people are relieved of the responsibilities of caring for themselves and making their own decisions.

It is this last point that I think is important to L’Engle whether or not is has political implications.  We are made to be individuals, unique and special, and we cannot be separated from responsibility for ourselves and our decisions and still have real joy, even if we have everything we seem to need.  When the “aunts” give gifts to the adventurers to prepare them for their trial, they give Meg her faults.  As Christians, we believe that everyone is uniquely made by God.  Our faults, shortcomings, imperfections make us needy of God’s grace, and His grace abounds in us to His glory.

In addition, IT, the mind-lord of Camazotz, is a finite being with finite imagination, thus the uniformity of the planet IT rules.  God is infinite, and His creation has enormous variety, abundance, scope and beauty beyond your imagination.  We can love, serve, and worship one God, we can all be imitators of Christ, and still each be a unique individual.

Before closing, I’d like to mention another Christian sci-fi classic, The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis.  There are some parallels between the works.  For instance, both L’Engle and Lewis, in Out of the Silent Planet, depict Earth as darkened and separated from communion with the larger universe because of the influence of human sin and the dominion of Satan.  IT, a big brain, reminds me of the Head from Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

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Revved! by Harry Paul and Ross Reck

Paul, Harry, and Ross Reck.  Revved!  New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

Revved! is a business parable.  Harry Paul and Ross Reck tell the story of Katie, a woman hurt by personal betrayal whose career suffers from her attempts to protect herself for additional injury.  She turns things around with the help and advice of an old friend and a radio psychologist.

In the context of a simple story, Paul and Reck describe a system intended motivate employees to perform at a new level, get engaged in their work and go above and beyond what is required in their job description.  It makes the supervisors and managers feel good, too.

The secret to getting the best out of people is this: care about them.  Honestly, demonstrably care.  People care about the people who care about them.  The care a supervisor shows for her employees will be reflected back in enthusiasm, performance, improvements and ideas.

The authors offer a note of warning.  Real caring can’t be faked.  If you jerk people around, it will backfire.

Paul and Reck offer a way to mitigate this potential problem.  Real caring can’t be faked.  Katie doesn’t want to risk getting hurt again by opening herself to genuine caring for others, so her counselors tell her to go through the motions even if she doesn’t really mean it.  It is a trick to get over the impediment of her self-preservation.  After a few weeks, she finds she genuinely cares for her employees.  The authors agree with William James that emotions follow actions, and if you act as if you care for someone, you soon will.

By stages, Katie is introduced to the few simple steps to demonstrate caring for others in the workplace.  The intent is to help her build new habits in manageable pieces and to prevent too much shock from her embattled and suspicious employees.

The authors give their system a name, Looking Out for Number Two.  Each step is named as well: Winning Them Over, Blowing Them Away, and Keeping Them Revved.  In spite of the fancy marketing language, program is straightforward.   The authors summarize it in three pages at the end of the book, and that could be shorter.  The titles are big, but the actions are small.

As you might expect, Katie sees amazing results in just two months.  Katie is a fictional character.  Real life might proceed a little slower an more messily.

Even so, the advice presented is sound.  It has the advantage of being simple and actionable.  It’s not about trying to stir up a feeling of caring.  It’s about specific actions that show caring in practical, meaningful ways, knowing that the response in our emotions and in others will come naturally.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Developing the Leader Within by John C. Maxwell
Winning with People by John C. Maxwell

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

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Books That Made a Difference to Me

I’m not a regular reader of O: The Oprah Magazine, but when I come across one, I turn to the “reading room” segment. In each issue, they have a celebrity, author or other notable person comment on a few books that they find notable. I enjoy reading and I’m curious about what other people enjoy reading, even if I don’t share their tastes. What follows are books that made a difference to me roughly in the style of the O feature.

The Holy Bible

As a believer in Christ, this book is a touchstone for me. The Bible is one of the ways God reveals himself, and it is the most explicit, specific, definitive and accessible special revelation. Jesus compared the word of God to a mirror, and said those who didn’t do it were like someone walking away from a mirror and forgetting what they looked like. Within its pages, the metaphor of a sword is applied to God’s word. One the great uses of this sword is to, in indelicate terms, cut through the crap.

Simple Pictures are Best
By Nancy Willard
Illustrations by Tomie De Paola

This is a children’s book and I first read it as a boy. It has so influenced me that I sometimes use the phrase “simple pictures are best” in conversation. The moral of this parable is to keep it simple, don’t create unnecessary complications. I’m not immune to mission creep and function overload. However, this book helped me develop an early appreciation for focus, setting priorities and enjoying those things that do one thing very well.

Spider-Man Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

I could carry on for some time about all that is great about Spider-Man. The essence of it is this: the core of Peter Parker and his story is ethics. Behind the mask, he is just a man and he is just as concerned with his family, friends and job as with battling supervillains. Like us, Peter faces the costly rewards of doing what is right and the painful price of choosing what is wrong in a complex world he doesn’t fully understand. What makes him a hero isn’t his power, it is his character.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

The atrocities of the Nazis were justified, in their minds, as a science-based policy for managing society. The science was eugenics; it originated in American. I was amazed that not only did it start here, but also one of its largest proponents and popularizers worked in my home state, Missouri. Black thoroughly traces eugenics from it roots in an America, both as a science and a policy, to its leap to other nations, its ultimate expression as policy in Nazi Germany and its aftermath, which continues to linger in science and politics. Today, calls for science-based policy are often in the news, but it is important that both policy and science be informed by ethics. (Edwin Black also wrote IBM and the Holocaust.)

The Road to Serfdom
By F. A. Hayek

Hayek devoted this book “to socialists of all parties.” His particular audience was the British intelligentsia (Hayek was an economics professor at the University of London and familiar with German intellectual life from his years in his native Austria). His message was a warning: socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism was a popular movement in the time Hayek wrote this book (first published in 1944). Even the United States looked to the communist, fascist and national socialist governments of the world as models to emulate (until we entered World War II and many of these governments became our enemies). Today, socialist ideas and policies are widely espoused, though few would put the socialist label on them, and their proponents seem to imagine, some may be convinced and some may pretend, that a planned society can still be a free one. Hayek demonstrates that socialist government and individual freedom cannot coexist for long.

The Holy Bible

It is hard to do the Bible justice in a few pages. In this review, I’ll only attempt to provide an outline. In particular I’ll discuss

-the major themes of the book,

-its major division, and

-the types of literature you’ll find in it.

THEMES

The primary theme of the Bible is the relationship between God and man. It’s a broken relationship. The authors of the various books address this in many ways. A couple of metaphors they use that I find particularly compelling are that of a marriage or a parent-child relationship. In these analogies, mankind is depicted as a cheating wife or a child who has run away to a destructive life. God is depicted as the faithful, loving husband or father who is reaching out to redeem, rescue and reconcile the one he loves.

God’s character is on display throughout the Bible. He is just and righteous, and his character is the foundation of morality. He also has great love and mercy. Fortunately, all of these traits are perfectly harmonized in God and shown to man in Jesus Christ. For those who have faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit works from within to recreate this character in them.

DIVISIONS

The major divisions of the Bible are the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament was written before the coming of Christ. It describes the fall of mankind into sin and God’s work to reconcile mankind to Himself with a focus on how this occurs in the formation (and eventual fall) of ancient Israel. The New Testament describes the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church, which is a fulfillment of the promises of God described in the Old Testament.

The major division of the Old Testament are

-history,

-writings, and

-prophets.

The historical books describe the history of man as a moral being, beginning with the fall into sin, and the God’s plan to save man worked out over time. As this plan unfolds, the history increasingly focuses on the Israelite kingdom. The writing are a set of poetic books. The prophets focus on a period of time leading to the ultimate decline of ancient Israel and predict the coming for Christ.

The New Testament can be roughly divided into

-the gospels, and

-the epistles.

The gospels describe the life of Christ and (in the related book of Acts) the establishment of the church. The epistles are message to the church that often deal with the practicalities of living the life Christ called his believers to live.

TYPES OF LITERATURE

The Bible is an assembly of many books, and there are many types of literature in each book. While the highly symbolic language of parts of the Bible get a lot of attention in some circles, most of it is written in a straightforward style. For instance, a lot of the Old Testament is historical narrative and a lot of the New Testament is letters from the apostles to the churches. Poetry is also commonly used. When reading the Bible, it’s important to know if the part your reading is a narration of events, a parable, a poem, or some other literary form.

The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.