Dec 24, 2024

Madeline L’Engle

I have long appreciated Madeline L’Engle’s (1918-2007) transparency and open-handed vulnerability in her writing. “Faith is what makes life bearable,” she wrote. “I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights.” Madeline became an accomplished American writer with many novels to her name, including A Wrinkle in Time, which sold sixteen million copies and received the prestigious Newbery Medal in 1963. Later in her writing career, she collected forty years’ worth of reflections on Advent and Christmas in her book Miracle on 10th Street. One entry looked back on her early years when she and her actor husband Hugh lived in their small apartment on 10th street in New York City with their daughter Josephine stricken with precarious health challenges in her early years. She wrote, “I think back to that Christmas when my husband and I did not know whether our little girl would live to grow up. Between that Christmas and this, there have been many times when I have been in the fiery furnace, but I am beginning to understand who is there with me. It is then, when I need it, that I am given courage I never knew I could have.”

Over the past seven days in Prayers from the Cloud, we prayed the Great Antiphons, seven titles that ninth century Christians ascribed to Jesus originating in the Old Testament. She referenced all of them in the poem “O Oriens,” a Latin term for the fifth antiphon that is commonly translated as “Dayspring.” It’s a fitting way to conclude this series on the antiphons and lead us into prayer on Christmas Eve:

O Come, O come Emmanuel
within this fragile vessel here to dwell.
O Child conceived by heaven’s power,
give me thy strength: it is the hour.

O come, thou Wisdom from on high;
like any babe at life, you cry;
for me, like any mother, birth
was hard, O light of earth.

O come, O come, thou Lord of might,
whose birth came hastily at night,
born in a stable, in blood and pain
is this the king who comes to reign?

O Come, thou Rod of Jesse’s stem,
the stars will be thy diadem.
How can the infinite finite be?
Why choose, child, to be born of me?

O come, thou key of David, come,
open the door to my heart-home,
I cannot love thee as a king—
so fragile and so small a thing.

O Come, thou Dayspring from on high:
I saw the signs that marked the sky.
I heard the beat of angels’ wings,
I saw the shepherd and the kings.

O come, Desire of nations, be
simply a human child to me.
Let me not weep that you are born.
The night is gone. Now gleams the morn.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel,
God’s Son, God’s Self, with us to dwell.

Madeline L’Engle, Miracle on 10th Street, 1998.

Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.