A Live Coal in the Sea

I really had to copy-blog this. I love Madeleine L'Engle. Occasionally we do not see eye to eye, and there are two of her books in particular I would NOT recommend, but all the others are amazing. Wonderful. Real. Faithful. She was not a dumb woman.
A Wrinkle In Time is her most famous, but I think she wrote perhaps 80 works.

The DHM wrote this today at the Common Room. I hope she never yells at me for copying her, but she has such profound things to write and provides such interesting sources. I hope someday we can meet in real life.

Enjoy!



Thursday, March 05, 2009
Weathering Storms

"Mark Twain once observed that no couple could begin to know the bliss of being married, short of twenty-five years together. In the presence of a companionable middle-aged pair, young romance seems a feeble reed in comparison to the strong plant of their devotion. How have they weathered the storms and reached such a mature affection, that the shining joy in being together is a blessing to all who touch their lives?" ~Josephine Moffett Benton, in The Pace of a Hen

When I read A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeline L'Engle, I thought of that passage from Pace of a Hen. Coincidentally, a friend of mine in another state also read Live Coal at the same I did. Neither of us knew the other was reading it. When she finished it, she emailed me the very same quote from it that I had intended to email to her:

"He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." ~William Blake



She also shared with me the source of the quote which provided the title of L'Engle's book:

"But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea." William Langland c. 1400.