September 6

Madeleine L'Engle, Frances Wright, and Catharine Beecher

Author

David Barnhart
September 06, 2025

Hopniss (ground nut) vine. 2024. Own photo.

Today marks the death, in 2007, of Madeleine L’Engle, author, essayist, and mystic. Her most famous work is A Wrinkle in Time. Although she was a devout Episcopalian, when she expressed a belief in universal salvation, many evangelical Christian bookstores stopped carrying her works. 

Today also marks the birthdays of rival abolitionists Frances Wright, in 1795, and Catharine Beecher, in 1800. Both were abolitionists and advocates for women’s education, but Catharine Beecher was religious and against women’s suffrage, while Frances Wright was humanist and for women’s suffrage. Beecher was a champion of kindergarten, and rallied women to oppose Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal. Wright was an advocate of free love and interracial marriage, and in the 1820’s founded an intentional community with the vision of becoming racially integrated.  

Reflection: 

Frances Wright wrote:

“It is not, happily, within our power thus to work destruction in the universal womb of things; still within the sphere of human influence — which extends to the uttermost limit of our world's circumambient atmosphere — we can, and do, modify all nature's kingdom; bending towards good or ill, health or disease, harmony or discord, each part, each unit of the universal plan.”

Madeleine L’Engle wrote: 

“When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we escape our self-conscious selves.”

“The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.”

And fittingly, for our time: 

“The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”

Prayer: God, help us to lose ourselves in creative play, in serving others, in pursuing justice and your kingdom — so that we may find both our true selves and you. Amen.