The power of story

From Walking on Water: reflections on faith and art by Madeleine L'Engle

"I was still at the age of unselfconscious spontaneity when I started to write. At the age of five I wrote a story, which my mother saved for a long time, about a little "grul," my five year old spelling for girl.
   "I wrote stories because I was a solitary, only child in New York City, with no easily available library where I could get books. So when I had read all the stories in my book case, he only way for me to get more stories to read was to write them.
   "And I knew, as a child, that it was through story that I was able to make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life. The sound of coughing from my father's gas-burned lungs was a constant reminder of war and its terror. At school I read a book about the Belgian babies impaled on bayonets like small, slaughtered animals. I saw pictures of villages ravaged by the Boches. The thought that there could ever be another war was a source of deep fear. I would implore my parents, "There won't be another war, will there?" My parents never lied to me. They tried to prepare me for this century of war, not to frighten me.
   "But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stores which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is. I wrote, and I illustrated my stories. At bedtime, my mother told me more stories. And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully.
   "It was a schock when one day in school of the teachers accused me of "telling a story." She was not complimenting me on my fertile imagination. She was making the deadly accusation that I was telling a lie.
   "If I learned anything from that teacher, it was that lie and story are incompatible. If it holds no truth, then it cannot truly be a story. And so I knew that it was in story that I found flashes of that truth which makes us free."

Amen!