"Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known"
About this Quote
No blinding light, no instant remake: L'Engle quietly refuses the conversion story as spectacle. By invoking the Damascus Road - the archetype of sudden religious certainty - she name-checks a culturally legible script, then steps out of it. The intent is partly defensive and partly liberating. Defensive, because modern religious talk often gets sorted into two bins: irrational leap or dramatic testimony. Liberating, because she claims a third mode where belief arrives like weather, not lightning.
The subtext is classic L'Engle: she distrusts neat binaries. Her novels live in the borderland between science and spirit, reason and wonder, the childlike and the cosmically strange. So "intellectual acceptance" is not a cold surrender to doctrine; it's a late-coming permission slip. The mind isn't the engine of faith here, it's the notary public. "What my intuition had always known" suggests a long interior apprenticeship, the slow accumulation of meaning through story, beauty, grief, and awe - experiences that don't argue so much as they press.
Context matters: as a 20th-century American novelist who wrote explicitly Christian work without accepting the fundamentalist performance of certainty, L'Engle positions herself against both secular suspicion and religious theatrics. She implies that conversion can be less about acquiring new information than about finally trusting one's own deepest perception. The line works because it reassigns authority: not to a preacher, not to a crisis, but to a lifetime of noticing.
The subtext is classic L'Engle: she distrusts neat binaries. Her novels live in the borderland between science and spirit, reason and wonder, the childlike and the cosmically strange. So "intellectual acceptance" is not a cold surrender to doctrine; it's a late-coming permission slip. The mind isn't the engine of faith here, it's the notary public. "What my intuition had always known" suggests a long interior apprenticeship, the slow accumulation of meaning through story, beauty, grief, and awe - experiences that don't argue so much as they press.
Context matters: as a 20th-century American novelist who wrote explicitly Christian work without accepting the fundamentalist performance of certainty, L'Engle positions herself against both secular suspicion and religious theatrics. She implies that conversion can be less about acquiring new information than about finally trusting one's own deepest perception. The line works because it reassigns authority: not to a preacher, not to a crisis, but to a lifetime of noticing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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