Love Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle pulls off a daring double move here: she elevates love to the ultimate moral metric, then immediately punctures any smug confidence we might have about passing the test. The line refuses the sentimental version of Christian love-as-vibe. Love is an audit, not a Hallmark glow, and by her count the books won’t balance. That blunt “not one of us” is doing real work: it drags the speaker off any private pedestal and makes failure a shared human condition, not an individual drama.

The subtext is a quiet revolt against two popular religious temptations: scorekeeping and self-exoneration. “Judged on love” implies judgment is real and exacting; it’s not the soft relativism of “we all tried.” Yet she also declines the opposite trap, the anxious righteousness that treats God as a cosmic grader. Her admission of likely failure is not despair but humility with teeth, a way of stripping virtue-signaling out of spirituality.

Context matters. L'Engle wrote from within a 20th-century American Christianity often split between moral confidence and modern doubt. She keeps the pressure of judgment while smuggling in mercy as the only plausible bridge between human capacity and divine standard. The final clause - “I could not call on him to come” - edges toward the bedside: mortality, prayer, the fear that when the lights go down you meet the ledger. What makes it work is its honesty. Love isn’t reduced to niceness, faith isn’t reduced to certainty, and forgiveness isn’t an escape hatch; it’s the only door left open.