Wit & Attitude Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

The line lands like a rebuke delivered in a whisper: the world’s ugliest institutions are not tragic exceptions but diagnostic evidence. L’Engle, a novelist steeped in Christian imagination, frames social catastrophe in moral-spiritual terms without letting readers hide behind abstraction. “When he comes” quietly signals judgment day - not a vague karmic reckoning, but a personal confrontation with a standard of love that exposes every alibi. It’s an eschatological countdown embedded in a sentence.

What makes the rhetoric sting is the move from spectacle to symptom. “Slums and battlefields and insane asylums” is a grim litany, a tour of places polite society prefers to treat as separate problems: housing policy over here, geopolitics over there, mental health “over there.” L’Engle collapses those categories into a single pathology. The subtext: we keep funding fixes for the visible disasters while refusing to address the deeper refusal to see one another as fully human.

Then she tightens the screw: these horrors are “the result of our failures in love.” Not our failures of planning, or competence, or even courage - love. That’s an old theological word made freshly uncomfortable. Love here isn’t sentiment; it’s the practical discipline of solidarity, care, and responsibility that would make slums unthinkable, war less inevitable, and asylums less like warehouses for the unwanted.

Context matters: L’Engle wrote in a 20th century shadowed by world wars and institutionalization, when “progress” coexisted with mass suffering. She’s insisting that the verdict won’t hinge on our intentions, but on the human wreckage we normalized.