Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Overview

Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art gathers a series of interlinked essays that probe how creative life and spiritual life inform and sustain one another. L'Engle moves fluidly between memoir, theological reflection, and practical counsel, showing how imagination operates as a bridge between ordinary experience and transcendent meaning. She treats art not as luxury or escape but as vocation, an obedient response to the call to see and to tell truth.

Central Themes

A persistent theme is the necessity of imagination for religious understanding. L'Engle argues that imagination is sacramental: it opens the human mind to metaphor, paradox, and the hidden depths of reality that theology alone can name but creativity can illuminate. She contends that faith without imagination becomes dry and literalist while art without spiritual grounding risks narcissism; the healthiest practice integrates the two, allowing beauty to point beyond itself.
Another core idea is vocation, how artists discern and live their calling. L'Engle insists that vocation involves discipline, humility, and persistence amid failure and doubt. Courage to take risks, willingness to be misunderstood, and fidelity to craft are presented as spiritual practices. She also wrestles honestly with doubt, presenting it not as enemy but as a companion on the creative path that can deepen rather than diminish faith.

Structure and Tone

The essays range from intimate recollections of L'Engle's own life and career to wide-ranging reflections on figures in art and theology. The tone is conversational, candid, and occasionally prophetic; she blends anecdote with theological meditation so that doctrinal points arrive embedded in story. L'Engle's voice is theological without being abstract, pastoral without being sentimental, inviting readers from many backgrounds to engage wrestle with questions about beauty, truth, and responsibility.

Notable Metaphors and Arguments

The title metaphor, walking on water, recurs as an image of the precarious courage required of artists who must step into the unknown. L'Engle uses biblical imagery alongside references to poets, painters, musicians, and fellow writers to show how creative acts mirror spiritual acts of trust. She makes a sustained argument that art can be a form of prayer: a disciplined seeking that acknowledges mystery, gives shape to longing, and sometimes points toward the divine.
Ethics of artistic practice also receive careful attention. L'Engle challenges creators to consider the consequences of their work, insisting that freedom must be balanced by responsibility to truth and neighbor. She is particularly concerned with how narrative and metaphor shape moral imagination, urging artists to resist facile cynicism and to cultivate empathy through story.

Relevance and Legacy

Walking on Water speaks to artists, theologians, educators, and lay readers who wonder how faith informs daily creative choices. Its blend of practicality and wonder offers both consolation and provocation: consolation for those who feel compelled to create, provocation for those who reduce faith to mere doctrine. The book has resonated widely because it treats the artistic vocation as spiritually central rather than peripheral.
L'Engle's insistence that creativity is integral to spiritual life continues to influence conversations about theology, literature, and pedagogy. The collection stands as an invitation to reclaim imagination as a theological gift and to practice art as a humble but vital form of witness, an offering that seeks truth, beauty, and the common good.