au revoir, Madeleine L’Engle
I have wept a few tears today for someone I never met. Ever since I was a child, I have returned to Madeleine L’Engle’s books over and over again. 
A Wrinkle in Time was my first. I read Circle of Quiet for the third time this summer in France.
I learned from Ms L’Engle how to hold faith together with imagination, obedience and respect together with a healthy degree of rebellion, and that life is to be lived right now, not as a down-payment for the hereafter.
“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
Rest in Peace, Madeleine. Thank you, thank you for all you have given to your readers. Obits in the NY Times. and Episocopal Life
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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“Maggi joined the Cambridge network. 9:20am”.
If the wall feed says it, it must be true. Welcome to Facebook!
I’m still resisting facebook – not sure how much longer I can hold out!
your listed network is ‘Cambridge Faculty’.
maggi i’ve invited you to be my friend
I don’t do Facebook, since my offspring do. So can we still be friends?!?!
I’m on Facebook; I did it in a wild attempt to get to speak to my daughter, who’s in France for a year. No good there! I’m far too old to one her friends!
And I’m left a little puzzled as to what it’s doing for me that emails and blog can’t do…
Please, please, please will you be my friend?!
As a non-geek I’m nevertheless beginning to sus Facebook’s niftier features (apart from as an ideal work displacement activity, of course… hem, hem. I’m sure you have *no* idea what I mean, being a fellow writer…)
Btw, this on Middlemarch may interest you – http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5396
Hi Maggi,
We would love to hear about your frustrations using Wetpaint. Hopefully we can solve those issues. And we’d be more than excited to have you as a non-geeky usability tester!
All the best,
Kevin
Wetpaint
Kevin, I was invited to join the Contemplative Catholic website as a writer/admin. I cannot for the life of me access my own or anyone else’s comments, can’t get into the profiles to see who I’m talking to, and find the whole thing frustrating to the point that I’ve given it up and simply e-mail the relevant people instead. Typepad has recently introduced a “page” feature so you can convert your blog into a website, which I am playing with, and it’s easy peasy. Well, almost easy peasy.
Kathryn, one of the most amusing things I’ve noticed about the page is when it says “Maggi and Xxx are now friends” about people you were friends with before the internet was even invented.
Simon – interesting article about Middlemarch, I enjoyed that. I always include (for good measure) the rather bleak reflection that while it has a redemptive aspect, it’s as much about the impossibility of excaping the poisition you were born to as it is about redemption in self discovery. I’m v. sad we don’t include M’mch any longer in our courses here, as it was one of the most fun to teach.
okay, if blogger is easy peasy, can you please tell me how to get ‘recent comments’ on my blog? I tried the cut and paste html, and you can see the bad result on the right hand side of the blog page….
I’ve had a look at it, it seemed even more pointless than myspace. Maybe I am stupid, but I couldn’t work out what it was supposed to do, or how it was supposed to do it.
I joined facebook to keep up with friends who were emigrating. However, apart from them most of my other friends I see regularly anyway so they usually have nothing new to say, and there are reasons why I’m no longer friends with people I was at Junior school with. My concern, is that all the time on it means real time is taken up and we displace face-to-face relationships with cybergossip about who has added who as a friend/written on their wall etc. I also find Facebook has a strangely addictive quality. I joined, and found I kept checking to see if anyone’s written anything (which they usually haven’t since the time I checked an hour before). I don’t do that with email, and I never used to check the letterbox that frequently either.