Let's hold on to that thought at this end of a century which is proving itself over and over again to be precarious. We've completely rid the planet of smallpox, but now new and even worse diseases have appeared to take its place. War, usually in the name of religion, is being fought all over the planet, but this is not as strange as I would like it to be because it's been going on for centuries.

I'm not happy about the dire predictions because they are usually cause for great pride on the part of the one who predicts. The predictors are more necromancers than predictors, than prophets. One early January evening my granddaughters and I were watching TV, and they had on several well known prophets who were telling us all what to expect during the next year. California was going to topple into the sea. There were going to be earthquakes in Memphis. I forget the rest of it because none of it happened. And my granddaughters and I agreed that it is not a good idea to send out over the air to millions and millions of viewers nothing but negative predictions. Sometimes these become self-fulfilling expectations.

We are supposed to live in hope, even when hope is difficult, even when terrible things happen. And they do happen. We've learned a great deal with our new techniques and our new technologies, but not nearly enough. Perhaps forecasting the second coming of Christ in the year 2000 is a way of dealing with our uncertainties psychologically, but I don't think its a healthy way. Grief has always been part of the human experience - grief and pain and love and cooking meals for our families, just being.

Now the year 2000 is coming. Time does move at an incredible pace. But as an excuse for forecasting the second coming, it's a mathematically incorrect one. Jesus was not born exactly 2000 years ago, but three or four years before we started counting or three or four years after, I forget which, because it doesn't matter. Jesus warned us against predicting the day of the second coming. "I don't know when it's going to be," He said. "Even the angels in heaven don't know. Only God knows." Only God knows, isn't that good enough? Especially if we trust God? Several years ago there was a bumper sticker which read: "In the case of the Rapture, this car will be unmanned." I get a vision of the family floating out through the top of the car, and the little car going around bumping into other cars. I thought: his is very irresponsible. It trivialized God's loving promises.

It was about two or three summers ago, we were eating out on the back porch and watching television and we were told about a man who, with the help of a very sophisticated computer, and, of course, John's Revelation, had predicted that the Rapture was going to come that night. The announcer broke into the program to say that there was a slight glitch in the computer, and the Rapture would be at the same time the next night. So, the next night at the same time, we sat out on the back porch and turned on the TV, and the time for the Rapture came, and the time for the Rapture went, and my son remarked that it probably had happened, there just weren't enough people to be raptured to be noticed.

I'm not looking for the Rapture, which, by the way, is a word not to be found in scripture. What I do look for is the promise of life that Jesus gave us, and life more abundant, no matter how many terrible things, no matter how many wonderful things happened. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows God's handiwork. When I consider the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars which the Creator has ordained, what are we that God is mindful of us? What are we that God came to visit us?" Isn't that a marvel? The God who made the heavens and the earth and the sun and the moon and everything else came to live with us, as one of us, to show us how to live, to show us how God wants us to live.

Rather than worrying about the second millennium, I marvel at the munificence of creation. What we have learned about our universe in the last few decades is far more shattering than Copernicus or Galileo's discovery that planet Earth is not the center of everything, but is an ordinary planet, circling a nice, middle aged sun, on the outskirts of a typical spiral galaxy. It is also far more shattering than Darwin's discovery that the planet may not have been made in seven earth time days, but may have taken quite a lot longer to evolve.

I love the Litchfield Hills where I live because they are old hills, worn down by rain and time and wind. I think of it whenever I say the 121st Psalm: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help." But Darwin's discoveries, like Galileo's, sent the Church establishment into fits of denial. Instead of rejoicing at the new disclosing of God's magnificence, the church drew back in horror. We fondly face most of that, although a few people are still hanging on to the unscriptural idea of earth in six days. On whose time clock I wonder? Greenwich Time? Eastern Daylight Time? Mountain Central Time? And what about Australia and the International Date Line? Doesn't scripture say over and over again that God's time and our time are completely different? That a thousand years in our sight are less than the twinkle of an eye?

Once at Berea College, I was asked what I thought about creation versus evolution. I said, "I can't get very excited about it. There's only one question worth asking and that is: ‘Did God make it?’ If the answer is yes, then why get so excited about how?" The point is that we believe that God created everything with love, and to show us how much we tiny human beings are loved, God came to live with us, as Jesus of Nazareth, to show us how much we are loved.

For a long time it was believed that the Milky Way was the galaxy, the only galaxy. And then it had to be accepted that it is one of many galaxies. And now we know that the number of galaxies cannot even be estimated. Last year, the redeemed Hubble telescope saw, in a piece of sky the size of a grain of rice, billions of hitherto undiscovered galaxies. It is beyond comprehension, but there it is. The universe is larger than we can even begin to imagine. How can God keep track of it all? How can we tiny creatures with our life spans, no more than a flicker, even be noticed by a God of such magnificence? Jesus is our assurance that we matter, and that what we do matters.

Last March I was at a conference center in Texas, up in the hill country, which is very sparsely inhabited. There's no nearby city, or even town, and so the evening sky, the night skies are just glorious. And I stood there on a hilltop, looking at the Milky Way, streaming its river across the sky, at stars so thick that it was as though someone had used a celestial star shaker. Not only did I see the stars, but I saw the comet. It wasn't just a blur in the sky that made some people say, "I think I saw the comet." No, it was there. Rather, a lop-sided circle and pulsing at us. I saw it every night for a week, and I was awed.

I'm equally awed when I think about the sub-atomic world, that the subatomic particles are as much smaller than we are as the galaxies are larger than we are. And they, too; live by a wondrous law of love. Subatomic particles are never separate or independent. They live in complete interdependence with each other, showing us a universe in which everything is completely interrelated. There is a favorite phrase among physicists, "the butterfly effect," by which is meant that if a butterfly is hurt, the effect of that accident will be felt in galaxies billions of light years away. The universe is that tightly interconnected. Physicists have also learned that they can no longer claim to study anything objectively. To study something is to change it, and to be changed by it. We change each other simply be being together today. We are part of a creation in which everything works together, the glad and the sad, and what we do matters. What we have learned about the enormity of the universe, both the very large and the very small, is far more shattering than the discoveries of Galileo and Darwin. We seem not to have realized how important they are. Not yet, at any rate.

Someone asked me, "You mean those billions of new galaxies have actually enlarged your faith?" Yes. Yes! But I understand the question. It's all too big, and we're too small. How can God possibly keep track of it all. In a universe with both the microcosm and the macrocosm too large for us to conceive, how can we believe that God cares about each one of us, that the very hairs of our head are counted, that the fall of every sparrow is noted? By faith. And that's what faith is for. Not the things we can prove, for which we don't need faith, but the things we cannot prove. My faith includes the deep assurance that God is aware of all that goes on in the universe, aware of every galaxy, every subatomic particle, aware of each one of us, that God, as Jesus, came to visit us, to give us this assurance, that there is a beautiful pattern of creation being worked out, and we are all part of that great work, and no part is too small.

Paul said, "Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are the Creator's judgements and God's ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Maker? Or who has given him advice? For of our God, and through our God, and to our God are all things to whom be glory forever." Amen.

Madeleine L’Engle: Oh, probably when I wrote my first story when I was five.

Talbot: I mean, it's profoundly theological. At age five, you were identifying with a spiritual component.

L’Engle: Well, all children, I think, are profoundly theological. School tends to knock it out, but I grew up shortly after the first world war. My father was gassed in that war. It took him until I was nearly 18 to finish coughing his lungs out, and I had to come to terms with all the evil on the earth. And yet we have to live in hope. Otherwise, there's just no point.

Talbot: Your father was a reporter.

L’Engle: Yes.

Talbot: Your mother studied piano.

L’Engle: Yes.

Talbot: How did they impact your faith journey?

L’Engle: Mostly by being very loose and liberal, in the best sense of the words, in their own faith. They were Episcopalians. Therefore, art was a part of their worship. So, I grew up in an atmosphere where music and painting and theater were all ways in which we glorified God. I also grew up with the idea that God is totally loving. And when I do wrong, I say, "Sorry", and I'm immediately forgiven. I missed the ugly God, looking like Moses in a bad temper wearing a dirty nightgown. I had only this wonderful God of love and forgiveness who nevertheless wanted me to do more than I thought I could do.

Talbot: You met your husband, Hugh Franklin, the actor, on stage in The Cherry Orchard.

L’Engle: Yes I did. I was working in the theater so I could make money to write books.

Talbot: And of course he was familiar to his audience as Dr. Tyler, Charles Tyler, in "All My Children," a television soap opera. I have a feeling that he still, although he's been gone ten years, still continues to inspire you.

L’Engle: Well, he's forty years of my life. You don't let that go.

Talbot: And you're wearing a locket, that is a very special family heirloom that holds his photograph.

L’Engle: It holds his picture.

Talbot: Madeleine, you have written that story is prayer. You do workshops and seminars around the country all the time on this. How do you begin to convey that concept to young people on college campuses?

L’Engle: Well, on college campuses I usually simply talk about my life and my totally unsuccessful childhood. I was always the one who couldn't make it, the one who was last chosen for teams. The teachers thought I was stupid and you know, if you really want to go on writing, that's a good thing to have happen because I could go home and forget homework and write stories instead. And there are a lot of kids who will respond to that. And then you are open to questions, and the questions are always theological. One of the main ones is, "Why, if God is good, do the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer?" Then we get into the age-old question of free will versus a pre-written script. I don't want that pre-written script. We are part of the script. We characters are writing the script with God.

Talbot: Your characters. You say they are your family. So much of what you write, of course, is autobiographical. The Austins could have been the Franklins. As you look back over those fifty books, in the course of your career, what characters are the most meaningful to you today?

L’Engle: Oh, they all are. I mean I keep writing about the same people by the same name over and over again. I mean, my characters have grown up. In my most recent book, A Live Coal in the Sea, is Camilla, whom I left at age, I think fourteen or fifteen, and am now picking her up in her late sixties and showing how she got to be the woman she has become. So I keep in touch with my characters.

Talbot: Your mother, who died at the age of ninety, was also an inspiration to you, and you wrote about that struggle in caring for an older parent. What does that mean to you now that you are an older parent?

L’Engle: Oh, I have a really big problem here. I was very happy to care for my mother, and she was very difficult her last year. I don't want my kids to have to do that. See, that's pride on my part. Absolute and total pride.

Talbot: But they must be so very proud of you, and you keep giving, and you're passionately involved in your writing.

L’Engle: Well, they're wonderful kids and wonderful grandkids. I had major foot surgery this winter. The night before, my granddaughter and her fiance spent the night. She got up at 4 o'clock to take me to the hospital and stayed with me until I went to the operating room. When I came back to my room, there she was, sitting and reading a book.