The Irrational Season

The Crosswicks Journals, Book 3

By: Madeleine L'Engle

Narrated by: Pamela Almand

Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

The bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time contemplates the true meaning of faith in the third installment of her series of memoirs.

Upon her death, the New York Times hailed Madeleine L'Engle as "an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation." L'Engle has long captivated and provoked listeners by exploring the intersection of science and religion in her work. In this intimate memoir, the award-winning author uncovers how her spiritual convictions inform and enrich the everyday.

The Irrational Season follows the liturgical year from one Advent to the next, with L'Engle reflecting on the changing seasons in her own life as a writer, wife, mother, and global citizen. Unafraid to discuss controversial topics and address challenging questions, L'Engle writes from the heart in this compelling chronicle of her spiritual quest to renew and refresh her faith in an ever-changing world and her ever-changing personhood.

©1997 Crosswicks, Inc. (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved

Such a timely book!

This memoir spoke to my on so many levels. I am grateful for Madeline’s voice that stays relevant for future generations.

Just what I needed during this irrational season..

How appropriate what ME wrote decades ago is for today. As we struggle through this polarized time in our world, it is a great comfort to be brought back to what is important.

Madeleine's Preachy Era

If you enjoyed her previous books in this series you may notice a stark difference beginning with this one. I found this book incredibly off-putting and almost embarassingly ignorant until I did more work to understand Madeleine herself, not just the way she portrays herself. From that understanding the meaning of these books bloomed for me. This is a woman in pain, with nowhere to send or truly express that pain. Now, in the Irrational Season, we should learn to read between the lines.

Poor Madeleine. While she has rarely shied away from including others very personal details in her books and memoirs, she carefully trims away the "unseemly" reality of her own life in The Irrational Season. Far from her previous books in this series, this journal is focused on the external, the choices of others, and how those choices are far inferior compared to the ones Madeleine has made for herself.

Within her rants about liberal sex and anti-choice rhetoric a perceptive reader may note an undercurrent of resentment and anger looking back on a long marriage and the vows, she clearly took incredibly serious, but obviously had many exceptions when it came to Mr. Franklin's behavior. As she rails against the lack of loyalty liberal women seem to feel for their responsibility to get married and have babies, I can only picture young Madeleine being abandoned by her parents at a boarding school and the horror of having what little family interaction she had being ripped away from her and all the times her Husband stepped out of their holy union.

The anger she feels toward her parents and her trifling husband all have nowhere to go and certainly could not be expressed by Madeleine without her feeling as though she broke some unspoken covenant with the past and would no longer be a good woman, good wife. She could not expect loyalty from either her husband or her parents, so she rages at the rest of the world and produces a finely tuned composition of her own life, the life she wanted to live, her own fiction.

Read this book with a sense of tenderness toward Madeleine's humanity. She was fallible, as are we all.