Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a gradual journey of understanding and acceptance rather than a sudden transformation.
Madeleine L'Engle reflects on her conversion experience as being a slow and thoughtful process instead of a dramatic, life-changing event. This highlights the importance of intellectual growth and the alignment of one's beliefs with inner intuition over abrupt revelations.
In practice
In a discussion on personal beliefs and spiritual growth, this quote can be used to illustrate a reflective mindset.
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
Made as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.
Giving is the business of the rich.
It is people who are important, not the masses.
The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
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