“And you should love me, because I deserve to be loved.” 

That one line in the 2018 film A Wrinkle In Time bothered me enough to write a whole article about it.

The heroine, Meg, speaks these words in the movie’s climactic scene, in which she fights for the soul of her precocious younger brother, who has been possessed by a brain-like demon. 

This line isn’t just a harmless adaptation of the novel, I argued. Instead, it goes so far as to invert the Christian message of L’Engle’s book: that love is given even when it’s undeserved. 

Jennifer Lee, the film’s screenwriter, had publicly stated that she made a conscious choice not to reflect the overt religiosity of the book in her film. 

“In doing so,” I wrote back in 2018, “it becomes a striking example of what filmgoers might lose when creators actively strip originally Christian works of their religious themes.” 

But then, the racial reckoning of 2020 arose. As I pondered Instagram posts about privilege and lamented police brutality, I found myself coming back to my  reflection on the new Wrinkle In Time. 

The film’s director, Ava Duverney, is a Black woman, as is the actress, Storm Reid, who depicted Meg. I’d appreciated the casting choice when I watched the movie (nowhere in the novel are the characters’ racial identities mentioned) but I didn’t see it as bearing on my thesis.  

But two years later, as I reconsidered the line that had so disappointed me, I tried to see it in the context of a Black woman casting a Black girl in an iconic role and having her declare, at the critical moment: 

“I deserve to be loved.” 

In this new conception, I felt like I could hear Meg speak not just to her brother, but to me, a white woman: Listen, and listen well. I deserve to be loved. 

When I wrote the original piece, I had focused my argument on the loss of the doctrine of grace I saw represented in Meg’s words: the crucial message that you are loved even when you don’t deserve it. This is an important lesson for Meg, who is consistently defined by her weaknesses. Meg, in L’Engle’s book, ultimately becomes a sacrificial giver of love, not the demander of it. 

However, Meg’s words in the film do resonate strongly with the reality of the imago dei that is also represented: those created in the image of God have intrinsic worth, no matter how the world casts us. As Sally Lloyd-Jones writes in The Jesus Storybook Bible, “He loved them, so they were lovely.”

I went back to my original article, ready to excoriate myself for not taking enough care with the racial dynamics that added shades of meaning to the film. As I read, I saw missed opportunities to acknowledge Meg’s race and how it may provide interpretive context. I saw a few sentences that I wish I had written more tenderly. But I still felt strongly about the argument: that something precious about the original book was lost in the secularization of the new version.  

I was left with two interpretations of the same 11 words, “And you should love me, because I deserve to be loved”: on the one hand a brave message of empowerment; on the other, a prime example of depleted riches. 

As I’ve considered the simultaneous legitimacy and seeming incompatibility of my Wrinkle takes, I find myself confronted with the bothness of life, so frequently expressed in some of humanity’s central questions. 

Are we defined by weakness or strength? Do we preserve or progress? Do we celebrate or lament? 

Over a year into a global pandemic, it feels as though we’ve been faced with more of these incompatible narratives than ever before. 

How do we hold both joy and suffering? And what does life look like when we need to both act and wait? 

I’m not speaking necessarily of the so-called “gray areas” of life, where what’s right or wrong is unclear because of the complexity of the question. Rather, I’m thinking of the paradoxical situations, the ones when we ask an either/or question and get the answer “yes.”

These questions, I’ve come to realize, demand not a relativistic understanding of reality, but instead a quantum one. 

Modern quantum physicists understand particles to be non-local. That is, they can exist in two places at the same time; things can be simultaneously up and down, or left and right. This “superposition,” as it’s called, collapses only when we observe it; when we seek to impose a one-and-true narrative on the particle, the quality of bothness disappears. 

This tension, this bothness, is a notoriously difficult space to live in. Our brains, quite literally, aren’t wired for it: we actively resist ambiguity and paradox. We want Newtonian laws of interpretation that give us predictable narratives about ourselves, our society, and how and why others act the way they do. We want words to have one meaning, evoking singular interpretations. 

Our polarized politics aren’t helping. Yet the knife-edged political questions on which we so strictly divide ourselves seem to me to be the ones that most require the answer both: 

Do we preserve traditions or progress beyond them?
Is sin personal or systemic?
Is our priority our family or our neighbor?
Are our identities inherent or constructed?
Should we challenge our children or protect them?
Should we trust prayer or science?  

Not all issues call for both. When a police officer murders an unarmed Black teen on camera, it’s Newtonian: measurable, observable, and, to our true disgrace, predictable. But far too often, even the most seemingly obvious narratives miss out on the quantum nature of individuals, communities, and cultures.

Because superposition collapses when measured, it must be inferred from the data, rather than observed. To accept the reality of this paradox requires the utmost interpretive care and attention when drawing conclusions. 

Superposition is woven into the fabric of creation, beckoning us to honor its paradoxes as we interpret the world. Perhaps our best attempt to enter into this bothness is through stories, told attentively and well, in ways that orient us to truths beyond our observation. Through stories like, say, A Wrinkle in Time.

In this moment, I celebrate Duverney’s Meg and seek intentional ways to honor her declaration: she deserves to be loved—indeed, she was created for it. At the same time, I seek to preserve the deep truths of L’Engle’s work and her unwavering commitment to sacrificial love and the depths of grace. 

The quantum reality of life, the bothness of humanity, of our own selves, demands it.