The Irrational Season

by Madeleine L'engle

  So if pride, usurping the prerogatives of the gods, is the opposite of meek, that begins to give me a better idea of what meekness is.

  One with no pride would therefore be meek, and I can only think of one man who rejected all the temptations of pride, and that is Jesus of Nazareth. So he was meek, then.

  My theology about Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the risen Christ is always wobbly, but I discover that I have no problem at all with Jesus and meekness. He was just as meek when he took a whip and drove the money changers out of the temple as when he turned the other cheek. And certainly his ultimate turning of the other cheek was his acceptance of the cross.

  I keep turning back in my mind to Satan and the temptations, because each temptation implied more than it actually said. It wasn’t only because Jesus himself was hungry that Satan tempted him to turn the stones into bread. There’s also the implication, ‘Come along, turn these stones into bread and you can feed all the poor of the earth.… Nonsense, when you come right down to it, man does live by bread alone. Feed ’em and you’ve got ’em.’ True, as the Grand Inquisitor made clear. But Jesus said the poor are always with us. We may not like it, but that’s what he said. Not that the poor are to be ignored, nor did he ignore them, but he wasn’t out to win them by magic tricks.

  So Satan tried again, innuendoes subtle under the words. “Well, then, just throw yourself down from this great height. You know the angels will hold you up lest you hurt your foot against a stone—one of those stones you so foolishly refused to turn into bread. But just jump! What a spectacle that will be for the mob! They’ll adore it—and you.”

  But that kind of adulation had long since been rejected by Jesus. It was Simon the Magus who fell for it—and from it. And a few others who have been more impressed by the magician than by the priest.

  “Oh, well, then, just worship me,” Satan cajoles, “and I will give you all the glories of the world, right now, without any waiting, without any suffering, without any cross.”

  And Jesus still said, No.

  Worshipping Satan is more like worshipping ourselves than anything else, and Jesus never confused himself with the Father. It was always, ‘Not I, but the Father.’ There was no hubris in Jesus, and if we want to know what meekness is, we must look to him.

  And to his mother. I wish we weren’t so afraid to love the most holy birth-giver, as the Orthodox call her. It takes great courage to be truly meek, and the best description of meekness I know is the first four lines of the Magnificat.

  My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my

  Saviour.

  For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.

  For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

  For he that is mighty hath magnified me; and holy is his Name.

  It’s not nearly as meek and mighty in the new translations. I don’t want my meekness watered down.

  And how am I, myself, to be meek? Meekness is something else which is not a do-it-yourself activity. Meekness is so wild that most of us don’t have the courage for it and certainly would not ask for it willingly.

  Who shoved me out into the night?

  What wind blew out the quavering light?

  Is it my breath, undone with fright?

  This is the Kingdom of the Beast.

  For which will I provide the feast?

  Who once was daft, with fear am dafter.

  Who went before? Who will come after?

  Who in this darkness sends me laughter?

  I cannot pray, but I am prayed,

  The prey prepared, bedecked, arrayed.

  The dark is sound against my ear,

  Is loud with clatter of my fear.

  I hear soft footsteps padding near.

  I, who have fed, will be the eaten,

  Whose dinner will I sour or sweeten?

  This is not hell, nor say I damn.

  I know not who nor why I am

  But I am walking with a lamb

  And all the tears that ever were

  Are gently dried on his soft fur,

  And tears that never could be shed

  Are held within that tender head.

  Tears quicken now that once were dead.

  O little lamb, how you do weep

  For all the strayed and stricken sheep.

  Your living fur against my hand

  You guide me in this unseen land,

  And still I do not understand.

  The darkness deepens more and more

  Till it is shattered by a roar.

  Lamb, stop! Don’t leave me here alone

  For this wild beast to call his own,

  To kill, to shatter, flesh and bone.

  Against the dark I whine and cower.

  I fear the lion. I dread his hour.

  Here is the slap of unsheathed paws.

  I feel the tearing of his claws,

  Am shaken in his mighty jaws.

  This dark is like a falcon’s hood

  Where is my flesh and where my blood?

  The lamb has turned to lion, wild,

  With nothing tender, gentle, mild,

  Yet once again I am a child,

  A babe newborn, a fresh creation,

  Flooded with joy, swept by elation.

  Those powerful jaws have snapped the tether,

  Have freed me to the wind and weather.

  O Lion, let us run together,

  Free, willing now to be untame,

  Lion, you are light: joy is in flame.

  It is only when the lion has me in his jaws that I am shaken into the courage to be meek.

  I knew meekness when John, friend and doctor, dropped my newborn son between my breasts and said, “Madeleine, here is your son,” and this after nearly forty-eight hours of work. I knew meekness half an hour later when the placenta wouldn’t come and I began to hemorrhage and spent the next hours fighting for my life. I remember thinking, “Hugh will have to marry Gloria to take care of the children,” and immediately I thought meekly, “No! I am going to take care of my own children! I am going to be Hugh’s wife! I have more books to write!” And then all thoughts had to stop and all concentration had to go into breathing, simply breathing, because I knew that as long as I could breathe I was still alive. The foot of the bed was raised into shock position yet I knew exactly what was going on. I tried to concentrate on nothing but keeping one breath following the one before as the doctors struggled to get a needle for a transfusion into veins which kept collapsing on them. And I kept on meekly breathing. A fresh doctor was called in, one who wasn’t exhausted with the struggle of holding, by hand, the uterus closed in order to stanch the flow of blood. The needle found a vein which would hold it, and life-giving blood began to move in my veins, and I meekly kept on breathing, for my babies, for my husband, for my work, and the breathing itself was prayer, please God, please God, please God …

  And the pain was bad, bad, and I kept on breathing and saying Please God …

  And after several hours I was all right, and my son was brought to me and put in my arms and my soul magnified the Lord …

  It strikes me how each Beatitude leads into the next. Poverty of spirit gives us the humble courage to mourn, which in turn frees us to be meek.

  But what’s this about inheriting the earth? Would we even want it? When God in his strangeness has allowed us to make such an incredible mess of it?

  But an inheritance is nothing we ask for or earn or deserve. It is something we are given by the testator, and we can either accept or betray the responsibility.

  We need not wait for God

  The animals do judge

  Of air and sea and grass

  Accusing with their eyes

  Waiting here en masse

  They cry out with their blood

  The whale caught in surprise

  By oil slick’s killing sludge

  The cow with poisoned milk

  The elephant’s mute
d roar

  At radioactive food

  The tiger’s mangy hide

  The silkworm’s broken silk

  (The animals do judge)

  The dead gulls on the shore

  Mists of insecticide

  Killing all spore and sperm

  Eagle and owl have died

  Caterpillar and worm

  The snakes drag in the mud

  Fallen the lion’s pride

  Butterfly wings are bruised

  They cry out with their blood

  Cain! Killer! We are blamed

  By beast and bird condemned

  By fish and fowl accused

  We need not wait for God

  The animals do judge

  Adam and Eve stopped being responsible stewards of the earth when they were tempted by Satan to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ‘and ye shall be as gods.’

  Our mythic ancestors crashed on the tragic flaw of hubris and so they were no longer meek.

  We are very blessed that it is the meek who are to inherit the earth, for they can be trusted with it.

  Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

  The planet earth is filled with starving people.

  What are we hungry for?

  What are we thirsty for?

  When I was in boarding school, one of the very youngest girls stole a watch. She was eight years old. Her parents were divorced. Her father was trying to forget this not very mute reminder of his broken marriage. Her mother flitted from pleasure spot to pleasure spot. There was no room in her frenetic life for a child.

  So the little girl stole a watch she didn’t want or need, because she was so hungry for love that she had to reach out, blindly, for something, anything, to assuage her hunger.

  We’re all hungry for something. Uncontrolled overeating usually masks an unacknowledged hunger. We have to know what we are hungry for before we can hunger and thirst after righteousness. Man does not live by bread alone, but bread does matter; it is not easy to hunger and thirst after righteousness with a belly bloated from starvation and bones bent with rickets.

  What is righteousness, anyhow? Like meek, it is a word which has lost most of its original power. I’m afraid it gives rise in me to pictures of gaunt women with thin, repressed lips, who know absolutely what is right and what is wrong, and certainly anything which is fun is wrong.

  But that’s self-righteousness, and no one ever said, ‘Happy are the self-righteous.’

  Since it helped me to understand meekness when I looked to Jesus, I look to him again to try to avoid all our distortions of righteousness. What do I see?

  I see a man compassionate and gentle with women in a day when this was extraordinary. I remember that the first miracle was turning water into wine at an Oriental wedding feast, and this kind of wild party would definitely be disapproved of by our self-righteous friend. His power is so great that more than once he brings the dead back to life, and yet he feels the power drain from him when the hem of his garment is grasped by the woman with the issue of blood. He has a robust sense of humor, and small children love him.

  Righteousness begins to reveal itself as that strength which is so secure that it can show itself as gentleness, and the only people who have this kind of righteousness are those who are integrated and do not suppress the dark side of themselves.

  After the baptism there was no question in Jesus’s mind as to who he was, and it was this self-knowledge which enabled him to see through the snares and delusions of the temptations. Most of us don’t have that certainty, and so we are hungry and thirsty for the wrong things.

  It is only when I know myself as a child of God by adoption and grace, a child of a God so loving that he notes the fall of every sparrow, calls all of the stars in all of the galaxies by name, and counts the very hairs on every head, that I am free to accept all of myself, the dark and the bright, and so become free to hunger and thirst after righteousness—and righteousness, ultimately, is a person.

  And in this person, righteousness includes the strength of forgiveness—a righteous person has a forgiving heart. The ancient Hebrew understood the word righteousness to include judgment, not the cold judgment of blind justice, but a judgment which must be tempered with mercy if it is to be righteous. Heaven knows, the best of us, in looking toward our own judgment, pray that justice will include clemency and compassion. I cannot think of any instance where I could throw the first stone.

  ‘Forgive us our trespasses (or debts or sins or whatever) as we forgive those who trespass against us’ means exactly what it says. As we forgive, so shall we be forgiven.

  If I am to hope to hunger and thirst after righteousness, then my heart as well as my will must know forgiveness. There are still things I cannot remember without an upsurge of pain, which means that I have not yet completely forgiven, no matter what my intellectual self has said. Deep wounds must heal from the inside out, and this may take a long time, but I must be very careful to do nothing to slow or hinder the healing. Until the memory of a hurt no longer pains me, I have not forgiven the hurter.

  When I am angry with husband, children, friend, it is impossible to hunger and thirst after righteousness. This doesn’t mean that we are never to get angry—Jesus got very angry on occasion; we mustn’t stay locked in anger, but must move on out to forgiveness and reconciliation—and suddenly we’ll find that we have been filled.

  Righteousness leads directly into Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

  But mercy goes further than that forgiveness taught us in the Lord’s Prayer. The human being is given the ability to forgive, but that capacity of mercy which not only forgives but also removes the sin is more than human.

  The English language, despite what we have done to it with all our jargons, is still extraordinarily rich and powerful in quality, though not in quantity, of words. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews used many words where we have been satisfied with one. As there are many words for our one love, so with mercy. The Hebrew chesed is seen over and over again in the Psalms, and Coverdale frequently translates it as loving kindness, that continued forbearance shown by God even when his chosen people are slow to keep his commandments and swift to turn to foreign gods.

  Another Hebrew word for mercy is rachamim, which has to do with tender compassion, the care of the shepherd for the stray lamb, the pity shown to the weak and helpless. And there is chaninah, a joyful, generous mercy, loving and kind.

  So mercy, as all the other Beatitudes, is a Christ-like word, and I must look for understanding of it in the small and daily events of my own living, because if I do not recognize it in little things I will not see it in the great.

  Again my children teach me. One time, shortly after we had moved back to the city and our children were still young—seven, ten, and twelve—we spanked our son for something the younger of his sisters had done. I don’t remember what it was; he was spanked because his father thought he was lying, rather than for any misdeed, and that is not the point of this memory, which is a happy one, so happy that it was easy to find the place where I had recorded it in my journal:

  Bion was spanked this afternoon for something Maria had done. And when Maria heard about it when she came home from Scouts she was upset, truly upset that Bion had been punished for something he hadn’t done. So we ran to the subway to go down to judo class where Bion was with Hugh, to clear everything up. Hugh had been terribly upset when he spanked Bion, as he thought Bion was lying to him. And I was so proud of Maria for owning up, and for being concerned. And the wonderful thing was how happy and loving both Maria and Bion were all evening. We had a hilarious dinner, playing buzz (the math game), which we had such a wonderful time with last night, and laughing almost as hard over it tonight. Funny how something like that can serve to clear the air.

  It was the laughter and joy of that evening which is proof of the mercy which mediated between sunside and nig
htside. I can conceive of forgiveness without this hilarity, but not mercy, which is the step beyond and leads to joy.

  O HILARITAS

  According to Newton

  the intrinsic property of matter on which weight depends is

  mass.

  But mass and weight vary according to gravity

  (It is not a laughing matter).

  On earth a mass of 6 kilograms has a weight of 6 kilograms.

  On the moon a mass of 6 kilograms has a weight of 1 kilogram.

  An object’s inertia (the force required to accelerate it)

  depends entirely on its mass.

  And so with me.

  I depend entirely on a crumb of bread

  a sip of wine;

  it is the mass that matters

  that makes matter.

  In free fall, like the earth around the sun,

  I am weightless

  and so move only if I have mass.

  Thanks be to the creator

  who has given himself

  that we may be.

  If I look at the Beatitudes not only as though each were a description of Jesus, but also as a definition, they shine in a powerful and brilliant light, so that light and darkness are suddenly alike. He is poor in spirit as we are seldom able to be, because we are seldom that spontaneous. He mourns with them that mourn and dances with them that rejoice and is criticized for both. He is meek, that lamb who is also lion. He hungers and thirsts, as we do, and offers himself to assuage our hunger and thirst, and so we are filled. He is merciful, with a compassion and joy beyond forgiving. There is the power of life and death in his mercy, and it is good to remember this each time we receive the power of his mercy in the bread and wine.

  It is only this extraordinary unstrained quality of mercy which helps me to make any sense out of Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

  This is a rough one. We all know that no one can see God and live, it’s all through the Bible. And it isn’t only a Judaeo-Christian idea—it’s in Greek and Roman mythology: in fact, it’s a basic presupposition of humankind.

  When Semele insisted on seeing Zeus in all his glory she was immediately incinerated. The human being is charred to ash by the glory of the living God. So who has seen God and lived? Who was that pure in heart?