The Irrational Season

by Madeleine L'engle

  and there was something in his glance

  and in the way his hand rested briefly

  on the matted head of a small boy

  who was getting in everybody’s way,

  and I knew that if only I could get to him,

  not to bother him, you understand,

  not to interrupt, or to ask him for anything,

  not even his attention,

  just to get to him and touch him …

  I didn’t think he’d mind, and he needn’t even know.

  I pushed through the crowd

  and it seemed that they were deliberately

  trying to keep me from him.

  I stumbled and fell and someone stepped

  on my hand and I cried out

  and nobody heard. I crawled to my feet

  and pushed on and at last I was close,

  so close I could reach out

  and touch with my fingers

  the hem of his garment.

  Have you ever been near

  when lightning struck?

  I was, once, when I was very small

  and a summer storm came without warning

  and lightning split the tree

  under which I had been playing

  and I was flung right across the courtyard.

  That’s how it was.

  Only this time I was not the child

  but the tree

  and the lightning filled me.

  He asked, “Who touched me?”

  and people dragged me away, roughly,

  and the men around him were angry at me.

  “Who touched me?” he asked.

  I said, “I did, Lord,”

  So that he might have the lightning back

  which I had taken from him when I touched

  his garment’s hem.

  He looked at me and I knew then

  that only he and I knew about the lightning.

  He was tired and emptied

  but he was not angry.

  He looked at me

  and the lightning returned to him again,

  though not from me, and he smiled at me

  and I knew that I was healed.

  Then the crowd came between us

  and he moved on, taking the lightning with him,

  perhaps to strike again.

  The woman with the issue of blood was both cured and healed, and that is easy to understand, but curing and healing are not always the same thing.

  It is always all right to pray for healing. It is also all right to pray for curing as long as we are willing to accept that this may not be God’s will, and as long as we are willing to accept God’s will rather than our own. Above the lintel of a church in New England are carved these words:

  REMEMBER, NO IS AN ANSWER.

  But we don’t like Noes; and sometimes we like the Noes of God less than any other No. This is a problem prayer groups must face. I believe in the power of prayer to heal, and in the power to cure as well as heal—for curing and healing are like mind and heart when they are separated. One young man told me of being called home from college to see his father in the hospital. His father had been ill for a long time, and he was warned that this was probably the end, and he was rebellious and angry. His father was in his early fifties, an active and brilliant man. It was not time for death. But when my friend got to the hospital and saw his father, his anger ebbed. He told me later, “I find this very difficult to explain, but I knew that my father was healed. I told this to my sister, and she said, ‘But Dad’s dying, the doctor says so.’ And I tried to tell her that that didn’t make any difference. I knew that Dad was dying, that death was very close, but I also knew that Dad was healed. And so it was all right.”

  That was a profound lesson, and few of us learn it so young. I think I learned, in nightside, at any rate, something of this lesson at the time of Father’s dying; and when I was asking God, “Do whatever is right, do whatever is right for Father,” what I was asking for was healing for this brave man.

  I have witnessed the healing which is more profound than curing, several times in my adult life. There was one young girl, a few years ago, who came frequently to the Cathedral, borrowed books from the library, found on the Close the kind of accepting community she was seeking. She was a pretty girl, with soft blue-black hair, and matching blue-black eyes with long, fringed lashes, too pretty for her own good. She wasn’t very bright; not retarded, but just not quite up to making any kind of adult decision. She leaned too heavily on a few of us, and we tried, as best we could, to help her be her own self. Until she was stricken with an acute and especially painful form of cancer. The symptoms had been there for over a year, but she had tried to pretend to herself that if she didn’t look at them they’d go away, and when she finally told someone, and was taken to the doctor, the disease was so far gone that there was nothing to do but put her in the hospital and hope that the end would be swift.

  One time when I went to visit her she clung to me and repeated over and over again, “I’ll be all right as long as you don’t leave me alone.”

  I don’t think that anyone prayed that Bethie be cured. But we all knew that she had no tolerance whatsoever for pain, and that she was not equipped to bear the pain which we were told was an inevitable part of her form of cancer. So we prayed that she not have more pain than she could endure.

  Bethie herself had no faith in her own prayers, and absolute faith in the prayers of half a dozen or so of us.

  She was able to leave the hospital. She came back to the Cathedral, where she was given odd jobs. For about six months she worked happily in her adopted family, and took aspirin for what she called her arthritis; the doctors told us that cancer was so deep in her bones by this time that morphine shouldn’t have been able to cut the agony. When she went back to the hospital, she was only there a few days before she died, and someone was with her all the time, and the prayers never stopped, and the pain never got too bad to be relieved.

  As far as I am concerned, that is miracle, corroborated by the doctors. Bethie wasn’t cured. She died. But she was healed.

  There’s a lot about this kind of healing that I don’t understand. The gift of intercessory prayer is not mine, though that does not let me off from praying for others. I know that when I prayed for Bethie, I hurt. I don’t think it was physical pain, but it was pain. During her dying I would wake up at night and pray for her, and this praying hurt. I knew that there were others praying for her, too, and that they, too, were probably hurting, and hurting worse than I. In some way all of us together took Bethie’s pain. I doubt if one of us could have done it alone; it would have been too much—though sometimes we are required to bear what is too much and we are given the strength to bear it. And what we bear is not, I think, pain by substitution, about which I am wary. I think of the stern face of the Christ in the mosaic in Istanbul, and know that when and if I am required to take such a burden without help, I will be given strength to do it; it will not be my strength, but it will be available for me.

  One of my favorite cousins had, at one period, excruciating back pain, and she had an old friend with the gift of healing in her hands who used to come and massage her back. The old woman would knead gently, and then she would take her hands and rub them, hard, against the carved posts of the bed, and Lacy asked her why she kept on doing this.

  “Why, Miss Lacy, I take the pain from your back, and I have to put it somewhere, and it’s not going to hurt the bedpost, so I put it there.”

  That explains something to me, but it’s still in the realm of mystery and miracle—not magic, definitely not magic, which has to do with man, but with miracle, which has to do with God.

  And it helps, when we are praying for others, if we have some understanding of what we are praying about. I can pray better about pain, because I have had severe pain. Whether this is my ill fortune or my good, it does help to enlarge my capacity for compassion for those in pain.

  One compassionate and
deeply loving Russian Orthodox priest said that he was often baffled when asked to intercede for those who were ill, because their suffering did so much good for their souls. This sounds callous, but it isn’t. I’m sure he wouldn’t have hesitated to pray for Bethie. I think that it has something to do with my theology of failure, and the Noes of God, and that out of the events in life which seem most negative, positive joys are born.

  When I was nine or ten I had my first attack of iritis, a little-known disease which causes an inflammation of the iris. When I had a second attack the following year, the doctor told my mother, in my hearing, that if I had a third attack, I would go blind. So the shadow of blindness has always loomed over me. But it has also caused me to see far more than I might have otherwise. This visual awareness is an extraordinarily positive joy.

  Medicine knows more about iritis than it used to. I have had more than a dozen attacks, and although each one sends me into momentary panic, I have come out of it and, again, am more intensely and joyously aware of everything I see than I was before.

  A few years ago the effects of iritis caused secondary glaucoma. This complication was compounded by the fact that the eye drops which are essential for the control of glaucoma irritate iritis, and the medication for iritis increases the high pressure of glaucoma. A vicious circle. A terrifying circle. I was very much afraid. My eyes’ reaction to the eye drops was not good. I knew that these were essential if my sight were not to be destroyed by glaucoma, but they gave me a constant headache, and acute photophobia; I, who so much loved the light, could see nothing when facing directly into light.

  This threat has been with me for so long that its very familiarity was a help. Like Bethie, I did not pray for myself. It was not so much that I had no faith in my own prayers, as that intuition told me to leave God alone about this, and let others do the praying. I did not hesitate to ask for prayers, I went running to my confessor. I asked him for (at the very least) courage. I told him that I was incapable of being brave for myself, but that I could be brave for those who expected me to be.

  Now, five years later, I know that his prayers, the prayers of a number of Sisters, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, of friends, of companions, of all kinds of people with the gift of intercessory prayer, are responsible for the fact that these two incompatible eye diseases have kept at least a kind of truce. I may not see as well as I used to, and I am, as always, myopic, and can’t see two feet in front of my nose without my glasses, but I SEE. I see to revise my own manuscripts. I see the faces of those I love. I see sunsets and mountains and babies and rain and daffodils and snow and oceans and storms and daybreaks.

  One winter a young English priest came to stay at the Cathedral for a semester of sabbatical leave. He was taking one or two courses, and he did most of his studying in the pleasant Cathedral library. Obviously we did a good bit of talking: about his life in England; about the girl he hoped to marry; about the failures of the established Church on both sides of the ocean; about his studies; about a paper he was writing on intercessory prayer. I told him about Bethie.

  One day he pointed at something far across the Close, and when I couldn’t see it, he was concerned. I made light of it, but a couple of days later he asked me if I would be willing to accept healing for my vision.

  “Ewen, of course I would, but I’m really all right, you know. Lots of people can’t see things as far off as you can.”

  But he said that he was well aware that there was more to it than that. Wouldn’t I like to be able to go outdoors without dark glasses? to drive a car again? Wouldn’t I like to be able to see as well as I once used to?

  Again I told him that of course I would, but that I already knew healing, that the very fact that I saw, that I was still visually functional, was miracle, and miracle enough.

  “But could you accept healing?”

  “Of course I could. But I can also accept it if this is not what God wants for me. I’ve learned a lot from having to accept a few limitations on my rugged independence.”

  I had also been through days of painful rebellion and struggle, and had worked through to at least a kind of acceptance, largely during several days spent alone on retreat at the House of the Redeemer, where the Sisters lovingly protected my silence, fed me, and shared their Offices with me. I did not at that time tell them that I had come to do battle with panic, but they helped me without words, and I worked out my fear and rage in silence and prayer, and when silence and prayer were too much for me, in writing reams of poetry. Perhaps the most useful was one I called

  ABRAHAM’S CHILD*

  Towards afternoon the train pulled into the station.

  The light came grey and cold through the dirty glass panes of the terminal roof,

  and the passengers on the platform blew upon their hands and stamped their feet,

  and their breath came out like smoke.

  In the comfortable compartment I leaned back against the red plush of the seat

  and looked out the window. All the signs were in a language I could not read.

  I got out my passport and held it, waiting in readiness.

  My papers were in order and the train was warm.

  The conductor slid open the door to the compartment and said to me,

  “This is the last stop on this train. You will have to get out.”

  I held out my passport. “No, no, my journey’s barely half over,”

  and I told him the cities through which the train was going to pass.

  He handed me back my passport and said again, “You will have to get out,”

  and he took me by the arms and led me from the train. His hands were so strong

  my arms cried out in pain. On the platform it was cold.

  “But I don’t know where I am!” I cried, “or where I am going.”

  “Follow me,” he said. “I have been sent to show you.”

  Through the glass of the station roof I could see the sun was going down

  and a horror of great darkness fell upon me.

  “Come,” the conductor said. “This is the way you are to go.”

  And he led me past the passengers waiting on the platform

  and past the foreign signs and a burning lamp in this strange land

  where I was a stranger. He led me to a train with no lights, and broken windows,

  and a pale wisp of smoke lifting from a rusty engine, and said,

  “Get in. This is your train.”

  I fell upon my face and laughed and said, “But this train isn’t going anywhere.”

  And he said, “Get in,” so I got in, and through a hole in the roof I saw the stars.

  He said, “You may sit down,” and I sat on a wooden bench

  and he put my satchel on the rack over my head. “I must have your passport.”

  I gave it to him. “Where are we going?” I asked. The train was cold.

  “The way will be shown,” he said, and closed the compartment door.

  I heard a puff of steam. The old engine began to pull the dark car

  and we ventured out into the night.

  It was not that I did not believe in prayer in general, or in Ewen’s prayers in particular, because I did. Of course I wanted to drive again, to be able to go out into the bright sunlight without pain. I don’t know why something in me was bothered by Ewen’s questions. It’s partly prickly pride if anybody notices any curtailment of my independence. But it was more than that. Ewen and I had become friends. I really didn’t mind his knowing my visual limitations.

  He persisted. “But you wouldn’t reject healing?”

  “Of course not. I don’t have any masochist or martyr complexes. I just want you to understand that the fact that my eyes are still seeing is already the result of prayer. I already know miracle. I expected to be blind long before now, and I am not. My marvelous present eye doctor doesn’t cluck gloomily like the last one and give me dour warnings. He just tells me he’ll keep me going, and I believe him. I see, Ewen. I see y
ou. God has already said Yes in all kinds of ways.”

  But his loving heart wanted me to see perfectly. One unusually quiet morning when almost everybody on the Close was tied up with a big conference, we locked the library door and prayed. It was a beautiful and healing experience. We prayed for each other. The sound of tongues was limpid and lovely. I shall never forget that morning. And I was healed.

  Not my eyes. For a few days nothing changed. Then, shortly after Ewen’s brief sabbatical was up and he had returned to England, I became radically allergic to my eye drops, an allergy which manifested itself by a black headache. I lost the rest of that spring and summer to pain. My doctors tested me for everything, from brain tumors on down, to make sure that the eye problems were not masking another cause for the headache. The pain was so severe that I was unable to write, and usually I can write my way through anything. I managed to stay on my feet, to cook the meals. But I was anything but whole, and it seemed particularly ironic that this should have happened almost immediately after the beautiful morning of prayer with Ewen when I had felt so strongly the presence of the Spirit.

  Ewen had said to me, “I don’t think God can want anybody not to be whole. Of course he wants your eyes to be perfect.” And I thought of the Orthodox priest who found it difficult to pray for his people who were ill and in pain, and I said, “I think God wants us to be whole, too. But maybe sometimes the only way he can make us whole is to teach us things we can learn only by being not whole.” And I remembered reading The Limitations of Science, by J. W. N. Sullivan, the only book which made sense to me during my dark agnostic period, and the book he wrote on Beethoven, in which he said that Beethoven’s deafness was necessary for his full genius. As I think over Beethoven’s work chronologically, this seems to be indisputable. How amazing to think that the paeon of joy in the great Ninth Symphony was written when Beethoven was totally shut off from any external sound. And Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he was blind.

  I don’t think that my months of pain had anything to do with Ewen’s prayers for my eyes. Ewen is truly ‘a beautiful person’ (I wish that had not become jargon); he lives his faith; he is dearly loved by his parish and he ministers to each of his lambs with a tender and constant gentleness which leaves me in awe. And I don’t think either of us was to ‘blame.’ It wasn’t our ‘fault.’ I do think that there were things I had to learn from those bad months. One of my friends, a wise and compassionate woman, was so distressed by my pain one afternoon when she dropped in to see me that she asked, “If it’s going to go on like this, wouldn’t you rather be blind?” And my immediate response was, “No!” Anything, anything to be able to keep on seeing those I love, the world around me.