The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  When my son walked into my room, I said, “Oh, Bion, the last time I was this glad to see you was the night you were born.” My daughter-in-law, Laurie, is a physician. She and Bion were able to talk with the doctors and satisfy themselves that everything was being done for me that needed to be done, and that Deborah’s offer of taking me in when I was well enough to leave the hospital was a firm and good one. But delighted as I was to see these two wonderful young people, I was still too injured to enjoy visiting, and sent them off in their brief time in California to see something of San Diego. And of course they could not stay, but had to get back to Connecticut.

  So I was alone again, and as I gained a little strength I felt a terrible sense of isolation. The trauma my body had suffered wakened all my primordial fears, fear of isolation, fear of being enclosed, fear of dark. I knew that these fears were a result of the accident and that ultimately they would leave, but there was no denying the fact that they were very much with me. One of the nurses suggested that I draw the curtains across the windows to shut out the scaffolding and the workmen. But to do that would have made my small room feel like a tomb. I didn’t care about the workmen; I didn’t want to be shut in. At night I wanted the door to my room open, not only to keep from feeling enclosed, but for the light.

  Because I was no longer in critical condition I saw very little of the overworked nurses; hospitals at this late end of the century are woefully understaffed. I felt lonely, isolated, in pain. Not back into life, yet not out of it. Still too wounded to pray for myself, I was aware enough to be grateful for the prayers that supported me, for the flowers that made my sterile room a bower. I had my small travel radio-alarm clock with me, and San Diego has a good classical music station, so I could listen to music, though I was careful not to keep the radio on constantly and run down the batteries; listening time was precious.

  After a few more days I remembered the red box in the closet in my room that had in it nearly six hundred manuscript pages of the new novel on which I had been working for over two years. The draft I had with me was the seventh. Certain Women was ready to go to the publishers. I had lived with this story and with the story of King David of Jerusalem for all this time. King David, I knew, had been through periods of isolation far more terrible than mine. During wakeful periods in the night I would think that in the morning I might be strong enough to ask for my manuscript, but I was not. It seemed, in fact, that I did my best thinking about it during the long nights. I was now off morphine, so my mind was clear. It, like the rest of my body, suffered from the trauma of the accident, but it was still capable of thinking of my novel and its characters. As so often happens with my stories, the book changed radically as I worked on it. The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search.

  I had started out to write a novel about King David’s eight wives, and I realized fairly quickly that I could not put myself completely into the bodies and minds of women who lived approximately three thousand years ago in a culture completely different from ours. I needed a twentieth-century point of view. What happened was that my twentieth-century cast took over, and the story of King David and his wives became a play that Nik Green, one of the twentieth-century characters, was writing. It didn’t mean that I had to live any less with King David and his wives—and his friends and enemies and his battles and his joy in the Lord—but that this story and its marvelous truth was being approached from a different perspective. King David brought his people from the bronze age into the iron age; what age are we living in? The electronic age? It’s different. We think differently. We certainly live differently.

  Much of the research that went into the writing of the first draft ultimately was put into the enormous pile of discarded manuscript pages on which I write telephone messages for my college-going granddaughters. But I wouldn’t have missed what I learned from it. I read 1 and 2 Samuel and the beginning of 1 Kings over and over, coming to the end of David’s story, and starting again at the beginning. But where is the beginning? It starts long before David’s entry into the tale, perhaps not as far back as the birth of Samuel, but certainly as far back as Samuel’s anointing of Saul as the first king of the Jews.

  Now the problem was that the Jews had never before had a king. They had the Lord, and they had the prophets and patriarchs. They did not need a king. The Lord did not want them to have a king. When the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said, “Now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have,” the Lord told Samuel, “They have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods.” The Lord was not pleased at the people’s clamoring for a king, and el warned them, through Samuel, what would happen when they got this human king, of their own making. This king would take their sons to be soldiers and their daughters to be cooks. The king and his men would take the fields and the vineyards, and everybody would cry out because of the king they had chosen,

  and the Lord will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

  And the Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to them and give them a king.”

  The story of the people of God wanting a human king is told in the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy, in verse 14 through the end of the chapter:

  When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,” be sure to appoint over you the king the LORD your God chooses. He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself….He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees….

  What? What? Saul did not have multiple wives, but David and Solomon certainly did. And Solomon is known for his silver and gold. And if Saul, David, or Solomon wrote out a copy of the law and read it daily, we are not told about it.

  Why did they need a king when they had the Lord? They were God’s chosen. The Lord was with them wherever they went. El had traveled with them in a cloud during the day and with fire by night. El spoke directly with Moses on Mount Sinai and gave them the commandments by which they were to live. They had a heavenly king; they did not need an earthly one.

  But they wanted a king. They did not learn.

  Have we learned?

  * * *

  —

  When the people wanted a king like other peoples, when they turned away from God, they were also turning from home, their real home, the kingdom of God. David himself had a vision of this kingdom, but he also suffered many times of painful homesickness, homesickness for the quiet hills where he tended his sheep, homesickness when his son Absalom turned against him, homesickness for his holy city of Jerusalem, homesickness for the Lord who had, through Samuel, anointed him king after Saul.

  In my hospital bed I was homesick. Here it was August, but I found myself thinking of Holy Week. Lonely week. The most painful part of the story. Jesus, at the end of his earthly mission, facing failure, abandonment, death.

  What kept him going? What keeps us going when we’re in the middle of the worst of it? The knowledge that we are loved by our Creator. Everybody else left Jesus. The disciples, those he had counted on to be with him to the end, all left him in the garden. No o
ne understood who he was, what he was about, what he had come for. How many times in our lives have we faced that utter and absolute abandonment? He knew that his mission had been high, and it was in ruins about his feet.

  He stood in front of Pontius Pilate and he held to his mission and his position because of love, God’s love, which did not fail, not even when he questioned it on the cross.

  What has happened during the centuries to that God of sustaining, enduring, total love? How can we survive without it?

  I cannot. I know I live and die by the assurance that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, and in that Word’s hour of need what pain must God have felt! Jesus was able to endure the agony of Holy Week and of the Cross only because he was never separate from the Source, and never doubted that he was loved or, at least, only for a fragment of a minute.

  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For our sakes Jesus went through all the suffering we may ever have to endure, and because he cried out those words we may cry them out, too. The night I knew my husband was dying I turned, as usual at bedtime, to Evening Prayer. It was the fourth of the month, and the first psalm for the evening of the fourth day is Psalm 22, and I read, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  Don’t confuse me by saying that Jesus was merely quoting David in the Psalms. Allow me to know that Jesus was willing to go through the same kind of anguish that sooner or later comes to us all.

  This is the story that gives meaning to my life, that gave meaning to those draggingly difficult days in the hospital and if it isn’t story it doesn’t work. The life-giving, lifesaving story is true story that transcends facts.

  There’s been considerable interest lately in checking the Gospels and trying to decide what Jesus really said, what he might have said, what he surely didn’t say, and too often the result of such academic research is not illumination, but loss of story. For such academics, miracles have to go. The Resurrection has to go. The story gets edited until there’s no life left in it and there’s nothing worth believing in.

  I read a refutation of this in a magazine that went to the opposite extreme and insisted that every word in the New Testament came out of Jesus’ mouth in exactly those words (in English), which were written down after many years of oral repetition. So we’re still stuck with a literal interpretation of facts, going from one extreme to the other.

  In the hospital in San Diego I didn’t get much comfort from facts. First of all, it’s easy to believe in facts. We certainly don’t need faith, not for facts. Faith is for the part of the story that superficially isn’t believable. Virgin births? Miracles? Resurrections? Unrealistic. Childish.

  Or is it maybe not so much childish as child-hearted? Children are better believers than grown-ups, and better theologians than many academicians. One child whose sister told her that there is no Santa Claus answered calmly, “That’s your problem.”

  In a world where we’re brainwashed by the media into thinking that life should be easy and painless and reasonable, it is not easy or painless or reasonable to be a Christian—that is, to be one who actually dares to believe that the power that created all the galaxies, all the stars in their courses, limited that power to the powerlessness of an ordinary human baby. That’s not reasonable.

  It is equally unreasonable to believe that this ordinary baby grew into a man who was totally human and simultaneously totally divine. Who was, as the Athanasian Creed affirms, totally incomprehensible.

  But who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?

  I remembered a conference during which a man announced, “I am a devout literalist. If I cannot believe that the stories in Scripture are literally and factually true, then I have to accept that there can be more than one interpretation of a story.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “Then how can I know which is the right one?”

  Aye, there’s the rub. We can’t. But one thing I’m learning is that I do not always have to be right. Or maybe we can look at two different interpretations of a story and understand that they are both right. If I have to take every story in the Bible as literal, and capable of only one interpretation, I will lose the story.

  What a story it is! It begins with conception, with Creation, and moves on through life and death to Resurrection, and most of it is impossible in ordinary terms of provable fact. If I have to keep in the Bible only what can be proved, I’ll be left with a book of very few pages.

  * * *

  —

  As July turned into August, and the August days drooped slowly by, I was grateful in the hospital for the prayer of Jesus that stayed with me, a continuing, strengthening rhythm that was as strong as my heartbeat. I was grateful that Jesus left all the good sheep and went out into the storm after the lost and strayed one. I was even grateful that he paid the workers in the vineyard the same amount of money, no matter how long they had or hadn’t worked. I was grateful for his promises to us that were either true or insane. I looked at the bruised and battered matter of my body and I was grateful that I believe that matter matters, matters to me, matters to the God who made it, and who took it on when all Love came to us as Jesus of Nazareth. I was grateful that my faith is more a matter of joy than of security. I was grateful that I still have a lot of questions that I do not expect to have answered, at least not by facts.

  There’s nothing anyone can tell me about death that’s in the realm of laboratory proof or literalism. To think about death is an act of faith, a courage that the unknown is not empty, a belief that God is Love, and Love does not create and then abandon or annihilate. I can’t prove it. Sometimes I don’t even believe it. And then hope, the deep, innate faith, surfaces.

  * * *

  —

  I had been gone from home since the fifteenth of June. Those last two weeks of June were spent teaching a writers’ workshop at Mundelein College in Chicago, where I am very much at home. The first two weeks of July were at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford, at Keble College. Then I met my eldest daughter and her husband in London for four nights of theatre and enjoying friends, after which we had six marvelously stress-free days on a barge in Burgundy. Our one great excitement was going up in a hot air balloon at eight-thirty in the evening, floating through sunset and moonrise over fields of golden sunflowers.

  After the barge we had two nights together in Paris, and then Josephine and Alan took off to continue celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and I flew to San Diego. I had been away from home, I felt, too long, and I had a vague sense of foreboding, a wondering if I would ever be home again.

  We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

  In literature the longing for home is found in the many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the story of the Garden, the beautiful place of love and spontaneity where we were in touch with our Source. But there are stories of an almost-forgotten beautiful place in the myths of all cultures—and of course I am using myth in its ancient meaning—that which was true, that which is true, that which will be true, that strange truth which is as elusive as home.

  We know in our hearts that the Garden was there, the place of beauty and home where we were all what human beings are truly meant to be. And somehow we blew it. We messed it up. We lost it. And we have been homesick ever since.

  It happens over and over again, the move from the beloved home place. It must have been hard on Sarah, when God told her and Abraham to leave home. On Jacob, fleeing, after he had cheated his father and his brother. On Rachel, after Jacob had incurred her father’s wrath. On Joseph, ruthlessly so
ld into Egypt. On Moses, leaving the land of Goshen which was no longer home because the Jews had been made into slaves. On David, fleeing his holy city of Jerusalem because his son was fighting him for the throne. On Mary and Joseph and the baby escaping to Egypt. Leaving home—it is a theme all through Scripture.

  When my mother was growing up in the South it was the norm for people to be born into one village or town, grow up there, marry there, have children, grandchildren, and ultimately die there—sometimes all in the same house. That is no longer the case. We are scattered, almost as radically as the Jews were under the Babylonians. Is it that different when an enormous conglomerate sends its employees all over the country, from one city to another, as the work demands?

  C. S. Lewis points out that our roots are really elsewhere. True. But we do not get to that elsewhere except through our journey in this life on this planet. While we are here we must put down roots so that we will not be uprooted by a passing storm. The roots may reach down through earthly life to “elsewhere,” but they have to go through the earth and our life on earth before getting to “elsewhere.” What else does the Incarnation affirm? Jesus came not to deny life, but to offer life, and life more abundant. We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on “elsewhere,” but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living fully here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both.

  In my book Meet the Austins, the family—which is very close to my own family—has been away, and they are coming home. Vicky Austin says,

  We sang and sang on the way home, and suddenly we were in Clovenford. There was the road up the hill to the hospital, and there was the street that led to Daddy’s office. We passed the school and the church and the store, and then we were driving up our road, and we saw our house, our own beautiful rambly white house, and Daddy was pulling up to the garage, and we were home.