The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. So be it.

  God’s. Not ours. The minute we want it to be ours—and that’s one of the temptations, after all—it’s grief. Grief for us. Grief for God.

  The kingdom and the power and the glory. Where are they?

  It’s been pounded into our heads in the last decade or so that God is neither up nor down; hell is not below nor heaven above. When the astronauts on the moon looked at the earth, there was no up nor down.

  I’m not sure what all the shouting is about, because a God worth believing in is obviously not limited by space or time or place. God includes all time and all space. The God of Creation made it, called it good, and it belongs to the Creator.

  But even if we know that God is not up and is not down, humankind lives by images, and it is sometimes through our earthly images that we catch glimpses of the heavenly. We live on a planet that is bound by the laws of gravity. Gravity pulls us down; levity raises us up. Our images come because of the laws of gravity. We sing:

  Lift up your hearts!

  We lift them up unto the Lord!

  Yea, Amen, Alleluia! There is joy in those words for me.

  But of course, God is not up, therefore we might as well say:

  Throw down your hearts.

  We throw them down before the Lord.

  No. It won’t do. We do have genetically bred images within us, sown by generations beyond our memory. We lift up our hearts in joy. God is the light of the world, and the darkness cannot comprehend it.

  Ultimately the heart’s desire is to move beyond images.

  Meister Eckhart says: “Thou shalt apprehend God without image, without semblance, without means. But for me to know God thus, without means, I must be very He, He very me.”

  When we receive the bread and the wine we pray that God may be in us, and that we may be in God.

  We say the Lord’s Prayer; we tell God’s story, as Jesus has told it to us. We turn to a Love that is far beyond our conscious understanding. It is more of a miracle than the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes.

  It is how we live and move and have our being.

  7

  STORY AS COMMUNITY

  When we say the Lord’s Prayer we do not say it alone, no matter how physically alone we are. We say it in community, the community of the disciples who asked Jesus to tell them how to pray, the community of everyone who has said this prayer in every language throughout the centuries, the community of those who happen to be praying it at the moment we are, whether we are together in church, or whether we are praying alone in our rooms.

  From the ends of the earth I call to you,

  I call as my heart grows faint;

  O set me upon the rock that is higher than I.

  (Coverdale Bible)

  Sometimes when I am feeling isolated I need to be on that rock so that I may have the vision to understand that I am not alone. When I tell my stories, I may be alone at my computer, but storytelling is always an act of community.

  Bedtime has been for me a special community time of storytelling. When my children were little, community was very visible, at home, school, church. But it had special meaning for me as we sat around the dinner table and held hands for grace. And, after the meal was eaten, the dishes done, there was the special time of getting ready for bed, brushing teeth, getting into night clothes, and then gathering together for prayer and story. I liked to start bedtime early so that it could go on longer. We read wonderful stories from books which had been mine as a child, and some of which had been my mother’s. When Hugh and I were raising our family we were not near a bookstore and we did not have extra money for new books. But we already had many shelves full of books. Great stories do not lose their appeal; they can be read over and over, with undiminished enjoyment.

  Perhaps community is especially important to me because I did not have it as a child: first, an only child in a big city, and then an only child in Europe where my parents wandered in the Alps trying to find a place where my father’s injured lungs could breathe with some kind of ease.

  I began to know community when we returned to the United States and I was sent to a second boarding school, Ashley Hall, where I was happy in the nurturing atmosphere of the world of school—the first time that school was community for me, rather than a place of isolation that had to be endured.

  Then there was the community of college, and after that the community of the world of the theatre where I was fortunate enough to find work. Being in a play is somewhat like being part of a great orchestra, and though my roles were the equivalent of the triangle in the orchestra, even the triangle is needed.

  My first conscious understanding of my need for community was the community of marriage, of our growing family, a family of open doors. Because we lived outside the village proper, playmates for our children had to be fetched and carried, and we usually had at least three extra for the weekends.

  Then there was the community of the church, the white-pillared, tall-spired church that stood directly across from our general store in the center of the village of Goshen. It was, for Hugh and me, a return to the church community. We had never left God, but we had rebelled, each of us, against our particular religious establishment. When our children were born we recognized that we needed to move back into a church community, and our church became the center of our lives, as well as the geographical center of the village.

  It was within the community of those who worked for the church, sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, visited the sick, that I first experienced a truly Christian community. I doubt if I will ever experience it in the same way again, because there are very few villages around today as small as ours was then; it, too, has grown.

  Years later, reading for who-knows-how-many times the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and coming across the passage where we are told that in the early days of Christianity you could tell the Christians by their love for each other, it struck me forcibly that for almost a decade I had experienced this kind of love.

  Does that decade sound idyllic? It wasn’t. For many reasons it was one of the most unhappy periods of my life. But I did experience Christian community, and it was this that kept much of what happened—illness, death, rejection—from being destructive. I know that I’m a better writer now because of the conflict and frustration of those years, my most difficult years as a writer, full of rejection slips, and I don’t want to minimize any of the pain.

  I don’t remember ever living without conflict of one kind or another, and I’m not at all sure that life without conflict would be desirable. Perhaps conflict is the tightening of the violin string so that the bow, moving across it, will make music. But the string must be loosened periodically or it will break.

  My choices have always reflected my need of community. A writer must write alone, but I need to have this solitude encircled by community. I can understand the community of marriage, of family, of religious communities, church community, the community of close friends, only in the context of human failure. It is only when I am able to acknowledge my own failures that I am free to be part of a community, and part of that freedom is to be able to accept that the community itself is going to fail. At the very least, it is going to change, and it may die, and this, in worldly terms, is failure.

  The church in our village offered me community and so redeemed my failures as wife, mother, writer. That church is very different today, but that does not change what it gave to me then. It still has much to give me today.

  My church in New York provides a different kind of community. We are a young and enthusiastic congregation, diverse in our approach to God, but this very diversity can be a strength as long as it does not become divisive. One of the ways in which the church offers community is through what is called house churches. We meet on
ce a week in our own geographical neighborhood with others from the congregation, a small group of anywhere from four to twelve, and share singing, Scripture, prayer—voicing our needs, our thanksgivings, and our requests. In an enormous city like New York such a house church can give us that intimate community that began to vanish as the small farms died and more and more people moved to the cities.

  The people in Jesus’ day lived in small communities where people knew each other, and my mother, growing up in what is now a large Southern city, also knew community. Her friends were mostly her cousins.

  The cousinly relations can be important indeed. I think of young Mary, receiving the announcement of the angel, becoming pregnant with God—what a terrifying prospect! How much support did she receive from her immediate family? Joseph, through the ministry of the angel, accepted the incredible story and did not turn her away. But others may not have been equally willing to believe the unbelievable. What about her parents? We are not told how they reacted. Even if they told her they believed her, it may well have put a terrible strain on them.

  So Mary left home and went up to the hill country to her cousin, Elizabeth.

  I know my mother was hurt,

  that she did not understand.

  Despite my Joseph’s keeping me

  she could not hide that she felt shamed.

  Mothers and daughters are too close.

  So I went up into the hill country

  to my cousin Elizabeth—as old

  as my mother, but because she was not

  my mother, she was not too close to

  understand.

  When I was little my cousin

  never laughed at me because I thought

  I talked with God.

  She did not tell me not to make up tales,

  never warned me not to blow up my own importance.

  Because she knew my littleness before God’s thunder

  she took me on her lap and rocked me.

  So I went to her, to the hill country,

  not so much to rejoice with her because

  she, too, was bearing within her womb

  a miraculous babe, but to ask for comfort,

  her understanding that the voice

  I heard had told me true about

  the father of my son.

  Oh, Elizabeth, my cousin, friend,

  My son is grown.

  Your son is dead, and mine….

  Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I need you now.

  I, too, am blessed with cousins, and in the South we claim each other even if the cousinship is remote. It is still a tie that is strong.

  King David had cousins, nephews. His army chief of staff, Joab, was his nephew. He had close friends who remained loyal to him even when it seemed that his son, Absalom, had taken everything from him. And it was this loyalty in the end that prevailed against the ugliness of civil war. I have often wondered what kind of community David’s wives had, living together in a harem, presided over, I suspect, by Abigail, the wife who was older, wiser than the others. Without community they might have been mortal enemies. David had a marvelous way of loving people enough so that they could love each other as well as him, the king.

  Friendship is powerful through the Bible, though I wouldn’t want to have friends like Job’s. Ruth, who was a forbear of Jesus, had a friendship with Naomi that was not unlike the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth.

  I am also blessed with a community of friends. We meet to eat together on a regular basis, because sharing bread and wine is an essential part of community and the time when we tell our stories.

  Many of the stories delight me! My friend Laryn leads conferences and often has to spend the night alone in a motel. One evening when she had finished her job and gone to her room, the phone rang. She answered. It was an obscene phone call. When the man called her a third time, Laryn, being Laryn, said earnestly, “I’m really worried about you. I think you must be very lonely. What I would like to do with you is pray with you, right now…” There was a click on the other end of the line, and no more phone calls. I find myself wondering if Laryn’s loving response didn’t make a difference to that sick person. He probably was lonely indeed, cut off from any kind of nurturing community.

  It is no coincidence that the people who are most aware that they are strangers and sojourners on the earth are the people who are most able to open their doors to the stranger and to receive the blessing the stranger brings. So we should not be surprised that Jesus, despite his awareness of his own migrant condition and his need for solitude—for time to be alone with the Father—also had a close community of disciples and friends. He had no permanent address, appearing and disappearing with disconcerting suddenness. It is only when we are not rigid in our expectations of our communities and when our doors are wide open, that he may choose to come, with the stranger, into our midst.

  8

  STORY AS JOY

  Awhile ago I was at a very large evangelical Christian conference in a Midwest city. After one of my talks a young woman came up to me and said, “You really seem to enjoy your faith.” She added, with a wry smile, “And that immediately makes you suspect.” I must have looked startled, because she said, “Oh, yes, it’s true.”

  She was a nice young woman, and she was not accusing me. Nevertheless it was an accusation, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Do I, in fact, enjoy my faith? And if I do, what does it mean? That trip to the Midwest was the first trip I’d taken since the accident. I was still weak, still in considerable pain. And yet I was being accused of enjoying my faith! On the whole, I was pleased, because it was an affirmation that my faith was not failing me when things were anything but good. My faith, however, did not prevent bad things from happening. It was, in mortal terms, no protection.

  And in immortal terms? St. John of the Cross says that in the evening of life we shall be judged on love. Have we been loving in this life? Has our faith in the Maker of the Universe been so joyful that we have been able to pass that joy on to all we encounter? And how are we to pass on that joy?

  We hear a lot about evangelism today and how the church must pay more attention to evangelism. But mostly evangelism is not what we tell people, unless what we tell is totally consistent with who we are. It is who we are that is going to make the difference. It is who we are that is going to show the love that brought us all into being, that cares for us all, now, and forever. If we do not have love in our hearts, our words of love will have little meaning. If we do not truly enjoy our faith, nobody is going to catch the fire of enjoyment from us. If our lives are not totally centered on Christ, we will not be Christbearers for others, no matter how pious our words.

  What is a religion like where faith is not enjoyed? I remembered a friend telling me that her mother grew up in strict Lutheran country. “If it was fun, it was sin,” she said. “It was as simple as that.”

  Even today there are schools where the students have to sign a pledge saying, among other things, that they will not play cards or dance. Personally, I’m a terrible card player, and I hate gambling, but I’ve played cards for fun with my grandchildren, and it has been fun. When my husband and I went on vacation we played cribbage, and a kind of double solitaire called “Spite and Malice,” and you were supposed to be as spiteful and malicious as possible with your partner, and that was fun, too, because it was a game. My husband was a solitaire player, and he would sit on our bed playing solitaire, with a script in front of him, and learn his lines while moving the cards in his game. The people in my family who play solitaire are those who are good with numbers, who prepare income taxes and do all kinds of mathematical things I can’t do. For them, it is a way of expanding the numerical parts of their brains, and it seems to work well. There’s nothing inherently wicked about it. In fact, what is not particularly enjoyable for
me, was very enjoyable for my husband. My minor mathematical bent comes out in my struggles with Bach fugues on the piano.

  As for dancing, my clumsiness has made me a poor dancer, but I remember with great pleasure one summer on Nantucket Island when I was playing in a lovely summer theatre. After the show was over and the audience had left, we cleared the stage, put on records of Viennese waltzes, and danced peasant fashion, our arms around each others’ waists, and I did much better at this than at ballroom dancing. And it was fun. And quite often it was joy. Fun can frequently be the doorway to joy.

  Is the ban of cards fear of gambling? That your faith is not strong enough to keep you from the snare of gambling? Gambling seems to be a disease, like alcoholism, but, thank God, not everybody has it. We’ve had some hilarious family games of poker-playing with ancient chips. I don’t like gambling any more than I like smoking, and I dislike smoking because it gives me terrible allergies and is a known health hazard; it’s a sin not against moral rectitude but against ourselves, which is what really makes it immoral. And dancing? Yes, it can be very erotic, but sex has been around since Adam and Eve, and dancing can be a healthy way of expressing it. Dancing between man and wife can be a great joy. A popular song when I was young was “Dancing Cheek to Cheek,” and yes, it was erotic, and I didn’t like it unless I really liked my partner, and it did not lead to sexual license.

  Almost everything good can be abused, but that doesn’t make the original good any less good, and if it’s fun, it may well be joy in the Lord and in Creation, not sin. When we deny our legitimate pleasures we are denying the Incarnation, for Jesus came to affirm, not to deny. He enjoyed eating with his friends, and shared food is always sacramental for me. Even good food can be abused, and over-eating can cause all kinds of problems, but that does not mean that all eating is therefore wrong. The confusion of excess with moderation must please Satan enormously.