The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  Yes, I enjoy my faith, and enjoying my faith frees me to enjoy all the lovely legitimate pleasures of life. Indeed, enjoying my faith helps me to discern which pleasures are legitimate and which are not.

  Story, telling story, listening to story, has been such a large part of my enjoyment, of my legitimate pleasure, that it’s difficult for me to realize that this is not necessarily generally true. All children, I believe, love story, enjoy story, need story. “Tell me a story!” they beg. And then, alas, the grown-up world tells us that story is not true and is only fit for children, who should outgrow it. If story is not true, is it fit for children? Children love story because it is true.

  And Jesus knew and loved story. When he and his disciples plucked corn and ate it on the Sabbath, and were reprimanded for this, Jesus reminded his accusers of the story of David eating the priestly shewbread from the temple when he needed food.

  The story of David and the shewbread is full of depths that Jesus understood and expected his listeners to recognize. David was fleeing from Saul. He asked Ahimelech, the high priest, for food, and all Ahimelech had to give him was the temple shewbread, so David took that. He was also not entirely honest with Ahimelech, telling the priest that Saul, the king, had sent him on a secret mission, rather than telling him the truth—that he was fleeing the king’s anger. Both David and Ahimelech paid heavily for this lie. Doeg, Saul’s chief herdsman, was there, and reported the incident to Saul, who sent for Ahimelech and his priests and accused them of conspiring with David against him. Ahimelech, more honest than wily, replied, “Who of all your servants is as loyal as David, the king’s son-in-law, captain of your body-guard and highly respected in your household?”

  For this honesty Ahimelech and all his priests were killed:

  Doeg the Edomite turned and struck them down. That day he killed eighty-five men who wore the linen ephod. He also put to the sword Nob, the town of the priests, with its men and women, its children and infants, and its cattle, donkeys and sheep.

  Only Abiathar, one of Ahimelech’s sons, escaped, and fled to David, who promised to protect him.

  Jesus, in referring briefly to David’s taking the shewbread from Ahimelech, knew the entire story, and he expected his listeners to recognize it, too. Do we? Are we as scripturally literate as Jesus expected his listeners to be? I am grateful yet again to my Episcopal parents who knew, loved, and shared the great stories of the Bible with me.

  I don’t know how to go to bed without reading, and what I want to read at bedtime is story, good story about interesting people who do brave and honorable and sometimes impossible deeds, and this gives me the courage to be braver myself and to dare things I might otherwise hold back from.

  “You really seem to enjoy your faith,” the young woman said. Yes, I hope I do. So what is it about my faith that I enjoy? I enjoy it because I believe it to be true, not necessarily factual, but true. If it’s factual I don’t need faith for it. I enjoy my faith because I believe that God created this wondrous universe out of love, and that God had fun in the act of Creation—hydrogen clouds and galaxies and solar systems and planets capable of sustaining life, and fish and birds and beasts and us human creatures. And then God rested, and I, too, enjoy my day of rest and (occasionally and wonderfully) several days of rest when I go on retreat.

  I enjoy my faith because it is full of story, marvelous story, and sometimes terrible story. I have just finished reading Alone by Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the incredible story of his desperate months alone at the South Pole. But out of his aloneness came new revelations of his enjoyment of his faith:

  The day was dying, the night being born—but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence—a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres….I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance—that, therefore, there must be purpose to the whole.

  Later in the book Byrd describes his anguish, physical and mental, when he is slowly being poisoned by carbon monoxide from a faulty stove:

  The dark side of a man’s mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions. I found it so with mine. It was as if all the world’s vindictiveness were concentrated upon me as a personal enemy….Eventually my faith began to make itself felt; and by concentrating on it and reaffirming the truth about the universe as I saw it, I was able again to fill my mind with the fine and comforting things of the world that had seemed irretrievably lost.

  Byrd’s faith affirmed my own as I read his story.

  Jesus taught by telling stories, witty stories, bitter stories, funny stories. I turn to the Bible every morning and evening because it is a great storybook and I never tire of great stories.

  But story, like cards and dancing, can be two-edged. Jesus talked of a two-edged sword, and our proclamation of the divinity of Christ can indeed be that. We can give people life with our own heralding of Jesus in our lives, but we must never forget that we can also deal death. We are called on as Christians to affirm and to offer life, but sometimes we can use Jesus to wound; life-giving words can become murderous words of death. During the terrible fires that burned hundreds of houses in Oakland, California, occasionally a single house would be spared, surrounded by the ruins of burned houses. In front of one house that was still standing, in the midst of smouldering foundations of houses that had been totally destroyed, was a large sign: THANK YOU, JESUS.

  That sign stabs my heart. One child said to his parents, “Jesus must hate us. Our house got burned.”

  In the evening of life we shall be judged on love. What kind of love caused that THANK YOU, JESUS sign to be flaunted in front of people whose homes had been destroyed? What kind of judgment of love will be given those people who put up that sign? Surely if my house had been spared I would have been awed and grateful, but I pray that I would not have used Jesus’ love in self-righteous pride. During Hurricane Bob, when the power in northwestern Connecticut stayed on, my heart ached for those areas where there was no power. At the same time, I was truly grateful for my tiny night-light. If I could have offered some of my power to those without it, I hope I would have.

  Share what you have, John the Baptist urged. If you have two coats, don’t gloat; give one of them away. If you have enough food, share it with those who are hungry. Rejoice in the love of God. Indeed, yes, enjoy your faith, but not to the exclusion or hurt of other people. I know of one family in Oakland whose house was burned, and they are people who have always enjoyed their faith, and I believe that they still do, because enjoying our faith is enjoyment in the ultimate, rather than the temporary.

  It is enjoyment in an ultimate victory that can be expressed only in the high language of poetry, not the low language of fact. What can we prove about Christ’s coming in glory? Nothing. It is far beyond the language of limited proof. Indeed, our entire faith rests on a joyous acceptance of the factually impossible. When we celebrate Christmas we are celebrating that amazing time when the Word that shouted all the galaxies into being, limited all power, and for love of us came to us in the powerless body of a human baby. My faith is based on this incredible act of love, and if my faith is real it will be expressed in how I live my life, but it is outside the realm of laboratory or scientific proof. God—the holy and magnificent Creator of all the galaxies and solar systems and planets and oceans and forests and living creatures—came to live with us, not because we are good and morally virtuous and what God’s creation ought to be, but precisely for the opposite reason, because we are stiff-necked and arrogant and sinful and stupid. We have indeed strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep.

  God still loves us so much that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, cam
e to live with us as one of us, and all for love.

  It’s a tough word, love. That love that God showed us at Christmas is beyond our finite comprehension. We can only rejoice. It is glory! It is what makes our hearts sing! It is what makes us enjoy our faith! It blasts the limpness of a factual interpretation into smithereens. Dr. Paul Nathanson, a researcher at McGill University’s Center for Medicine, Ethics, and Law, writes,

  My theory is that the churches are secularizing, and they are jettisoning myth and ritual, the imaginative elements. The Bible is mined for statements to legitimate moral or political stances, but it is no longer taken seriously as something to stimulate the imagination and evoke the sacred.

  When I receive Communion I am partaking in the most sacred myth and ritual of the Christian church (and let us remember that myth is about truth). When we receive the bread and the wine we receive the truth of Jesus’ promise, the truth of his love. We don’t need to get hung up on words like transubstantiation, which tend to take the Eucharist out of the truth of myth and into the wimpiness of fact. What happens when we receive the bread and wine is a mystery, and when we try to explain it in any kind of way we destroy our own ability to partake in the truth of this marvelous and eternally mysterious ritual.

  When we receive the bread and the wine we are indeed taking into ourselves Christ’s love, that love that will be finally expressed in the Second Coming.

  Yes, we are meant to enjoy our faith; I do truly believe that. But our enjoyment involves acceptance of our mortality, of the Cross, and the even deeper wisdom of our immortality. Getting literal about the mighty acts of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ leads to dead ends.

  When Christ was born as a human baby, he ensured that he would die, because death is something that comes to every human being. But because Jesus Christ was wholly God as well as wholly human, he rose from the grave, to the astonishment not only of the Roman overlords and the powerful Jews in the Sanhedrin, but to the astonishment of all those who had been with him during his earthly life. The Resurrection, too, is beyond the realm of fact (Do you believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection? No! I believe in the Resurrection!) and bursts into the realm of love, of truth, for in Jesus, truth and love are one and the same.

  God’s tough love did not stop with the birth in Bethlehem. It shone all through the life of Jesus. The Gospels show him as a strong and uninhibited man who enjoyed his friends, most of whom weren’t “the right people”; he enjoyed his great gift of healing; he turned water into wine at a wedding feast; and he enjoyed his faith, even when no one understood him or why he was on this earth or what he was offering us. How terrible it must have been for him that no one truly understood him—not the disciples, not his friends, not Mary of Magdala, or Mary of Bethany. No one. And he kept on loving, even in his time of total abandonment.

  The story of Jesus is indeed great story, but it goes far, far beyond the realm of provable fact and into the realm of mystery and marvel.

  A few evenings ago two parents were putting their small child to bed. The child fervently thanked God for all the good things that had happened that day, and then added, “And God did it all with his left hand, too!” This child happened to be right-handed, and the curious parents asked, “Why God’s left hand?” And the child replied earnestly, “Jesus was sitting on his right hand.”

  The parents were able to move their little one beyond this literalism, but it is a groove of literalism many people remain stuck in, and that is, indeed, taught in some churches. However, if we take Scripture seriously rather than literally, we discover it has little to say about “moral or political stances,” and instead constantly “stimulate[s] the imagination and evoke[s] the sacred” (Dr. Paul Nathanson).

  One of many things the Bible stories have taught me is that God loves me, just as I am. I don’t have to struggle for some kind of moral perfection impossible to attain. It is the biblical protagonists who, like us, far from perfect, show us how to be truly human. I don’t believe that God deliberately made me with one leg considerably longer than the other, but that is how I am, and I am loved that way, resultant clumsiness and all. I knew that God loves me as I am, so I was able to accept the wondrous truth that my husband did, too—one result of enjoying my faith! For we cannot give love if we cannot accept it.

  Does enjoying my faith imply protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? No. It did not stop my husband from dying prematurely. It did not stop a careless truck driver from going through a red light and nearly killing me. My faith is not a magic charm, like garlic to chase away vampires. It is, instead, what sustains me in the midst of all the normal joys and tragedies of the ordinary human life. It is faith that helps my grief to be creative, not destructive. It is faith that kept me going through the pain at the very portals of death and pulled me, whether I would or no, back into life and whatever work still lies ahead.

  It is faith that what happens to me matters to God as well as to me that gives me joy, that promises me that I am eternally the subject of God’s compassion, and that assures me that the compassion was manifested most brilliantly when God came to us in a stable in Bethlehem. God gave us the wonderful story of Jesus, and that story dignifies my story, your story, all our stories. As we read it in the Gospels we see that Jesus was not only a great storyteller, he also came in for much frightened and irrational criticism. He was accused of having fun with his friends. His enjoyment of his faith, too, was suspect! This joy came from his constant awareness of his Source. And it is that awareness of our Source that takes away our fears and not only allows us, but prods us, even commands us to enjoy our faith.

  John the Baptist proclaimed that Jesus would baptize us with the Holy Ghost and with fire, and that fire is the fire of love, not the fire of a literalistic version of hell, but the fire of love, right here, right now. We are called to love each other, and that call is not for an easy, sentimental love, but for tough love, love that knows when to say No rather than Yes. I have slowly learned that when God says No to my most earnest prayer, that No may well be the prelude to a wonderful Yes I couldn’t even have begun to predict. If I am to enjoy my faith I have to trust the No comes from love, not anger. I have discovered that many people who do not enjoy their faith are afraid of God, afraid because they view God as an angry parent who must constantly be placated lest he vent his anger with unreasonable and irrational noes because we don’t deserve the yeses. If I felt I had to deserve God’s Yes answers I’d be miserable indeed. God says Yes whenever possible because it is our Maker’s pleasure to give us pleasure. We are loved because we are God’s and that love is shown most gloriously through Christ’s presence in our world and in our lives.

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  STORY AS GOOD NEWS

  The four Gospels tell us the story of Jesus, and that is Good News indeed. The Good News is what the word gospel means. We read the Gospels with joy, not with long faces.

  We read the Gospels with joy because in human terms the story they tell is impossible. Jesus said, “With man it is impossible. With God nothing is impossible.”

  In human terms, how can we understand the great good news of the Incarnation? How can we understand the all-powerful, immortal God putting on mortality, sharing with us life and death and all that comes in between, and then offering us the radical joy of the Resurrection? Oh, indeed, yes, in human terms what God offers us is impossible, and it is when we try to limit it to the possible that we get into trouble, terrible trouble. When we limit God’s mighty acts to the possible we can castigate and sometimes kill other Christians because their understanding of Christ is not exactly like ours. We can be terrified of Roman Catholics and refuse to have any statues or images in our churches. We can deny ourselves the nurture of symbol and sacrament because their potency is fearful. Sometimes when I am asked if I am a New Ager, I reply, “No, I am an Episcopalian,” understanding that Episcopalianism is as alie
n to my questioner as the New Age! When we try to define and over-define and narrow down we lose the story the Maker of the Universe is telling us in the Gospels. I do not want to explain the Gospels; I want to enjoy them.

  And that is how I want to read and write the story. This does not mean that story deals only with cheeriness, but that beneath the reality of life is the rock of faith. I ask God to set me upon a rock that is higher than I so that I may be able to see more clearly, see the tragedy and the joy and sometimes the dull slogging along of life with an assurance that not only is there rock under my feet, but that God made the rock and you and me, and is concerned with Creation, every galaxy, every atom and subatomic particle. Matter matters.

  That is the promise of the Incarnation. Christ put on human matter, and what happens to us is of eternal, cosmic importance. That is what true story affirms. Someone asked me why all my stories have happy endings, and I replied, “They don’t. Joshua is killed in The Arm of the Starfish and he’s not going to come back to life. Neither are Maggie’s parents in Meet the Austins. Ron, in The Other Side of the Sun, is shot by Aunt Olivia in order to prevent an even worse death.”

  No, many of my stories do not have happy endings, but I suspect that what made the reader ask that question is that despite the tragedy of life, the stories affirm that it matters. It matters to us; it matters to our Creator. Ultimately there is meaning to tragedy, even if we may not know what it is in this life. Story helps us dare to take seriously Jesus’ promise that every hair of our head is counted—one of the Maker’s joyous exaggerations. Or is it exaggeration? Are there angels whose job is to do such counting? What has happened to Christianity that there is so little joy? (Not mere happiness. Joy. Someone told me that the difference between happiness and joy is sorrow.) Why do we forget the promise of the rock under our feet? Why is there so much fear, so much antagonism, so much judgmentalism? Why do some people read story looking for something to criticize rather than applaud? It is a human tendency to draw together when a common enemy can be found. If there is no real enemy, or if the real enemy is too fearful to be faced, then one has to be made up. That frightens me more than the real enemy.