The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  Some people, in an effort to avoid all pain, try to focus on a literal Resurrection, which is a painless Resurrection. But I suspect the Resurrection may be as traumatic as birth, for it is indeed a new and cosmic birth. The Cross and the Resurrection are inseparable. There is no resurrection until there has been a death. Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

  Meditation is the practice of death and resurrection. When we include meditation as part of our daily practice of prayer we are not dabbling in New Age-ism. We are simply letting go of that conscious control we hold so dear; we are opening ourselves up to the darkness between the galaxies which is the same as the great darkness in the spaces within our own hearts. Only if we have such faith in the reality of the happy ending can we let go of everything we think of as being ourselves, knowing that the Maker of the Universe who has Named us into being is there, waiting for us, calling us into deeper being. Occasionally those who meditate (the wise old women, male and female) are given the further gift of contemplation, which is beyond human thought. And until we can let go of our conscious, cognitive selves in this way, we are not ready for the happy ending.

  If we look for the happy ending in this world and according to the standards of this world, we’ll never find it. We can’t earn it; we don’t deserve it; there’s no way we can acquire it, no matter how many merit badges we manage to pile up.

  And it came to pass…Once upon a time…A story is a beginning, and the very fact that we are telling a story affirms our belief in redemption.

  The real princess and the younger son and their adventures—after the beast has been kissed and turned into a prince—are blessed by marriage, by the two protagonists living happily together ever after and ruling their kingdom with prudence and power.

  But the beast and the princess and the journey are not without us, but within us, and we ourselves are the kingdom over which they are now to rule. The happy ending does not come automatically, and it does not come free. We must embark on the Quest, knowing that it involves great dangers. We are not protected by our goodness or our own superior powers. We know we are not qualified, and we rejoice in being servants. The happy ending begins with our recognition of our wholeness, which is symbolized for us in the elements of the fairy tale. We are much more than we know, and we can begin to find that more through our willingness to go on the Quest, and to welcome in ourselves the younger son, the elder brother, the true princess, the benevolent king, the enchanted beast, the wise old woman, all leading towards that redemptive fulfilling of the journey which is our story.

  The happy ending is part of our calling Jesus Lord, and that is a sheer, unadulterated gift of the Holy Spirit, sometimes given us when we least expect it, and sometimes so gently that it is a long time before we even recognize it. Someone who loudly affirms Jesus as his personal Saviour may be further from knowing the Lord than someone who lovingly longs to be able to do so and hardly dares, knowing the enormity of such an affirmation and the incredible responsibility it brings. If we are to affirm Jesus as Lord, we must model our behavior on his, though sometimes when we ask, “What would Jesus do?” there is no easy answer.

  Even when there is no answer, hoping to do what Jesus would do is still the gift of the Holy Spirit, and because God’s time and our time are as radically different as the mortal body and the cosmic body, the gift begins at our baptism. As Archbishop William Temple says, the more we are enabled to start dying now, the less noticeable the transition will be when we come to our physical death which, if we are allowed to enter it knowingly, not drugged and strung up on life-support systems, can be our greatest and deepest offering of self in meditation.

  Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me was in the rhythm of my breathing and my heartbeat from the moment the truck hit the car until I went under the anesthetic. And when, after the surgery, I woke up, Lord Jesus Christ was still with me. There have been times, during the slow period of recuperation, when I have wondered why I am still alive. Why didn’t I die there and then? Why have I not visibly grown spiritually? I was truly willing to die; I was not afraid.

  So shouldn’t my waking from anesthesia have shown me and all my friends a new me? Shouldn’t my monsters have vanished, leaving a wise old woman? Wouldn’t you expect that I’d have become some sort of a saint, more deeply spiritual, after such an experience? But none of this has happened. I’m the same old Madeleine, impatient, volatile. I still ask unanswerable questions. Have I grown at all?

  Yes, I believe that I have, but growth is still for me a slow process, not a Damascus Road experience. God will help me to become a wise old woman in God’s good time. Maybe it is a good thing that I am still Madeleine, recognizably the same person, not only physically, but spiritually; I must still look to my monsters, recognize them, name them, ask God to redeem them.

  It is time for me to understand that the true princess part of myself is chronologically behind me, and that makes it even more important that I become the wise old woman. The wise old woman is the part of you and me most able and willing to understand the Resurrection.

  When I was in ICU, the trauma team made their rounds. In what I learned was typical fashion they stood at the foot of my bed, and I heard one doctor say, “Here we have a seventy-two-year-old Caucasian female.” He began telling the others what had happened to me. He made a few factual mistakes. Finally I said, “This seventy-two-year-old Caucasian female is quite conscious, can hear everything you have to say, has a name, and no, I was not driving the car, I was in the passenger seat.”

  Later, one of the doctors came to me with an apology. “Sometimes we just have to play at being doctors.” He smiled.

  The next time the doctors were making rounds, and stopped at the bed before mine, I heard the head doctor say to the patient, “I hope you don’t mind if we need to talk about you rather impersonally.”

  So maybe some good came out of that tiny incident, a good that in its own small way leads toward the happy ending.

  For the happy ending is intrinsic to the life of faith, central to all we do during all of our lives. If we cannot believe in it, we are desolate indeed. If we know, in the depths of our hearts, that God is going to succeed, with each one of us, with the entire universe, then our lives will be bright with laughter, love, and light.

  12

  STORY AS RESURRECTION

  The year is turning to a close as I write this. I am out of the city for two weeks, at Crosswicks, rejoicing first in the confusion and excitement of Christmas—with four little boys six and under!

  Now they are gone. The beds are all stripped and remade, and I am once again in my own bedroom, after having had to move out to the couch in my workroom to make room in this inn. It was wonderful to share the excitement of the children, to be together as family, but it is good to be quiet again, just the three of us, Bion and Laurie and me. The children all had sniffles; now, of course, so do we.

  On the weekend, when Laurie (the physician) is not on call, we take the dogs and walk to the brook and to the beautiful pond the beavers have made for us. Hugh and I longed for years for the beavers to come and make a lake for us, and now, at last, it has happened. I miss Hugh because he isn’t here to enjoy it, but it is a good missing because it recalls all the good things we did enjoy together.

  Right now I must think about not slipping and falling! There is enough ground cover of snow to provide traction, and I have on good hiking boots. The dogs rush ahead, double back, rush ahead again. Once we are into the woods the wind drops and it is less cold. We get to the stone bridge over the brook, which is still running under its icy edges despite the subfreezing weather. To the right of the brook is the first and smaller of two remarkable beaver dams. We follow around the rim of the frozen pond to the larger dam, an amazing feat of engineering. The pond gleams silver. The winter light slants through the trees.
We don’t talk much, except to remark on some particular beauty or other—the light on the icicles near the first dam, a small bird’s nest in a low cleft of a tree.

  Then we tramp home to make cocoa and warm our toes. And think a little about the past year. There has been considerable personal grief. It has not been a good year for many of our friends. For the planet it has been an astounding year. The world events that shared the news with Hurricane Bob when I was first home from the hospital in San Diego have continued to accelerate. There is no more Soviet Union. The communist religion has gone down the drain with unprecedented rapidity. There is now a commonwealth of nations, and what will happen in the next year is far from clear.

  The bitter fighting between Serbs and Croats continues, the differences in religion making the fighting more anguished. Why is so much war muddied by religion? Do not the Catholics and the Orthodox worship the same Christ, the same blessed Mother of God? And, in other parts of the world, much is shared by Catholics and Protestants. Why do different visions of God cause war between Moslems and Christians and Jews and Hindus? What is wrong, that we let our dogmas about God separate us rather than unite us?

  Story helps us understand our humanness and our mortality. All grief is mourning over death—the death of a friendship, of a hope, of a career, of a marriage, of a love. If we try to circumvent the right and proper period of mourning, or repress it, then it will fester within us, and hurt both us and everybody we come in contact with.

  I remember being alone in the beach house the day after my grandmother died, and sensing simultaneously her presence and her absence. And I turned to story, a book I had already read and reread, a book in which a young woman is called to look at her own life and let it go. And her grief eased my grief.

  This morning I talked with and cried with a friend who has had one physical vicissitude after another. She has every right to weep. She is one of the bravest people I know, but she needs to express grief over what is happening to her body, and everybody expects her just to go on being brave. Right now she needs to weep like a child, and such weeping embarrasses people.

  There are times I, too, need to weep, because I am still paying for last year’s accident with fatigue and pain. I am ashamed, though I think that’s probably foolish. Sure, the world has taught us not to mourn, but that’s the world we’re not supposed to conform to. We’ve listened to the world for so long that we don’t know how to mourn. We don’t even know what it’s about. And this denigration of mourning seems to be a twentieth-century phenomenon that came in—I’m not sure when, but during my lifetime. I remember when I was a little girl growing up in New York City, seeing houses with all the shades drawn, and a funeral wreath on the door—a public announcement that those within that building were mourning.

  And I remember the prickling of unease when I saw black and white signs on an apartment door: DIPHTHERIA or SCARLET FEVER. With the discovery of antibiotics we have saved a lot of lives, but we have also come to think of death as unnecessary. We no longer have a mandated or permissible period of mourning. Though it is futile to assign a timetable for grief, it is eased if it is expressed.

  When I was a child there was mourning for death; death was still respectable. There were other kinds of grief, much more hidden. The divorcee was usually depicted smoking a cigarette in a long holder; she wore brilliant lipstick and dresses above her knees and had a “come hither” look. Or was that how respectable married people insisted on looking at the divorcee, so they wouldn’t have to mourn with her the death of a marriage?

  We don’t wear mourning for our dead anymore, sometimes not even at the funeral. What did I wear at Hugh’s funeral? I do not remember. Clothing seemed totally unimportant. I don’t know what I wore, except my grief.

  Nowadays divorce is more commonplace than a long-term marriage, and as for those other hurts, the loss of a job, the acceptance of illness, having to move from a home—we’re expected to grin and bear it and shed no tears.

  But tears need to be shed, alone, and with each other.

  The proper expression of grief is mortification.

  The word mortification, like widows’ weeds, has gone out of our daily vocabulary. Mortification is expensive. It is a grace that is costly.

  How many of us have cried with Jo March and her sisters over Beth’s death? Or with Sara Crewe when she is told that her father has died in India? But the healthy expression of grief is contrary to what the world would teach us.

  If we do not allow ourselves to grieve, we cannot allow God to grieve. Surely when things go wrong with us human creatures, when a child is hit by a truck and killed, when people who love each other hurt each other, when Christians are murderous in the name of Christ, oh, surely God grieves. That is shown clearly all through Scripture.

  The easiest way to discover what the world would teach us is to watch television commercials. More money is put into the commercials than into the actual shows. One year my husband was on a soap opera; he was in both a Broadway and an off-Broadway play; he was in two movies; he did a major television commercial. And he made more money from the commercial than from all the rest of the jobs put together.

  I’ve never seen anyone grieving on a television commercial. Basically what the commercials teach us is that we are to believe in security and the instant gratification of pleasure as the greatest good in living. If we will just buy the right painkiller and the correct insurance we will be secure. And that will make us happy.

  Oh?

  Instead of being allowed to grieve for the precariousness of all life, we are taught to look for a security that does not exist. No one can promise that we will end a day in safety, that we, or someone dear to us, will not be hurt.

  All too often we fall for it and go into debt to buy the latest gadget. Whatever it is, it’s made to self-destruct after a few years, and it will never help whatever it is that’s making us hurt.

  What does help? The gift of Christ, who offers us the grieving that is healing. This kind of grieving is a gift; it helps us “Walk that lonesome valley.” It involves a lifelong willingness to accept the gift, which is part of what Bonhoeffer called costly grace.

  Costly grace is no bargain in a world offering us “bargains.” But if we look for cheap grace we end up with nothing. As Bonhoeffer said,

  Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate….Costly grace is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which [we] must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs [us] our lives, and it is grace because it gives [us] the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it loves the sinner.

  We were bought with a price, and what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us.

  God took a tremendous risk when he created creatures who could make mistakes and wrong choices. We do not pay for our mistakes by ourselves; God pays with us. Forgiving us is part of that payment. Over and over God forgave his stiff-necked people; over and over he forgives us and calls us to be part of that forgiveness.

  Forgiveness requires healing grief. Forgiveness hurts, as all grief must, and if it hurts to forgive, it hurts equally to be forgiven. We can feel magnanimous when we forgive—in which case it isn’t real forgiveness because it does not involve grief. True forgiveness involves fellow-feeling with the one forgiven. When we accept forgiveness we accept ourselves as sinners, which is not popular today, even in the church.

  In my own search for a church home I look for a community where there is deep and continuing forgiveness, where a path is steered between permissiveness and rigid judgmentalism. I want
a community where I will find true grace, knowing that true grace is not cheap.

  True grace involves knowing that people, even those we like least, those we find hardest to forgive, are more important than things. When human beings try to limit themselves to a world of things they can buy and have, they lose, as Dr. Ott points out, their awareness of the wholeness of being human, and they lose their stories.

  People who try to sell us cheap grace equate integrity with self-indulgence, freedom with anarchy, liberation with chaos. It doesn’t work. Only discipline and obedience to the strict law of love allow us to be free. It is only the daily discipline of work at my desk which frees a book to be born. It is only the discipline of daily prayer which allows the freedom of meditation and contemplation. A river isn’t a river when it overflows its banks. The stars would be raging, flaming destruction if they had not been set in their beautiful courses. So with grief; each day of our lives is preparation for grief, preparation for living in Jesus so he may live in us.

  I structure my life in the daily reading of Morning and Evening Prayer, and in the Eucharist. Then, when tragedy strikes unexpectedly, as it so often does, the framework for grief is already there.

  When I was in the hospital ICU, and later, when I was moved to a private room, I was hungry for the Eucharist; indeed, I was desperately lonely without it. A nurse had read an admission form to me, taking down my answers, and when she said, “Religion?” I replied “Episcopalian.” It wouldn’t have mattered if I had said Baptist or Lutheran; the churches can no longer afford chaplaincy services. At least they could not in the University of California San Diego Hospital Center. When Luci returned home to San Francisco and called me, I told her that I was not happy with my church’s lack of response to human needs, and she immediately got on the phone, and a kind priest from a neighboring town came to me. But I felt grief that my church was not there for me or for anybody else in that hospital.