A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Hugh and I first ran into Canon Tallis when we were directing the pageant at the Cathedral, after my cake-baking fiasco. Ran into is right. We clashed. He did not like vast quantities of school children in the Cathedral during Advent, that austere time of eschatology, reenacting the Christmas story out of chronology. He bristled when he saw us. We bristled when we saw him. We could conceive of no reason why the pageant wasn’t the most important thing in the world, why he didn’t put at our disposal all the facilities of the Cathedral.

  Later, when I knew him better, I explained to him, passionately, that the chronology of the pageant wasn’t really what was important; Christmas is an arbitrary date anyhow; the important thing was that the children should have some idea of Christmas beyond street-corner Santa Clauses and loudspeakers braying out Christmas carols. “Don’t you understand that many of them won’t have any Christmas otherwise? They won’t even go to church. If it’s not to be a blasphemy they’ll have to have it here, now, before the school vacation begins, out of chronology—but in real time.”

  Thus Madeleine the agnostic.

  But we did, after that, have all the cooperation possible from the Cathedral staff.

  Later on I went to Canon Tallis, almost by accident, when I was in trouble. I’d made an appointment with another canon at the Cathedral, and his secretary forgot to put the appointment in his book. He was full of apologies, but had to be away, so couldn’t see me later, and suggested Tallis. Canon Tallis was the last person I wanted to see. Something told me that it would either work magnificently or be totally horrible.

  It worked magnificently.

  It wasn’t that my problem was solved but that I had help in bearing it. I also told him all my intellectual doubts, my total incredulity about the incarnation; the idea that God could pitch his tent among men was absurd. Of course! It still is.

  I had talked with several Congregational minister friends about my intellectual doubts. I was eager to be converted—I didn’t like atheism or agnosticism; I was by then well aware that I am not self-sufficient, that I needed the dimension of transcendence. They were eager to convert me. But they explained everything. For every question I asked, they had an answer. They tried to reach me through my mind.

  First of all, my mind is not that good. I’m not stupid; I did graduate from Smith with honors. But I am, basically, not an intellectual. Nevertheless, I knew that I could not throw away my mind, and it was not the discoveries of science that bothered me. On the contrary. The book I read during this period which brought me closest to God was one that never mentioned God, The Limitations of Science, by J. W. N. Sullivan.

  My minister friends gave me all kinds of theological books to read, mostly by German theologians. The more I read, the further I was shoved away from any kind of acceptance. I would read logical explanations of the totally mysterious scandal of particularity and think: if I have to believe all this bunk, then Christianity is not for me. One line in the Book of Common Prayer made sense to me: the mystery of the word made flesh. If only my friends would admit that it was a mystery, and stop giving me explanations! I wrote in my journal: “I talk to people—oh, people I respect, people I like—and yet I never feel any sense of terrific excitement in their own lives about Jesus, in the way that the early Christians must have been excited so that they were transfigured by Jesus. In no one, no one, no matter how loudly they talk about salvation being possible only through Jesus, do I find this great thing showing in them, glowing in them, lighting their lives, as it must if it is to make any sense today at all.” I was, I am sure, less than fair; nevertheless that was what reasonable explanations did to me.

  Canon Tallis did not explain anything. He listened to my doubts in silence. I think he thought they were really very unimportant. As far as my specific, daily problems were concerned, I found that I could take them more lightly, could laugh more easily.

  Then spring came. Hugh was away with the tour of Luther. He’d had a fine time playing Cardinal Cajetan on Broadway, and we felt that he should go on tour. But all kinds of things happened that spring. Bion, eleven, started running a high fever, for which no explanation could be found. At the hospital the doctor assured me that there was a physical cause, and they would go on testing until they found it. For forty-eight hours I lived with the knowledge that the doctor thought that Bion had cancer of the liver. He had been talking to me in abstruse medical terms, but one of my closest friends is a doctor, and I more or less went through medical school with her, and suddenly the doctor looked at me and said, “Do you know what I am talking about?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I do.”

  “We’re re-testing, and I’ll call you as soon as the results are in.”

  Hugh and I were trying not to phone each other too often; we called about every three days. He would be phoning the evening that we would know the results. By shortly after six, when Hugh usually called, I had not heard anything. Then the phone rang, and I dreaded telling Hugh what we feared; there was never any question of keeping it from him; he’d hear it in my voice. But it was not Hugh, it was the doctor, and it was not cancer.

  Then Hugh’s father died, and he had to fly from Chicago to Tulsa for the funeral. He called me from Chicago before leaving; I already knew, because I had talked to his sister that morning. While Hugh and I were talking, I could hear his voice break, and he said in astonishment, “Isn’t it extraordinary, this is the first time I’ve felt anything about Dad, talking to you.” But of course we both knew that it wasn’t extraordinary at all.

  Then happy news. Josephine was to be salutatorian of her class, graduating at sixteen. We were joyful and proud. But Hugh couldn’t come for graduation, because he had taken time off from the play for his father’s funeral. And Bion was still in the hospital.

  Then something happened, something so wounding that it cannot possibly be written down. Think of two of the people you love most in the world; think of a situation in which both are agonizingly hurt and you are powerless to do anything to help. It is far easier to bear pain for ourselves than for those we love, especially when part of it is that we cannot share the pain but must stand by, unable to alleviate it.

  Canon Tallis hardly knew us at all, then. But he stepped in. What he did is involved with all that I cannot write. The point right now is that this was the moment of light for me, because it was an act of love, Love made visible.

  And that did it. Possibly nothing he could have done for me, myself, would have illuminated the world for me as did this act of love towards those I love. Because of this love, this particular (never general) Christian love, my intellectual reservations no longer made the least difference. I had seen love in action, and that was all the proof I needed.

  21

  There is no more beautiful witness to the mystery of the word made flesh than a baby’s naked body. I remember with sensory clarity sitting with one of my babies on my lap and running my hand over the incredibly pure smoothness of the bare back and thinking that any mother, holding her child thus, must have at least an echo of what it is like to be Mary; that in touching the particular created matter, flesh, of our child, we are touching the Incarnation. Alan, holding his daughter on his lap, running his hand over her bare back with the same tactile appreciation with which I had touched my children, made a similar remark.

  Once, when I was in the hospital, the smooth and beautiful white back of the woman in the bed next to mine, a young woman dying of cancer, was a stabbing and bitter reminder of the ultimate end of all matter.

  But not just our human bodies: all matter: the stars in their courses: everything: the end of time.

  Meanwhile we are in time, and the flesh is to be honored. At all ages. For me, this summer, this has been made clear in a threefold way: I have fed, bathed, played pat-a-cake with my grandbabies. In the night when I wake up, as I usually do, I always reach out with a foot, a hand, to touch my husband’s body; I go back to sleep with my hand on his warm flesh. And my mother is almost ninety and pre
paring to move into a different country. I do not understand the mysteries of the flesh, but I know that we must not be afraid to reach out to each other, to hold hands, to touch.

  In our bedroom there is a large old rocking chair which was in the attic of Crosswicks when we bought it. It seems to have been made especially for mothers and babies. I have sat in it and nursed my babe in the middle of the night. I have sung innumerable lullabies from it. When Hugh was in Medea, which was sent overseas in 1951 by the State Department, I sat in the rocking chair, carrying his child within me and holding our first-born in my arms, singing all the old lullabies, but especially Sweet and Low because of “over the Western sea,” and “Bring him again to me.”

  This summer I sit in the rocking chair and rock and sing with one or other of my granddaughters. I sing the same songs I sang all those years ago. It feels utterly right. Natural. The same.

  But it isn’t the same. I may be holding a baby just as I used to hold a baby, but chronology has done many things in the intervening years, to the world, to our country, to my children, to me. I may feel, rocking a small, loving body, no older than I felt rocking that body’s mother. But I am older bodily; my energy span is not as long as it used to be; at night my limbs ache with fatigue; my eyes are even older than the rest of me. It is going to seem very early—it is going to be very early—when the babies wake up: Alan, Josephine, Cynthia, and I take turns getting up and going downstairs with them, giving them breakfast, making the coffee. Is it my turn again so quickly?

  Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?

  Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

  Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

  Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.

  I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.

  The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.

  22

  I’m off to the brook again. Summer is almost over; the golden rod is aflame. The bush burns with the red of autumn. The family has scattered, is scattering, to England, Mexico, Florida, California, to the big house across the lane and up the road. I’ve already started moving things back to New York. We are having a deep, gentle, September rain, which the land, the trees, the brook need thirstily. Yesterday I waded downstream for a long time, wet from the waters of the brook itself, from the rain, from the drops shaking from the leaves as I pushed under, over, through the overhanging trees.

  The brook, the bush, the sun-warmed rock, as in the song, have seen, felt, touched, healed me.

  Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses’s vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.

  The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Crosswicks Journals

  1

  This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift descent.

  Once, when I was around twelve, we took a twenty-mile toboggan ride down a Swiss mountainside. The men guiding the toboggan were experienced mountaineers; the accelerating speed was wildly exciting. Mother and I both clutched the sides of the toboggan as we careened around sharply banked curves. The guides could keep it on the hard-packed snow of the path, but they could not stop it in its descent. My mother’s plunge into senility reminds me of that toboggan ride.

  When I look at the long green and gold days of this summer, the beautiful days are probably more beautiful, and the horrible days more horrible, than in actuality. But there’s no denying that it’s a summer of extremes.

  It might be said with some justification that all our summers are summers of extremes, because when the larger family gathers together we are a group of opinionated, noisily articulate, varied and variable beings. It is fortunate for us all that Crosswicks is a largish, two-hundred-and-some-year-old farmhouse; even so, when four generations’ worth of strong-willed people assemble under one roof, the joints of the house seem to creak in an effort to expand. If we all strive toward moderation, it is because we, like the ancient Greeks, are natively immoderate.

  This is our fourth four-generation summer. Four Junes ago Mother’s namesake and first great-grandchild, Madeleine, was born. We call her Léna, to avoid confusion in this household of Madeleines. Charlotte, the second great-granddaughter, was born fourteen months later. My mother is very proud of being the Great-grandmother.

  But she is hardly the gentle little old lady who sits by the fireside and knits. My knowledge of her is limited by my own chronology; I was not around for nearly forty years of her life, and her premotherhood existence was exotic and adventurous; in the days before planes she traveled by camel and donkey; she strode casually through a world which is gone and which I will never see except through her eyes. The woman I have experienced only as loving and gentle mother has, for the past several years, been revealing new and demanding facets. When she wants something she makes her desires known in no uncertain terms, and she’s not above using her cane as a weapon. She gathers puppies and kittens into her lap; she likes her bourbon before dinner; she’s a witty raconteur; and the extraordinary thing about her descent into senility is that there are occasional wild, brilliant flashes which reveal more of my mother-Madeleine than I ever knew when she was simply my mother.

  But she is my mother; there is this indisputable, biological fact which blocks my attempts at objectivity. I love her, and the change in her changes me, too.

  She was born in the Deep South, spent her married life wandering the globe, in New York and London, and now, in her old age, prefers the more clement weather of North Florida for the winters. But her presence in Crosswicks has always been part of the summers. A friend asked me, “Did you invite your mother to spend the summers with you or did she invite herself?”

  I was a little taken aback. “There wasn’t ever any question of inviting. We just said, ‘When are you coming?’”

  “Did you discuss it with Hugh?”

  I don’t think it ever needed discussion. My mother and my husband have always loved each other—after the very first when Mother wasn’t happy about the idea of my marrying an actor. She and Hugh are much alike, in character, in temperament. A stranger would be apt to take Mother and Hugh for mother and son, and me for the in-law. We have always thought of her as part of Crosswicks. She helped make it grow from the dilapidated, unloved old building it was when we first saw it, a quarter of a century ago
, to the home it is now. She helped plan my workroom out over the garage, a beautiful study which the children named the Tower. When we lived in Crosswicks year round, while our children were little, she usually spent one of the winter months with us; when we moved back to New York for the school year, this was even more fun for her, because we could go to the theatre, the opera.

  I have been so used to having my mother be my friend as well as my mother, to having her be Hugh’s friend, that I was surprised at the idea of “inviting” her to spend the summer, and at the implication that this is not the usual way of things.

  Perhaps it’s not, but having Mother spend the summer in Crosswicks is part of the chronology of the house.

  Hugh and I drive to New York, to the airport, to meet her and bring her the hundred miles to Crosswicks. I am shocked when I see her. The plane flight has been harder on her than we had anticipated; the toboggan has continued its descent at an accelerating pace since we saw her at the ninetieth-birthday celebration on April 30. She is confused during the two and a half hours’ drive. I hold her hand and try to point out familiar landmarks.

  “I don’t remember it,” she says anxiously. Only occasionally will she see a building, a turn of the road, a special view, and say, “I know this! I’ve been here before … Haven’t I?”

  We stop at our usual halfway place, the Red Rooster, for lunch, but Mother is too nervous to eat, and we stay only a few minutes, while Hugh and I quickly swallow hamburgers. I continue to hold her hand, to pet her. My emotions are turned off; I do not feel, any more than one feels pain after a deep cut. The body provides its own anesthesia for the first minutes after a wound, and stitches can be put in without novocaine; my feelings are equally numbed. We complete the drive, and I am anxious only to get Mother home, and to bed, in the room which has been hers for a quarter of a century. My thoughts do not project beyond this to the rest of the summer.