And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  In that first epiphany, when matter was formless and space was empty, God created. How marvellous that there should be something rather than nothing! How marvellous that there is, rather than that there is not.

  God created, and it was joy: time, space, matter. There is, and we are part of that is-ness, part of that becoming. That is our calling: co-creation. Every single one of us, without exception, is called to co-create with God. No one is too unimportant to have a share in the making or unmaking of the final showing-forth. Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off. That is a fearful responsibility, but when God made “man in our image, male and female,” responsibility went with it. Too often we want to let somebody else do it, the preacher, or the teacher, or the government agency. But if we are to continue to grow in God’s image, then we have to accept the responsibility.

  God’s image! How much of God may be seen in me, may I see in others? Try as we may, we cannot hide it completely.

  A young reader knowing of my love of new words, sent me a beautiful one: namasté: I salute the God within you.

  The words which have taught me most richly come in logical progression: ontology: the word about being; ousia: the essence of being, that which is really real; ananda (also sent me as a gift by a reader): that joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse. And now: namasté.

  If we accept that God is within each of us, then God will give us, within us, the courage to accept the responsibility of being co-creators.

  We live in a world which has become too complex to unravel; there is nothing we can do about it, we little people who don’t have big government posts or positions of importance. But I believe that the Kingdom is built on the little things that all of us do. I remember my grandmother was fond of reciting:

  Little drops of water,

  Little grains of sand

  Make the mighty ocean

  And the pleasant land.

  A single drop can’t make even a puddle, but together, all our little drops and God’s planning can make not only a mighty ocean but a mighty difference. Alone, there’s not much we can do, but when Peter healed a cripple it was made very clear that it was not by his own power, but by the power of Christ, the creating Word, that the healing was accomplished.

  This power is available to all of us. Indeed, with everything we do, we either use or reject it, for we do nothing in isolation. As the physicists who study the microcosm are discovering, nothing happens in isolation; nothing exists in isolation. Quanta, the tiny subatomic particles being studied in quantum mechanics, cannot exist alone; there cannot be a quantum, for quanta exist only in relationship to each other. And they can never be studied objectively, because even to observe them is to change them. And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech;

  there is neither speech nor language; but their voices are heard among them,

  sings the psalmist.

  Surely what is true of quanta is true of the creation; it is true of quarks, it is true of human beings. We do not exist in isolation. We are part of a vast web of relationships and interrelationships which sing themselves in the ancient harmonies. Nor can we be studied objectively, because to look at us is to change us. And for us to look at anything is to change not only what we are looking at, but ourselves, too.

  And our deepest messages of love are often conveyed without words. In my writing I have used the word kything, found in an old Scottish dictionary of my grandfather’s, to express this communication without words, where there is “neither speech nor language.” To kythe is to open yourself to someone. It is, for me, a form of intercessory prayer, for it is to be utterly vulnerable.

  To some people it smacks of ESP. They are wary of such things, not being able to understand them. Kything is indeed a kind of ESP, although it goes much further, for it takes a deep faith in the goodness of creation and the power of love to open oneself in love and hope and faith. So it came as a shock to me when I received a letter asking me, with great sincerity, if kything was satanic. Evidently, to the writer, any form of extrasensory perception was of the devil. Of course, wherever there is good, in comes the devil at a gallop. But to kythe, to be with someone in that deepest communication which is beyond words, is of God, not of the devil. When I was a child, my test for real friendship was the test of silence: Could I and my friend be together without speaking and be comfortable with each other? If the answer was Yes, then I could trust the friendship.

  We do not love each other without changing each other. We do not observe the world around us without in some way changing it, and being changed ourselves. To listen to the news on radio or television is to be part of what is going on, and to be modified by it. But how on earth—or heaven—can that be reciprocal? We are changed by war and rumour of war, but how can we in turn change what changes us?

  There are some obvious, small ways. We can join, if we are female, the League of Women Voters. We can do volunteer work (despite a nine-to-five job) in the hospice movement. We can write our senators and congressmen. In the Greek play Lysistrata the women were so outraged by war that they banded together against the men to stop it. We are not as helpless as we may seem.

  Those are a few of the obviously active ways. But there are less obvious ones that are equally important. I was asked how we could pray for our planet, with the devastating wars which are tearing it apart, with greed fouling the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I replied that the only way I know how to pray for the body of our planet is to see it as God meant it to be, to see the sky as we sometimes see it in the country in wintertime, crisp with stars, or to see the land with spring moving across it, the fruit trees flowering and the grass greening, and at night hearing the peepers calling back and forth, and the high, sweet singing of the bats.

  In the spring, the early spring, during the height of the Falkland crisis, I knelt on the damp earth planting onion sets, and smelling the rich growing odor of the freshly turned garden, and the pungency of the onions. Planting onions that spring was an act of faith in the future, for I was very fearful for our planet. It has long seemed likely that if there is atomic devastation, it will not come from one of the great powers. (Russia does not want war any more than we do. The land of Russia is still not healed from the terrible wounds of the Second World War. The scars are still visible. Nor is China hungry for war.) If we blunder into the folly of atomic warfare it is more likely to come from something seemingly as absurd as the battle over the inhospitable Falklands than from something predictable.

  So I planted onions, and hoped, and prayed, and suddenly I was aware of being surrounded by the song of the birds, making an ecstasy of melody, and their joy was a strengthening of hope. As I sat back on my heels, the better to listen, the birdsong was an affirmation of ultimate all-rightness and also of immediate all-rightness, despite the news to which we were anxiously listening. The birds know. We sophisticated people have forgotten what the “primitive” people have always known, that the birds know, and that a change in their song is a portent of change to come, usually terrible change. But this singing of the birds was their own spring song, which I have heard year after year, and so my heavy heart lifted.

  That evening Hugh and I saw something we had never seen before, two robins in a mating dance, and that, too, was affirmation. It may seem that the beauty of two robins can do little to heal the horrors of our planet, but I believe that in their dance they were not only following the call of spring, but healing—or helping to heal—all that has gone wrong with the sweet green earth on which they live.

  A year ago a family of robins made their nest in our garage. We are used to having barn swallows come in and try to set up light housekeeping, but not robins. However, one day we noticed that on the back of a bicycle which hangs on the wall was a robin’s nest. By standing on a box, we could see the eggs, naturally a beautiful robin’s-egg blue! And of course we could no
t use the garage until the eggs were hatched and the fledglings had learned to fly. That was the spring that the gypsy moths devastated the land, defoliating a tree in an hour. Mountainsides were as bare and brown as in winter. And it was our son’s theory that this particular robin family had “known” that the trees were going to lose their protecting leaves, and so they had come into the garage, contrary to pattern, to keep their babies safe.

  This spring the robins were back in the newly-dressed trees in their re-created green, and in our area of the countryside the gypsy moths have done little damage.

  —

  The Falkland crisis ended, but the fear of war does not. With each onslaught of terror it hits us anew. Why do we tend to forget that this has been a century of fear, when the second half of the century has been gripped in the fear of atomic horror?

  A reminder of how long this fear has been with us came to me when I turned to some old journals to type out for my children the stories of their births, and some of the things they did and said when they were little. I don’t go back to those journals very often, and I was surprised at the many entries which showed my anguish about the possibility of atomic warfare.

  One time in the fifties when we were listening in anxiety to every radio newscast, trying not to let our small children see how anxious we were, I recorded putting them to bed. Our youngest was four. His prayers were dictatorial to God (as only a four-year-old can be dictatorial), and intimate. That night, in the middle of his long “God blesses,” he said, “God please don’t let there be any more wars. Please just let everybody die of old age.” And, a few months later: “…and God, please remember about do unto others as you would they do to you. Please make them do these words. Make them think. Make them think, and not destroy this world.”

  So we all continue to pray for the planet, visualizing the pussy willows turning furry in the spring, listening to the songs of the insects and tree toads in the autumn, hearing the rain fall on the thirsty gardens, seeing the unique blue of the robins’ eggs.

  The robins affirm, for me, the validity and vitality of creation. The robin’s song is as important to the heavenly harmonies as is the turning of the galaxies. And it is all, all held in the love of God.

  One of the early words by which the ancient Hebrews knew God was El. El—the Lord. Beth-el, for instance, means the house of God. So I find it helpful, wherever and whenever possible, to call God El, or el, rather than using the masculine or feminine pronoun, because the name el lifts the Creator beyond all our sexisms and chauvinisms and anthropomorphisms.

  We human creatures, made in the image of God, in church as well as out, too often reject instead of affirming the Word which has proven to be the cornerstone. And we worry, too often, about peripheral things. (Like baptism: Is dunking more valid than sprinkling?) And we are continuing to worry about sexist words to the point where we are coming close to destroying language. To call God either him or her, he or she, is in both cases to miss the wholeness of the Creator. And so we lose all sense of proportion, and try to clamp God once again within our own broken image.

  And so I return to the reality of our trinitarian God of creation, el.

  El. That power of love. That holy thing. Do we believe that it was a power of love which created everything and saw it was good? Is creation purposeful? Or is it some kind of cosmic accident? Do our fragments of lives have meaning? Or are we poor human beings no more than a skin disease on the face of an unfortunate planet? Can we see the pattern and beauty which is an affirmation of the value of all creation?

  On the cover of the May, 1982 Scientific American is a beautiful photograph of a “pattern of radio emission from the gigantic elliptical galaxy IC 4296. [There are so many quadrillions of galaxies that the scientists, alas, have run out of names and resorted to numbers. I am grateful for the psalmist’s affirmation that God knows all the stars by name.] The galaxy, probably a member of the Centaurus cluster of galaxies, is 120 million light years away. It is nonetheless the closest of the ‘classical’ radio sources: the sources consisting of two symmetrical lobes of radio emission….[T]he patch is really two jets of ionized gas emerging in opposite directions from the center of the galaxy….The distance between the lobes is almost a million light years.”

  The macrocosm. Too enormous for our finite minds readily to comprehend.

  And then the microcosm. The distances between the parts of an electron are proportionately as vast as the distance between those lobes of radio emission from a galaxy.

  What does that do to our concept of size? It either makes us throw up our hands in horror at the over-awesome incomprehensibility of creation, or it makes us cry out in joy at the total unimportance of size, for all, all of it is held in God’s loving hand. “See, I will not forget you,” el assures us in the book of the prophet Isaiah. “I have carved you on the palm of my hand.”

  —

  I am grateful for our freighter vacations which provide stress release from the normal strains of daily living. But though there are no phone calls, no interruptions, nothing that has to be done, even a vacation on a freighter does not offer a safe and placid world. Creation is still wildly beautiful, and it is still wild. Eleven is mighty close to twelve on the Beaufort scale, and twelve is disaster.

  If I affirm that the universe was created by a power of love, and that all creation is good, I am not proclaiming safety. Safety was never part of the promise. Creativity, yes; safety, no. All creativity is dangerous. Even with the advances of science, women still die in childbirth. Babies are born with distorted limbs or minds. To write a story or paint a picture is to risk failure. To love someone is to risk that you may not be loved in return, or that the love will die. But love is worth that risk, and so is birth, its fulfillment.

  This is no time for a child to be born,

  With the earth betrayed by war & hate

  And a nova lighting the sky to warn

  That time runs out & the sun burns late,

  That was no time for a child to be born,

  In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;

  Honour & truth were trampled by scorn—

  Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

  When is the time for love to be born?

  The inn is full on the planet earth,

  And by greed & pride the sky is torn—

  Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

  Anyone embracing Christianity for the sake of safety is going to distort the broken body even further. The desire for safety at any expense ultimately leads to death. It is the desire for safety which has made some people take refuge in religions which provide all the answers, make their members feel more saved than people who don’t belong to their group, and promise freedom from danger. Insistence on static answers has brought about the recurring conflicts between science and religion.

  At a writers’ conference I was asked by a young man, “Do you believe in evolution?”

  I had been talking about structure in fiction, not about science, and the question was asked in the sort of belligerent manner that told me he was waiting to pounce on any answer, no matter what, as “wrong.”

  A crowded lecture room during a lecture on techniques of fiction was neither the time nor the place to get into an argument about evolutionism versus creationism, and in any event I find little to argue about. So I replied that I thought that God could create in any way which seemed good to el.

  And that, indeed, is what I think. The only reason I can find for all the shouting about how God created is that it allows some people to stop thinking, to settle back into the safety of their rut, to stop thinking about what it is really all about.

  What it is really about is that creation is God’s. It is el who has made us, and not we ourselves. To argue about how God made us is to argue about nonessentials. As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter a whit how God created. The important thing is that creation is God’s, and that we are part of it, and being part of creation is for us to be co
-creators with el in the continuing joy of new creation.

  That is a great calling, and when we argue about how God created us, we forget our vocation, and the tempter rejoices. I’m all for genuine scientific research, but when we argue about how, rather than if, or why, we miss the point. In a world where fewer and fewer people believe in God at all, where life is for so many an unimportant accident with no meaning, where we are born only to slip back into annihilation, we need to stop arguing and affirm the goodness of creation, and the power of love which holds us all.

  —

  As far as the evidence of science shows today (and the evidence of science is always open to change with new discoveries), evolution seems a likely explanation of how all the galaxies, solar systems, planets, creatures, human beings came to be. There are holes in this theory, things left out, things left unresolved, but that we “thinking reeds” have evolved slowly, the original unicellular creature becoming ever more and more complex, until brains were developed which were complex enough to ask questions, seems consistent with present knowledge. One of the still open questions in the debate is the extraordinarily rapid development of the brain pan from something tiny to the much larger one which contains and protects our complex brains. Why this development came about more swiftly than the ordinarily slow process would account for is one of the still unexplained mysteries. But the rapid development of the cranium and the cranial cavity happened, and with our complex brains we think, and we ask questions, and often we want them answered before we have gathered enough evidence.

  If new evidence should prove that evolution is not how it all happened, that won’t do anything to change the nature of God, any more than Galileo’s discoveries changed the nature of God. Nor would it shatter my faith. The Lord of Creation makes as el chooses, and only el knows how. “I’ll be what I will be,” God replied to Moses when asked about his name. The options are all open, free. Free of all the restrictions we human beings try to impose on our Maker. Free to offer us an example of freedom which we hardly dare contemplate.