And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  Creation continues lavishly, and we are part of it. Not only are stars and people and fireflies born, not only do they die, but what we as creatures do during our life span makes a difference. We are not just passive, acted upon; we are also actors in the great drama of creation. As to the passionate arguers about creationism versus evolutionism, I still think they’re missing the point. The more hotly they argue, the more widely do they miss the point. The more zealous they grow in defending their cause (like the church establishment of Galileo’s day) the less are they able to sit back calmly and observe the evidence and say, “This, too, is the Lord’s.”

  When I am most defensive about something, arguing hotly that I am right, it is time for me to step back and examine whatever it is I am trying to prove. When I am refusing to listen to anyone else, intractably defending some position or other (like doctors refusing Semilweisse’s radical suggestion that they wash their hands before touching open wounds) then I am incapable of being a co-creator with God. God urges us to be willing to change, to go out into the wilderness, to wrestle with angels, to take off our shoes when we step on holy ground.

  And to listen. God asks us to listen, even when what el asks of us seems most outrageous.

  —

  It has long struck me with joy and awe that the theory of evolution is not contrary to the teaching of the Bible. One of the many extraordinary things about those first passages in Genesis is that they so nearly describe what has come to be recognized as the order of evolution. What matter if, in the language of great poetry, a few billenia are the first day, and a few more the second?

  The amazing thing is that at the beginning there was darkness, formless and empty, and the Spirit brooding, brooding almost as though getting ready to hatch creation, and then the Word shouting for joy, and here we are! The Word spoke, and from nothing came the glory and music and pattern of a universe.

  And how long, in cosmic time, were the billenia which made up each of the days of creation?

  Hugh and I lay on the top deck of our little ship at night and looked at the stars, the nearest one in that hemisphere perhaps seven light years away, and the next one seventy, and others seven hundred, seven thousand, seven million. We were looking not at a one-dimensional sky, but a four-dimensional one, a multidimensional one, seeing out to the furthest reaches of space and time as we lay on one small spot on the top deck of a freighter; and that small spot in the space/time continuum was moving at approximately ten knots an hour. The planet, too, was moving, as it turned daily on its axis and yearly in its journey around the sun. And the sun was moving in the great turning of the galaxy, our Milky Way. In that magnificent immensity we realized, suddenly, how limited our view of time usually is.

  We were looking at the brilliantly lit sky not only in our own present, but in the long past of most of the stars. Perhaps one of those sparkling diamonds was no longer there; we were seeing it so many million light years ago; perhaps it had gone out long before there was human life on this planet, and we were just now seeing its fire. How much time we were seeing, as well as space!

  On a small ship the ability to be aware of our tiny, yet significant part in the interdependence of all of God’s creation returns, and one’s mind naturally turns to cosmic questions, rather than answers. Seeing the glory of the unpolluted horizon, the brilliance of the Southern Cross against the black velvet sky, opened up questions about creation and the Creator.

  And laughter, too, for though we cannot take ourselves seriously enough, we can also take ourselves far too seriously.

  One of the sailors remarked casually as he was swabbing down the deck, “It’s a short walk from the womb to the tomb,” and jolted us back from cosmic time to mortal time.

  But mortal time is part of cosmic time, and during that short walk we are given glimpses of eternity, eternity which was before time began, and will be after time ends. The Word, who moved into time for us and lived with us, lives, as Christ, in eternity; so, when we live in Christ, when Christ lives in us, we, too, are free from time and alive in eternity.

  On the ship we moved from time zone to time zone, resetting our clocks, a reminder that our time follows the movement of the planet. And within one time zone there are probably a million different perceptions of time.

  Every summer we watch eagerly for the hummingbirds to come sip the nectar of delphinium and bee balm outside our kitchen windows. They hover by the flowers, seeming to achieve a stillness in the air, their wings moving so rapidly that we cannot see the motion. I have been told that their perception of time is so much faster than ours that to the tiny birds we human beings, moving at fewer rpm (or mph) do not even appear to be moving. So, according to our human perception of time a century may seem long, but all that has happened since that first moment of creation is no more than the flicker of God’s eye. In the life span of a star, an ordinary star like our sun, our lives are such a fragment of a fragment as to seem practically nonexistent, even if we live four score years and ten, like my mother, or even five score, like my grandfather. So, according to one perception of time, the zealous creationists are right—God created everything in an instant—or, rather, seven days; and according to another perception of time, the pragmatic evolutionists are right, and life has evolved slowly over our chronological millennia. And, according to any perception of time, we human creatures with our brief, mortal lives are nevertheless so important to the Creator that el came to live with us; we are so beloved!

  Since we live in time, it is almost impossible for us to understand that eternity is not a time concept, that it has nothing to do with the passage of time. The astrophysicist’s concept of time has changed radically in the past half century. Time is not, as the old hymn suggests, a never-ending stream. Time, like the rest of us creatures, is complex and paradoxical and full of quirks and surprises.

  Sandol Stoddard in The Hospice Movement, quotes Dr. Cicely Saunders: “We learn, for example, that time has no fixed meaning as such. An hour at the dentist seems like forever, but an hour with someone you love flies past. And yet, wait a little and look back on it. The hour of discomfort and anxiety is totally forgotten. What we remember forever is the hour of love.”

  The hour of love is the hour when God’s creature, time, and el’s human creatures, like us, collaborate with each other.

  In New York, where we must live most of the year, we are aware of time largely because we are too busy; we have too many appointments. Like the White Rabbit we constantly cry out in distress, “I shall be late!” But in the days before timepieces, when the rhythm of the seasons was essential to survival (as it was to the ancient nomadic Hebrews, to Abraham and Sarah) people were far more conscious of time than we are. Right timing was an integral part of prayer and of life. If the crops were not planted and harvested at the right time, there would not be enough to eat. Understanding the rhythms of nature was literally essential to survival, physically and psychically, and there was not the brokenness between the two that has come about in our time.

  Scripture is constantly breaking through chronos into kairos. All those hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, Job cried out of the intensity of his pain and grief an incredible affirmation:

  “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the last day on earth, and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and whom my own eyes shall behold, though my reins be consumed within me.”

  For at that last day we shall truly understand the meaning of creation and the story of Genesis. We shall truly understand what it means to be co-creators with the Lord of creation. God’s time is always now, and in this eternal now our Redeemer lives, and we shall see him, face to face.

  One day shortly after we’d crossed the equator, heading north, we saw a pod of what the captain guessed was between one and two thousand dolphins sporting about our little ship. There before our eyes was the joy of creation. It was all Hugh could do to keep me from climbing the rai
l and diving overboard to join their joy. Our joy. Our leaping and diving and pirouetting. Our ocean. Our sky. Our joy in our Creator.

  The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes: “There are helps which the apprentice in contemplation should employ, namely, lesson, meditation, and orison, or, as they are most generally called, reading, thinking, and, praying.”

  Good advice, which I try to heed during my daily times with the Bible, so that sometimes after only a few verses my mind will move into “free fall” and sometimes the thoughts stray far from the words I have just read, and yet lead me into prayer. On a ship, time stretches beyond the boundaries of chronology, into real time, kairos, where it is possible to read more slowly, think more deeply, and pray more naturally, than during the usual overscheduled days of chronos.

  But something else, even beyond those excellent words of help for Scripture reading, made me go back to book 1, chapter 1, verse 1, of the Gideon Bible. That was the Lenten lections I was reading morning and evening, and which made me ask anew:

  Who is this el, this Creator? Who was it to whom Jesus was always referring, and to whom he was always faithful? Who was it to whom Jesus prayed?

  There are so many preconceptions encrusting our idea of the Father to whom Jesus turned in prayer, in joy, in anguish, that it is almost impossible to remove all the barnacles of tradition and prejudice which have accumulated over the years, and see and hear el freshly.

  Each time I come to the story of Jesus’ baptism it hits me with renewed force. After his baptism, during which the Holy Spirit descended upon him, that same Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. That never ceases to shock me. It was not an evil spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness. It was not a fallen angel. It was the Holy Spirit. And this story is as crucial to the New Testament as the Exodus is to the Old.

  Jesus insisted that his cousin, John, baptize him. And though John proclaimed that he was merely the forerunner of one whose sandal strap he was unworthy to unloose, he did as Jesus asked. And as Jesus came up out of the water, he saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him. And there came a voice from heaven saying,

  “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

  Whom do we pray to? If we are to pray, we must know where our prayers are directed. Jesus prayed to his Father. And here again we have, in this century, a source of confusion. It was my good fortune to have a father I could respect and honour as well as love. But there are many people who are not granted this blessing, who have fathers who are domineering, or weaklings, or incestuous, or alcoholics, or sadists, or anything but models of a true father. Jesus called the Master of the Universe Abba; daddy. Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, was a man he could admire, a man with enough sense of his own self to be able to accept Mary for his wife under the most unusual of circumstances. But what about the rest of us, living in this time of extreme sexual confusion? There was plenty of sexual confusion in Jesus’ world, too, especially in the Roman culture where license and perversion were the order of the day. Nevertheless Jesus constantly referred to his heavenly Father, and he taught us to pray: Our Father.

  Praying to the Father is easy for me, since my image of a father is of someone with total integrity. Not that my father was perfect—anything but. He had a volatile temper—which I have inherited. He had wildly fluctuating moods. Before he died (I was seventeen) he often made me angry and now I understand him better than I did then. But he never gave an answer to a question to which he had no answer. If he promised me anything, I knew that I could trust that promise, and it gave me a sense of the meaning of promises which helps me to this day.

  Jesus calls the Creator Father, and for him it is a valid image. For those of us who are only confused or hurt by this image it is not as easy. Perhaps it helps to remember that it is an image, and an image is only a way of groping toward the real. Yet some of us may find in the image of the Father the parent that we always longed for, and needed, the parent that our human father never was. We have to look at, and take seriously, Jesus’ image, whether or not it is one which is creative for us. What is it that we trust most? Is it the turning of the stars in the heavens? That, for me, is another image of the Creator. Julian of Norwich called Christ her sister. John of the Cross and John Donne used the powerful language of romantic love. Recently a young friend wrote to me about her reading the Bible in French. “I wanted to share with you one of my discoveries—it’s one that Julian of Norwich would have liked. The other day I was reading the beginning of the Gospel of John. It goes,

  Au commencement était la Parole, et la Parole était avec Dieu, et la Parole était Dieu. Elle était au commencement avec Dieu.

  “ ‘She was with God from the beginning.’ Although I think too much fuss is made regarding sexist language, it was a real treat to see Jesus—la Parole—spoken of in feminine terms.”

  It is Jesus of Nazareth, the Word as human being, who calls God Abba. It is the Word, willingly and lovingly limiting itself in the form of what, as Word, Word had created—a sacrifice far beyond our comprehension. But if the Word, as Jesus, could call out, “Abba!” so can I.

  We all have our own images, and they nourish us, but ultimately the Lord to whom we pray is beyond all images, all imagining.

  The Holy Spirit came upon Jesus in the form of a dove—another image—and then that same Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. Why? Why tempt us? Why tempt Jesus?

  It was at the moment of his baptism that Jesus was recognized as Messiah, the Promised One. If, as Jesus, he was fully man as well as fully God, there had to come a time of recognition of his vocation. And a vocation must be tested. That is why, in a monastery or convent, there is a period of postulancy, of novitiate. Is this vocation real? Its reality must be tested.

  So Jesus fasted. And he played. And at the end of his long period of fasting, when he was weak with hunger, the tempter attacked. “If you’re really the Son of God,” he urged, “turn these stones into bread.”

  And Jesus wouldn’t. He could have, but he wouldn’t. He simply quoted from Deuteronomy:

  “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.”

  Then the devil took him to Jerusalem and set him on the highest pinnacle of the temple and suggested that he jump off, just to prove that he really was the Son of God. And the devil, being very clever, and knowing Scripture better than most of us, quoted the Psalms:

  “He shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you, and in their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

  And Jesus knew that if he jumped the angels would hold him up and he would not be hurt. And since he knew Scripture even better than Satan he quoted Deuteronomy right back:

  “It is written: you shall not tempt the Lord your God.”

  But Satan, still hopeful, took him to a high mountain, and because Satan was an angel, even if a fallen one, he still had great power and used it to show Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth in a moment of time. And he said, “I can give you all this.” And he could. And Jesus knew that he could, for Satan is the prince of this world, and in the world he has proven far too often how powerful he is. He said to Jesus, “I can give you all this, and all the world’s glory, without any suffering on your part, for it is mine to give.”

  And it was. And it is.

  But Jesus said,

  “Get away from me, Satan.”

  And again he quoted:

  “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”

  And the devil left him, and angels came and ministered to him.

  One by one Jesus turned down the world’s great temptations. Satan still uses those three; he doesn’t need any others; we still fall for the same ones, over and over again. When we pray,

  “Lead us not into temptation,”

  we are asking the Holy Spirit not to test us as Jesus was tested, for we have seen that we are not immune to all that Sata
n offers us, as individuals, as churches, as the establishments of science and medicine and education and any other human establishment we can think of. We fall into one or another of the temptations, often deluded into thinking that what we are doing is for the best. We want short cuts to the Kingdom. We want it to be easy. We want to be pleased with ourselves—which is very different from loving ourselves. And so we heed the temptations. But Jesus didn’t, because his whole being was rooted in his Father, the God who created heaven and earth and saw that it was all good.

  It is impossible to understand the New Testament without a firm grounding in the Old. Jesus quoted again and again from Hebrew Scripture (and not just when he was getting rid of the devil). The writers of the Gospels assumed that those who heard them would be familiar with Hebrew Scripture. The quotations are not credited or cross referenced because as a part of daily prayer they were a familiar part of living. The God of the Old Testament is the God in and with and through whom Jesus lived, the God he refused to tempt, the God he served, even unto death.

  I tend to stray from that God. All my false preconceptions get in my way, and these preconceptions surely please Satan, for they turn me from the Creator to the tempter who is much more “reasonable” and who, in worldly terms, has more power. Power is what Satan offers us, whereas God keeps pointing out that we serve el best in our weakness, so that we can acknowledge that it is the Creator choosing to work through us, his fragile creatures. It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves. But because we enjoy feeling powerful, we accept Satan’s offers.

  And look what happens. Just turn around. Watch the news on TV. Read the daily papers. Walk along a city street.

  And so as I turned to Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1, I tried to read without all the preconceptions which have been built up over the centuries—a task I understood was not completely possible, but which could nevertheless be attempted. And at sea it was made easy, for the ocean and the sky were there to help and to encourage. And to pray for me.