And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  I stood at the rail looking down at the ocean and saw the foil-like flickering of flying fish, and it struck me that knowledge is always open to change; knowledge, not wisdom. If it is not open to change it is not knowledge, it is prejudice.

  —

  One day in very early spring I spent several hours autographing and answering questions at a delightful bookshop in a college town. In the late afternoon a young man who had been standing around, listening, came up to me and said, “I’ve really enjoyed what you’ve been saying to people, but I haven’t read any of your books because I hear they’re very religious.”

  At that, all my little red flags of warning unfurled and began flapping in the wind. “What do you mean by religion?” I asked. “Please define it. Hitler was very religious. Khoumeini is very religious. The communists are very religious. What do you mean by religion?” And then with astonishment I heard myself saying, “My religion is subject to change without notice.”

  And I felt that I had received a profound revelation.

  As God has revealed elself throughout history, our concept of the Creator has changed and deepened. If we close ourselves off to revelation we are, in a real way, silencing God. If God is I will be what I will be (which is what el replied when Moses asked “Who are you?”) then our understanding of el’s ways has to be open, too. A few years ago a popular lapel button read, Please be patient with me, God isn’t finished with me yet. Did we really understand what that button was saying? If I discover that my concept of God is becoming limited, then I am beginning to shut myself off from revelation. And if I assume that my concept of God is final, I have fallen for Satan’s temptations, because if I decide that my concept of God is final, then I am falling into hubris.

  Faith and religion are not the same thing. Although my faith may falter, it has to do with the constancy of God’s love. Religion, which is the expression of faith, may find different expressions appropriate in different times and places and to different people, and the variety of these expressions can enlarge our perceptions and deepen our faith.

  John Wesley Watts, who lived in West Virginia in the nineteenth century, wrote his own epitaph as he lay dying, and subsequently it was engraved on his tomb: John Wesley Watts: A Firm Believer in Jesus Christ, Jeffersonian Democracy, and the Methodist Episcopal Church.

  I respect his conviction, but it is conviction, not faith. I come closer to defining and describing faith when I remember the great preacher Phillips Brooks, who was asked by an earnest questioner why he was a Christian. He thought seriously for a moment, then replied, “I think I am a Christian because of my aunt, who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.”

  Or, as my friend Canon Tallis puts it, “A Christian is someone who knows one.”

  If I have faith, it is because I have met faith, I have seen it in action. And this faith is never a vague, pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. Heaven is not good because life is bad; the quality of our lives while we live them is preparation for heaven.

  In the beginning God looked at creation and called it good. Very good.

  There was nothing, and then came the mighty acts of creation, darkness and light, sea and land, fish and birds and beasts and finally man—man made in the image of God, male and female.

  And of course as soon as this glorious creature appeared on the scene, along came confusion and conflict. And story.

  No matter what else can be said about human beings, we do provide good stories. One of my favourite Hassidic tales ends, “God made man because he loves stories.” And story is where we have learned to look for truth.

  Time is God’s. We are God’s. Creation is God’s. Yet even as we attempt to regulate our dogmas in the church we adopt a proprietary attitude. In fact, we tend to try to protect God. For example, we explain exactly how el created everything, as though we knew better than el how the Creator chose to create. When we try to protect God, all we do is stop our understanding of God from growing and deepening, because if we are open to new discoveries in the world within or without, it might change our comfortable image of God. In a fairly recent issue of Christianity Today, a magazine for which I have deep respect, the entire issue was taken up with issues of creationism, with theologians and scientists trying to explain, without doubt, exactly how God started it all. Though the magazine tried to be fair, to publish more than one point of view, the whole thing left me exhausted and frustrated. Some of the articles were so defensive about exactly how it all happened, that I found them difficult to read. I am not comfortable in a closed system where there are no questions left to ask, or where questions are shunned as heresy.

  In The Meaning of Persons Dr. Paul Tournier points out that scientists are a great deal more humble now than they were half a century ago. It is a pity that more theologians do not also have this humility before God’s mighty acts of creation.

  Why do people who are Christian feel so zealously that they have to protect God from truth? How can a scientific discovery, no matter how radical, be upsetting to a Creator who made all things, who is all Truth? God never promised us that truth would be easy, but he never warned us to shun it; he urged us to seek it, in order to be free. Often when we wrestle with truth we are reflecting Jacob’s night of wrestling the angel.

  Simone Weil writes, “For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

  But we keep on trying to protect God, in order to keep him in our own little corner. When our eldest child was baptized in the Episcopal Church, my beloved Mrs. O’ defied her Roman Catholic Church in order to go to the baptism.

  Now things have changed so that when I am at Mundelein College I stay in the convent with the sisters and go to Mass with them in the morning, and that is great joy.

  Only a decade or so ago in the Episcopal Church my Southern Baptist husband was—at least in a good many churches—not welcome. And I would not, could not, go to a Lord’s Table which excluded Hugh. Why did we ever fear that God could not protect his own table? He is the Host—why did we feel that we had to check over the guest list for him?

  That, too, has changed. Our religion is not closed from revelation; we are beginning to trust creation to the Creator, and to understand that our own awareness of the hows of creation truly must be subject to change without notice. But we cannot have this openness unless our faith in God as Lord of all is bedrock under our feet.

  How we need this rock!

  Paul, in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth, emphasizes the firmness of the rock, and the eternal is-ness of Christ, when he writes:

  All our ancestors were under the cloud…and all passed through the sea; and were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.

  Christ with us always, before the journey, during it, after the end. That is the rock under our feet, the rock which springs forth with healing, thirst-quenching water. The Trinity has always been a unity; the Father, who will be what el will be, the Holy Spirit, before creation, brooding over the universe. And then the Word shouting for joy.

  And it was good. We have done much to distort and wound that good—that distortion and pain are results of the gift of free will. But that does not make the original good any less glorious.

  And I turn to story, for enlightenment. Some of the stories Jesus tells about our places at the table say a good deal to me here.

  Story is paramount throughout Scripture, beginning with the beginning. In the Book of Genesis alone is all the material for a flaming bestseller—sex, incest, virtue, violence, greed, conflict, lust, love, murder—it’s all there.

  The first human characters in this amazing drama ar
e Adam and Eve, who were expelled from Eden. In order to understand this story, we have to recognize that it is told from the point of view of the fall of this planet, whereas this planet was falling for something which had already taken place in more cosmic terms.

  There was war in Heaven.

  That fact was part of the revelation to Saint John the Divine.

  Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

  And Satan and his angels are still here. When the Lord, in the beginning of the Book of Job, asks Satan what he has been doing, he answers that he has been walking up and down, to and fro over the earth. (Looking to see what he could do? He finds plenty to do, then and now. Alas.)

  The war in heaven is still going on, and we are a part of it. It is easy to see wickedness here on this planet, in every newscast, newspaper, magazine; a little less easy, perhaps, to perceive that it is not limited to our earth, or our solar system, or our galaxy.

  As we think about this vast, cosmic battle, it is far too easy to fall into dualism, to think of darkness and light battling each other from the beginning, as some of the eastern religions proclaim. But if God created everything and saw that it was good, then something must have happened to this good, to change and distort it. The problem is not from without; it rose from within. And we have within each of us some of this wrongness, and too often we refuse to see it, and don’t understand why we are not happy, nor why our faith seems a dim thing, nor why our prayers are like dead ashes.

  But what is faith? We all know people who are convinced of the rightness of their faith, and yet seem to be narrow-minded and sometimes downright vicious. People who are convinced of the rightness of their religion are quite literally burning the books they have decided are not Christian, urged on by their ministers. Anything that mentions ghosts, witches, spirits, has to go, and if that is taken literally, the Bible will have to be added to the pyre: because of Saul and the witch of Endor and Samuel’s ghost. It reminds me a little of the hysteria during Joseph McCarthy’s wild attempt to point his trembling finger at communists in this country. Not that there aren’t communists in this country, working for our overthrow; there are. But when we get hysterical about it, we tend to start looking under the wrong beds; we ignore the dangerous people and begin to persecute the innocent. We seem to have learned nothing from Salem.

  Recently I was sent a clipping from a Midwestern newspaper listing ten books which were to be removed from the shelves because of their pornographic content. One of them was my own novel, A Wind in the Door. This has me both frankly fascinated and totally baffled. I have thought seriously about this, looking at the book to see if there is anything which could possibly be interpreted as pornographic, and haven’t found anything. Another of the books cited was C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles. This is the first time C. S. Lewis and I have been listed together as writers of pornography. Of course, if teenagers get hold of this list, the sales of our books will soar!

  And that itself says something sad, not about the children, but about the world presented to them by the adults. We tend to find what we look for. If we have prurient minds, no matter how pure we delude ourselves into thinking we are, we will find pornography everywhere. If we are looking for dirt, we will find it, or worse, we will soil things which are not in themselves dirty. If we are looking for meaning, for order in complexity, for the love which heals, then we are less apt to find filth, seeing instead something which God has created, and is therefore valuable.

  Some books, movies, paintings, are, in fact, destructively pornographic, and pornography is on the increase, in a world which we can no longer look on with loving eyes, seeing the goodness of it all. But C. S. Lewis pornographic? Should I laugh or cry?

  Far worse than this absurdity is the sorry fact that all across the planet people who are convinced of the rightness of their religion are killing people whose religion differs from theirs. There seems to be a terrible confusion between faith and prejudice.

  A young friend told me of an East Indian Christian who had suggested to her that we are not called to be Christians; we are called to be Christs. I find this both challenging and freeing when I am confused by all the things which Christians are doing all over the planet, in the name of Christ, which seem incompatible with all that Jesus taught.

  I distrust the word Christian as an adjective; it has become less an adjective than a label, separating those who call themselves Christian from the rest of the world. How can those who would follow Christ assume that they are more beloved of the Creator than any other part of his creation, when God created everything, and saw that it was good? And if God created man in his own image, male and female, then all, all of humankind is part of that image, known or unknown, served or betrayed, accepted or denied. God loves every man, sings the psalmist. Perhaps it is more blessed to be aware of our part in the Image than not, but Jesus made it clear that sometimes it is those who are least aware of it who serve the image best. It is truer to that image to be like the publican, aware of his unworthiness, than like the Pharisee who was puffed up with the pride of his own virtue; it is truer to the image to say, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief,” than to dismiss the crucifixion by saying, “It is good for one man to die for the sake of the nation.”

  Faith consists in the acceptance of doubts, the working through them, rather than the repression of them.

  Faith is beyond literal definition. If we could define it, or give a recipe for it, we could make a Fanny Farmer Cookbook of Faith, and all we’d have to do is check the index for the kind of faith we needed at the moment. But faith, like prayer, is a gift, a gift of knowing that the light shines in the darkness, of knowing that the light cannot be put out, no matter how diligently the tempter tries to snuff it. The gift, when it comes, frequently alters our perception of reality, and the manner in which we pray. Prayer, like faith, is a much misunderstood, much abused word. Sometimes we pray most honestly when we pray in ways which are considered childish, when we give ourselves to God just as we are, with all our imperfections, prejudices and faults. Is it really prayer when someone who cannot force us to change our honest point of view says, piously, “I’ll pray for you”?

  —

  Throughout recorded history there have been totally different perceptions of reality. To the ancient Hebrews, a hierarchy of gods did not, for a long time, seem inconsistent with their God is one and God is all. The earth was the center of the universe, and the sun by day and the moon by night were put there entirely for our benefit. Community was not only understood, it was essential for survival, and when the ancient Hebrew said “I” it was seldom clear whether he meant himself as an individual or the community. There are examples of this equating of the person with the community in many of the Psalms.

  Communication with God was simple and direct and often startling. It would not have seemed as astounding then as it would be today to have the angel Gabriel appear to a young girl, hand her a lily, and tell her that she was going to become pregnant by the Holy Spirit.

  But even by the time of this amazing event, the world view was far more complicated than it had been only a few centuries earlier; but we human beings, on planet earth, were still, and would continue to be for a good many more centuries, the prime focus of God’s concern.

  The mediaeval world, having gone through the harsh purification of the Dark Ages, had its own clearly-diagrammed perception of reality. Heaven was up; earth was here; hell was down. God’s mysteries were taken for granted; and the relation between God and the creature was forthright. People were not afraid to ask God, Why?

  In the Renaissance world the question became less why than how? This persistent asking of how can be seen in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, although L
eonardo, being a genius, often asked why and how at the same time.

  As astronomy became a more and more sophisticated science, it was finally conceded that the earth was not, after all, the center of all that God had created, but a very small part of a greater whole—a difficult transition for many people. It is not easy for any of us to step out of the limelight.

  With the coming of the industrial revolution and a focus on experiments which could be confirmed by laboratory testing, perceptions again shifted radically. When I was a school girl, probably the majority of scientists were atheists because God was no longer needed. Humanism rode high. It was assumed that what science had not yet discovered, it would shortly accomplish. We were, we thought, on the verge of knowing everything. The eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was about to pay off. The scientists in their labs, serene in the white coats of their priesthood, were the new gods.

  I would like to think that it was my realization of this falseness that made me dislike math and science while I was in school, though if I had any such awareness it was purely intuitive and unknown to me. I loved geometry, because it dealt with questions, even when one was able to write Q.E.D. at the bottom of the paper. The rest of it I disliked because I was no good at it. During chemistry classes I tried to amuse myself by pretending that I was Madame Curie, and all I accomplished was blowing up the lab, which was in an old greenhouse. So when I am asked by interviewers about my “great scientific background,” I have to reply that I have none. The magnificent theological mystery of science did not burst upon me until well after I was married and had three children.