And so we come to the story of the Tower of Babel, the reverse story of the great day of Pentecost, which was the redemption of Babel, the great day of Pentecost when once again people understood each other when they spoke.
It was not the building of the tower that was wrong, but the reason for it: hubris, once again. If the tower reached to heaven, the builders reasoned, they would be as God.
And, as always when we fall for this particularly effective temptation of Satan, disaster followed, and the Lord said,
“Go to, let us confound their language, that they may not understand each other’s speech.”
And suddenly the people began to speak in different languages, and they could no longer understand one another. The effects of this fragmentation are frighteningly visible today, among the nations, and (more surprisingly and less excusably) within the church.
Of all the roles my husband has played, one of my very favourites is that of Cardinal Cajetan in John Osgood’s play Luther. Cajetan has a long, impassioned speech in which he begs Luther not to leave the church. Among other cogent reasons he gives is that we would no longer have one language if the church were divided into denominations, each speaking the language of a different country. Whereas, if the church stayed together, there was always the lingua franca of Latin, understood whether one were in France or Germany or Serbo-Croatia. It would be a sorry fragmenting of the body.
It was either Emerson or Thoreau (from either of them it would have been an extraordinary statement) who said that the worst thing to happen to Western civilization was Luther’s leaving the church. This statement, considering who made it, cannot be tossed aside. I’m still thinking about it.
Hugh was fascinated by the role of Cajetan, and did a good deal of research into the character of this complex man. It so happened that, during the run of the play, friends of ours went to Rome with their two daughters, who were friends of our children. These little girls had not seen the play, and were probably not aware of Hugh’s role in it. But one day when they were in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the younger of the two girls stopped in front of a statue, pointed, and said, “Look! There’s Mr. Franklin!”
The statue was of Cardinal Cajetan.
I have no explanation for this kind of marvellous synchronicity. I simply rejoice when it happens.
And synchronicity weaves and interweaves throughout Scripture.
—
After the disaster at Babel there’s a long column of genealogy, until we come to the begetting of Abraham, Lot, and Sarah. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to call them by their familiar names, though as so often happens in Scripture, part way through their lives their names are changed by God; Abram becomes Abraham, and Sarai becomes Sarah. One of the many reasons I wish I knew Hebrew is the importance of the meaning of names. For instance, the Hebrew for Isaac is Itzak, and Itzak means laughter (though Isaac had a singularly unfunny life). But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Abraham and Sarah were old. They’d probably used up their social security benefits. They were candidates for a Retirement Village or an Old People’s home—had there been such things. Sarah was long past menopause, and Abraham his equivalent thereof. They had lived a full, if childless, life, and surely deserved some peace and quiet in their old age. You would certainly think that they were the last people God would pick as pioneers.
But the Lord from whom Jesus refused to turn away when the Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tempted, doesn’t pick the logical people to do the work which needs to be done, and that’s one of the most important things to know about God. Each one of us, el’s creatures, is going to be asked to do things we don’t think we can do, and el is going to expect us to do them.
Perhaps that is the meaning of the strange story of the fig tree which did not give figs to Jesus. Nikos Kazantzakis wrote:
I said to the almond tree,
Sister, speak to me of God.
And the almond tree blossomed.
When God asks us to do something, el expects us to do it, whether we think we can do it or not.
Many great things have been accomplished by people the world didn’t think adequate to do them. The pages of history are filled with heroic people who have had epilepsy, club feet, were stutterers, short of stature, blind, one-armed…
In a much less sensational way, I was a tongue-tied, shyness-frozen adolescent and young woman. In any public gathering I backed into a corner and tried to become invisible. When I was first asked to give a talk in front of an audience, I had to hold on to the podium, quite literally, in order to stop my knees from buckling under me. It was only when I realized that my shyness and awkwardness were a form of self-centeredness, and that I, myself (or what I thought of as myself) didn’t matter, that I began to be able to open my mouth and speak, to look at the other person’s needs instead of my own, to be able to reach out instead of drawing back.
We do occasionally learn from our mistakes. When I am enabled freely to throw my arms around someone in spontaneous pleasure at meeting, I am reminded of an occasion in my young womanhood when I was in my mother’s hospital room (she was there for some minor surgery), and a friend of mine came in, to see me, as well as to visit my mother. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and she held out her arms in greeting and I, the Yankee cousin frozen into shyness in the midst of all the southern kin, did not return the gesture, not realizing until later that this reticence could well have been interpreted as rebuff.
It wasn’t till long after that experience that the human touch became a joy to me, but the acute awareness that I had not returned love with love was a lesson I will never forget. It was not a lesson I learned that day, once for all. It is a lesson I never stop learning.
Slowly I have realized that I do not have to be qualified to do what I am asked to do, that I just have to go ahead and do it, even if I can’t do it as well as I think it ought to be done. This is one of the most liberating lessons of my life.
The qualifications needed for God’s work are very different from those of the world. In fact, when we begin to think we are qualified, we have already fallen for the tempter’s wiles. Not one of us has to be qualified in order to employ lesson, meditation, and orison; to read, think, and pray over Scripture. We do not need to have gone to a theological seminary, or to have taken courses in Bible in or out of college. We do have to be willing to open ourselves to the power of the living Word. And sometimes that can be frightening.
But we are in good company. Surely Abraham and Sarah were frightened when the Lord said to them,
“Leave your country, leave your family, and go to a land which I will show you. And I will make from you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and you will be a blessing.”
The story of Abraham and Sarah is many-layered, and over the centuries we have barely scratched the surface of all that it means. But we turn back to it, again and again, because it gives us glimpses of the nature of the God who was called Abba—Father—by Jesus. God’s calling of Abraham and Sarah demanded a response which was not action alone, but action which was prayer.
And God continued,
“And I will bless them who bless you, and curse them who curse you, and in you shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
All families, not just a few here and there, separated from the rest of the population, but all families of the earth shall be blessed, whether we deserve it or not.
Would we listen if the Lord asked of us what he asked of these old people? I hope we would, but I’m not sure. Nor am I sure that if we listened, and heard, we would have obeyed. But Abraham and Sarah, and Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and all their retinue,
went forth to go into the land of the Canaan.
All was going well with the journey for these intrepid voyagers, and then there was a famine so severe that Abraham went into Egypt for food. But he was afraid that if he admitted that Sarah was his wife, he might be killed, for Abraham, suddenly looking at Sarah w
ith fresh eyes, said to her,
“I’m aware that you are a fair woman to look upon, therefore the Egyptians will kill me, but they will save you and keep you alive.”
So he asked Sarah to pretend she was only his sister because, according to the custom of that time and that part of the world, it was all right for a stranger to sleep with a man’s sister, but not with his wife. If one of the noble Egyptians looked upon Sarah, and wanted her, and knew that she was Abraham’s wife, they would have to kill him first to have her.
Pragmatic, our father Abraham.
So they left Egypt when the famine was over and continued on their way. Abraham’s and Lot’s servants quarrelled, and because Abraham did not want dissension between himself and his nephew, they agreed to go their separate ways. Lot went to Sodom, where he was taken captive, whereupon his uncle
armed his trained servants, born in his own land, three hundred and eighteen
to rescue Lot.
Scripture is often specific about numbers. Numbers are their own language, and it has been suggested that if and when we make contact with a culture from another galaxy, we should try to communicate with a binary code using numbers, rather than words. Nevertheless, numbers have their own magic, and musicians, such as Bach, are very aware of the importance of them.
After Abraham had rescued Lot he was blessed by Melchizedek. In spite of the conjectures of theologians and historians, he remains a mysterious figure. He was
a priest of Salem, and also a priest of the most high God.
And the psalmist foretold of Christ that he would be
a priest forever, not in the Aaronic priesthood, but after the order of Melchizedek.
Of course, Melchizedek was a priest long before the Hebrew temple was built, or the ark of God, long before the Lord gave the stone tablets of the commandments to Moses, long before Aaron became high priest, long before the tabernacle and the Holy of Holies. But Melchizedek was a herald of things to come, because he brought bread and wine to Abraham, thereby prefiguring the Eucharist.
Abraham continued the journey after this refreshment, but he was still unhappy because he had no children, and he complained to God about this.
That’s another thing the heroes of the Old Testament have in common: Whenever they are disturbed or upset they complain to God, loudly and uninhibitedly.
I am often surprised at the number of people who think it is somehow wrong to complain to God. When I complain to God, I don’t take it out on my family and friends. And when I complain to God, I am often shown what it is that I am really complaining about, and that I am being silly, or trivial, or selfish, or cowardly. Or that I am in deep trouble and it is right to turn to my Maker. When I vent my feelings on God, el will give me the courage, or other gifts I need that I might very well not have received if I had been too reticent to complain.
Abraham was not afraid to complain. So God took him out one night and said,
“Look now toward heaven and tell the stars, if you are able to number them…so shall your seed be.”
What an extraordinary promise to make to an old man! But Abraham believed in the Lord.
God does not ask us to believe the reasonable things; why should el? Believing in what is reasonable is no problem. El asks us to believe that which is not so much unreasonable as that which exists on the other side of reason. So that all that I base my life on is beyond reason, beyond proof.
Believing is never easy, and it is not cheap. Yet Abraham believed, and he did what the Lord told him to do.
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him.
I think that most of us have known something of this horror. Terror anticus, it is called. It is part of the price of faith. The greater the jewel we seek, the higher the price. But it is worth it. It is worth it.
—
In those days, if a woman were childless, she could bear her husband a baby through the body of her maid. It is difficult for us on our overcrowded planet to understand the vital importance of children for the nomadic peoples of those days. Children were a matter of life and death, not only for the individual family, but for the preservation of the tribe, the community. If there were not enough hands to bring in the crops, to protect the tribe from the enemy, disaster would follow.
So Sarah sent her maid, Hagar, in to Abraham, and she conceived, and when she saw that she had succeeded where Sarah had not, she despised the older woman. How bitter that must have been for barren Sarah. So she sent Hagar away, and in due time Hagar bore a son, Ishmael, and Ishmael means bitterness.
The story might well have been different if Hagar had not scorned her mistress. But she did, and there are depths below depths in the story of Hagar, and of Ishmael, too. Their story, being part of Abraham’s and Sarah’s story, was a familiar one to the people of Jesus’ time; it was part of their mythic language, which runs in the bloodstream. When the child of the slave was compared to the child of the free woman in Paul’s Galatian epistle, there were probably few people who did not remember Hagar’s scorn of her mistress. And Hagar, in looking down on Sarah, had fallen into the trap of the tempter, and bitterness followed.
—
Chapter 15 begins,
The word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision.
Scripture is full of visions, and they are to be taken seriously and tested very carefully. It may be appalling to us to accept that Satan can speak in tongues, mimicking the Holy Spirit angelically; so also can he send visions, and all visions must be tested against the temptations in order for us to know who has sent them, and whether or not we can trust them. People have had visions where they were told to murder, and they have obeyed these terrible visions, and the result has been sorrow on earth and in heaven.
Anything good (kything, visions, physical love) is immediately imitated and distorted by the tempter, but that does not make the original good any less good, or change or alter the original good which God made.
When the Lord of heaven and earth sends us a vision it is for a good reason. God often speaks to us at night, when we have let down our defences and are quiet enough to hear his voice. When we try to take control of our lives, and perhaps the lives of some of the people around us, our eyes and ears are closed to God’s visions.
Scientists and artists both know that visions and inspiration come when least expected. Often we will worry over a problem, brooding fruitlessly, and when we have let it go, suddenly the answer will be there, just when we have stopped looking for it. Sometimes when I am walking my dog at the end of the day, and my mind and body are tired, I will simply walk without thinking, letting my mind roam free. And then I am often given unexpected and beautiful gifts. And sometimes I am given horrors.
As a storyteller I have been trained to think of every possibility that can happen to my characters, and this training seeps off the page into what is happening in my own life, and the lives of my family and friends. And so, as I can imagine all the good things, so can I imagine the terrible. And, if I am open to the good things, I am also, as a consequence, open to the bad.
In The Time Trilogy there are evil creatures called the echthroi. The singular is echthros, a Greek word which simply means the enemy. It is an enemy-sounding word, and I have come to understand that the enemy rejoices whenever I project a fearful vision. If someone is late driving home, I have immediate visions of all kinds of terrible accidents, and there have been enough accidents in our lives so that I know that they do happen. But I try to shut off each bad projection, superimposing a lovely one instead. If there is too much talk of nuclear warfare, again I pray for the planet by visualizing it as whole and beautiful, perhaps in the autumn, when gold and scarlet sweep across the landscape. Or I visualize my family during a time of happiness, a festival dinner, with all the candles lit, and all of us holding hands around the table.
If the ugly visions persist, “Lord!” I cry, “Protect me from echthroid projections!” And, “Send
your holy angels to cleanse me, mind, body, spirit. Send your angels to banish the echthroi.” And I say the prayer from the office of Compline:
Visit this place, O Lord, and drive far from it all snares of the enemy; let your holy angels dwell with us to preserve us in peace; and let your blessing be upon us always; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
And I sing the ancient monastic hymn:
From all ill dreams defend our eyes,
From nightly fears and fantasies.
Tread underfoot the ghostly foe
That no pollution we may know.
Some of these words seem even more applicable now than they did when they were written, centuries ago. No pollution? How do we escape the pollution of greed, and lust for power, and hardness of heart? And the more modern pollutions of noise and filth and contaminated air and water?
However, if I am totally immune from the projections of the ecthroi, from the horror of great darkness, from terror anticus, then I immunize myself also from the visions which the Lord sends. And I must trust the Lord and el’s angels to guard and protect me.
Rainer Maria Rilke said that he was afraid that if he vanquished his demons, his angels would leave him, too. So here we are, once again caught in paradox. And we often refuse to accept the paradox by calling visions unreal, figments of the imagination, delirium, madness, hysteria. We don’t want to let go our control.
So it is not surprising that it is during sleep (“Samuel! Samuel!”) that our manipulative selves let go their rigid authoritarianism, and our dreams come to us, with messages sometimes quiet and beautiful, sometimes terrible, so that we wake up, trembling. Most of us have recurring dreams. I go, periodically, to a beautiful house, a house I have never been to, but whose many rooms are well known to me, and whose beautiful views rest the troubled spirit.
And It Was Good Page 10
