And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Please go home and check the Bible and see if you can find out where it is forbidden, and come back and bring me chapter and verse,” I suggested.

  If she looked it up, she didn’t find it, not in a concordance, not in the text.

  Mantra is simply a convenient borrowed word for the kind of prayer that is constant, which helps us to pray at all times—which the Bible does tell us to do. For the Christian, the mantra can be any short petition from the Bible, preferably one which includes the name of Jesus. The most frequently used petition is the cry of the blind man on the road to Jericho, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner, or the shorter version, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

  This is familiarly known as the Jesus Prayer, and I am uncomfortable whenever anyone says, “I use the Jesus Prayer,” for we never “use” the Jesus Prayer. It uses us.

  And far too often we take the name of Jesus casually, or, even worse, possessively. I do not want to be what my husband calls “a bumper-sticker Christian.” Recently we were parked behind a car with two bumper stickers. The one on the left said I LOVE MY PEKINGESE. The one on the right said I LOVE JESUS. Somehow I do not put much stock in that kind of love! Perhaps I was turned off by I LOVE MY PEKINGESE and I LOVE JESUS side by side because there was something possessive about those messages, something separating the owner from those who have neither Pekingese nor Jesus as pets. That scares me. The Word is not a pet. The Word is the wildness behind creation, the terror of a black hole, the atomic violence of burning hydrogen within a sun. (Christ is both lion and lamb, and lions are not domesticated.)

  A minister friend of mine in the Midwest was parked beside a car, at a red light, and the other car had the familiar bumper sticker HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. The car behind them began to honk insistently, and the man in the car with the bumper sticker got out, went to the honking car, leaned in the window and said, “You goddam fool, can’t you see there’s a red light?”

  The man who had been honking replied mildly, “But I just love Jesus!”

  Remember what Jesus had to say about someone who called his brother a fool?

  A friend of mine, an old and holy man, occasionally talked about people he felt were “bejeezly.” The people in the above two stories were bejeezly, using the name of Jesus trivially, thoughtlessly, smugly. Anyone saying the Jesus Prayer with such an attitude is tampering with the incredible Power of the Word which created all things. We must approach the name of Jesus humbly, in the same way that we approach the table to receive the bread and wine.

  “But doesn’t the Jesus Prayer seem selfish?” I am sometimes asked. “Isn’t it selfish to ask it for me?”

  We must learn that we never ask it for ourselves alone. Me is always the Body. And when I am praying for someone, holding on to the Jesus Prayer, me is whoever I am praying for.

  When I was given this prayer by my spiritual director two decades ago, I, too, asked if it wasn’t selfish, and he didn’t even bother to answer my question, knowing that the Jesus Prayer itself would inform me. And it did. When we have been with this prayer long enough it becomes part of our life rhythm. When I wake up at night it comes bubbling up into my conscious mind like a little fountain—somewhat like the fountain in the wilderness which the Lord made to spring up for Ishmael. When I am frightened or in pain I hold on to it like a drowning sailor holding on to a rope. When I was going under anesthesia for some scary surgery (well, all surgery is scary) I held tightly to the life line of the Jesus Prayer, and there it was, holding me up out of the deep waters as I came back to consciousness.

  A friend of mine who had a frightening series of episodes where her heartbeat raced alarmingly, clutched at the Jesus Prayer to calm her panic, and her heartbeat, and then wondered if it was all right to say such a prayer in order to slow down the out-of-control rhythm of her heart, for the Jesus Prayer did indeed alleviate the wild acceleration. And I could only say that God wants us to be healthy, and that she was not “using” the Jesus Prayer, but holding on to it faithfully, so that she could offer herself to God and allow her body to respond according to el’s will.

  I do not understand the radiant power of the Jesus Prayer, but I am grateful for it every day. And perhaps it is just as well not to understand, because if we did, we might indeed be tempted to “use” it, to treat it merely as a tool.

  One time, more than thirty years ago, after I had come very close to death, I had a terrible dream which recurred to haunt me for a good many years. I would wake up from it in a cold sweat of terror. There were various settings for the dream, but the constant element was that I could not light the lamps in whatever room I was in. I would reach for a light switch, or a lamp pull, and the light would not come on. It would not come on because there was evil in the room, keeping it in darkness. It was the evil which was so terrible, and I would rush frantically from light to light, but the light was under the power of the evil. Sometimes I knew where the evil was, coiled like a snake, and I could not pass it. One time when I was visiting my mother in the South, it was in the hall between her room and mine, coiled around a small bookcase which held a set of encyclopaedias, and it would not let me by to get to my mother. Another time it was in our apartment in New York, possessing the kitchen. The setting varied, but the terror was the same, and I would wake up from the dream cold with terror. It was Abraham’s horror of great darkness in its most extreme form.

  One night, after I had been given the Jesus Prayer, and it had been deep within me for quite some time, I dreamed this dream again. This time the setting was a house in London. I was in a room on the top floor, and as usual in the dream I was rushing from lamp to lamp, but the evil had control of the light. The evil was coiled across the door sill, so that I could not get out of the room to get down the stairs, and the evil possessed the stairs. And then, suddenly, in the dream, I was holding on to the Jesus Prayer, and the strong rope of this prayer took me through the miasma of evil, all the way down the stairs, and out into the brilliant sunlight.

  I have not had the dream since, and that is twenty years. I may have it again; I do not know. But I do know that the evil cannot permanently quench the light, that the light shines in the darkness, and that it will be there for me, bright and beautiful, forever.

  I do not always say the Jesus Prayer well, but that is all right; it helps me, not the other way around. And it has helped to show me the aim of contemplative prayer.

  The aim of the oriental method of contemplative prayer is total loss of self—nirvana. My son-in-law, Alan, tells me that nirvana means “where there is no wind.” For the Christian the wind of the Spirit is all-important, that Spirit which brooded on the face of the waters in the beginning, which spoke through the prophets, and which came to us as our Comforter after the Ascension. We do not seek to go to that place where there is no wind, where there is nothing.

  Rather than the total loss of self which comes with nirvana, the aim of the Christian contemplative is discovery, our discovery of God and by God. We seek God not in order to find but to be found. When God discovers me in the deepest depths then I am truly Named, and rather than ceasing to be, I become.

  It is a meeting of lovers.

  John of the Cross wrote:

  Let us rejoice, beloved,

  And let us go forth

  To behold ourselves in your beauty,

  And he wrote again:

  …that I may resemble you in your beauty, and you resemble me in your beauty, and my beauty may be your beauty, and your beauty my beauty; wherefore I shall be you in your beauty, and you will be me in your beauty, because your beauty will be my beauty; and therefore we shall behold each other in your beauty. (Spiritual Canticle, stanza 36, no. 5)

  It is a mountaintop experience (as the cliché has it), but we must remember that for one Mount of Transfiguration there were multiplied days of fishing, ploughing the fields, walking the dusty roads. The daily duties must be done before we are given a glimpse of glory. As an old Southern
woman said, “I don’t mind cookin’, ’cept hits just so damn daily.”

  We can get hooked on too many mountaintop experiences, and this is as dangerous as drugs. Our love of God, and God’s love for us, is most often expressed in dailiness. The incarnation is an affirmation of the value and richness of dailiness, and of the rhythm of work and play.

  We get out of rhythm, out of synchronization, and a Quiet Day, a retreat, a place and time apart from the regular round of dailiness can help us to reestablish the rhythm.

  My annual birthday present to myself is a retreat at the convent of the Community of the Holy Spirit, just a few blocks from our apartment—but it might be halfway around the world. I move into silence slowly, but also with a feeling of homecoming. The Sisters still eat in silence, except on special days, and since they are a teaching order, the silence must be a welcome relief. During the day most of the Sisters are teaching at school, and I can be in the chapel by myself (but never alone), or in the peace and privacy of my room. In the early morning, at noon and in the late afternoon and evening, I share in the Offices. I am nourished in all areas of myself, and then am better able to return to the dailiness of the ordinary working day.

  Simone Weil writes, “The key to the Christian concept of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.”

  (Orientation: “Eastward-ness.” Fascinating.)

  “The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”

  Warmth of heart is often emphasized in essays on the Jesus Prayer, such as Unseen Warfare, or The Way of the Pilgrim. I think that Simone Weil is warning against prayer as a pleasurable, self-satisfying emotion, rather than total attentiveness to God and his will, no matter how startling that may sometimes be.

  Sometimes the Jesus Prayer does surprise and turn me around, but mostly it is a beautiful part of that rhythm which is with me not only when I am on retreat, but during that “damn dailiness” which is the largest part of our lives.

  William Johnston writes in The Mirror Mind that “we must carefully distinguish between a word that is truly religious and one that is magical. In authentic religion the power of the word resides not in the sound itself but in the faith of the speaker. In magic, on the other hand, the power resides in the word itself—hence what counts is the use of the correct formula, correctly pronounced, and this formula must be kept a dark secret, since anyone who knows it automatically possesses the power. It is this magical use of words (as well as the mechanical repetition of sounds) that Jesus castigates when he says, ‘And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words.’…I emphasize this because magical formulas have been used in certain forms of oriental meditation that have been introduced to the West, and magic is to be avoided by anyone who would practice authentic religion.”

  Certainly I have never attempted to count the number of times the Jesus Prayer repeats itself within me during the day and night. There is no more virtue to be found in saying it a million times than half a million. I share Father Johnston’s sensitivity about turning religion into magic (If I say the Jesus Prayer ten thousand times then God will give me thus and so); but I also believe that there is more power in the words of the Jesus Prayer than in my own fragile faith. When my spiritual director gave me this prayer I was still trying (and failing) to understand the incarnation with my intellect. Jesus is wholly God and wholly man?!? Jesus is exactly like us, except sinless?!? Jesus came to save us from our sins and from the Father?!?

  My mind was running into intellectual brick walls. But I had been trained in college to use my mind. Even though I had majored in English literature, I was trained to be suspicious of anything which was beyond the realm of logic. And so I was suspicious of the incarnation; I was suspicious of accepting Christ as Lord.

  My spiritual director knew this when he gave me the Jesus Prayer. He offered it to me not as an easy solution to my problems, but gently, tentatively, as a gift. And because I trusted him I was willing at least to open the gift, look at it, try it on. And so, not really believing in Jesus, I started to live with the Jesus Prayer. And the power of the prayer itself moved from beyond the limitations of the intellect and into my heart.

  I never stumbled into the error of thinking of the prayer as some kind of magic formula. I knew only that I was lost and that I needed to be found. My finding was not magic; it was miracle. And miracle comes from God. Human beings can use magic, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil; it has great power. But miracle is wholly God’s, and miracle, the particular miracle of the Jesus Prayer, made me understand as never before that all power belongs to God.

  With man it is impossible. With God nothing is impossible.

  Magic: I find I’m not really sure what magic is. An old woman growing healing herbs in her backyard and brewing them into tea for ailing children is not practising magic; she is practising an old and valid form of medicine. People who do not know the virtue in healing herbs can wrongly confuse the posset with magic. Magic is simply using what God has created, using it to do the things God created it to do. The problem arises when people forget that the power is God’s and give it to a human being, or to whatever the human being is using. Magic becomes bad when a human being takes the credit for it. The focus should be on God, the Giver of the gift, otherwise something which is intrinsically good will be turned into something which is at the least dangerous, and at worst downright evil.

  The Old Testament prepares us for the gift of the Jesus Prayer. In Deuteronomy we read:

  “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

  God’s Word shall be everywhere in your life, in all parts of your living, in your downsitting and your uprising. The continual trust in the Word of God is not limited to the Jew or the Christian. It is part of the longing of the human psyche in all cultures. The Kalahari bushmen listen for it in the tapping of the stars. The Buddhist believes that the “proper recitation of the sutra is a way of salvation not only for the one who recites but also for his relatives and friends,” writes William Johnston in The Mirror Mind.

  And in all cultures it is made clear that the recitation of the holy words is never for the individual; it is for the salvation of all people, the redemption of the entire universe. The interrelationship is so total that at the death of a single person the galaxies quake. And the laughter of one child is part of the singing of the stars.

  —

  Nevertheless I would like all the answers re my prayer life, my spiritual life, handed me all tidily wrapped up. But I have learned that if I want neat, unconflicting answers, I would have to go to some rigid sect where my free will would be denied. And so I have learned to rejoice in questions.

  I left the Episcopal Church, the church of my birth, after six years of Anglican boarding schools. In college I opted for the world of the intellect, where mind alone was going to conquer all. I read philosophy, taught by a brilliant atheist, and found that I still longed for God, and so did the philosophers.

  My return to the church was not easy. It was a difficult journey of painful questions and painful happenings. I had to live through illness, and through the death of some close to me. I had to live through more than a decade of rejection for my work. And a near decade of living year round in a rural setting, while we had our family, ran a general store in the village, and I was forced to face all the questions to which I found no answers, and which I learned, agonizingly, had no answers. Not in mortal terms.

  At a writers’ conference a you
ng woman stood up and said, “I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was about eight, and I didn’t understand it. But I knew what it was about.” And that remark, too, was a revelation to me.

  At a church conference recently someone asked, “You have referred to your agnostic period. What happened to get you out of it?”

  And I reply, joyfully, that I am still an agnostic, but then I was an unhappy one, seeking finite answers, and now I am a happy one, rejoicing in paradox. Agnostic means only that we do not know, and we finite creatures cannot know, in any intellectual or ultimate way, the infinite Lord, the undivided Trinity. Now I am able to accept my not-knowing—and yet, in a completely different way, in the old biblical way, I also know what I do not understand, and that is what my agnosticism means to me now. It does not mean that I do not believe; it is an acceptance that I am created, that I am asked to bear the light, knowing that this is the most wonderful of all vocations.

  When I returned to the church of my birth it was not to discard the intellect, but now I know that to depend on intellect alone is not enough. Perhaps it is because I am a storyteller that I need sign, symbol, sacrament, that which takes me beyond where my mind can go alone.

  I discover that I am most certain of who I am when I am paying least attention to myself, that I most enjoy the legitimate pleasures of this world when they are not uppermost in my mind. My prayer life is very up and down. I go through long dry periods, and although I know that these are part of faith, when I am lost in the dark night of the soul I fear that it is never going to end. I do know that I need to do my daily finger exercises of prayer, reading Morning and Evening Prayer and meditating on psalter and Scripture even when the words seem empty and my thoughts stupid. Sometimes the Jesus Prayer is like a slack rope. But if I do not do my finger exercises regularly, when the time comes for the words to be filled, they will not be there.

  I wish that the church demanded more of us. The human psyche thrives on creative demands, and if we aren’t given real ones, we fall for illegitimate ones, like those imposed by some of the sects and which can sometimes lead to horrors such as ritual suicide in Guyana. In order to receive and fulfill legitimate demands, I am an associate of the Community of the Holy Spirit, and following that rule is, far from being restrictive, wonderfully freeing. It is shape and pattern when the days are overbusy, or when I look for definitive answers and find none.