The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  During those times

  when you have gone silent in the midst of laughter

  have you remembered all the innocence

  slaughtered that you might be with us now?

  When you have gone up into the mountain apart to pray,

  have you remembered that their lives were cut down

  for your life, and so ours?

  Rachel’s screams still shatter the silence

  and I cannot sleep at night for remembering.

  Do you ever forget your children that sleep?

  When will you bring them out of the sides of the earth

  and show mercy unto them?

  Who will embrace them until you come?

  I cannot sleep.

  But because I have already tasted of the cup

  I cannot turn from you now.

  I, who live, praise you.

  Can those who have gone before you into the pit

  celebrate you or hope for your truth?

  Tell me, tell me, for I am an old man

  and lost in the dark cloud of my ignorance.

  Nevertheless, blessed is he

  whom thou hast chosen and taken, O Lord.”

  He did not speak again.

  But he was there when the rocks were rent

  the veil of the temple torn in twain

  the sun blackened by clouds

  the earth quaked with darkness

  the sky was white and utterly empty.

  The city gaped with loss.

  Then, out of the silence,

  the Lord went

  bearing the marks of nails and spear

  moving swiftly through the darkness

  into the yawning night of the pit.

  There he sought first

  not as one might have supposed

  for Moses or Elias

  but for the children

  who had been waiting for him.

  So, seeking, he was met

  by the three Holy Children

  the Young Men

  burning bright

  transforming the fire into dew as they cried:

  “Blessed art thou, O Lord God, forevermore.”

  And all the children came running

  and offering to him their blood

  and singing: “With sevenfold heat

  did the Chaldean tyrant in his rage

  cause the furnace to be heated

  for the Godly Ones

  who wiped our blood like tears

  when we were thrust here

  lost and unknowing.

  The Holy Three

  waited here to receive us

  and to teach us to sing your coming

  forasmuch as thou art pitiful

  and lovest mankind.”

  So they held his hand

  and gave him their kisses and their blood

  and, laughing, led him by the dragon

  who could not bear their innocence

  and thrashed with his tail

  so that the pit trembled with his rage.

  But even his roaring could not drown their song:

  “For unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship,

  with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever,

  and unto ages of ages, Amen.”

  And the holy children were round about him,

  the Holy Innocents and the Holy Three.

  They walked through the darkness of the fiery furnace

  and the dragon could see their brightness,

  yea, he saw four walkers loose

  walking in the midst of the fire and having no hurt

  and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God.

  And he saw the Son of God move through hell

  and he heard the Holy Children sing:

  “Meet is it that we should magnify thee,

  the life-giver

  who has stretched out thy hands upon the cross

  and hast shattered the dominion of the enemy.

  Blessed art thou, O Lord God, forevermore.

  O Jesus, God and Saviour,

  who didst take upon thee Adam’s sin

  and didst taste of death

  (the cup was bitter),

  thou hast come again to Adam

  O compassionate One

  for thou only art good

  and lovest mankind,

  Blessed art thou, O Lord God, forevermore.”

  So hell was shriven

  while the holy children, singing,

  transformed the flames to dew,

  and the gates of Heaven opened.

  Then, by the empty tomb,

  the old man slept.

  If the dark prophets who infuriated the people of the Establishment in their own day have anything to say to me today, it is through their constant emphasizing that God is so free of his own creation that he can transform us in our pain into a community of people who are able to be free of the very establishments which are formed in his name. For these establishments inevitably begin to institutionalize God’s love and then he teaches us (put my tears in your bottle) what love really is—not our love, not what we want God’s love to be, but God’s love.

  4 … To a Long-Loved Love

  When I was a little girl in France I put out my shoes on the Eve of Epiphany. They were only ordinary shoes, not proper sabots, so I wasn’t sure that they would be noticed by the three Wise Men; but in the morning one shoe held a new drawing pad, and the other a box of colored pencils. I like the idea of presents and feasting on Twelfth Night, so that Christmas can follow quietly on Advent. Christmas doesn’t start until Christmas Eve, and then it can go on and on and the tree shines as brightly on Epiphany as on Christmas Day.

  And there’s more time to make things, which is one of the joys of Christmas. Our favorite presents are the homemade ones. Several years ago we decided that we were not going to be bullied by the post office or the Greeting Card Establishment into mailing our cards well before Christmas. We make our own cards, and I may not get an idea for one well before Christmas, for one thing. And there are a goodly number of people we write to only once a year, tucking the letter in with the card. So for the past several years we’ve taken our time, and as long as the last Christmas letter gets mailed before Lent, that’s all I worry about, and Epiphany is a season of joy instead of exhaustion.

  EPIPHANY

  Unclench your fists

  Hold our your hands.

  Take mine.

  Let us hold each other.

  Thus is his Glory

  Manifest.

  Epiphany is a special time to me in another and extra-special way, because Hugh and I were married during the Epiphany season, thirty years ago, and my wedding anniversary is part of my personal calendar of the Church year. My attitude toward the promises Hugh and I made is a fundamental part of my theology of failure, and the freedom and laughter and joy which this brings.

  During Advent, when I contemplate the four last things, I think not only of the end of all time and matter, but of my own end, Hugh’s end. A friend of mine said that when two people truly love each other, each one has to be willing to let the other die first. I try to be willing, but it’s not easy.

  And it’s not part of the American atmosphere where the amoeba, rather than the human being, would be the logical symbol of success. Amoebas never betray each other by dying. Nor is there any sexism in the amoeba’s culture—though this may be because there isn’t any sex. The amoeba produces by dividing and subdividing, which doesn’t sound like much fun.

  However, fun or no fun, the amoeba is a success—and when I consider the world’s definition of success, I doubt if there’s ever much fun involved. But the amoeba is way ahead of the human being, because it is immortal. It has no normal life span. Unless killed by some unforeseen accident, the amoeba lives forever.

  Radio and television commercials seem directed more to the amoeba than to the human being, especially those for life insurance, where the announcer says, “… b
ut in case something should happen to you …”

  It strikes me forcefully as I listen to those unctuous words that something is indeed going to happen to me, and to that announcer, and to everybody who buys or does not buy insurance. We are going to die. We have a life span, and sooner or later, by accident or disease or attrition, we are going to come to the end of our mortal lives.

  Why do we have a life span instead of being like the amoeba? Because of sex. It wasn’t until it took two members of a species to produce offspring that a life span came into the evolutionary system. Sex and death came into the world simultaneously. All creatures with a complicated cellular system have a life span: it may be a few days, a few years, or threescore years and ten.

  Obviously we are all failures, we human beings. We may have fun, but we’re flops. But maybe I’m happy because I am a failure, a human failure who enjoys sex, has a limited life span, and who made marriage vows which have added both to the fun and the failure. I wish the American marriage service had not deleted the words of the English service, where the man says to the woman, “With my body I thee worship,” because I think the basic difference between Christian and secular marriage is that Christian marriage affirms the pleasures of the body, of creation. Too many people would like to forget that Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine at a marriage feast, in a glorious affirmation of human love, human joy, human pain. Wine is a word which has meaning upon meaning for the Christian: water into wine; the baptism of water and blood; and it is only when I think of the wedding at Cana that I come close to understanding the words of the ancient prayer: Blood of Christ inebriate me. At the Eucharist I pray that our souls may be washed in this precious blood, and that it will preserve our souls and bodies into everlasting life. These are terrible prayers, and it is small wonder that so many of us are afraid to say them, and that many of the new translations try to water them down.

  I was taken aback to have a well-known liberal theologian say that he wished that people would not think of sex in terms of morals, and I replied that I had never thought of sex and morals in conjunction, and he said, “You’re very lucky. Most people still think that sex is not very nice.” What a strange, revealing remark, and what a totally un-Christian point of view. And yet I think that it is often a factor in the breakup of a marriage.

  A year ago on our anniversary I had occasion to take a taxi, and the driver and I got to talking, and we talked about marriage, and I said that it was pretty much of a record for a writer and an actor to have been married for twenty-nine years. He turned completely around, disregarding the traffic and the snowy streets, and said, “Lady, that’s not a record. That’s a miracle.”

  He’s probably right. It’s an extraordinary thing to me that Hugh and I have been married for this long. It is also, I believe, a good marriage, although much of it would not seem to be so in terms of the kind of success commercials would hold out to us. However, our own expectations of marriage were false to start out with. Neither of us knew the person we had promised to live with for the rest of our lives. The first bitter lessons of marriage consisted in learning to love the person we had actually married, instead of the image we wanted to have married.

  I was twenty-seven. I had been living in Greenwich Village and working in the theatre. I had made a lot of mistakes and failures in love already, and had learned that structure and discipline were essential in my life if I wanted the freedom to write. Shortly before I met Hugh, I had painfully but totally cut loose from an undisciplined group of friends, and I assumed that the kind of pattern needed in my single writing life would also be essential to my married writing life. I was too involved in the ecstasy of love to think much about the inevitable conflicts ahead, and I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had been aware of them. I don’t ever remember living without conflict of one kind or another, and I’m not at all convinced that life without conflict is desirable. There’s not much conflict in the grave, but while we’re alive the only creative choice is choice of conflict.

  I realize how fortunate I was in the terms with which I started my marriage; I had had one novel published; the second was already in galleys; I had made a good start as a professional writer. When Hugh asked me to marry him, and talked about children, I said that I, too, wanted children, but that he had to understand that I could not stop writing, that he was marrying me as a writer, marrying all of me, not just the part of me which would bear his children. And I rather naïvely told him that writing takes a lot of time, and that I would be glad to do the cooking but he’d have to do the dishes.

  The division hasn’t been that straight down the line, but we’ve always shared household chores, and we have also shared the nurture of our babies. Hugh showed a generosity and understanding as rare then as it is now when he accepted me on these terms, and never expected me to be only an appendage, an et ux. I have never had to struggle against my husband to be me. This doesn’t mean that we haven’t had struggles and conflicts in our marriage—we have—but they have been in different areas.

  It is the nature of love to create, and Hugh and I did want to make babies together. In my conception of love, something always has to be created during the act of intercourse, but this something may be simply a strengthening of love, a love which is participation, not possession. Daniel Day Williams, in The Spirit and the Forms of Love, was the one to bring to my attention the idea of love which is participatory, and not long after I had read this book I was able to talk with him about it, and was taught even more. Just as our friendship was a’birthing he died, and I look forward to learning more from him in heaven.

  Too often, love is seen in terms of possession, and this destroys marriage. Until Hugh and I started our first baby, our love-making was a discovery of each other, was creating this strange new creature, a marriage.

  I’m glad that I’m a human mother, and not a sea horse; the sea horse might well be a symbol for the more extreme branches of women’s lib, because the female sea horse lays her eggs in the male’s pouch, and then he has to carry the eggs to term, go through labor pains, and bear the babies.

  I don’t understand why some women consider childbearing a humiliation; it’s an extraordinary act of creativity, and men suffer a great deprivation in being barred by their very nature from this most creative of all experiences. But there’s a price on it, as with all good things, especially for a woman who feels called to do something as well as being wife and mother.

  I actively enjoyed the whole magnificent process of having children, the amazing months of pregnancy when suddenly one becomes aware that one is carrying life, that a new human being is being created. While I was carrying Josephine, our first-born, I felt quickening while I was in an eye-and-ear hospital with a recurring eye problem; a young nurse happened to come into my room as I felt the first small flutterings, and I cried, “I think I feel the baby!” She ran to the bed and put her hand on my belly, and her joy in feeling the new life was almost as great as my own. From then on, there was a lovely procession of nurses and doctors coming to feel the baby; the quickening of new life is something which doesn’t often happen in an eye-and-ear hospital.

  I find the birthing of babies even more fantastic. And here I feel profoundly that the husband should be given the privilege of being with his wife during the birth, that he should not be excluded. This didn’t happen with Hugh and me until our son, Bion, was born in a small New England village, and delivered by an old-fashioned general practitioner. Hugh was with me to rub my back during pains, to hold my hand, suddenly to see the crowning of his son. Our first baby was born in a big New York hospital, delivered by an eminent obstetrician, and I spent hours left alone and in pain and afraid. It’s enough to make the whole process seem degrading.

  And nursing: I loved nursing my babies, but when Josephine was born, nursing was not yet popular again in New York City; it’s more trouble for the nurses, and I had to fight for the right to nurse my baby: “But nobody nurses babies nowaday
s.” “I do.”

  My husband’s theatre hours are definitely not nine to five. I had seen other young wives up at six with the baby, and unable to manage to be awake and ready to listen and talk when their husbands got home from the theatre, and I was determined that this was not going to happen with us. Our baby was a strong, healthy specimen, so, while I was still in the hospital, the head nurse told me that they had decided that the baby didn’t need the 2 A.M. feeding and they were going to cut it out. “But my husband’s an actor and we’re up at 2 A.M. Let’s cut the 6 A.M. feeding.” This wasn’t hospital procedure at all, and I had my first hospital fight to be a human being and not a cog in routine. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was the 2 A.M. feeding which would be cut. I replied in equally certain terms that if my baby was brought to me at 6 A.M. I would turn my breasts to the wall. I won.

  I had made a choice, a free yet structured choice. Why should a man come home at all if his wife isn’t awake and available? I had seen other actors go to the local bar instead of coming home to a dark apartment. This choosing the structure of our day was not being an unliberated woman. I chose it for my own pleasure, too; I enjoyed this time with my husband; it was no sacrifice. And I profoundly disbelieve in the child-centered household. What happens to the parents when it is time for the children to leave the nest if all of life has been focused on the fledglings?

  We had such fun with Josephine that we wanted more children, and this was when Hugh decided to leave the theatre—it didn’t seem fair to our children to have two parents in precarious professions. But I don’t think that either of us realized what this complete uprooting was going to involve. I know that I had a glamorous and completely unrealistic vision of life in the country, based on romantic English poetry, and my illusions were shattered in short order.

  In refusing to nurse my baby at 6 A.M. I was already moving toward what is now called ‘choosing an alternative life style.’ And when Hugh and I left New York and the theatre to continue raising our growing family, and went to live in a small village in New England, and ran a general store, we did what was later to be called ‘downgrading’—though we certainly didn’t think of it as such. Nor was it.

  When the children were little I was often on edge with sheer frustration. I was trying to run a big two-hundred-year-old house with no help; for three hours a day I helped my husband in the store—my shift was from noon to three in the afternoon, so that he could go home for lunch and a nap. Two of our best-sellers were teat dilators and bag balm—these are for cows; over half our customers were farmers, many of whom are still our good friends.