The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Well, here I come another cropper. The first person who comes to my mind is Jacob, and Jacob does not fit any normal definition of the pure in heart. Jacob was really pretty much of a stinker, cheating his brother Esau, tricking his blind and dying father to get a blessing which did not belong to him.

  But he recognized God when he wrestled with him, and he limped forever after. And that limp is important, for the point the Old Testament writer is making by emphasizing Jacob’s thigh is that anyone who has seen the living God and survived is marked by this experience and is recognized forever after by the mark.

  The early Christians were recognized by the rest of the world, for they bore the mark of the wound of love, and the sign of this love is light, by which they were recognized and for which they lay down their lives. There’s a chorus of a song which goes, “You can tell we are Christians by our love.”

  Can we? Are we wounded enough to be recognized as Christians?

  In a church in New Jersey I saw this poster made by the teenagers: If you were arrested as a Christian would there be enough evidence against you to convict you?

  That arrow really shot me right through the heart.

  But I was severely questioned by a young man, a song writer, on this very subject. Oh, sure, he said bitterly, you can recognize Christians by their love for one another because they don’t love anybody else.

  There’s a good deal of truth in this accusation, but of course that kind of self-love isn’t love at all, and it isn’t Christian, either. But if I am to love others, and not only my own kind as he pointed out, then I must first accept that I am loved; this is the necessary prelude for my acceptance of myself. Then am I able to love those close to me, parents, husband, children, friends. Only then am I free to move out and love those less lovable to me, to love my enemy.

  When this young man was a boy he had read A Wrinkle in Time, which he said he still rereads occasionally. So I said, “Okay, remember when Meg has to go back to Camazotz to rescue Charles Wallace from the power of It, the naked brain, she knows that if she could love It, her love would defeat It. And she can’t do it, so she turns to Charles Wallace because she can love her little brother, and that love is strong enough to defeat the cold intellectual power if It. I came to this ending from my own experience, because there was someone I knew I ought to love, and with every effort of will I tried to love and I couldn’t do it. But I found that if I turned away completely, and thought about those I could love, my husband, my three children, then I could get back into love, and then I could turn with love to the person I had such difficulties with.”

  And later I said, “But in A Wind in the Door Meg has to make the next step into mature love; she has to learn to love Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Jenkins is not an easy person to love.”

  We love wherever we can love, and the power of that love spreads until the circumference of the circle of love grows wider and wider. At least that has been my own experience, even though I know to my rue that the circumference of my love is still much too small.

  It’s too small for all of us; I’m not just breast beating. The circle grows slowly and painfully even with the saints, and so does purity of heart. Who can possibly be pure of heart in this impure world?

  Peter. Peter recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. And Jesus said, “Flesh and blood has not told you this.” So purity of heart is not a virtue, it is a gift, and Peter, bumbling, noisy Peter, was given the gift of purity, the ability to see God. And after this he betrayed the God he had seen, he ran from him, he denied him, he was not there when they crucified his Lord. But he believed in the Resurrection, and his confession of Jesus as Messiah was the rock on which the Church was founded, and in the end he lay down his life for what he had seen and known.

  The fact that Peter could see God, and thus be pure in heart despite all his faults and flaws, is a great comfort, because it tells me that this purity, like every single one of the Beatitudes, is available to each of us, as sheer gift of grace, if we are willing to be vulnerable.

  But Peter saw God two thousand years ago, when the second person of the Trinity came to his Creation as a man, when his footsteps were left in the dust, when the light of his smile lit the sky with the brilliance of the sun. What about now, two thousand years later, when his presence among us has been gone for so long? Who can be pure in heart and see God now?

  It is one of the burdens of living in a fallen world that each generation has its war. For Hugh and me it is World War II, and in one of the stories coming from this war I find my image of that purity of heart which allows a human being to see God and live.

  This story concerns a Lutheran pastor in Germany who could not reconcile his religion with the Third Reich, which pretended to protect the religious establishment as long as those who belonged to it were pure Aryan (forget that Jesus was a Jew) and were willing to heil Hitler. This pastor had met with Hitler, who liked him, and wanted to give him preferment. But the choice was as cut and dried for the pastor as it was for those first Christians when they were asked to burn a pinch of incense to the divinity of the emperor. And he did not have celibacy to make his choice easier. He had a wife and children and he loved his family and he did not take lightly his responsibility to them.

  But he could not betray everything he believed, everything that he stood for in his ministry; he could not burn that pinch of incense.

  He and his wife and children were sent to a concentration camp, and the wife and children died there. Like Anne Frank’s father, he was the only one left.

  When it was all over, when Hitler’s megalomaniac kingdom had fallen, and the world was trying to put itself back together and return to everyday living, it was remembered that he had seen Hitler. Someone asked him curiously, “What did Hitler look like?”

  He replied quietly, “Like Jesus Christ.”

  And that is what it is like to be pure in heart and to see God.

  I’m not anywhere nearly there. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, where I can see through my own sin and sham to the image of God in the lowest of his creatures. Like Meg, I do have to start where I can love. But that is at least a start.

  Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

  Never have we needed peacemakers more. There is a peculiar horror in turning on radio or TV for the news and hearing about Christians fighting Moslems, or Catholics fighting Protestants, or Jews fighting Arabs.

  If I continue to struggle to think of the Beatitudes as a description of Jesus, it is bound to affect my understanding of peace, because Jesus, the peacemaker, the Son of God, said that he came not to bring peace, but a sword. And the Hebrew word shalom—peace—is not a passive word like the Greek eirēnē, a primarily negative word denoting the absence of war, but a positive word, shalom, the peace which comes after the last battle.

  Do we have to think about war before we can think about being peacemakers? A teenager wrote to me about one of my books and then added, “We’ve been studying the Crusades in school. Can there be such, a thing as a Holy War? Can a Christian kill?”

  It was not an easy letter to answer, nor did I answer it to my satisfaction. Offensive war, never. That’s easy. But defensive? Could we, in conscience, Christian conscience, have refused to enter World War II? Could we have stood by and let Hitler take over our friends and neighbors and accomplish his mission of exterminating all Jews? We couldn’t, my generation, or at least so it seemed to us. And we had to take on our American selves some of the responsibility for all that caused Hitler and his rise to power. We felt deep in our hearts that the only way to be peacemakers was to fight the Nazis and then cry, Shalom!

  Several young men who were close to me were killed in that war, and if we had learned enough to know that there is no such thing as a war to end war, at least they died believing their cause was just, and something in me will not let me say that they died in vain.

  But I have to look directly at the fact that the Hitler Jugend believed
in the justness of their cause, too. They were saving the world. It’s confusing, this trying to think about war, and it makes me understand with deep pain that, despite the bite of that apple, a great deal of the time we do not know what is good and what is evil. We cannot tell our left hand from our right.

  I was sorting these thoughts out one morning, and began outlining them to my friend Tallis.

  He looked down his nose at me. “Don’t be so cosmic.”

  “Am I being cosmic?”

  “Yes. Don’t be.”

  When I tend to go cosmic it is often because it is easier to be cosmic than to be particular. The small, overlooked particulars which are symbols of such things as being peacemakers are usually to be found in our everyday lives. Of course we’d rather have something more dramatic and spectacular, so we tend not to see the peacemakers in our own path, or the opportunities for peacemaking which are presented us each day.

  When I need to think particularly rather than cosmically, I turn as always to my family, this time once again to the little boy whose sister hurried to the judo studio the day he had been punished for something she had done.

  The judo lessons came about not because of the dangers of living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but because of the school bus in our small New England village. When Bion was in first grade the school bus stopped at the bottom of the hill, nearly a mile from our house. The two other boys who got off at the same stop were both older and bigger, and when there was nothing better to do, they jumped on the little first-grader and roughed him up.

  Hugh asked, “Why don’t you fight them back?”

  Bion answered reasonably, “There are two of them, Daddy, and they’re bigger than I am.”

  So when we moved to New York in the middle of the next school year, he had judo lessons. He enjoyed judo, and he was good at it.

  One Saturday he took the bus down Broadway to spend the day with a friend. As he was walking the long block between Broadway and West End Avenue, three boys came up to him and demanded his money. All he had was his bus fare, which he handed over. He then went on to his friend’s, and in the late afternoon borrowed the bus fare to come home.

  He told us about it at dinner, and Hugh said, “Why didn’t you use your judo on them?”

  “For fifteen cents, Daddy? I might have hurt them.”

  He was, and is, a peacemaker.

  So are many of the people I pass each day on the rough streets of the Upper West Side. I remember one time when we were setting off for Crosswicks for the first weekend in the spring, and Hugh went to the liquor store to see if he could have a carton in which to pack some things. But the cartons had just been picked up, so the proprietor of the liquor store went next door to the pharmacy to see if there was a box there. There wasn’t, but the pharmacist went to the laundromat to see if there was one there.…

  Peacemaking. Peacemaking on Upper Broadway, illumined by this quick generosity of all the shopkeepers on the block knocking themselves out to find an empty carton.

  It’s there for me to see, as long as I recognize it. And I must recognize, too, the opportunities for being a peacemaker which are daily offered me. Nothing dramatic or spectacular, but lots of little things, and the smallness does not make them less opportunities.

  Just on the walk between our apartment and the Cathedral library, for instance; it’s a crowded time of day, when I take off in the morning a little after eight o’clock, with mobs of people going to work, sleepy, unready for the damp cold in winter, the humid heat in summer. Each morning I walk past a large supermarket. Across the sidewalk is a metal slide, sloping from a huge delivery truck to a side entrance of the market. There is a small gap in the slide, just large enough to let one person pass through at a time. A man in the truck sends heavy cartons down the slide, and they are lifted over the gap by another man who stands trying to do his job of getting the truck unloaded while people coming from both directions are trying to get through the gap. My dog and I are among them. The man struggles to get the cartons across the gap and onto the lower section of the slide under conditions which are, to put it mildly, frustrating.

  One winter the man with this thankless job was large and strong-looking, but older than a man ought to be who has to lift heavy cartons. His skin, which had once been coffee-with-cream, was tinged with grey. His expression was dour, and who can blame him? Most people, hurrying to jobs which are no more than drudgery, thought only of getting through the bottleneck which was impeding their way, a reaction which is no more than natural. But my job is real work, and real work is play, not drudgery. I walk through the dirty and crowded streets to a place of trees and grass and beauty, and within this place to a gracious, book-filled room where I am free to write, and this is joy.

  So, one morning as the dog and I slid through the bottleneck, I smiled and said, “Good morning.”

  I got no response. Naturally. The sour look did not soften. Why should it? It was stubbornness which made me persist in saying “Good morning,” or “Thank you,” day after day.

  One day he smiled back.

  One day he smiled first.

  Not much in the way of peacemaking, is it? But it is what is offered me each morning. And, as my grandmother was fond of reminding me, little drops of water and little grains of sand make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.

  The way of peacemaking given us may be something so small that it seems hardly worth doing, but it is these small offerings which build our reflexes for the larger ones. The ways of peacemaking given middle-class Americans like me are far less spectacular than—for instance—those given the group of Protestant and Roman Catholic women in Northern Ireland who daily risk their lives to cross the battle lines and pray with each other, but the grace to brave such danger has been built on the foundation of the small responses—even things as small as not wanting to hurt the boys who took your bus fare, or everybody on the block trying to find a carton, or smiling at the dour man who now smiles, too—it may not seem like much; it is not much; but it is what is given at the present moment, and it is what ultimately provides the grace for the greater tests.

  When we are given the grace to be peacemakers even in these little, unimpressive ways, then we are children of God, children by adoption and grace, but children nevertheless, who are bold to call him Father, Abba. So we children are helped to become peacemakers, and one day we will truly be able to cry, Shalom!

  6 … The Noes of God

  Lent has gone by too quickly. Holy Week is here and I have to start thinking about Good Friday; God’s Friday; and there is the last Beatitude waiting for my attention, and so I feel that it is somehow appropriate to work it into my Holy Week thinking: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Tallis tells me that the Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes Easter, whereas the Western Church emphasizes Good Friday, but I have never been able to think of one without the other. As it takes both male and female to make mankind, so it takes both Good Friday and Easter to make Christianity.

  On Palm Sunday in the Cathedral the congregation participates in acting out the Gospel, and we are the mob, and I choke as I shout out, His blood be on us, and on our children. Crucify him! Crucify him! I choke not because it is something I would never under any circumstances say, but because just as I do not know what I would have done had I been an ordinary German under Hitler’s regime, neither do I know what I would have done had I been caught up in that mob. I might well have cried, Crucify him! and been convinced that this was the right thing to do.

  An even more deeply moving service is on Maundy Thursday when, after the bread and wine has been given and received, one by one the candles are snuffed out. Then everything is taken away. The altar is stripped down and the naked marble has wine poured into the five “wounds” and washed with water. Finally the seven great hanging lamps are, with difficulty, lowered by the sacristan who pulls them down by a long pole with a hook on the end. As he get
s each one down he blows it out.

  Darkness. Emptiness. There is nothing left.

  That is how it must have been for the disciples. For his friends. Dark. Empty.

  He was dead. All their hopes were shattered. No one knew there was going to be a resurrection. Their hearts were heavy and without hope. He was just a minor political agitator after all, instead of what he said he was. On Good Friday no one thought about Easter, because Easter hadn’t happened yet, and no one could dream of such an impossible possibility.

  Perhaps, we call Good Friday good because it was what made Easter possible. But why wasn’t there any other way? Does it always take failure in man’s terms to make success in God’s?

  One of my young married students has suffered all her life because she was taught in her Church that she was born so sinful that the only way the wrath of God the Father could be appeased enough for him to forgive all her horrible sinfulness was for God the Son to die in agony on the cross. Without his suffering, the Father would remain angry forever with all his Creation.

  Many of us have had at least part of that horror thrust on us at one time or other in our childhood. For many reasons I never went to Sunday School, so I was spared having a lot of peculiar teaching to unlearn. It’s only lately that I’ve discovered that it was no less a person than St. Anselm who saw the atonement in terms of appeasement of an angry God, from which follows immediately the heresy that Jesus came to save us from God the Father.

  The quality which has always amazed and rejoiced me about God is his constant loving concern for his Creation. Even when we are most disobediant to the laws of love he still cares; he is slow to anger and quick to forgive—far quicker to forgive than his human creatures, such as Jonah, who is intensely irritated by the Father’s compassion. This loving concern is apparent all through the Old Testament, preparing us for the ultimate concern shown in the New where he actually comes to us as one of us.

  If he is truly one of us, wholly man as well as wholly God, then his death is inevitable. All men must die. All created matter ultimately comes to an end.