The Spirit broods over the waters before the beginning of man’s time; speaks through the Prophets; guides Michelangelo’s chisel, Shakespeare’s pen, Serkin’s fingers. I understand and I do not understand; I know and I do not know.
One evening I was up in Tallis’s apartment, leafing through an obsolete icon calendar which he had kept for the beauty of the photographs. One of them struck me with that extraordinary arrow of revelation and recognition which is one of the brightest of human joys. In this icon the prophet Elijah is sitting in the desert, and is telling God that it is better for him to die than to live, in much the same angry way as the prophet Jonah.
In the icon a raven has come, as God promised, to feed the prophet. And in the raven’s beak is the round white circle of the communion bread: Chronology once more broken apart by kairos, by the truth of love.
Silence was the one thing we were not prepared for,
we are never prepared for.
Silence is too much like death.
We do not understand it.
Whenever it comes we make up thunders and lightnings
and we call anxiously for the angels to sing for us.
It is all right for Elijah to kill all those false prophets,
though they were comfortingly noisy;
it is all right for him to bring that poor widow’s boy
back to life with his own audible breath;
that is only a miracle. We understand miracles.
But he survived God’s silence, and that is more extraordinary
than all the sounds of all of Israel’s battles rolled into one.
Why is God silent? Why does he not sound for us?
He came silently to birth. Only the angels,
Taking pity on us, sang to make that silence bearable.
When he came to dwell among us men on earth
only his mother understood the silence,
and when he died she made no sound of weeping.
Why does silence make us shiver with the fear of death?
There was more sound to comfort our ears
when he was hammered to the cross
and cried out through the strangling bonds
and the temple veil was rent and graves burst wide,
than when he was born. I am not sure
that death is silent. But Easter is.
The angels did not sing for us, heralding the glory.
There was no sound to prepare us, no noise of miracle,
no trumpet announcing the death of death—
or was it what we call life? We did not understand
and we ran from the empty tomb and then
he came to us in silence. He did not explain
and at last I knew that only in silence is the word
even when the word itself is silent.
Thus in silence did that strange dark bird
Bring to Elijah in the desert the whole and holy Word.
If I cannot receive the gifts of the Spirit in silence, I will never be able to receive them in any other way. Often I understand that this strange dark bird has been with me only when I am turned again and look back, with anamnesis, and realize that the No of God, when I felt most deserted, was a Spirit-filled No preparing me for a Yes.
Hugh and Alan and Tallis are my teachers, and better teachers no one could hope for. When I go flying off on a tangent, as I so frequently do, one of them will reach out and pull me back. One time I evidently gave a limiting adjective to God in front of Alan. I don’t remember what I said, nor what his rebuke; I only know my response, which was to go off and scribble these lines which, a few minutes later, I put into his hand.
LOVE LETTER ADDRESSED TO:
Your immanent eminence
wholly transcendent
permament, in firmament
holy, resplendent
other and aweful
incomprehensible
legal, unlawful
wild, indefensible
eminent immanence
mysterium tremendum
mysterium fascinans
incarnate, trinitarian
being impassible
infinite wisdom
one indivisible
king of the kingdom
logos, word-speaker
star-namer, narrator
man-maker, man-seeker
ex nihil creator
unbegun, unbeginning
complete but unending
wind-weaving, sun-spinning
ruthless, unbending:
Eternal compassion
helpless before you
I, Lord, in my fashion,
love and adore you.
It is a strange love affair I have with this One who breathed his Spirit into me, baptized me with it all those years ago, willy-nilly, who never betrays me, though I am consistently unfaithful to him, like Hosea’s wife. Not only do I listen to the wiles of the dragon, I become the dragon, and then I remember Rilke’s words:
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last minute turn into princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave … Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
I know that when I am most monstrous, I am most in need of love. When my temper flares out of bounds it is usually set off by something unimportant which is on top of a series of events over which I have no control, which have made me helpless, and thus caused me anguish and frustration. I am not lovable when I am enraged, although it is when I most need love.
One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.
So God does with me. I strike out at him in pain and fear and he holds me under the shadow of his wings. Sometimes he appears to me to be so unreasonable that I think I cannot live with him, but I know that I cannot live without him. He is my lover, father, mother, sister, brother, friend, paramour, companion, my love, my all.
Until I can say this, I cannot understand my theology of failure, or the Noes of God.
MARCH 25TH: THE ANNUNCIATION
To the impossible: Yes!
Enter and penetrate,
O Spirit, come and bless
This hour. The star is late.
Only the absurdity of love
Can break the bonds of hate.
*From L’Engle, Lines Scribbled on an Envelope, copyright © 1969. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
10 … Show Me Your Hindquarters and Let Me Hear You Roar
What’s all this stuff about a Trinitarian God? We’re rugged individualists, we Americans, and all this gabble about three in one and one in three is pluralism and not E pluribus unum, whatever that used to mean; we don’t have to take Latin in school anymore. This Trinity thing is one way of allowing ourselves polytheism instead of monotheism. And it’s tied up somewhere with the family as a unit, but nowadays the validity of the family is being questioned, and even by bishops of the Church.
We’ve come near to discarding the Trinity season as part of the Church calendar, because 3 in 1 and 1 in 3 makes even less sense than 0 × 3 = 0 instead of 3. And if we are becoming free to ignore the Trinity, then we can ignore the breakup of the family as a coherent and creative unit. Most families aren’t, so why pretend?
Because of the United States industrial patterns, with many middle-class families consistently being uprooted every few years, thus breaking familial community, we’ve been forced into rationalizing this breaking up by denying the value of parental and grandparental relationships, and calling them manipulative and abnormal, all full of Freudian nastiness. Few children today grow up with easy coming and going between uncles and aunts and grandparents. This is the way things are, and we tend to justify the way thin
gs are as good and right, and so the family as the living image of the Trinitarian God becomes denigrated—otherwise old people couldn’t be shuffled off to institutions as so many are. Sometimes there is no choice. The ‘nuclear’ pattern of family life makes it inevitable. But not always. Sometimes it is simply easier. It’s not nice to see someone growing old and incontinent. It’s easier to put the sight away. So families fall apart, and divorce is made easy, because this is the way of the world, and put Grandma in a home because it’s really horrid for the kids to see her sitting there drooling, and last night she wet her bed.… The rector was telling me of a place where they’re really very kind to them.…
The breaking up of families and the cult of youth has encouraged us to dishonor old age and to ignore the Fourth Commandment as being out of date. It was one thing for those nomadic old Hebrews who didn’t have the advantage of Senior Citizens’ Villages and Old People’s Homes and Nursing Homes and all that technocracy has given us, but it has little bearing on the realities of life in the enlightened United States.
If one thinks of Mother as being devourer and emasculator (some are, but not all; mine wasn’t), then it’s easy to feel one needn’t honor her, or if Father is only the image of the paternalistic male chauvinist pig Old Testament God (some are, but not all; mine wasn’t), then one needn’t honor him, either. It strikes me as being a weaselly way out of responsible and creative (and therefore painful) relations.
I have been tested about this, and in the fire, too, and I’ve written about this testing in The Summer of the Great-grandmother, and I wouldn’t have been able to go on honoring my mother had it not been for the support and compassionate help of the entire family. I may not have thought consciously about the Trinity that summer, but in my intuitive subconscious I learned a lot about it.
We’ve been trying to understand the Trinity in terms of provable fact instead of poetry, and so we stop saying the Creed at many services. But the Creed is not a blueprint for faith; the Creed is a symbole. If I have to say the Creed in terms of scientific proof, I cannot say it all. But the Creed, like the Trinity, is best understood in the open language of poetry, of myth, that language in which we participate when we try to express ultimate things.
Athanasius and his friends, hammering out the Quicunque Vult in order to defend the Trinitarian God they adored, struggled to move beyond the literal level of daily words and yet make the point, and sometimes blundered into absurdity (as Dorothy Sayers noted): the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Spirit incomprehensible—the whole thing incomprehensible. Of course it is. That’s partly the point of Athanasius’s powerful wielding of words as though he were trying to catch hold of the whirlwind. The Trinity is trapped in neither time nor space. Before Abraham was, I am, cries the second person. I will be what I will be, shouts the first. And through the brilliant flame of the Spirit I know that the Christ on whose name I call was creating galaxies and snowflakes long before there were living beings naming the animals in the Garden.
Perhaps the morning stars still sing together, only we have forgotten the language, as we have forgotten so much else, limiting Christianity to a mere two thousand years. We’ve known it by that name for even less, but that is our shortsightedness. When God came to us as one of us he was misunderstood and betrayed and part of that misunderstanding and betrayal is our dimming his brilliance because it’s too much for our feeble eyes; our limiting his power because we’re afraid of the unsheathed lightning; our binding him with ropes of chronology instead of trying to understand his freedom in kairos. Not that we’ve done any of this to the Lord himself, only to our image of the One we worship, and that’s bad enough.
We’re so dependent on the literal level that many Christians today have never even heard the Athanasian creed because it’s just too much for sane modern man come of age. It was all so long ago, when Christianity was first formulating its symboles against the early heresies that it seems irrelevant, and we don’t even recognize that we’re surrounded by the same old heresies today. Satan doesn’t need new weapons to confound us as long as the old ones still work.
In the last couple of decades there has been a new interest in community, so perhaps the idea of a Trinitarian God will once again be valid for us.
Unity in diversity has not always been as difficult for the human mind to understand as it is today. In the Psalms, for instance, we often don’t know whether the psalmist is talking of himself, or of the community. And for the psalmist there is very little difference. He is who he is because he belongs to the people chosen by God. Without his community, he has no identity.
The same kind of assurance was known by the early Christians. They knew exactly who they were, through their baptisms, and each one literally held the lives of the others in his hand. That doesn’t mean that they were identical, all good little Christians exactly alike, any more than my big toe and my elbow are identical, or my eyebrows and my fingernails. But, with all their radical differences, they had to be one body in order to survive; just as our corporeal bodies must be a unity. If my left foot walks in one direction and my right in another, I’m not going to get anywhere—except flat on my face.
My moments of being most complete, most integrated, have come either in complete solitude or when I am being part of a body made up of many people going in the same direction. A vivid example is a great symphony orchestra, where each instrument is completely necessary for the whole; a violin cannot take the place of a trombone, nor cymbals of the harp; and there are even times when the lowly triangle is the focus of the music.
(I love Chaliapin’s definition of heaven: “There will be five thousand sopranos, five thousand altos, ten tenors—I don’t much like tenors—a thousand baritones, and I will sing bass.”)
Where have I known this unity?
In the Holy Mysteries. Yes.
And years ago when I was in the theatre and was privileged to be a small part of bringing a play to life, I remember one evening during rehearsal lying up on the grid and looking down from this great height to the stage and yet being a complete part of all that was being said and done.
And I knew it when we lived in Crosswicks year round and I directed the choir in the village church, knew it not because I was director, but because I was a part of something which became a whole, and was far more beautiful than the sum of its parts, even in midsummer when all of the tenor and bass section had to be out haying and I sang tenor, or bass an octave high.
And I know it around the family table where all of us different and dominant human beings, with all our diversity, are one.
One night after a small dinner party at a friend’s house, I wrote for him:
Sitting around your table
as we did, able
to laugh, argue, share
bread and wine and companionship, care
about what someone else was saying, even
if we disagreed passionately: Heaven,
we’re told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial,
eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium
partakes—for me, at least—of sacrament.
(Whereas the devil, ever intent
on competition, invented the cocktail party where
one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare
we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free?
Yes! Around your table we
knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless
the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest.
And I knew the beauty of community in the birthing of my babies. We human beings are not meant to give birth to our offspring alone, any more than the dolphin, who delivers her babes with the help of midwife dolphins, in community. The need of the mother for support at this incredible moment has too often been forgotten by science, and it is good that once again the father can be present at the birth of his seed and share in this marvelous communal act.
I wish I knew it more often in church, and th
at I were a less reluctant Christian. The Church is too grownup for me, too reasonable, too limited. One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof. I find that I agree with many college-age kids who are rejecting the adult world—not those with bad cases of Peter Pantheism, but with those who understand that the most grownup of us is not very grownup at all; that the most mature of us is pretty immature; that we still have a vast amount to learn.
The writers I admire most, who mean most to me, who teach me most, are, by and large, dead. One reason that there are not more great novels or plays or poems written today is that writing, like prayer, has become a do-it-yourself activity. Buy a book, take a course, and you will learn to be in control of your pen, manipulate words, and choose what you want to write, and be a success.
That’s not the way it is.
A writer grimly controls his work to his peril, manipulates only in great danger (to be in control of your technique is very different from being in control of the work). Slowly, slowly, I am learning to listen to the book, in the same way I try to listen in prayer. If the book tells me to do something completely unexpected, I heed it; the book is usually right. If a book like this present one, a strange kind of book for a storyteller, pushes me to write it, I have no choice except to pay attention. All I can do, as far as activism is concerned, is to write daily, read as much as possible, and keep my vocabulary alive and changing so that I will have an instrument on which to play the book if it does me the honor of coming to me and asking to be written. I have never yet fully served a book. But it is my greatest joy to try.
It takes courage to open oneself vulnerably to the depths of a book. The moment I set words down on a page I become responsible for those words. Letters from readers have forced me to be aware of this responsibility which I would much rather not know about—but there it is, and I had better accept it. A letter from a teenager ran something like this, “I am thinking about becoming a Christian, but one thing worries me. All my friends who are Christians say that only Christians can be saved. What do you think? I’m writing to you because your stories have made me trust you.” That’s more responsibility than I want. But we’re all of us responsible the moment we get out of bed every morning. I wrote that teenager a long letter (we’re still corresponding) and I hope that I gave her a glimpse of God’s love which is always greater than our continual misinterpretation of it. But I don’t know. And that is frightening.
The Irrational Season Page 18
