with the scurrying of rats, with shoddy
tarts, skills, thugs, harsh shouting.
And what comfort is cold within? We’re able
to offer a slim repast. The taste of brine
warm from fresh tears, is in the glass. Choosy
guests will not come here. The bread is body
broken. The wine is dark with blood. I’m doubting
if half of those invited will turn up.
Most will prefer to choose a different table,
will go elsewhere with gentler foods to sup.
And yet this is indeed a wedding feast
and we rejoice to share the bitter cup,
the crumbs of bread. For O my Lord, not least
of all that makes us raise the glass, is that we toast
You, who assembled this uncomely group: our one mysterious host.
Bread. Wine. A dinner table. The firm clasp of hands as we say grace. The warm flame of candles. It is all an affirmation of incarnation, of being, versus non-being. Even the sender of those cockroaches was in a perverse and sick way affirming incarnation, while completely misunderstanding the act.
The Lord Jesus Christ whose very name has the power to pull me from the terror of non-ness came to earth in a vulgar affirmation that all creation is good; we can dirty it, turn it to evil, join the angel who fought against Michael, but creation itself, all matter, is good.
We are afraid of the physicalness of incarnation. Jesus of Nazareth was a total man, with every part and function of a man’s body—even the parts which Paul described as “less honorable.” The more shattering thing is that he was tempted in all ways, including temptations I’ve never known, some I’ve probably never even heard about. I worship a Christ who is fully God because he was incarnate more completely than anyone I have known.
This past week while we were in the city, Bobby came to the north field of Crosswicks and spread its browning clover and grasses with manure. During the weekend Hugh goes to the rotting mulch of the composte heap and spreads it over the garden before ploughing it in. And this is good.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? It is the Lord strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory? Even the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.
Thus cries the psalmist. Thus I cry after him.
Who is this King of glory? A child born of a woman. A man betrayed by his friends as well as by his enemies. A failure who died ignominiously and who should by all logic have been immediately forgotten. A king of no glory on earth, a king who lost his battle with the Powers of this world, or so it would seem from the surface of the story. He performed a few miracles, but miracles were nothing new; others performed miracles. And he couldn’t save himself at the end.
If I am to seek for answers to my questions, or even for the questions to ask in the first place, I must hold to this failure; but it isn’t easy, so far have we strayed from the original vision. We don’t understand the method in his madness. His coming to us as a human child, in total weakness, was the greatest act of warfare against the powers of hate and chaos that I know. And if I, too, am to fight in this battle, it is from his weakness that I must draw my strength.
The symboles by which I live are the answers to my questions, are themselves the questions, are the healers of our brokenness. When we deny our wholeness, when we repress part of ourselves, when we are afraid of our own darkness, then the dark turns against us, turns on us, becomes evil. Just as the intellect when it is not informed by the heart becomes vicious, so the intuition, the subconscious, when it is forcibly held below the surface, becomes wild, and until we look at it and call it by name, our own name, it can devour us.
Am I afraid to look down into the dark and acknowledge myself, and say: Madeleine! and know that this, too, is part of what I am meant to be? Yes, I am afraid sometimes, but I become less afraid as my trust in the pattern of the universe deepens. I, too, have my place, as do we all, with the greatest galaxies, the smallest particles. Perhaps it takes all of this, all of creation, to make the Body of Christ, and the bride.
The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At the winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark. The sun does die. And then, to our amazement, the Son will rise again.
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come
In your fearful innocence.
We fumble in the far-spent night
Far from lovers, friends, and home:
Come in your naked, newborn might.
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come;
My heart withers in your absence.
Come, Lord Jesus, small, enfleshed
Like any human, helpless child.
Come once, come once again, come soon:
The stars in heaven fall, unmeshed;
The sun is dark, blood’s on the moon.
Come, word who came to us enfleshed,
Come speak in joy untamed and wild.
Come, thou wholly other, come,
Spoken before words began,
Come and judge your uttered world
Where you made our flesh your home.
Come, with bolts of lightning hurled,
Come, thou wholly other, come,
Who came to man by being man.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end,
Time’s end, my end, forever’s start.
Come in your flaming, burning power.
Time, like the temple veil, now rend;
Come, shatter every human hour.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end.
Break, then mend the waiting heart.
We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness, and the result of our failures in love. In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.
But his love is greater than all our hate, and he will not rest until Judas has turned to him, until Satan has turned to him, until the dark has turned to him; until we can all, all of us without exception, freely return his look of love with love in our own eyes and hearts. And then, healed, whole, complete but not finished, we will know the joy of being co-creators with the one to whom we call.
Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Crosswicks Journals
One
Crosswicks is a typical New England farmhouse, built sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, so it is well over two hundred years old. Its square central section has been added to haphazardly over the years, white clapboard somehow tying it all together, so that the house rambles pleasantly and crookedly. A dropped ball will roll right to the central chimneys, and the bookcases we’ve built in are masterpieces of non-alignment.
Crosswicks is a symbol for me of family and community life, of marriage in general and my own marriage in particular. It stands staunchly on the crest of one of the Litchfield hills in the northwest corner of Connecticut and through the centuries has withstood the batterings of many storms—blizzards, hurricanes, even a tornado—of love, anger, birth, death, tears, laughter.
Perhaps it is a particularly potent symbol for me because, until the house came to us over forty years ago, I had never lived in a real house, much less had one of my own. I was born on the asphalt island of Manhattan and lived for my first twelve years in an apartment. I had my own small back bedroom, its one window looking onto a court, where the stories of other city dwellers were sometimes enacted for me behind unshaded windows or on
the rooftop of a building lower than ours. I was an only child, with an ailing father, and lived a solitary life. My parents had dinner at eight o’clock in the evening, and I had my meal on a tray in my room and ate happily, with my feet on the desk and a book on my chest.
It was a totally different childhood from that of my husband, Hugh Franklin, who had a much more typically American upbringing, growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a comfortable, unpretentious house on a pleasant, tree-lined street of similar houses filled with professional father, stay-at-home mother, and many other children on the block to play with.
How different were Hugh’s and my early years; each of us was given different treasures, different sorrows. I grew up in a world of books, music, theatre, a small world where the artist was the norm, rather than the odd one out.
Hugh grew up in a world where artists were thought to belong to a half-world of permissiveness and promiscuity. His father was a distinguished lawyer, and there were books in the house, though not many, according to the standards of my parents. The First Baptist Church was central. Regular churchgoing was compulsory. To be a “Christian” was essential.
My mother and father were Episcopalians, but being a “Christian” was secondary (if it was thought about at all) to being a good and faithful singer, or painter, or writer.
Totally different worlds.
My father was a writer, a journalist and foreign correspondent and news analyst, though mustard gas in the trenches of World War I stopped much of his traveling. My parents’ friends were painters, sculptors, singers, actors, composers. The world of the nineteen-twenties seemed a world of parties. A terrible war had ended. People played almost frantically. Mother and Father were either dressing to go out to a party or the theatre or the opera or they were preparing to have friends come in.
I was on the fringe of that world, a child isolated in my own room, but aware of and taking for granted the music, the laughter, the conversation going on in the rest of the apartment.
My parents had been married for nearly twenty years when I was born, and although I was a very much wanted baby, the pattern of their lives was already well established and a child was not part of that pattern. So I had my own, with which I was well content, reading and rereading, writing stories and poems; illustrating my stories with pencil and watercolors; playing the piano; living far too much in an interior dream world. But that interior dream world has stood me in good stead many times when the outer world has seemed to be collapsing around me.
After my childhood in New York came a time of wandering about Europe, trying to find air clean and pure enough for my father’s damaged lungs. World War I, which had little place in Hugh’s early life, remained paramount in mine, along with the fear of war.
What I, overprotected by my solitude rather than my parents’ design, did not realize was that the terrible Wall Street crash of ’29 had affected everyone’s lives. More imminent was the fact that my father was in the hospital with pneumonia, that my mother could not hide that she was frantic with anxiety. Then the crisis was over and he was home, but nothing was the same.
We were moving, leaving New York and moving to Europe. The doctors had recommended a sanatorium in Saranac, but after the crash, with its consequent Depression, my parents could not afford Saranac. The standard of living in the French Alps, where the air was clean and clear, was much lower than the standard of living in the United States. The Depression had closed down most of the great resort hotels. There were no “beautiful people” and the world was a war away from the jet set. Most of the available pensions around the emptied resort hotels had no indoor plumbing and no running water. But the air was the clean, dry air the doctor had recommended. If we stayed in New York my father would be prone to another attack of pneumonia, which might well be lethal. We had to move away from everything I had known.
How my parents must have missed the opera, the theatre, the parties that had been so much a part of their lives in New York. But they shielded me in their Olympian way from feelings which must have bordered on desolation.
Our first home after we sailed from New York was, strangely enough, a château. My parents were planning to have the summer in the French Alps with another family, also devastated by the crash. Mother told me later that the real-estate agent resisted even showing them the château, it was in such terrible condition, but they insisted, and fell in love with its ancient charm. And it was cheap—cheap because nothing much had been done to it since the eleventh century. Well, there was an ancient, pull-chain water closet, but I remember the water for the day being brought to the bedrooms in big china pitchers which had matching washbowls. There was a strange bathroom with an enormous bathtub set in a mahogany base. Under the tub was a firebox by which the water was heated. Of course, the firebox made the tub too hot to sit in, so we used it only for occasional cold baths.
Two young women from the village helped out, accustomed to cooking with no running water, no refrigerator, nor, for that matter, a stove. There was a fireplace with a spit suitable for roasting an ox. It is impossible for me to understand what total dislocation this must have represented for my parents. They had not been rich, but they had been surrounded and nourished by the richness of New York’s artistic community. Suddenly to be totally uprooted and set down in a tiny provincial village without even a radio for music must have been shocking.
I spent the summer dreaming and wandering through the dusty rooms of the château. The great day for the grownups was Friday, when the horse-drawn fish cart clattered across the cobblestone streets of the village. Not only would there be fish for dinner, but the fish were kept fresh on ice, and my parents were given enough ice so that on Friday evenings they had dry martinis before dinner.
Meanwhile, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my as-yet-undreamed-of husband was experiencing the Depression in a very different way. His lawyer father was counsel for one of the big oil companies. Like many others in those plush days before the crash, he had been buying stocks on the margin, for himself, and for friends. The Franklin family lived comfortably, and Hugh’s older brother and sister were sent to college. Hugh, much younger, was still at home, about to enter high school, when the crash came. His father lost everything. Unlike some businessmen, he did not jump out his office window or declare bankruptcy. Instead, he spent the next quarter of a century working, and at the time of Hugh’s and my marriage in 1946 he had just finished paying back to his friends and acquaintances every penny he had lost in investing for them in the stock market. A man of great integrity and honor.
But while Hugh was growing up, there was no money. Only a summer ago Hugh told of his humiliation in going to the junior prom in a brown suit. He was the only boy in his large class at Tulsa Central High who could not afford to rent a tuxedo. The girl he was taking to the prom made excuses to leave early. After all these years, the memory still caused him deep pain.
Certainly, no adolescence is lived through without pain.
The summer of the château, my twelfth summer, came to an end and I was sent to my first boarding school, this one in Switzerland. My parents moved through a succession of rented villas, pensions, and small hotels. My father’s lungs did not improve; my mother’s health was delicate. During school holidays I stayed with them wherever they were, and it was their presence, rather than place, which gave me a sense of home.
The closest we came to living in a house was when we returned to the United States and, after my grandmother’s death, went to live in her beach cottage, perched atop a dune in north Florida. I adored it, although I was never there for more than a few weeks at a time. In the summer I was sent off to camp; in the winter I was in boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. My parents were not trying to “get rid” of me. I knew that they unqualifiedly loved me. But life was hard enough for them without the added needs of a lonely teenager. And they were trying to protect me from their own pain. My father was dying. My mother was emotionally and physically drained.
We
all loved the old beachhouse. It was built for summer, with the house open, back and front, to the breeze, and with a wide veranda wrapped all the way around to provide shade. In the winter it was bitter cold. North Florida is not like Miami or Palm Beach. It has the beautiful and ancient trees that south Florida does not have—the water oaks, the live oaks, the camphor trees, the tall pines. It also has a raw northeast wind, and my parents (and I, during the holidays) wore layers of clothes as though we were at a ski resort. But there was always the beauty of the ocean, with the wide white beach in front of the house, with the lagoon and jungle behind. And I had my own room, my first real room to myself since leaving New York. I had an old cherrywood desk that had belonged to my great-grandmother Madeleine L’Engle, and mahogany bookcases with sliding glass fronts which protected the books at least a little from the damp.
My father finally died from pneumonia when I was seventeen, the autumn of my last year in boarding school. My mother sold the house at the beach—I was too full of grief even to weep, or to understand that she had no choice. When I went home for Christmas, it was to an apartment in Jacksonville. My mother was to live there the rest of her long life. The great blessing of the apartment was the view of the St. Johns River—St. Johns Bay, it was called when she was young. The river curved about the spit of land on which the apartment was built, and she could see the sun both rise and set over the water.
I graduated from Ashley Hall and went on to Smith College, with my mother never for a second making me feel that I “ought” to give up my own life and take care of her. She was a woman remarkably capable of taking care of herself.
Hugh grew up on one street in one house—the same house where his sister and brother-in-law now live.
One December we had the amazing experience of going to their golden wedding celebration in the house where their parents had had their golden wedding anniversary on a street that has not changed. Extraordinary, in this day and age.
Hugh’s brother-in-law has completely renovated the house and it is beautiful and comfortable. But when Hugh was growing up, there was no money for anything but the barest essentials, and he was able to go to college only because he won a full scholarship to Northwestern University’s famous School of Speech. Though he couldn’t afford to rent that tux for the high school prom, he was president of the Honor Society, had leads in all the school plays, and by his junior year had been picked out by a talent scout for Northwestern.
The Irrational Season Page 25
