A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  But our own need for law and our system of prosecution and sentencing does not produce true punishment, because true punishment should result in penitence. Real punishment produces an acceptance of wrong-doing, a repugnance for what has been done, confession, and an honest desire to amend. Real punishment comes to me when I weep tears of grief because I have let someone down. The punishment is not inflicted by anyone else. My own recognition and remorse for what I have done is the worst punishment I could possibly have.

  Jacob punished himself after tricking Esau. His terror of revenge made him run away from his brother, and it was to be many years before he could return home.

  Perhaps the most poignant moment for me in all of Scripture comes after Peter has denied Jesus three times, and Jesus turns and looks at him. That loving look must have been far worse punishment for Peter than any number of floggings. And he went out and wept bitterly.

  Jacob, too, learned to weep bitterly, but he was an old man before he came to an understanding of himself which included acceptance of repentance without fear.

  This is something a criminal court is not equipped to cope with. The judge and the lawyers and the jurors are there to learn the facts as accurately as possible, and to interpret them according to the law. Forensically.

  It is impossible to interpret the story of Jacob in this way. Jacob does outrageous things, and instead of being punished, he is rewarded. He bargains with God shamelessly:

  “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God.”

  Jacob also agrees to tithe, but only if God does for him all that he asks. He cheats, but he knows that he cheats; he never tries to fool himself into thinking that he is more honest than he is. He openly acknowledges his fear of Esau’s revenge.

  And yet, with all his shortcomings, he is a lovable character, and perhaps we recognize ourselves in him with all his complexity. He has an extraordinary sense of awe—an awe which does not demand fairness, an awe which is so profound a response to the Creator that it cannot be sustained for long periods of time.

  But whenever El Shaddai came to Jacob, he was ready for the Presence. That was why he took his stone pillow and built an altar. Jacob knew delight in the Lord in a spontaneous manner which too many of us lose as we move out of childhood. And because we have forgotten delight, we are unable to accept the golden light of the angels.

  Three centuries ago Thomas Traherne wrote:

  Should God give Himself and all worlds to you, and you refuse them, it would be to no purpose. Should He love you and magnify you, should He give His son to die for you, and command all angels and men to love you, should He exalt you in His throne and give you dominion over all His works and you neglect them, it would be to no purpose.

  Should He make you in His image, and employ all His Wisdom and power to fill eternity with treasures, and you despise them, it would be in vain. In all these things you have to do; and therefore all your actions are great and magnificent, being of infinite importance in all eyes; while all creatures stand in expectation of what will be the result of your liberty….It is by your love that you enjoy all His delights, and are delightful to Him.

  As I live with Jacob’s story I see that there is far more to him than the smart cheat, the shallow manipulator. There are many times when he so enjoyed the delights of God, that he himself became delightful.

  How often are we delightful to God? How marvellous that we are called to be delightful!

  We are not meant to cringe before God, or to call on Jesus to come and save us from an angry and vengeful Father. We are to enjoy all the delights which the Lord has given us, sunsets and sunrises, and a baby’s first laugh, and friendship and love, and the brilliance of the stars. Enjoying the Creator’s delights implies connectedness, not dis-aster.

  And so there is hope that we, too, may so enjoy all the delights that God has given us, that we may truly be delightful.

  Almost every early spring we have ice storms around Crosswicks. While the mercury hovers around the freezing point, the rain falls and as it touches the trees it coats the branches with silver, bending the birches like bows, drooping the delicate twigs of willow and maple with a heavy freight of ice. Inside the old walls of Crosswicks the wood stoves and the open fireplace keep us warm, and when the ice-laden power lines fall, candles and oil lamps are lit.

  The power usually goes out during an ice storm, so since our pump is powered by electricity, at the first sign of freezing rain we fill the tubs, and several kettles of water. During our first ice storm we were not country-wise enough to prepare for waterlessness, and caught cold by having to go outdoors in the icy rain to relieve ourselves. Since then, while the power is out, we flush the toilet once or twice a day by filling a bucket with water from the tub, and sloshing it down the bowl. This used to fascinate the children, who wanted us to flush the toilet more often than we thought necessary. After all, that tub of water had to last us until the power came back on.

  One time, many years ago when the children were little, an ice storm came at the time of the full moon. We went to bed with nothing to see in the sky but thick clouds, and we listened to the progressive sounds of rain, the clicking of ice, and the sudden loud cracking of broken branches. During the night the wind shifted from the east to the northwest. The clouds had been ripped away and the full moon was revealed, bringing the ice-coated branches to life with silver and diamonds. It was a faerie land of beauty, and we woke the children, so that they would not miss the extraordinary loveliness.

  Ice storms are magically beautiful, but they also cause great damage to the trees, which cannot withstand the weight of ice. Such storms are part of the normal expectations of wind and rain as the earth begins to thaw from the long winter freeze.

  But the weather also does things which are not at all anticipated. On the last Monday of June a twister pranced by our house, which was neither expected nor usual. Throughout most of the area there was no more than an ordinary summer thunder storm, not particularly severe. But along one lethal path there was a tornado. Fortunately, we were all out, and all the windows were wide open to catch the breeze. Otherwise, I am told, we might not still have a house.

  On the little terrace outside our kitchen window are some fairly heavy chairs, deliberately heavy because a house on a hill is vulnerable to high winds. One of the chairs was tossed across the road, along with a couple of small tables. Branches of the old willow tree were found twisted in the limbs of a maple tree on the other side of the garden. In the orchard our favourite old Winesap apple tree was snapped off at the roots and lay dying on the ground. A majestic maple was felled and crashed across the road. Another maple was split from top to bottom, sliced in half. Almost all the trees lost major branches. The ground was littered with limbs and leaves and with hail the size of golf balls. It was a scene of devastation.

  And we ourselves were devastated. It was an abrupt reminder of the precariousness of this world full of the Creator’s delights. After the separation of the creature from the created when Adam and Eve were sundered from the Garden, the world has been unstable under our feet. There seems to be no spot on earth which is immune to the “natural disasters” of tornado, hurricane, earthquake. In northwest Connecticut we must often batten down against hurricanes, but a tornado in our part of the world seemed an unnatural disaster, leaving us bewildered.

  The only reason we had a vegetable garden left was the unusually cold spring which delayed planting, and the tender shoots of corn and tomato, broccoli and green pepper, were still tiny. They were lashed to the ground by wind and rain, but they were young enough so that they could be lifted upright again, take deeper root, and grow.

  All during the summer we stiffened nervously whenever we heard a rumble of thunder, and looked at the horizon to make sure there was no dark funnel of cloud rolling toward us. But the precariousness of the plane
t next manifested itself not in a storm but in the trembling of the earth. I woke up one early autumn morning just after dawn, feeling the bed shaking under me. Earthquakes are not common in the Litchfield Hills, but there was no doubt that this was an earthquake, rattling the windows, shaking the floors.

  It was not a severe earthquake, though it was an unusually long one, and it again left us with a renewed awareness of the uncertainty of life. We never know, from one moment to the next, what is going to happen.

  The psalmist sings,

  God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters rage and swell, and though the mountains shake in the tempest.

  On one level that is true. To know that we are one with our Maker gives us this deep understanding that el is indeed our hope and our strength. But there is another level in us that legitimately experiences fear when the earth is moved, or the hills fall, or the tempest rages.

  Earthquakes were more common when the planet was younger, and the earth’s crusts were still settling. In Jacob’s desert world there was a newness and a harshness to the land, shrivelling under the fiery sun. Famine was more lethal than storm, and Jacob came to know famine in much the same way that it is being known in desert countries today, where the rains are not falling, and the sands move across and choke a once green and fertile land.

  My mother, who was a very wise woman, used to say that when we abuse the planet overmuch, it will turn on us. Is that what is happening, with earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions devastating the earth? We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiralling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

  Cleaning up after the tornado was a sad job. A fleeting thought crossed my mind: We have faithfully tended our little corner of field and forest, we plough compost back into the garden in the autumn, we use no chemical fertilizers or sprays, we try to keep the woods a safe haven for wild life. We plant and nurture trees and flowers and vegetables and herbs. But if we expect that to protect us from wind and storm, aren’t we falling into forensic thinking again? Aren’t we crying out, in effect, “But it’s not fair!”

  We cut and piled wood from the wind-felled trees, knowing that they would provide more than enough firewood for the winter, but still grieving for the death of those trees which had been our friends.

  I like to take time out to listen to the trees, much in the same way that I listen to a sea shell, holding my ear against the rough bark of the trunk, hearing the inner singing of the sap. It’s a lovely sound, the beating of the heart of a tree.

  I couldn’t stop myself from asking, Why the old apple tree? Why the grand maples? Why did the twister skip the ancient willow, fading with age, or a sapling which wasn’t doing well, and attack the strongest and healthiest trees? If the tornado was not consciously evil, it was still evil.

  I wrestle with these questions which do not have logical answers, wrestle with mysteries, much as Jacob wrestled with the angel. How do we even attempt to understand the meaning of tempest and tragedy, love and hate, violence and peace?

  I struggle, and as always when I struggle to find the truth of something, I turn to story for illumination. And, as I grapple with the angels of difficult questions, I think of Jacob who saw a ladder of angels, reaching from earth to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending, linking heaven and earth, the creation to the Creator, not separated from each other, but participating in each other. Delight. At-one-ment.

  For God is beyond all our forensic thinking. God is love.

  During the first week of jury duty I got home one night as the phone was ringing. With no sense of foreboding I picked it up, and a cold and angry voice accused me of spreading abroad a terrible secret I had been told in deepest confidence. I had told no one. I do not know how the secret—so terrible I cannot even hint at it—leaked out, who else had been told. But I was blamed, and I was angry, very angry, at the injustice of the accusation. How could the person who had trusted me enough to tell such a devastating story then turn around and think that I was the kind of person who would abuse and betray such trust?

  In my outrage, I wanted justice to be done. I wanted to be exonerated. I wanted whomever it was who had viciously spread the secret to be caught and punished. Forensic thinking—and I needed to grapple with this, not angrily, but lovingly, compassionately. Jury duty and Jacob had pushed me into some hard thinking.

  Jacob’s brother, Esau, also went through outrage at the injustice which had been done him, but he did not remain in anger. He wept in anguish over the lack of justice, but he did not sulk.

  Family stories are as complicated in the great dramas of Scripture as they are in real life. A few weeks ago, after a large family gathering, I wrote in my journal with a figurative sigh of relief that nothing untoward had happened, adding that with a family as complex as ours, that was no small achievement. But honest family relations are seldom simple. Isaac must often have grieved about his twin sons. And what kind of image did Isaac himself have of fathers? What did he think of his own father who had bound him and laid him on the wood for the holocaust, and lifted his knife to kill him? What did Isaac think of a father/God who would ask such a thing even if, at the last moment, this masculine God sent a ram in a bush for a reprieve? If Jacob was slow to accept Isaac’s God for his own, it would surely be understandable for Isaac to be slow to accept Abraham’s God, but there is no indication that he was reluctant. He was an extraordinarily accepting man.

  I must learn to accept, too. To accept that life is not fair. That I must not remain in my hurt and anger over being falsely accused of betrayal. That I must let it go, and move on, as best I can. As the people of Scripture were willing to let go and move on, to go wherever it was that God called them.

  Poor Isaac, Jacob’s father. His life was not easy. Probably the best part of it was his love for Rebekah, even if Abraham chose her for him. But the meeting of Isaac and Rebekah is the first love story in the Bible—love story, rather than romance, for “romantic love” was nonexistent in the harsh and practical realities of desert life when the nomadic Hebrews were wandering from oasis to oasis. That is just as well, for romantic love is not real love. The illusion of romantic love as something pure and undying kills the possibility of real love. Romantic love inevitably leads to death. Tristan and Isolde, Pelleas and Melisande, Héloise and Abelard: Theirs was romantic love, magnificent romantic love, perhaps, but it led to death. There is also a creative death to romantic love, the death to the illusory love of romance, and a growing up to the true love of mature human beings.

  The great teacher at Smith, Mary Ellen Chase, told our class that the novel begins where the romance and the fairy tale end.

  The patriarchs and matriarchs, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, had the real thing, despite their human foibles, and their human sins. Having seen the great Sahara desert, I understand something of the incredible physical demands made of husband and wife in that unfriendly climate. They had to be able to work together, to be good companions. A love which was romantic or merely erotic would never have survived.

  Isaac had need of a good companion, especially after Sarah, his mother, died. In those days the genuine love of mother and son was not considered neurotic, nor need it be at any time. It was Isaac’s father, not his mother, who bound him and laid him on the altar of the rock. It was the incomprehensible Father/God who gave the order for the holocaust. Perhaps Sarah would have refused?

  Even after the substitution of the ram, Isaac may have had twinges of wonder about the reliability of fathers. Maybe fathers were expected to be unreliable. But Sarah, the mother, was to be counted on, in laughter, in tears, to accept even
where she did not condone. Isaac must have missed her grievously.

  And in those days people had not yet fallen into the “blame it all on your parents” syndrome, a misconception as fallacious as the illusion of romantic love. It insists that nothing is our fault, thereby denying us any share in the writing of our own story. Whatever we have done that is wrong is considered to be not our fault because of our parents. Or our teachers. Or somebody. When we refuse all responsibility for our behaviour by blaming it on our parents (or anybody else), we are also abdicating free will. A lot of us (I, too), have had unhappy or strange childhoods, but this need not be lethally crippling. Isaac rose above all that had happened to him and became one of the trinity of patriarchs invoked as Israel’s heroes.

  And as helpmeet he had Rebekah.

  The story of Abraham’s search for a wife for Isaac emphasizes that there will be trouble if one marries someone who worships an alien god. Therefore Abraham did not want Isaac to marry someone from the land of Canaan, in which they had settled, and where the gods were not El Shaddai. So Abraham called to himself the eldest servant of his household and said to him, “I am asking you to put your hand under my thigh.” (By this Abraham’s servant and friend knew that he was being asked to make the most solemn oath possible, because special veneration was given the organs of generation.)

  Abraham continued,

  “I ask you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of earth, that you will not let my son marry a daughter of the Canaanites, among whom we live. No. You are to go back to my country, and to my kind, and find a wife among them for my son, Isaac.”

  The servant said, “But perhaps the woman will not be willing to come with me to this strange land. Then would you want me to bring your son back to the land you came from?”

  Abraham said, “No! Do not take my son back there. The Lord God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house, and from the land of my own people, and who spoke to me, and who swore to me, saying, ‘To your seed will I give this land,’ this Lord my God will send an angel before you, and you will be able to bring back a wife for my son.”