A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  And what about Ezekiel and those glorious wheels which some people think may have been UFOs? There we have our first glimpse of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. There we see the resurrection of those dry bones with living flesh, as we read the language of poetry which expands our understanding beyond its normal limitations.

  The mythic interpretation is not a facile, shallow one, but an attempt to move into the deep and dazzling darkness of that truth which the fragile human mind cannot exhaustively comprehend, but can only glimpse with occasional flashes of glory.

  To live with an understanding that myth is a vehicle of truth is a far more difficult way to live than literally. The mythic world makes enormous demands of us, and that may be why it is so often shunned. The greater the good we are seeking, the greater the possibilities for perversion. But that does not make God’s original good any less good; it simply heightens the challenge.

  I am sometimes shocked by what I read in the Bible. There is much that I am still struggling to understand, such as the horrible story in Judges of the man who divided his raped and murdered wife into twelve pieces, sending one piece to each of the tribes of Israel. I still struggle with the story of the blighted fig tree. Does it mean that when Jesus asks us to do anything, he will give us the power to do it, whether we ourselves are able to do it or not? Some of the violence in both Testaments frightens me, caught up in this age of violence. But my response of shock may be a good thing, because it pushes open doors which I might otherwise be fearful of entering.

  That limited literalism which demands that the Bible’s poetry and story and drama and parable be taken as factual history is one of Satan’s cleverest devices. If we allow ourselves to be limited to the known and the explainable, we have thereby closed ourselves off from God and mystery and revelation.

  Once I remarked that I read the Bible in much the same way that I read fairy tales, and received a shocked response. But fairy tales are not superficial stories. They spring from the depths of the human being. The world of the fairy tale is to some degree the world of the psyche. Like the heroes and heroines of fairy tales, we all start on our journey, our quest, sent out on it at our baptisms. We are, all of us, male and female, the younger brother, who succeeds in the quest because, unlike the elder brother, he knows he needs help; he cannot do it because he is strong and powerful. We are all, like it or not, the elder brother, arrogant and proud. We are all, male and female, the true princess who feels the pea of injustice under all those mattresses of indifference. And we all have to come to terms with the happy ending, and this may be the most difficult part of all. Never confuse fairy tale with untruth.

  Alas, Lucifer, how plausible you can be, confusing us into thinking that to speak of the Bible as myth is blasphemy. One definition of myth in the dictionary is parable. Jesus taught by telling parables. Did Jesus lie? Blaspheme?

  It is Satan who is the lie, who has chosen the lie, and turned his back on truth.

  A study of the myths of various religions and cultures shows us not how different we human beings are, but how alike we are in our longing for God, for the Creator who gives meaning and dignity to our lives.

  I am not sure how much of the great story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is literally true, how much is history, how much the overlapping of several stories. Did both Abraham and Isaac pretend to Abimelech that their wives were their sisters, or have the two stories mingled over the ages? Does it really matter? The mythic truths we receive from these stories enlarge our perception of the human being, and that unique being’s encounters with God. When the angel of God comes to wrestle with us we must pray to be able to grapple with the unexpected truth that may be revealed to us. Because Jacob, later in the story, had the courage to ask for God’s blessing, we may, too.

  If we take the Bible over-literally we may miss the truth of the poetry, the stories, the myths. Literalism can all too easily become judgmentalism, and Jesus warned us not to judge, that we might not be judged.

  How difficult it is! When I worry about those who castigate me for not agreeing with them, am I in my turn falling into judgmentalism? It’s hard not to. But not all the way, I hope. I don’t want to wipe out those who disagree with me, consigning them to hell for all eternity. We are still God’s children, together. At One. Even if I am angry, upset, confused, I must still see Christ and Christ’s love in those whose opinions are very different from mine, or I won’t find it in those whose view fits more comfortably with mine.

  Dear God. What am I looking for? Help me to look for Christ.

  God can use unworthy material to accomplish magnificent purposes. Worthiness is not a criterion. One can be worthy and closed, like the Pharisees in all generations and all races, all religions, failing to understand that openness to God’s revelation is first and foremost. One can be worthy and so wrapped in one’s worthiness that one fails to recognize the three angels who came to Abraham, or the angel Isaac knew would pick the right wife for Jacob, or those angels ascending and descending the great ladder as Jacob lay with his head on the stone. Those three great patriarchs were unworthy, but they were open to change, change in themselves, change in their understanding of their Maker. All of them saw angels. Through them we, too, can learn to be open, not closed. We, too, can have eyes and ears open to the great challenges God offers us. This does not mean fluctuation with the winds of chance or whim, but recognizing the wind of the Holy Spirit, whose sign is always the sign of love.

  Jacob at last was at one with the angel. So may we be, too.

  Jacob wrestled all his life—with his brother, Esau; with his father-in-law, Laban. But it was God with whom he really had to struggle.

  —

  In the 1983 summer festival of children’s literature at Simmons College in Boston, the overall title for the week was, “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?” The question is asked by T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, and it’s a question we are not usually encouraged either to ask, or to attempt to answer, particularly in our various institutions. Especially not in the church. But it’s a question we need to ask, with courage, as we look at what is going on around us in the world, with wars in the name of religion accelerating all over the planet, each group claiming to represent The Truth, and occasionally proclaiming it with acts of terrorism. Universe-disturbers can be destructive as well as creative.

  If we disturb the universe, no matter how lovingly, we’re likely to get hurt. Nobody ever promised that universe-disturbers would have an easy time of it. Universe-disturbers make waves, rock boats, upset establishments. Gandhi upset the great British Empire. Despite his nonviolence, he was unable to stop the shedding of blood, and he ended with a bullet through his heart. Anwar Sadat tried to work for peace in one of the most unpeaceful centuries in history, knowing that he might die for what he was doing, and he did.

  Does it encourage our present-day universe-disturbers to know that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before them were universe-disturbers? Their vision of God, while undeniably masculine, was also the vision of a God who cared, who appeared to his human friends and talked with them. The patriarchs lived in a primitive, underpopulated world, and yet their vision of God as Creator of all, of God who cared, of God who was part of the story, was very new.

  Jesus was a great universe-disturber, so upsetting to the establishment of his day that they put him on a cross, hoping to finish him off. Those of us who try to follow his Way have a choice, either to go with him as universe-disturbers (butterflies), or to play it safe. Playing it safe ultimately leads to personal diminishment and death. If we play it safe, we resist change. Well. We all resist change, beginning as small children with our unvarying bedtime routine, continuing all through our lives. The static condition may seem like security. But if we cannot move with change, willingly or reluctantly, we are closer to death and further from life.

  If we want to play it safe, we have to settle for a comfortable religion, one which will not permit questions, because questions are universe-disturbers.
(Children never hesitate to ask the disturbing questions: Who was God’s mother? Do numbers ever come to an end? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?) If we don’t allow questions, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are capable of defining God. Every new scientific discovery about the nature of the universe has shaken one religious group or another, and yet the new discoveries do nothing whatsoever to alter the nature of the universe; they simply force us to grow in our understanding and our love of the Creator of all.

  And yet, somehow or other, we’ve managed to keep on believing that this planet, and we who inhabit it, are the chief focus of God’s concern. The idea that we may be only a small part of el’s concern is very threatening.

  Can God, no matter how omnipotent, keep track of it all? There are quadrillions and quintillions of galaxies, with their uncountable solar systems. The world of the microcosm is as vast as that of the macrocosm. If we did nothing all our lives but count, we could come nowhere near to counting the galaxies, much less the stars. And as for the subatomic particles…Can God possibly keep track of all galaxies and quarks and tachyons?

  Yet in a small way even we human beings are capable of considerable multitracking, as Jean Houston calls it. It is said that Caesar could dictate seven letters simultaneously. During the tenure of one minister who irritated me profoundly, I found that I could listen most attentively to his sermons if, at the same time, I was memorizing the Psalms, thinking about the anthem, planning the meals, and sometimes thinking a poem. In a house full of children I was multitracking as my ears were open for each one of them, while I might be playing the piano, listening for the kettle to boil, and the timer to ring for the casserole in the oven. We all multitrack, even when we aren’t aware of it. We’ve taught our computers to multitrack enormous quantities of information for us. Isn’t God’s ability to multitrack far greater than that of the most complex computer? God, showing Jacob the stars, needed no computer to call them all by name.

  Somehow or other I must try to comprehend a God who not only can keep track of it all, but who is focussed on all of it, who cares, who is aware, who is there for me when I call out for help, or cry a “Thank you!”

  It doesn’t work if I think of God as Out There. We’ve long known that God is not Out There, but we revert, and have to remind ourselves. I strain painfully to accept the obvious, because sometimes the obvious is not a gnat, but the whole universe.

  Back when it was still possible to believe that this planet was the center of everything, that the sun and the moon and the stars were hung in the sky entirely for our benefit, it was quite possible to think of God as our Maker, Out There. God took nothing, and created a planet with water and land and fish and land animals, and proclaimed it good, looking at it all from a heavenly distance. We have too often thought of God as being outside the universe, creating us, and looking at what happens to us, concerned, but Out There. But as I contemplate the vastness of the night sky on a clear, cold night, God Out There does not work. Out There is too far out; God becomes too remote; I cannot hide under the shelter of el’s protecting wings.

  Scripturally, God is always in and part of Creation, walking and talking with Adam and Eve, taking Abraham out to see the stars, wrestling with Jacob.

  And, in the most glorious possible demonstration of God in and part of Creation, God came to us in Jesus of Nazareth, fully participating in our human birth and life and death and offering us the glory of Easter.

  If we shed our idea of God as being someone Out There, separate from all that has been made, and begin instead to think of God as within all Creation, every galaxy, every quantum, every human being, then we cannot hold ourselves “out there” either. We cannot set ourselves apart from anything that happens. Anywhere.

  That’s one reason some people shun fiction. Fiction draws us into participating in other lives, other countries, other ways of life or thinking. It is a way of helping us to be in and not out there.

  To accept ourselves as part of everything is a big responsibility, and many would rather not face it. It is far too easy to take refuge in our own little group, rather than allowing the Creator to change us, as he changed Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

  If God created everything, if the Word called all things into being, all people are part of God’s loving concern. The incarnation was not only for the Jews. Or the Christians. Christ did not come to save Christians, but to save sinners.

  It’s seductively pleasant to think that God loves Christians better than Buddhists or Hindus; that, as one well-known evangelical preacher pronounced, God does not listen to the prayers of Jews. No? What about the beloved Psalm 23? A psalm written by and for Jews, remember, with its glorious affirmation of faith: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you (God) will be with me.

  But what about bad prayers, ugly prayers? Damn my enemies, so that the dogs’ tongues may be red with their blood. What about the Iranian terrorists? Does God hear their prayers? Or the Irish Republican Army after it has bombed a store full of Christmas shoppers? Or the Christians who feel they can’t be happy in heaven unless they’re watching the tortures of the damned in hell? Does God hear these prayers? I am certain that el does, even as my own worst prayers are heard. But the answer to prayer is always the answer of love, and when we are hard of heart, our ears are closed to love.

  Just as a human parent listens to the demands of the children, not excluding anyone, but trying to turn anger to love, greediness to generosity, willful disobedience to responsibility, so, I believe, God does with us, and it is the Holy Spirit, praying through us, who can turn our ugliest prayers toward forgiveness and reconciliation.

  How do we pray for those whose hateful actions fill us with horror? How do we pray for the Russians who shot down a domestic plane full of unsuspecting people? For hijackers? For the Muslims who bombed our Marines in suicide missions? How do we pray for those in our own government who, I am told, did some experimenting with germ warfare in the New York subway system? Or those who refuse to put anti-pollutant devices into their factories (because it is expensive enough to cut into their profits) and, wittingly, unnecessarily foul the air that even they have to breathe? Have we prayed enough? Not for revenge, but for the love that heals?

  How do I keep from the pride of being judgmental? How do I open my heart in prayer? In love? The fact that I don’t do it very well doesn’t mean that I don’t have to try. And then God can take my most fumbling, faltering prayers and make something lovely of them.

  Jacob had to learn that prayer is not bargaining with God. He had to learn that the God he finally decided to accept as his own was not a God who could be tamed. When Jacob cried out for God’s blessing, it was a cry to a great and extraordinary power.

  Jacob learned, too, that he had to make peace with Esau, and to do so he had to be willing to open himself to change. We, too, must open ourselves to change. It is only through prayer, be it no more than a cry of “Help!” that we are given the courage to let ourselves be changed, along with all the changes in the world around us, over which we have no control.

  Like Jacob, we stand once again at the threshold of great change, not only the rapidly accelerating technological changes, but change in our understanding of God’s revelation of the Divine Plan, as we are challenged to grow spiritually. Why has our spiritual development lagged so agonizingly far behind our intellectual development? We have accepted most of the outward changes—electricity, the telephone, the automobile, the plane, and the computer. But spiritually we are far behind. We know more with our minds than we do with our hearts, and this is breaking us.

  Adam and Eve, eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, precipitated themselves into a masculine world, for knowledge, intellectual knowledge, is masculine. Wisdom, which we desperately need, is feminine, sophia, in Greek. Better yet, hagia sophia, holy wisdom. We need holy wisdom to help balance our misuse of the fruits of the intellect.

  We must not be afr
aid of becoming once again in tune with our whole selves, even when becoming whole disturbs the universe. We become whole never by being rigid or unloving or isolating ourselves from the rest of our fellow beings, but by opening ourselves to God’s revelation of the unity of the universe.

  What is our part in keeping this planet alive? Working toward stopping the folly and horror of atomic devastation? To say that nuclear warfare is inevitable is defeatism, not realism. As long as there is anybody to care, to pray, to turn to God, to be willing to be el’s messenger even in unexpected ways, there is still hope.

  How can we have a wide view of the unity of the universe and of God without lapsing into a vague pantheism? If God created all of Creation, if God is the author of Buddhists and Hindus and Jains as well as those who have “accepted Jesus Christ as Lord,” how can we avoid a wishy-washy permissiveness?

  Not by retreating back into a closed system. Not by saying: Only those who believe exactly as I do can be saved. Not by insisting that only those whose god fits into the same box as my god will go to heaven. Not by returning to polytheism and proclaiming that our god is greater than the gods of other cultures.

  Paradoxically, it comes back to us, to our acceptance of ourselves as created by God, and loved by God, no matter how far we have fallen from God’s image in us. It is not a self-satisfied, self-indulgent acceptance, but a humble, holy, and wondrous one.

  Look! Here I am, caught up in this fragment of chronology, in this bit of bone and flesh and water which makes up my mortal body, and yet I am also part of that which is not imprisoned in time or mortality. Partaker simultaneously of the finite and the infinite, I do not find the infinite by repudiating my finiteness, but by being fully in it, in this me who is more than I know. This me, like all of creation, lives in a glorious dance of communion with all the universe. In isolation we die; in interdependence we live.

  If I affirm that the God of love does indeed love all of Creation, that the salvation of the entire universe is being worked out, what does that do to my own faith?