A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  I rejoiced to read in William Johnston’s The Inner Eye of Love that Saint Shinran rebelled against legalism and proclaimed “the pre-eminence of faith and grace,” and that “he has been frequently compared to Luther.”

  We don’t have to drop nuclear bombs again. We don’t have to blow ourselves up. We’ve had the capacity to destroy all life on this planet with germ warfare since World War I, and we haven’t done it. But we need all the prayers we can possibly get, all the openness of love, no matter how much it costs. And we need to look for angels.

  I wish that the made-for-television film The Day After had added just a minute to its bleak and hopeless ending, that it had shown Lawrence, Kansas, in the spring, or harvest time, that it had ended with the wedding which was halted by the bombing. I wish it had ended with a message of hope: This is what we are working for—life, not death.

  It is not good to send out only negative vibrations, to offer no alternative to disaster. We need positive energy, too, which is something we can do something about, stopping ourselves when we are feeling negative, and looking for something positive. If sound waves stay in the ether forever, then the voices of those men who never forgot to call my father are still there, too. The words of love are strong. We need to listen to them.

  We have lived with the possibility of extinction since the planet was formed, extinction by natural calamity, by the shifting of the planet on its axis, by epidemic, by our own avariciousness. It should have taught us to live more fully—savouring each moment, using each day fully, seeing each sunrise and sunset and evening star, turning our hearts to those we love—but by and large we’ve gone on as usual, dragged down by ordinariness. But even if we can expect to live out our full life span, nothing is ordinary. Life itself is extraordinary. “Little lamb, who made thee?” Blake asks. “Dost thou know who made thee?” He also asks: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye framed thy fearful symmetry?”

  —

  The sign of hope that Mel gave us in the story of Jerome Hines was with me as we gathered together for Thanksgiving dinner the next day, as we put on the banquet cloth, the best china and crystal and silver, lit candles, and held hands all around for grace.

  Did Abraham ever gather all his various children and their mothers together for a meal of thanks and rejoicing? Did Isaac and Rebekah call Jacob and Esau to share a meal, thanking God for the fruits of the land and for Esau’s mighty hunting? Did Jacob and his wives sit down with all their sons and their one daughter?

  After Abraham’s feast for three angels, and Lot’s festive meal for two angels, it should be clear to us that there has always been a sacramental aspect to a shared meal. The guest at our table must be honoured thereafter; you cannot break bread with someone and then stab that person. But if the meal has been desacralized, that obligation no longer holds.

  As a twentieth-century society we have desacralized mealtimes as we have almost all aspects of our lives. At my alma mater the students still eat in the dining room of their house, at small tables, taking turns with the serving and washing up, but at most colleges and universities there is now something called Food Service, and meals are cafeteria style, catch as catch can (and usually make the institutional food I griped about seem marvellously gourmet food by comparison!).

  Even at home families do not always eat together, because of conflicts in schedule, so the meal is further desacralized with plates in laps before the TV, and loses its link with the heavenly banquet.

  How do we regain the meal as sacrament? As a foretaste of the at-one-ness to come? Does something as simple as a family meal make that much difference?

  It does, oh, it does.

  If there is a sense of sacrament about the meal, then it can spread out to all areas of life. No one with a vital sense of the sacred could go into a church or synagogue and commit acts of vandalism. And it took an overwhelming sense of the sacred for Jerome Hines to be an angel unaware when he sang Boris in Moscow.

  Jerome Hines was granted the knowledge of the creative result of his prayer for Khrushchev, and he is a man so committed to God that he can accept the understanding without falling into pride, into taking personal credit for what he did. It is probably a blessing that most of us are not granted this knowledge. We do like to be patted on the back, to be told that what we did was terrific, or significant. And it sometimes is. But we never act alone. We simply participate in God’s action. It may be action which is expressed through us, but the love is always God’s, and it is our joy to be allowed to share.

  The butterfly does not understand that the beating of its wings can be felt in distant galaxies. The butterfly is simply, fully, and beautifully a butterfly.

  So let us try to be simply, fully, and beautifully human beings, bearing within us the image of God.

  Jerome Hines prayed for the atheist leader of an atheist country, and whether the atheists like it or not, theirs is a powerful religion. We, too, are called to pray for those whose religion differs from ours, those who condone acts of terrorism, who are zealots espousing destructive causes. We are also called to pray for those whose god is different from ours, and yet who live quiet, godly lives. How do we pray? Simply by offering to God our concern for all of Creation, not coercively or manipulatively, but lovingly, for it all belongs to the Creator. We separate ourselves from the stars and from God when we separate ourselves from any part of Creation.

  But a wariness of “the others” seems always to have been part of human nature. The patriarchs were uneasy with peoples of other tribes and other gods, as we may be uneasy with Muslims and Parsees and Quiztanos. But today, with all the instant information from TV and radio, newspapers and magazines, we have less excuse for our lack of understanding.

  As Abraham had not wanted Isaac to marry a foreigner, so Rebekah and Isaac did not want their sons (particularly Jacob) to marry any of the women from Heth, who worshipped different gods, who were “them,” not “us,” and so Isaac charged Jacob not to take a wife of the daughters of Canaan.

  And God Almighty bless you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and give you the blessing of Abraham, that you may inherit the land where you are a stranger, the land which God gave to Abraham.

  Paternalistic, nationalistic, and in terms of the late twentieth-century, distressing.

  But Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, did not live in the late twentieth-century, and we abuse all that we have learned in the intervening centuries if we try to rewrite history. Yet that is what we are unwittingly doing as we attempt to change language into what is called inclusive language, which ends up being more sexist than the language it is trying to replace.

  Even by continuing to link Sarah with Abraham, Rebekah with Isaac, Rachel with Jacob, I’m slightly changing the emphasis, and I’d better be aware what I’m doing.

  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were forefathers. Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel were interesting women, but they are seldom referred to as foremothers, though that is what they were. Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel lived in a world of patriarchs, not matriarchs, and it is futile to try to see their culture as something it was not. We may hope to influence present and future history, but we must beware of altering the past unless we really and truly know what we are doing and have been called by an angel to do so.

  T. S. Eliot (in Selected Prose) says that it is not “preposterous that the past should be altered by the present, as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

  Such a poet is needed now; a casual or irresponsible altering of the past can be very dangerous.

  The tents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not far from the tribes who worshipped the goddesses, the matriarchal religions which so upset the patriarchal Hebrew. But Jacob and Rachel did not live with Astarte, or Ashtaroth, or Ishtar, or any of the female goddesses, and there is no point in pretending that their world understood that
the feminine is as important as the masculine. I suspect that our forefathers were afraid of the feminine, in the world, in themselves. That fear is still very much alive today, fear of the nurturing darkness of the womb, of the intuitive self which can give insights unavailable to the conscious will, of the tenderness of love with all its vulnerability. And that fear makes the feminine in Jacob all the more remarkable.

  Our religion needs to change as our knowledge and understanding grow, but beware if we change it thoughtlessly. The new translations of the creed are a case in point. I love the new Episcopal prayer book, love it enough to feel free to criticize it where I feel it has fallen short of its best. We used to say that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Now we say He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s not the same thing at all. We are all (or should be) conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. To say that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit is far more exciting. The angel came to Mary and told her that

  “The Holy Ghost shall come upon you.”

  It’s a shocking myth, but it’s been our myth for a long time; we’ve held to it for two thousand years, even though it has kept some people from being Christian because they “cannot cope with the virgin birth.” The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it’s far less mind-boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us. But I find myself disturbed at the changing, by some committee or other, of the myth which brought God and the human creature together in marvellous at-one-ment, as Jacob’s ladder brought heaven and earth together. That’s the wonder, that God can reach out and become one with that which has been created. This at-one-ment should not be broken thoughtlessly. Nor should we fall into that trap of rigid literalism. We don’t have to know the how of parthogenesis. And even the word parthogenesis is a stumbling block, trying to use scientific jargon to express what is inexpressible mystery. All we need to know is God’s terrible closeness, an intimacy which hallows our createdness.

  A minister friend said, “It’s very nice to know we’re related to God on his mother’s side.”

  The great mysteries of the creed are an affirmation which I find difficult to make in the new language which is watered down to make it easier, and which offends me because it tries to put the radically unbelievable glory by which I live into rational, palatable language, which I find so unpalatable that I gag on it. Not that I am against contemporary translations; I am strongly for them. But I want them to be in the very best “language of the people,” not impoverished by unimaginative realism.

  When our children were very young we started reading the King James translation of the Bible to them, and they weren’t old enough for it, and were bored. So we switched to J. B. Phillips’s translation. One day our little boy was sent from the table for some misdemeanor and told to stay away for five minutes. At the end of five minutes he came rushing down the stairs crying, “What did I miss?” J. B. Phillips’s translation worked beautifully for him. And Phillips still works for me, too, far better than some of the more recent translations which are tinged with condescension toward both the human creature and the Creator.

  But don’t let’s stop trying. We need to do better in our new translations than we are presently doing. In trying to use inclusive language, we have blundered into inconclusive language.

  What’s wrong? Our language does indeed need changing as we come to accept the feminine as well as the masculine, the intuitive as well as the intellectual. But thus far our attempts are not working. I suspect that this is because the inadequacy of our language is a symptom of something far deeper, a brokenness between the human being and the Maker, and an equal brokenness within ourselves. We have lost the ability to see the marvellous ladder of angels uniting heaven and earth, and so we have become earthbound, separated from the stars and the music of the spheres.

  Our lacks in language are a reflection of our brokenness. When we spend our energy futilely trying to fix pronouns, we can forget that we may be bleeding to death.

  If we could stop focussing on symptoms, and allow God to heal us with creative love, the healing of language would follow.

  Man, the image of God, male and female. Whole. Our own image of God is unavoidably anthropomorphic. As human beings, we think in human terms; there is, for us, no other way. But the image of God within us is love. And God is a spirit.

  We are reminded in the New Testament that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We honour our bodies because they are made to contain the Holy Spirit, the image of God, but they are not themselves what they contain. I have sometimes been most awesomely aware of the image of God in someone whose body is distorted; I saw the image in an old woman so crippled with arthritis that her body was nothing but knots; I saw the image in a young man born with terrible deformities; the image is there for us in the suffering servant of Isaiah,

  his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance…he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

  If we bear the image of love in our own flawed, human bodies, it is this love which will ultimately renew language. And then perhaps we will be given a truly great writer, like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, to transform language with genius.

  Religion and language are like rivers, constantly flowing from the same source, as we respond to all that is happening in the world around us. Maybe one day we’ll get the hang of it, the yin and the yang of it. Language changes most graciously through poets and storytellers, and most clumsily when it is being manipulated by reformers and committees.

  I saw a small sign in one of the offices of Bethel Seminary in Minnesota. God so loved the world that he did not send a committee.

  Not a committee, but the Word of love.

  —

  In Berdyaev’s Revelation and Truth, which I continued to read during jury duty, he wrote that the age of the Old Testament was the Age of the Father. The New Testament was the Age of the Son. And he referred to the time at which he was writing—several decades ago—as the Age of the Spirit.

  We are now groping slowly toward the Age of the Trinity, of wholeness. The fact that we Christians are beginning to recognize our brokenness, our fragmentation, is a sign of this healing movement. We speak now of holistic medicine. We speak of certain people as being holy, which really means being whole. We are turning once again to the insights of myth, the lessons of story, as we seek to move beyond the limits of the intellect.

  The Holy Trinity contains knowledge and wisdom and male and female and child and sage and artist and holy fool and philosopher and mathematician and musician and a few million other qualities. The glory of the stars at night is an image of wholeness, for the universe is a unity. The smallest subatomic particles have their share in this unity, in the perfecting of the pattern.

  The human family, too, is an icon of the Trinity, but how we have defaced and cracked the icon. The sacredness of family is desacralized by the breakdown of family life and the so-called sexual revolution which promised freedom, but which has brought about alienation and terrible loneliness. When we focus on one aspect of the Trinity, or of ourselves, at the expense of the whole, we blunder into disaster.

  Maybe it was time for the sexual revolution, but it, like all revolutions, went further than the initial vision. Abortion is an ugly and unsolved problem, and while the theological answer may be clear, easy answers produce such unloving actions as the throwing of bombs. Herpes and AIDS have become epidemic, terrifying as the Black Plague. We may be more open about sex, but we have emphasized the purely physical at the expense of the fullness of love.

  At first Jacob loved Rachel because she was beautiful. But then the love strengthened as they came to know each other in the truest, deepest ways.

  No matter how objective I try to be when I read the s
tory of Jacob, or any part of Scripture, I am reading into it, willy nilly, my own prejudices, hopes, culture. This is inevitable. I see past history from my place within present history. It is impossible to see it exactly as it was for even the most objective of historians. It is easiest to understand when it is in the form of story. Even so, I still read into it my own questions. My understanding of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, is formed by my understanding of all my encounters with people. Did Rebekah love her son Jacob more than she loved her husband, Isaac? She was willing to deceive Isaac in order to get the blessing for the younger, favoured son, Jacob. It was Rebekah, his mother, who told Jacob what to do, who was the initiator of the plot to deceive blind old Isaac. And she deceived her son, Esau, too, the hairy one, who was loved of his father.

  Isaac was old, and nearly blind, and he called Esau, his eldest son, and Esau said, “Behold, here am I.”

  And Isaac said, “Behold, now I am old, and I know not the day of my death. Therefore, I pray you, take your quiver and bow, and go out into the field, and take me some venison, and make me some savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat, and that my soul may bless you before I die.”

  Rebekah heard this, so she went to Jacob and told him, and said, “Do what I command you. Go to the flock and fetch me two good kids of the goats, and I will make them savoury meat for your father, such as he loves, and you shall bring it to your father, that he may eat it, and bless you before his death.”

  And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, “But Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. Perhaps my father will feel me, and know that I am deceiving him, and will give me a curse instead of a blessing.”