A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  And in contradiction to all the demands for bloodshedding,

  Love you, therefore, the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

  But Deuteronomy was written long after the saga of Jacob, after the giving of the commandments, the setting up of ceremonial laws, the moving into a more forensic way of life. Jacob was not bound by the details of hundreds of laws. He knew that he could not earn God’s blessing, but he did not hesitate to demand it. He knew that he needed it. And this deep need and passion showed that his heart had a deeper understanding than his conniving head. If Jacob had had to earn God’s love, he would not have gone far.

  Nor would he have seen those angels and the wonder of at-one-ment, of knowing the place where he had slept to be a sacred place, the house of God. How often do we feel such wondrous awe? We have lost much of it in the effort to have God as a friend, or, not so much a friend as a pal. And that doesn’t work, either. God is both transcendent and immanent, and often in the wondrous moments of sheltering under the eternal wings, we know ourselves and all the stars in all the galaxies as belonging to God. How can we not feel awe?

  Oh, I am in awe of the maker of galaxies and geese, stars and starfish, mercury and men (male and female). Sometimes it is rapturous awe; sometimes it is the numinous dread Jacob felt. Sometimes it is the humble awe of knowing that ultimately I belong to God, to the Maker whose thumb print is on each one of us. And that is blessing.

  —

  Poor Esau. If he felt awe at the glory of the stars we are not told about it. He was more interested in satisfying his immediate hungers. He didn’t get much love, either from his mother or his twin brother. But he did not hold grudges. Rebekah told Jacob to go away until Esau cooled off, and she knew her elder son well enough to know that he would indeed cool off. I like that in Esau, the unwillingness to hold on to anger, the lack of desire for revenge. Perhaps Jacob did not know his brother well enough to know that Esau had a generous personality. Despite Rebekah’s rank favouritism of the handsome younger son, Esau had fine qualities, including the refusal to sulk and smoulder over past insults.

  Even about marriage, Esau did not receive the loving parental advice lavished on Jacob. We read that, “Esau, seeing that the daughters of Canaan did not please Isaac his father,” went to Ishmael, his uncle, and married Mahalath, one of Ishmael’s daughters. That doesn’t seem to have pleased his parents, either. Esau, from the moment of his birth, was given a hard time.

  But he did not respond to the indignities heaped upon him with cursing.

  Even if I do not feel “good” about it, I must learn to bless and not damn. During a period of discussion at one conference I emphasized this and mentioned, rather casually, that I had said of someone, “God, bless the bastard.” Not only did this startle some of the people at the conference, it was also liberating. God loves us as we are, even at our most ungracious. And to bless, no matter how little we may feel like it, is to participate in love.

  Cursing is a boomerang. If I will evil toward someone else, that evil becomes visible in me. It is an extreme way of being forensic, toward myself, as well as toward whatever outrages me. To avoid contaminating myself and everybody around me, I must work through the anger and the hurt feelings and the demands for absolute justice to a desire for healing. Healing for myself, and my anger, first, because until I am at least in the process of healing, I cannot heal; and then healing for those who have hurt or betrayed me, and those I have hurt and betrayed. I must hope for healing for those two arrogant men with their clever lawyers; healing for the clever lawyers, too, deliberately defending two men who had used knives with intent to hurt or kill, but who hadn’t used them skillfully enough to hurt the old woman they attacked as badly as the assistant district attorney claimed.

  Are they any less worthy of blessing than was tricky Jacob?

  Or you? Or me?

  Perhaps most difficult of all is learning to bless ourselves, just as we are. Before we can ask God to bless us, we must be able to accept ourselves as blessed—not perfect, not virtuous, not sinless—just blessed.

  If we have to be perfect before we can know ourselves blessed, we will never ask for the transfiguring power of God’s love, because of course we are unworthy. But we don’t have to be worthy, we just have to acknowledge our need, to cry out, “Help me!” God will help us, even if it’s in an unexpected and shocking way, by swooping down on us to wrestle with us. And in the midst of the wrestling we, too, will be able to cry out, “Bless me!”

  I am certain that God will bless me, but I don’t need to know how. When we think we know exactly how the one who made us is going to take care of us, we’re apt to ignore the angel messengers sent us along the way.

  There is a story of an old man who lived by a river. In the spring the rains were heavy, and the river rose. The sheriff came by in his jeep, and said to the old man, “The river is going to flood, and I want to evacuate you.”

  The old man folded his arms confidently. “I have faith in God. God will take care of me.”

  The sheriff shook his head and drove off.

  The river continued to rise. It lapped about the old man’s house, rising up to the porch. The sheriff came by in a row boat, and said, “The river is continuing to rise. I really need to evacuate you.”

  The old man looked at the river which covered his steps and lapped across the porch. He folded his arms. “I have faith in God. God will take care of me.”

  The sheriff shook his head, and rowed away.

  And the river inched higher. At last the old man was clinging to his rooftree. The sheriff came by in a helicopter and hovered above the old man. “I really must evacuate you. You’ll drown if I don’t.”

  But the old man repeated, “I have faith in God. God will take care of me.”

  Frustrated, the sheriff left.

  And the river rose even higher. And the old man drowned.

  In heaven, he was very upset. He went to God and said, “Why did you do this to me? Why did you let me drown? I kept telling the sheriff that I had faith in you, and that you would take care of me.”

  God said, “You ninny! I sent you a jeep, and a rowboat, and a helicopter!”

  When we ask God for help, we can’t insist that help come in the way that we have decided. If we are demanding specific blessings, we may miss the actual ones God has sent to us.

  Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.

  Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

  He forgives all your sins, and heals all your infirmities;

  He redeems your life from the grave and crowns you with mercy and loving kindness.

  The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.

  For as the heavens are high upon the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him.

  Bless the Lord, you angels of his, you mighty ones who do his bidding, and hearken to the voice of his word.

  Bless the Lord, all you his hosts, you ministers of his who do his will.

  Bless the Lord, all you works of his, in all places of his dominion, bless the Lord, O my soul.

  There were many times in Jacob’s life when he must have experienced intense loneliness. After he had stolen his father’s blessing, with his mother’s urging, he could not stay at home to enjoy it, but had to go away, to stay with his uncle Laban.

  Is there anybody in the world who has not, at one time or another, experienced a deep loneliness, when all support systems fail, when there is nobody there—nobody? It is at such times that I reach out for God most longingly. Here, as God was present for Jacob, not God Out There, high in a distant heaven, but present, even in the loneliest depths of my heart. For if I cannot find God here, within, how can I find el anywhere else?

  Jacob’s vision of glory came in the midst of his terror. We do not have to be at peace, or have perfect conditions, in order to glimpse glory. It was as possible for me to have a flash of hea
venly understanding in that tiny box of a jury room as in church or out on the grandeur of the ocean.

  The universe is immeasurably vast. God only Out There, looking on, does not help me. I seek and know a closer God. God not only within all that has been made, God not only within during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, but God within, right now, within me, in the salt of my tears, the beating of my heart.

  Lancelot Andrewes wrote:

  Be, O Lord, within me to strengthen me

  Without me to guard me

  Over me to shelter me,

  Beneath me to stablish me

  Before me to guide me

  After me to forward me

  Round about me to secure me.

  Those lines were written four centuries ago. The idea of God everywhere is not new, but God has been pushed Out There, without, for so long, that we forget the within-ness, and the marvel that God can come and reveal wonder in the most ordinary things. One early summer day I came home from trying to clip back the weed alders which were blocking the view from the star-watching rock, and met a young friend, also returning to the house, carrying his shirt which was stained red with the miracle of tiny, luscious wild strawberries, and which remained pinkly patterned after numerous launderings. This uncovenanted bounty of the field was worth one shirt, and a reminder of the marvellousness of the ordinary loveliness on the hillside by Crosswicks.

  Sometimes the loveliness of God’s presence comes in the midst of pain.

  I wasn’t quite over a bad case of shingles when I went south to conduct a retreat. I felt miserable. The shingles blisters, which had managed to get even into my ear, had burst my eardrum. The weather was not cooperating. Instead of being warm and sunny (I had hoped to be able to sit on the beach and bask in the sun and heal) it was cold, rainy, and raw.

  When the rain finally stopped, I went for a silent walk on the beach with two caring friends. The ocean was smothered in fog, but occasionally the curtain lifted enough to reveal a fishing boat, and a glimpse of muted silver on sea. One of my companions found some lovely driftwood. The other picked up some tiny donax shells and put them in my palm. And there, in the silence, in the fog, in my pain, was a sensation of being surrounded by the almighty wings of God, right then, at that time, in that place, God with us.

  As Lancelot Andrewes called on God to be.

  When I think of Jacob alone, his head on his stone pillow, I can easily hear Lancelot Andrewes’s words coming from him. The vision of angels which came to him when he fled from home, and had not yet reached Laban, changed Jacob’s perception of God, and he vowed a vow, bargaining with his father’s God, but finally affirming,

  then shall the Lord be my God: and this stone, which I have placed for an altar, shall be God’s house: and of all that God shall give me, I will surely give a tenth to God.

  Jacob was in the habit of making bargains: You do this for me, God, and you can be my God. But he was beginning to learn wonder, and awe at the marvel of the vision he had been sent.

  How often we are given visions, and walk right by them, or through them (like the old man by the river) because we have lost our sense of wonder, our belief in all that lies on the other side of reason.

  On my desk I have a placard which my granddaughter Charlotte made for me as a Christmas present, copying out Shakespeare’s words in large italic letters: “Oh, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping.”

  This delightful gift was a result of a week Charlotte and her sister, Léna spent with us at Crosswicks. In the evening we would get into the big four-poster bed with mugs of cocoa, and read As You Like It, taking turns with the roles. Charlotte was reading Celia, one of Shakespeare’s most delightful and liberated characters, when she hooted out this joy with a spontaneity and lack of inhibition which we often lose as we move from the childhood world of play and daydreams into the adult world where we have to worry about the price of fuel oil and the rising cost of living. How sad that so often we stifle our sense of joy and wonder.

  A letter to me from an eleven-year-old girl posed the question, “How can I remain a child forever and not grow up?”

  I wrote back, “I don’t think you can, and I don’t think it would be a good idea if you could. What you can do, and what I hope you will do, is remain a child forever, and grow up, too.” That is what it means to be a whole human being, rather than an isolated fragment of our own chronology.

  Charlotte, Léna, and I, reading As You Like It, aloud, were children, and they were also young adolescents, and I was also a grandmother, but we shared our wonder. We culled other quotable lines from the play, chortling as Rosalind says, “Why, know you not that I am a woman? When I think, I must speak!”

  Perhaps that’s one of the best of the feminine characteristics. When we think, we speak. Which means that we have the courage of our convictions. Sometimes we tell stories, or write stories. Children have not lost the notion, as many adults have, that to read is to speak; it is, in fact, a form of dialogue. That is probably the chief difference between reading a book and watching television. In viewing we do not engage in dialogue; we are acted upon; we do not, in any true creative sense, participate. But when we read, we are creators. If the reader cannot create the book along with the writer, then the book is stillborn. The reader is also an artist.

  Léna and Charlotte and I were artists as we read aloud.

  Rosalind and Celia were universe-disturbers in their own inimitable ways, Celia being willing for love of her cousin to go into exile. And because a sense of wonder was vivid in Celia, she was able to make a game of something that was supposed to be humiliating and shameful. And in the end the “wicked uncle,” who had sent Rosalind and Celia into exile, repented. The wicked may “play games,” but, paradoxically, they do not know how to play.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel says that “indifference to the sublime wonder of living” lies behind all the evils which have befallen our sorry century. I remember Léna and Charlotte as little ones twirling with delight in a daisy-filled meadow, singing ring-around-a-rosy with me, until we all fell into the white and green field, breathless with laughter.

  Heschel continues, “Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which only has to be organized in order to be mastered.”

  I cannot explain angels, nor do I need to. But I want to hear the lovely swish of their wings, to know that they are there, God’s messengers of love and hope.

  To lose our sense of wonder is to grow rigid, unable to accept change with grace. This has been a century of change, accelerating change, which gives every indication of continuing to accelerate. We tend to adjust to the technological changes fairly well. We’re not like the old woman who announced, “If God had wanted us to fly, he wouldn’t have created trains.”

  We’re grateful for the advances of medicine. I love the electronic typewriter which is sensitive to my thoughts as they flow through my fingers. Technology’s outer changes are very visible, and we’ve managed to keep up with them fairly well. But we haven’t changed inwardly enough to keep up with the changes we’ve made outwardly, thus creating problems we’re just beginning to recognize. Or to refuse to recognize. For if we recognize that our spiritual development lags woefully behind our intellectual development, and that we must do something to heal this brokenness before we are split completely asunder, then we must open ourselves to God. This is dangerous to our self-satisfaction or complacency. If we open ourselves to the untamed God, we may get hurt. We may make mistakes. We may find that our lives are being turned around. And that takes courage, a childlike courage.

  We become whole by being all of ourselves, including the aspects of ourselves we like least as well as those of which we are able to approve. When we try to approve of ourselves (rather than to love ourselves) we tend to lose both our senses of humour and of wonder. Only if I retain the irradiating joy as I see the first trout lily in the spri
ng, the first bright red of the partridge berries in the autumn, can I become a “grown-up.”

  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were “grown-ups” in the proper sense. They accepted themselves as they were, and they remained sensitive to the wonder of God. And they were willing to change, to move into new ways.

  Not only did Abraham marry Keturah, after Sarah’s death, and have children with her, he also (according to the custom of the day) had concubines, and more children by them as he lived out his one hundred threescore and fifteen years.

  Did he really? Did the patriarchs live as long as Scripture tells us, or did they count age differently? I’m ready to grant the vast length of their years a willing suspension of disbelief. They lived on a planet as yet unpolluted. Air was clean and fresh to breathe. Rainwater was pure and could be tasted with relish; acid rain was many centuries away. Food was simple and wholesome, rough and full of bulk. It is quite likely that people then lived longer than we do, whereas during the Dark and Middle Ages and for many centuries thereafter they had far shorter life spans than we have—and by we, I mean those of us in the Western world, for the current life span in the Third World is no longer than the life span in Europe in the Middle Ages.

  Ishmael—Abraham’s first son, the little boy dying of thirst in the desert, to whom God gave a spring of water—Ishmael, too, lived to a ripe old age, “a hundred and thirty-seven years,” when

  he gave up the ghost and died.

  A phrase much used in Scripture, to give up the ghost. What does it mean? Ghost = spirit = breath. In the liturgy we ask that our thoughts may be cleansed by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit may breathe truth and renewal into us.

  When we give up the spirit, we stop breathing, we give the ghost back to the Creator. When their time came, Abraham and the others of the day gave up the ghost “and were gathered to their fathers.”

  That was enough. Life was full, and there was little questioning of what came after it. Such questions did not come until a more densely-populated world where the wicked flourished and the innocent suffered and the inequities of this life became more apparent.