A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  Jacob admitted to Laban that he had run away because he was afraid. His very willingness to acknowledge his fear was a sign of his courage. And cunning. But he denied taking Laban’s teraphim, and suggested that his father-in-law search for these small images, swearing, rashly, that whoever had them should not live—a kind of cursing for which he would pay bitterly. For he was unaware that it was his beloved Rachel who had taken the teraphim, perhaps for protection during their flight, perhaps because they were the familiar little gods she was accustomed to. Jacob, unknowing, called for the death of whoever had stolen the images. Was this curse irrevocable, as blessings are irrevocable? Did Jacob’s rash words cause Rachel to die in giving birth to her second son, Benjamin?

  Laban looked through Jacob’s tent, and through Leah’s tent, and then he went into Rachel’s tent.

  Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them in the camel’s furniture and sat on them….And Rachel said to her father, “displease my lord that I cannot stand to greet you, because the custom of women is upon me.” And Laban searched, but he did not find the images.

  The custom of women. The menstrual period. Blood.

  Blood, the great taboo of the Old Testament. A woman during her menstrual period was thought to be unclean, because to shed blood is to shed life.

  This attitude still prevails in some parts of the world today. I stood outside a Jain temple in Bombay and read the sign out front with its various prohibitions: Do not enter with shoes on. Women in menstrual cycle not allowed.

  After walking on the filth of any city street, my own New York included, taking off one’s shoes seems sensible indeed. But blood?

  What is there about blood? I started reading an interesting and challenging article by an Islamic scholar. As I read, I was amazed at how completely I was able to accept all that he was saying, and I applauded internally when he affirmed that of course God is female as well as male—and of course women are just as important as men in the eyes of God—except during the menstrual period when women do not say the prayers.

  At this point I closed the article. What kind of equality is this? What is there about this blood which is so terrifying to men?

  I had cause to learn a good deal about blood this summer, and it has made a great difference in my response to this fluid which, to the ancient Hebrew, was taboo because it represented life itself.

  —

  It began in July when Hugh and I spent fifteen days on a fifty-foot boat with friends in the coastal waters of northwest Canada, near Prince Rupert Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands. There were six of us on the boat, and we were the crew. What there was to be done, the six of us did. We each took our turn on watch. Whoever was at the wheel needed someone else sitting right there on a stool, for drift watch, for in those far northern Canadian waters there are many drifting logs and “dead heads” difficult to see, which could do great damage to a small boat.

  Hugh and I were not quite prepared for the vastness of the wilderness, and our almost total isolation. At night we would pull into an inlet, and anchor. Our only companions were seals, dolphins, loons. We saw bear tracks, though we never saw bears themselves. There was usually at least one great eagle perched watchfully high up on a tree in these climactic forests—forests which have grown as much as they can grow.

  During those fifteen days and nights of the trip we never saw the moon or the stars; we were so far north that it was still daylight when we went to bed. We learned a lot of wilderness lore, and we ate almost entirely out of the sea. I never thought I’d take having a shrimp or crab cocktail every evening for granted. We caught more than we could eat. We had red snapper and rock fish, and we harvested abalone at low tide, and ate them thinly sliced in garlic butter. We ate the eggs of the sea cucumber. We learned that six people living together in a small amount of space with no privacy, no way to get away from each other, have to practice great forbearance, and maintain an acute sense of humour.

  It was a good time, a special time. But there was an unsuspected serpent as there usually is in Eden. Our drinking water was put into the boat whenever we docked near a town, and in one batch of water was an organism known as aeromonas. It gets into the human intestine where it does very nasty things. Aeromonas is rare on the North American continent. It is usually found in Australia, almost entirely in the intestines of children where it is self-limiting and short lived. For an adult to be taken over by this little organism is unusual indeed, and in an adult the effects can be quite violent.

  It didn’t bother anybody else, but for some reason it got me. It invaded my intestines and wrought havoc. Not much is known about it in adults, except that it produces the symptoms of acute ulcerative colitis, and this means pain, severe cramping, and blood. Not unlike the dysentery which afflicted the English in India.

  The people at the lab were absolutely delighted to have discovered their second aeromonas, the first having been in a child. My doctor had happened to read an article about aeromonas in The Lancet, the English medical journal; he also knew I had been in estuary waters, the only place aeromonas is found, and put two and two together.

  It was a relief to have a name to put to my problem, but it didn’t put an end to it. Basically, I lost August, spending it in bed. I was weak, tired, and in pain. At night when the pain kept me from sleeping, I listened to tapes, music, and then a series of tapes from a conference at Aqueduct Center in North Carolina, conducted by Drs. Paul and Margaret Brand. The Brands were both children of Baptist missionaries in India, and were missionaries themselves. They have given their lives to caring for lepers, first in India, and finally in Carville, Louisiana. Dr. Margaret Brand is an ophthalmologist, Dr. Paul Brand an orthopaedic surgeon. I listened to their tapes, at first rather reluctantly, because for this cradle Anglican there is something a little uncomfortable about some of the Baptist ways of speaking about God. But as I listened, night after night, I began to feel that I was in the presence of holy people. I was ready to listen when Paul Brand began to speak about the marvellousness of pain.

  The most terrible thing to happen to the leper is the loss of pain. The hands and feet of the leper become useless stumps not because of leprosy, but because the leper feels no pain. If the leper loses fingers or toes, as so often happens, it is not because of the disease itself, but because the leper is not warned by pain that the fingers or toes are being hurt, and therefore damage or infection are not prevented. Pain is an angel to tell us that something is wrong. The body which cannot feel pain suffers terrible and often fatal injury.

  My body knew pain, and I was doing something about it, taking antibiotics to kill the infection, and finally heavy doses of steroids to mitigate the colitis symptoms. Had I had no pain it is quite possible that the little aeromonas could have finished me off. But I had pain, and this pain was alleviated and put in perspective as I listened to Paul Brand rhapsodizing about its wonderful function.

  Other marvellous and unexpected insights were given me during those long nights. Blood. It is a scary thing to see the bowl bright with your own red blood. So I was ready and able to listen when, during the small hours of one night, Paul Brand talked about blood.

  My husband left his southern Baptist background when he went away to college. We’re both turned off by hymns about being washed in the blood of the Lamb. It sounds too graphic, too literal, to be for me a valid image.

  Bleeding, blood, is seen as the source of life, especially for the Jew, for whom the eating of blood is the one real taboo. When God made the new covenant with Noah, after the flood waters subsided, and told him to repopulate the earth, Noah was given only one prohibition:

  “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, you shall not eat.”

  This prohibition against the consumption of blood is repeated throughout the Bible, loudly, clearly, emphatically. Blood stands for life; that is why an animal must be completely drained of blood before it can be eaten.

  Once my husband naively went into a kosher butch
er shop in our neighbourhood in New York and asked for a leg of lamb, and the poor butcher nearly fainted. Jacob himself added a new taboo the night he wrestled with the angel. The angel smote him on the thigh, and Jacob limped thereafter, so that for Jews ever since, the thigh of the animal, with the sciatic nerve, is prohibited. But the chief taboo is blood.

  So, when I was losing blood, I was very aware that I was also losing life. Paul Brand reiterated that the taboo against blood is the strongest taboo in the Bible.

  We find mention of this ancient prohibition even in the Psalms.

  But they that run after another god shall have great trouble. Their drink offerings of blood will I not offer.

  So when Jesus said, in John’s gospel,

  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.”

  This he said in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.

  Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”

  But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, “Do you take offense at this?” Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you that do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that should betray him. And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

  After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.

  Drink my blood? Break the great taboo? What a shocker that is! For me it was a salutary shock, reminding me that Jesus almost never did what was expected of him, and that God, at all times, and in countless ways, is ready to shock and surprise us into seeing things in a new way. This new understanding about blood is very much with me at communion when I receive the cup. It is indeed a new commandment.

  Was it because of the shock of this command of Jesus’ that in the Roman Catholic Church until very recently the priest was the only one to drink from the cup, and the people received the bread only? Was it too strong, too shocking? Now, in many Roman Catholic churches, the cup is offered, too. But I don’t want ever to take it for granted. I want to be reminded what an extraordinary thing I am doing.

  Yet I still find it hard to think of being washed in the blood of the Lamb.

  Jesus, little lamb, meek and mild. Jesus, tender shepherd. All right, these are images which have given comfort to countless suffering people. But there is also Jesus, the great Shocker.

  Think of the story of the woman with the issue of blood. It has long been one of my favourite stories of the healing power of Jesus—the anguished, bleeding woman trying to reach for the hem of his garment, seeking for the help doctors had been unable to give her (and she had gone to many doctors). Without seeing her, Jesus knew that someone had touched him, because he felt that “virtue” had drained from him.

  “Who touched me?” he asked.

  The disciples, not understanding, wanted to know how he could ask such a question, with a mob pressing all around him. But the woman crawled forward and confessed that it was she who had touched him, and he told her, lovingly, that her faith had made her whole.

  Again he had done something terribly shocking. He had broken the great taboo. The woman with the issue of blood was a woman whose menstrual bleeding had gone on and on without ceasing. She was unclean, and anybody who touched her, or was touched by her, was ritually unclean, and had to go through the prescribed purification procedures, according to the law, before touching anybody else.

  So Jesus healed this unclean woman, and by her touch he became ritually unclean himself. He was on his way to the house of Jairus, whose daughter was mortally ill. But Jesus did not stop to follow the law, to purify himself. Ritually unclean, so that anybody who touched him was also unclean, he went to Jairus’s house, and raised the little girl from the dead. Thereby he broke another taboo, going against the proscription against touching a dead body. He touched her, and she was alive, and he suggested that she be given food. Shocking behaviour. Everybody he touched, after being touched by the woman with the issue of blood, was unclean. But he brought a dead child back to life, making himself doubly unclean, and the child, also. Ritually unclean, but alive! Jesus acted on the law of love, not legalism. As far as we know, he never did anything about getting himself ritually cleansed. Because love, not law, is the great cleanser. In obeying this higher law he shocked everybody, including his closest friends, in his extraordinary and unacceptable ways of acting out love. Of being Love.

  Jesus never broke the law simply to break the law, never as an act of rebellion, but always to obey the higher law of love. That is the only valid reason for breaking the law. Does it violate the law of love? Truly? Then it may be broken, even if it shocks the establishment as Jesus shocked the establishment by healing on the Sabbath, by letting his disciples pluck grain, by reminding us that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. But his violation of the great blood taboo was the most shocking of all.

  —

  When Paul Brand was a child, he often went into tiny villages with his father who, although not a doctor himself, often had to lance people’s ugly infections to drain them of pus and blood. The young Paul was put off by this. He did not want to become a doctor because he did not like blood.

  God has ways of sending us strong messages, without tampering with our free will. In order to become a missionary, Paul Brand had to take a thorough course in first aid. There would be many times when he, like his father, would be in places where there was no doctor. He would have to learn something.

  Part of the first aid course was a stint as an orderly in a large London hospital. One night, shortly after he had gone on duty, a young accident victim was brought in. She looked dead. White, bloodless. There was great rushing around, and a blood transfusion was started. Paul Brand was asked to stay by the woman and to let the nurses know when the blood in the transfusion bag got low.

  And so, he said, he watched a miracle. First a tiny flush of colour came into the cheeks. Then the dead white lips were touched with pink. The girl’s eyelids fluttered, and she opened her eyes. Blood was indeed life.

  So Paul Brand became a doctor, with an entirely new concept of blood. Blood as life. Our life. Our life given to us in the blood and the body. And suddenly he saw all the exhortations to wash in the blood of the lamb not to be literal, as he first took them. Instead, he tells of it as an inner, not an outer washing, and likens it to the life-giving quality of a blood transfusion. He said that if people knew as much about the human body as we do today, they would not have said, “wash me in the blood of the Lamb,” but “transfuse me with the blood of the Lamb.”

  So, when we receive Communion, we are transfused.

  Sometimes it is spiritual pain which makes us aware that we need a transfusion. Just as physical pain is a marvel for the human body, an early warning system, so is spiritual pain. So is grief. Grief for the loss of someone we love, either by death, or by broken relationship, which can be more painful than death. Grief is a pain warning.

  I grieved for the friendship broken when I was accused of breaking a confidence. And once I was able to grieve, rather than to be angry, and sorry for myself, and to want justice done, then healing became possible, healing which cannot occur without love.

  If I was innocent in this case, surely there have been other times in my life when i
nadvertently I have broken confidences. We all say more than we ought to say, or more than we know we have said. Or we don’t speak out when a word would make all the difference. Not one of us is totally innocent in either the words of our mouths or the meditations of our hearts. We are all part of this battered, bleeding bride, struggling to regain beauty and purity. And there is nothing, nothing but a transfusion of love which will make any difference at all.

  But we need our pain warnings before we can turn to love.

  If we watch television, read magazines, we come across a very different attitude toward pain. Avoid it. Deaden it. Take a pill, kill it, then you won’t heed its warning. What do the media want us to believe in? Aspirin. Tylenol. Excedrin. Codeine. Or any of the other hard-selling painkillers. Anything but pain.

  We don’t want pain. We certainly don’t go looking for it. But when it comes, we should heed its warning. I was not offered painkillers while I was struggling to get rid of the aeromonas. But listening to the music, and to the talking tapes was as effective as a narcotic would have been, and possibly even more so.

  A young woman told me of a terrible eye injury for which she could be given no painkillers, because they would impede the healing of the eye. So, she said, she lay on the floor, writhing in pain, and asked her husband to play records, loud music, Beethoven and Brahms symphonies. And while she was being transfused by music, washed in the great orchestras, the pain subsided until she could lie still, listening. And slowly her eye healed.

  There are times when it is appropriate to use painkillers, as I know through personal experience. Pain is not romantic, and I don’t want to suggest sentimentally that it is never intolerable. James Herriot, the Yorkshire veterinarian, writes in one of his books about being called by a farmer to tend a sick animal. Nearby in her stall a cow lay bellowing in mortal pain. The farmer refused to let the vet touch the cow, saying she was going to die, anyhow, and he wasn’t going to waste money on her. Herriot could not stand the poor animal’s agony, and when the farmer wasn’t looking, he took a hypodermic needle and gave the cow a massive shot to assuage her pain so that at least she could die quietly. The next day when he returned to the farm to tend the other animal, he expected a dead cow, but there she was, peacefully munching hay. The painkiller had relaxed her anguish so that she was able to heal.