A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  As usual, there are no valid generalities about pain. But I suspect we need medication less often than the media would have us believe. Sometimes healing and pain can work together to mend us. I don’t envy those who have never known any pain, physical or spiritual, because I strongly suspect that the capacity for pain and the capacity for joy are equal. Only those who have suffered are able to rejoice.

  It is only when we know ourselves wounded, know that we have lost blood, that we are aware that we need a transfusion. (Sometimes it is only the wise physician who recognizes pain that is intractable, as the Yorkshire vet recognized it, and knows that help is needed.) The transfusion is for someone who has experienced the warning wonder of pain, and the acceptance of the loss of blood, either physically or spiritually.

  There are days when I go to the altar and I am less aware of my need for a transfusion than I am on other days. That is all right. But I am always aware that I am tapping into the source of a tremendous power of love. It is not a magic power. As far as I am concerned the experts can worry about words such as transubstantiation. When you need a blood transfusion you don’t worry about things like that. The transfusion of love is not always a comfortable one, because such love may push me into letting go some cozy ideas, push me into a new way of looking at God, and therefore at myself.

  What am I looking for? Sometimes God opens my eyes so that I see something totally unexpected, something which may cause pain and loss. And then I need to be transfused.

  This is always a reminder that God loves us, just as we are. We don’t have to perfect ourselves by adherence to the letter of the law. Jesus has broken the law, radically, with his violation of the taboo of blood, and in the breaking of the taboo has shown the healing power of love. We, too, violate the taboo, break the law. We must understand that when we take the bread and wine we are doing something shocking.

  Jesus was not shocked by the woman who was ritually unclean, or the man who collected taxes for the Romans, or even the woman taken in adultery. But he was shocked and grieved by hardness of heart.

  We are blessed indeed to be able to feel pain, our body’s warning system that something is wrong, and that we need help. Indeed, yes, I need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, transfused with the blood of the Lamb, for that gives life, and life abundantly.

  Laban never found his household gods; Rachel was too cunning for him. Had she learned this from her husband?

  Jacob (feeling guilty about his genetic manipulation?) was immediately angry with the one he had tricked, and he said to Laban,

  “What is my trespass? What is my sin, that you have followed me so hotly? You have searched all my stuff, and what have you found that belongs to you? I’ve been with you for twenty years,”

  he continued, reminding Laban that his flocks and worldly goods had flourished under Jacob’s care.

  “I served you for fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your cattle, and you have changed my wages ten times.”

  They quarrelled elegantly in those days, and made up elegantly, too. Jacob and Laban made a covenant, and Jacob set up another stone for a pillar, and called the place by several names, including Mizpah, for, Laban said,

  “The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent from one another.”

  The word Mizpah has often been etched on pins and lockets, and given by lovers to each other. But it was said first by a father-in-law to his son-in-law after they had had a bitter quarrel. After that,

  Jacob went his way, and the angels of God went with him.

  Did the angels of God remind him that he had unfinished business with his brother, Esau? Jacob sent messengers to Esau, telling them,

  “Thus shall you speak to my lord Esau: ‘his servant, Jacob, says, I have stayed with Laban until now, and I have oxen, asses, flocks, menservants and womenservants, and I have sent to tell my lord Esau, that I may find grace in his sight.’ ”

  And the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother, Esau, and he is coming to meet you, with four hundred men.”

  This terrified Jacob, because he thought that Esau, after all these years, was coming out to kill him, and he divided his retinue, all the people and all the animals, into two camps, saying,

  “If Esau comes to one company and smites it, then the other will escape.” (In his fear, he continued to punish himself for his own trickery.)

  Then he turned to God and said, “O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac…Deliver me from the hand of my brother, for I fear him, lest he come and kill me, and the mothers and their children. And yet it was you, Lord, who said, I will surely do good for you, and make your seed as the sand on the seashore, which cannot be numbered.”

  Jacob stayed where he was that night, and prepared presents (bribes?) for Esau: two hundred she-goats, twenty he-goats, two hundred ewes, twenty rams, thirty milk camels and their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls, and twenty she-asses, and ten foals.

  He did not know his brother very well, our too-clever Jacob. He took his own two wives, and the two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and sent them all over the brook with everything that he had, so that he was alone, completely alone.

  And then came the angel to wrestle with him.

  Long before, on his flight to Laban, Jacob had seen the ladder of angels, connecting heaven and earth; now he was wrestling with heaven in Person.

  And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.”

  But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

  And he said to him, “What is your name?”

  And he said, “Jacob.”

  Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

  Then Jacob asked him, “Tell me, I pray, your name.”

  But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him.

  So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel, limping because of his thigh. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh on the sinew of the hip.

  Jacob’s angel wrestled with him all night. We don’t always have the courage to keep it up as long as that, though night is often a time for the most intense spiritual struggle, and we don’t always know who started it—we, with our unanswerable questions, or the angel, leaping on us unexpectedly.

  Perhaps we need the angel to start grappling with us, to turn us aside from the questions which have easy answers to those which cause us to grow, no matter how painful that growth can be.

  Luci Shaw condenses into this small poem some of the intense personal longing that was Jacob’s, and is ours, in grappling with heaven:

  With Jacob

  inexorably I cry

  as I wrestle

  for the blessing,

  thirsty, straining

  for the joining

  till my desert throat

  runs dry.

  I must risk

  the shrunken sinew

  and the laming

  of his naming

  till I find

  my final quenching

  in the hollow

  of the thigh.

  This was a critical point, a watershed in Jacob’s life, when he came to grips with God—with the reality of heaven itself.

  In the Bible, heaven is described metaphorically, not literally. We are given some hints and clues, but it remains for us a realm of mystery.

  When my father died when I was seventeen, I pondered heaven and God’s plan for el’s complex and contradictor
y children, and it seemed to me evident that nobody I know, certainly including myself, was ready for heaven after this mortal life in which we are all, one way or another, bent and broken. There may be a handful of people who are prepared for the unveiled vision of God. But most of us are not, most of us still have a vast amount to learn. I don’t know how God plans to teach me all that I need to know before I am ready for the Glory, but my faith is based on the belief that I don’t have to know. I have to know only that the Maker is not going to abandon me when I die, is not going to make creatures who are able to ask questions which simply cannot be answered in this life, and then drop them with the questions still unanswered.

  “But the church says…” I am sometimes reminded.

  The church (of all denominations) has often said one thing, and then gone on to say something else again. The church pronounced that the earth is flat, that it is the center of creation and God’s concern, with the sun and the moon and the stars revolving around us, all for our benefit. It is now generally acknowledged that the earth is part of a solar system on the outskirts of an ordinary spiral galaxy.

  Within this century the church said that God is impassible and cannot suffer or grieve or feel pain. It is now generally acknowledged that God, rather than being aloof and impervious, is more like the suffering servant of Isaiah. God is in the desert with the starving children, is in the burning buildings, is present with the piles of bodies in the battle-torn cities, a Maker who is part of all that happens and who suffers whenever the creature suffers.

  As to who goes to heaven, there seems to be considerable division. Some churches are holding adamantly to a heaven for Christians only. Other churches are asking questions, wondering if this judgmental (if not forensic) attitude toward heaven is true to the love of God.

  After Gandhi’s death a friend of his was asked whether or not Gandhi was a Christian. The friend replied that the answer depended on what was meant by the question. If the question meant whether Gandhi belonged to one of the established institutions or not, then the answer was no. But if what was meant by the question was whether or not Gandhi believed in Jesus Christ, then the answer was yes.

  Once when I was lecturing at a denominational college I was asked, during the question and answer period, whether or not I thought Gandhi was in heaven. “Yes,” I said. “But,” protested the young man who asked me, “Gandhi did not accept Jesus as his personal Saviour.” Didn’t he? In any case, when Gandhi attempted to go to a Christian church, he was turned away because he was the wrong colour. The Christian establishment was hardly offering him a Christ of universal love.

  It became evident that this young man was far more interested in keeping Gandhi out of heaven than in getting him in. Finally I said, “For me, Gandhi is a Christ figure. I’ll be perfectly happy to go wherever he goes. If you want to call that hell, that’s your problem.”

  There is still room for change, change in us all. But we really haven’t gone much further than the ancient Egyptians in thinking about the afterlife.

  Hugh and I spent two intense weeks in Egypt last winter, with a small group—nine of us—and an excellent Egyptologist, travelling from Cairo and the pyramids and the Sphinx to Luxor, taking a small boat that followed a thousand miles, and penetrated back more thousands of years, on the still largely-unexplored Nile, and on to Aswan and Abu Simbel. We steeped ourselves in the world of ancient Egypt, a world we know about largely because of the Pharaonic faith in God—or the gods. We were filled with awe as we walked through the sacred spaces of the temples, through long, pillared halls to the altar and the holiest holy places.

  My heart lifted with wonder at the searching soul of the human being, striving toward God, yearning for the Creator, for the power of love which made all the galaxies and all the solar systems, the Creator of all, for whom the life of our planet is no more than the flicker of an eye.

  And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God. Nothing we say about the Creator can begin to be adequate. It is always small and fumbling and human and anthropomorphic—no matter how mighty our monuments.

  What those ancient Egyptians were saying to me in their frescoes and carvings was that life would have meant nothing to them at all without their faith in God, even if their gods frequently came to them in both animal and human form.

  Were they aware that human beings, marvellous as we are, are also fragile and fragmented? It would seem so, as we studied the complex patterns of their civilization, at least as aware as we are. It seems ironic that the people who refuse to admit any brokenness in themselves are often unhappy. Even if they announce that they are not broken, they still fail to live up to the model of perfection they have set for themselves, a dislocation which produces in them a deep unhappiness. We live most comfortably and lovingly with ourselves when we can look at our brokenness, physical or spiritual, know that God will help us, and that we are loved just as we are. God loves me with all my volatility, stubbornness, flaring temper, clumsiness, and that makes it possible for me to accept myself, loving myself in God’s love of me. It also makes it more possible for me to love other people as they are, and not set impossible standards which they cannot meet.

  Jesus had visibly imperfect people as friends—a tax collector, a woman who had been possessed of seven demons, a Pharisee who dared speak with him only in the cover of darkness. Where Jesus leads, it is easier for us to follow.

  Christ, the second person of the Trinity, was revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth in an incredible act of love. But Christ can speak to me in other ways, too, ways which do not diminish my love of Jesus as Lord. Christ spoke to me through the ancient culture of the pharaohs, although I am not tempted to worship their pantheon of gods. Christ can speak to me through Saint Shinran Shunin as I walk my dog to and from the park. Obviously I do not see Saint Shinran as a Buddhist would see him. I see him from my point of view as a Christian torn by the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. I see him as Christ would have me see him, and with a hope that with Christ’s love our swords can be beaten into ploughshares, our bombs defused as we seek food for our overcrowded and hungry planet.

  Christ can speak to me through the white china Buddha who sits on my desk at Crosswicks and smiles at me tolerantly when I fly into a torrent of outrage or self-pity. That forbearing smile helps restore my sense of proportion, and rids me of that self-will which keeps me caught up in myself so that I am isolating myself from Christ. Of course I am no more likely to become a Buddhist than my parents were likely to turn to Islam when they framed those lovely verses from the Koran.

  There is no limit to the ways in which Christ can speak to us, though for the Christian he speaks first and most clearly through Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, my icons would be idols if they did not lead me to follow more closely in Jesus’ steps.

  And Christ spoke to me as I walked through a great column of stone lions leading into the temple at Karnak. We were there at dawn, to avoid flies, tourists, the heat of the sun, and those great soaring columns provoked in us a cathedral sense of awe.

  “Why are there so many rams, in the carvings and the frescoes?” someone asked our guide.

  To my delight she told us that the ram in the Egyptian temples is Abraham’s ram. I remembered that Abraham had indeed been to Egypt, and so had Isaac, and so had Jacob. The desert we were seeing was very much like the desert they had crossed. Because the pharaohs of Abraham’s day knew the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac, and the last-minute substitution of the ram, the Egyptians adopted the ram into their pantheon of gods as a symbol of life.

  Possibly Abraham had stood where we were standing; possibly he had even seen the reproductions of the ram, his ram, who had saved Isaac, and thereby Jacob as well.

  “Why are there so many cobras?” we asked, “so many vultures and crocodiles?”

  “In those days they worshipped what they feared,
” our guide told us. Placating the gods, it has been called, and it’s still something we tend to do if we’re not careful. If we view God as a vengeful judge, and turn to Jesus to save us from the furious father, aren’t we worshipping what we fear?

  Those old Egyptians also worshipped the baboon because every morning when the sun rose, the baboons all clapped their hands for joy, applauding the reappearance of the sun. What a lovely picture, the baboons all clapping their hands and shouting for joy as the sun rose! So it seemed to the Egyptians that the baboons must have had something to do with the rising of the sun, and that their applause helped to bring the sun back up into the sky.

  The scarab beetle, too, was an object of worship, because it disappeared down into the desert sands at sundown, and then came up again in the morning as the sun rose, and was, therefore, a symbol of the resurrection for them.

  What? The resurrection? Yes, our guide told us, that is what it was called, their firm belief in the resurrection of their bodies, not immediately after their death, but at some unknown future date, which was why so much elaborate preparation went into embalming. I’m not sure how much essential difference there is between the tombs with food and jewels in them, and our own recently abandoned belief that our bones will rise up out of our graves at the Second Coming. Cremation is impermissible because God can’t do anything with ashes; if someone dies in a shipwreck and the body is lost at sea and eaten by fish, that’s just too bad. Or, if someone is trapped in a burning building and incinerated by fire, that, too, is just too bad. If there is no actual body to be raised, there can be no resurrection. What kind of powerless God is being worshipped? God, who made our bodies, can raise them again from nothing, if need be.