A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  I knew true Christian community in that church, but I missed symbols. As a storyteller I live by symbol. It fills and feeds me so that in a symbol-less church I feel undernourished. It is true that any symbol can be made into an idol. Any symbol can be elevated or distorted into something it was not meant to be. But that does not destroy the truth of the original symbol. Was God not showing Jacob a marvellous symbol in the glorious ladder of angels?

  A few Christmases ago my son and daughter-in-law gave me a pretty pair of silver earrings. Each earring was in the shape of a crescent moon, containing a scattering of stars. I don’t think any of us realized that this was the Proctor and Gamble logo until the recent brouhaha in which it was alleged that this logo was an ancient trademark of the devil. So much noise has been made about this that sales have fallen, and I understand that this logo is to be phased out, and no longer used on Proctor and Gamble products.

  What!?! The crescent moon and the stars Satan’s symbol? How can that possibly be? Who made the moon and the stars? Genesis makes it very clear that the heavens are the Lord’s, and that el is the loving Creator of the universe. How can we be so stupid as to call the loveliness of the night sky a sign of Satan? I am totally baffled.

  And horrified. I am not about to give over the beauty of moon and stars to Satan or to Satan worshippers. God took Abraham out at night to see the stars, the stars made in the mighty acts of creation. The Maker’s stars. The Maker’s moon.

  In some early civilizations the crescent moon was a symbol of worship of the goddess, Ishtar or Ashtaroth, and other female deities, like Diana, whose symbol was the moon. These goddesses were said to be beneficent when the moon was waxing, and maleficent when it was waning. In countries where the crops followed the phases of the moon, where earth was mother, the worship of the moon goddess was natural. In the western world of Protestantism we have swung to the opposite extreme, criticizing the Roman Catholics for their reverence of Mary, the most holy birth-giver (as the orthodox call her), and have emphasized a masculine, patriarchal God who sometimes seems to have more of the attributes of Zeus with his bolts of lightning, than the loving Abba of Jesus.

  Perhaps the fear of the symbol of the crescent moon and the stars is a masculine fear of the feminine. But we need to regain the feminine, the intuitive, the nurturing element in ourselves, and in our understanding of the Godhead, our Maker, who is all in all, mother, father, brother, sister, lover, friend, companion. The great mystics of the church, such as Hildegarde of Bingen, Meister Eckhardt, Lady Julian of Norwich, were casual about the gender of God, using the male or female pronoun as the need arose. Let us not be bullied into fearing the feminine symbol of the crescent moon. We see our tides swing to the rhythm of the moon. Our bodies follow the moon’s phases. Our words month and Monday come from the same source. Our dependence on the rhythm of the moon is part of the interdependence of all nature, all life, all Creation.

  Christ’s cross has been a vital symbol throughout the ages; it does not belong exclusively to the Christian era. The butterfly (like the ram) has long been a symbol of metamorphosis and resurrection, adding new meaning to the “butterfly effect.”

  The extraordinary world of particle physics is providing new symbols for me, and new understanding of old symbols. My response to my discovery of Einstein’s theories of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory was to write A Wrinkle in Time, as I struggled to understand the wonders of the Creator and creation.

  Was it a coincidence that I picked up Berdyaev’s book warning against a forensic view of God just as I started jury duty and especially just as I needed to pay heed to this message? Or that I began to read about particle physics with its theory of the total interdependence of all creation just when the church and the world seemed to be shattering into inimical, isolated fragments? Is there such a thing as coincidence? (A priest friend told me that “a coincidence is a small miracle in which God prefers to remain anonymous.”)

  So it did not surprise me when I settled myself in my seat for a plane journey, that I opened the New York Times science section to an article on particle physics; nor that the two books I carried in my bag were Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, and John Boslough’s Stephen Hawking’s Universe, and that all three were mutually nourishing, each reinforcing the others.

  The world of particle physics is a new world in my generation, and has revealed a universe of such complexity that even the greatest physicists do not fully comprehend it.

  My parents, growing to adulthood in those strangely placid years before World War I, lived in a far simpler world. Their understanding of the nature of the universe was closer to that of Jacob’s day than of ours, so rapidly has our knowledge grown. For them, despite the fact that it was acknowledged that stars are suns, and our planet part of an ordinary solar system, creation was infinitely smaller and easier to comprehend than it is today. Ants and gnats and the no-seeum-bugs that came out in the spring were as small as anyone needed to comprehend. There were smaller things, such as germs and viruses, which could be seen only through microscopes, but, still, they could be seen.

  And then the heart of the atom was opened. Scientists, struggling to make a bomb to end all bombs, were given more money for their research than ever they would have been given in time of peace. How did they dare set off that first atom bomb, when they were not at all sure that it would not start a chain reaction that would blow up the entire planet? And yet, knowing of this possibility, they went ahead. Was it bravery or folly?

  Whichever it was it has opened up a new understanding of the universe, and it is up to us to try to understand it creatively, as a further revelation of the wonders of the mind of the Maker.

  I turn to the study of astrophysics and particle physics because these disciplines are about the nature of being, and so may be for us revelations of what God is like, and how Christ’s love works to enflame our own.

  So I sat on the plane, fastened my seat belt, and started the Times article, by Walter Sullivan, and read that not only do quanta (subatomic particles) have the ability to communicate instantaneously, but according to French theorist Bernard d’Espagnat, such instantaneous signals exceed the speed of light.

  What does that mean, I wondered? And then I remembered that we have instances of inexplicable, instantaneous communication in our own lives. There are stories, many authenticated, of people calling each other, instantaneously, across vast distances. A mother will sit up in bed, abruptly wakened from sleep, and rush, unthinking to make a phone call. Her moment of waking comes just as the grandbaby begins to choke, and the call alerts the parents and the baby is reached just in time.

  My grandfather had passage on the Titanic; his bags had already gone onto the ship, when a voice told him to leave the gangplank, not to sail. The warning was so clear that he heeded it.

  We don’t understand such phenomena any more than physicists understand the behaviour of some subatomic particles. But this is no reason to say that such things do not happen. It is no reason to say they are works of the Devil, rather than of Christ. There are many occurrences that we must admit we do not understand. As long as this world belongs to the Word who made all that was made, that is all we need to know. Maybe one day, as we develop spiritually, we will understand more than we do now. When we are in heaven, in the Presence, we will “know as we are known.”

  Quantum mechanics, according to the Times article, “indicates that properties usually attributed to matter have no real existence until measured.”

  This parallels Parker Palmer’s affirmation that the self becomes real only when reacting with other selves. We do not become real in isolation, but in response to the others we encounter along the way, and who call us into being, as the observing scientist calls quanta into being.

  And how do we, ourselves, become real? Hugh married an introverted, shy, undefined young woman. I became real as I responded to him, to our children, to our friends, who quite literally brought me out of the shell in which I
had hidden myself.

  Destructive criticism is devastating because it does not make real; instead, it negates and destroys. Constructive criticism builds, bringing out the hidden reality.

  In the world of particle physics, I am encountering a new reality, which enlarges and enhances my own.

  The indeterminacy of quantum mechanics seems to upset scientists as much as it does theologians. But why is this “probability” aspect of quantum mechanics more perplexing than the “probability” aspect of sperm?

  Of all the thousands of the male sperm ejected during coitus, only one will meet and unite with the female ovum. Which one? Who can guess? Is it complete indeterminacy? Had another sperm met and united with my egg, I would have a very different child from the one who came from the particular sperm and ovum which succeeded in bonding.

  Yet this randomness in the mechanism of human reproduction doesn’t seem to upset anybody, and it has been known, at least since biblical times, that the male sperm, as well as the female egg, is needed for conception.

  Just after I wrote these thoughts in my journal, I picked up Alter’s book and read about “the vigorous movement of biblical writing away from the stable closure of the mythological world, and toward the interdeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguity of a fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history.” Fascinating to come across the word interdeterminacy in two such different contexts, though I don’t agree with Alter’s definition of “the mythological world” as offering “stable closure.” It’s the old misuse of the word mythological, and I might rather substitute the word, “cultic.” The important thing is that both the world of Scripture and the world of quantum mechanics are worlds of indeterminacy. That is a freeing thought, because a world of determinacy is a world where everything is preordained beforehand, where there is no free will.

  I shudder at the once widely-accepted theory that God preordained us all before we were born for either heaven or hell, and nothing we did would change this predestination. What kind of god would predetermine part of his creation to eternal damnation? This is surely not consistent with God’s creation in the early chapters of Genesis, when Elohim looked at all that had been made and called it good, very good. And yet this brutal theology used to be widely accepted and taught, a kind of spiritual terrorism.

  One time when I was visiting my family in Lincoln, England, I was given a tour of the cathedral. Two things remain with me. We went into the cathedral through one of the side doors, and a wooden inset in the stone above the door was pointed out. This had been put into the arch to hold a canopy so that a king could walk under it, protected from the elements. Since that time, nobody had bothered to take down the inset. The king was Richard the Second.

  Suddenly I realized how very old England is. Crosswicks, well over two hundred years old, seems ancient in North America, but many places in England and on the European continent are so much older that our oldest buildings seem new in comparison.

  The other thing that has stayed firmly in my mind is a story. After we had been through the cathedral, we went to the library, one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, with an unusually fine collection of books. The dean who went into exile at the time of Cromwell spent his years away from England in Holland, which was then the center of the book world. He returned with a superb collection of books.

  On one of the walls of his library hangs the portrait of a woman with a pleasant face, and a ruff around her neck. This was the dean’s mother. Long before he was born, this woman, then a young girl, was convinced that she was one of those predestined to be damned. This was her firm conviction, and it did not make her very merry. One evening she was having dinner with some friends, and they tried to assure her that she could not be certain that she was damned. But, she told them, she was certain, absolutely certain. “I am as certain that I am damned as that this wine glass will shatter when I fling it to the stone floor.” She flung down the fragile glass. It did not shatter.

  So she cheered up, married, and ultimately became the mother of the dean.

  Thank God for indeterminacy!

  There are people, however, who seem so plagued by terrible things that it would indeed seem that they have been damned. In their lives one tragedy follows another. It is a terrible mystery. But do not come to me when something terrible has happened saying, “It’s God’s will.” No! Death, disease, murder, may be from man’s error, but never God’s will. In the face of suffering and tragedy, we can only have faith that somehow, ultimately, in God’s time all wounds will be healed.

  For God is the God of love, and love will not rest while there is any suffering left, any rebellion, any anguish. The song of the stars in their courses will not return to the full beauty of the ancient harmonies until the coming again in glory of the Lord of Love.

  —

  The great British biophysicist, J. B. S. Haldane, said that “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than anything we can imagine.”

  More recently, Douglas Adams, in introducing chapter 1 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, wrote, “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for, and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.”

  I laugh, and yet I marvel, too. If the universe is in a state of flux (one theory), expanding out from a mass denser and smaller than a subatomic particle, to form all the galaxies, moving out into the darkness of space, even further away and further apart, until the procedure reverses itself and pulls back in until once again it is the infinitely small primal unity, who is to say that God’s design is going to be the same every time? And what about the theories of alternate universes, or multiple universes? These concepts are frightening only if we forget that whatever it is, and however it is, it is God’s. And as long as the Maker knows what it is all about, and as long as we test our speculations against the love of God, as well as the laboratory, all shall be well.

  Haldane’s description of the universe as “stranger than anything we can imagine,” is an exciting one for me, because nothing is strange for the Creator of it all. And in the fullness of time, kairos, God’s time, we, too, shall see the full glory as it really is.

  Alter, in The Art of Biblical Narrative, refers to the “double dialectic between design and disorder, providence and freedom. The various biblical narratives…[form] a spectrum between the opposing extremes of disorder and design.” He is talking about the Bible, but he could just as well be talking about particle physics. Or about our own lives, which often seem an incomprehensible mixture of accident and pattern. We are created by God, who has given us free will. Therefore we can work either for or against God’s design. It is a splendid paradox.

  And, as always with paradox, it can be expressed best in symbols.

  I am more at home with the symbols which come from astro- and particle physics than I am with those which are coming from the computer. The computer, it has been suggested, is going to change the way we think, and I hope that we will use enough free will so that this change will be constructive, not disastrous. But great care must be taken.

  The computer has proved itself to be anything but infallible. It can make horrendous mistakes, including the near precipitation of nuclear war. Daily it makes minor mistakes, and not long ago I was the victim of one of them.

  I had been on an intense and overscheduled lecture tour in the Pacific Northwest. On the last day, when I was in Spokane, Washington, at a Young Writers Conference, I phoned to reconfirm my flight home to New York the next day. I was told that everything was fine, I was in the computer, but my flight would leave at 11:25 A.M., rather than 11:35, as my ticket said. Fine. No problem.

  The next day I went to the airport bright and early, ready to relax and sleep on the long flight home. I handed over my ticket, and the man behind the counter looked a
t it and told me, “That flight was cancelled three weeks ago.”

  “But I reconfirmed it yesterday!”

  He played for a long time with his computer. Finally he looked up, saying, “I think the computer thought you were leaving from Portland, Oregon.”

  “As you can see,” I replied icily, “I am in Spokane, Washington. What are you going to do?”

  Again he played with his computer, and at last offered to send me to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport where I could change planes and…

  “No,” I said flatly. “Not O’Hare. I am too exhausted for O’Hare.”

  Finally he sent me to Seattle, where I had to go from one arm of the satellite to another as far away as possible, changing planes and airlines, and accept the fact that I would get to New York several hours later than I had expected, and at the airport furthest from Manhattan.

  I capsized into my seat, telling the sympathetic hostess what had happened. “To err is human,” she said. “To foul it up completely takes a computer.”

  I was so exhausted that I reached for the airline magazine and began leafing through it. Almost immediately I came across an article describing in glowing terms the world of the microchip which we are inheriting. And I read, appalled; “What the automobile has done for the legs, what television has done for the eyes, the computer will do for the mind.”

  No!

  I don’t like what the automobile has done for our legs, or what television has done for our eyes, and I certainly do not want the computer to manipulate our minds.