A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  Jacob, wrestling with the angel, was in his own way holding on to Christ. And the angel blessed him.

  After that glory he went on and tried to bribe Esau to forgive him, typical Jacob-fashion. And Esau

  ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept.

  Esau wept with joy to see his brother again. And Jacob? Were they tears of relief that Esau wasn’t still angry?

  Esau did not want all the gifts Jacob had brought in order to placate him. He said,

  “I have enough, my brother. Keep what is yours.”

  But Jacob urged him,

  “Take, I pray you, my blessing that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me.” And he urged him, and he took it.

  The King James translation uses the word blessing. Jacob has just been blessed by the angel who wrestled with him all night and smote him on the thigh. He also has his father, Isaac’s, blessing, stolen from Esau. Surely it is time for him to give a blessing to his brother.

  The Jerusalem Bible uses the word gift, rather than blessing, but for me the symbol of blessing is deeper and richer.

  Alter says that he feels that the King James translation of Hebrew Scripture is truer to the intent of the original than any other. Other translations, in trying to avoid the frequent repetitions of the Hebrew, for instance, miss the point that these repetitions are a conscious artistic device, building in power. I read from many different translations, but I return again and again to the King James.

  And I like it that Jacob is at last willing to give Esau a blessing.

  Jacob and Esau were not either/or people. They had the full complexity of the both/and human being. Open at one moment, closed at another. Brave, cowardly. Loving, lying. Jacob never hesitated to cheat, and yet God called him Israel. How are we to understand?

  We are at a demanding threshold of understanding right now, as we move from deterministic, forensic thinking, to more indeterministic, vulnerable thinking. We are unique, incomparable creatures, but was creating us God’s chief achievement or ultimate aim? We can no longer separate ourselves from the rest of creation, nor think of ourselves as more important in God’s eyes than stars or butterflies or baboons. We are part of a whole which is so intricately balanced that the smallest action (watch that butterfly) can have cosmic consequences.

  We need to step out of the limelight as being the pinnacle of God’s work. I suspect that those first human creatures who walked upright on their hind legs and so freed their hands to make and use tools, most likely thought of themselves as the pinnacle of creation. Look at us! We are man who uses tools! God has done it at last!

  Perhaps we have just as far to go in the long journey toward being truly human.

  It is not easy to accept the both/and-ness of the people we love. Or ourselves. I am highly intelligent; I am also frequently extremely stupid. When somebody I love and admire does something which seems to me to be totally unworthy I am devastated, and it takes a while before I find balance and allow that person to be as both/and—or even more so—than I am. Sometimes it seems that the greater the human being, the deeper the potential for stupidity or sin.

  I was brooding about this when a young friend of mine came to tell me that ultimately the computer will no longer be binary, but trinary. (A trinary [trinitarian] computer would not have “thought” I was leaving from Portland, Oregon.) Right now the computer works on the binary system: one/zero. Either/or. Yes/no. Lewis Carroll could have been forecasting our present computers when he had the Red Queen ask Alice, “What’s one and one and one and one…”

  When Alice says she doesn’t have the faintest idea, the Red Queen says scornfully, “She can’t do sums at all.”

  One and one and one and one…that’s the way the computer counts, incredibly swiftly. But ultimately, even this is not going to be adequate. We are going to have to move to a computer which is trinary.

  In technical language, my friend told me, the trinary computer will have positive polarity, negative polarity, and neutral polarity. Or: yes/no/mu. Mu means that neither yes nor no is a workable answer.

  He illustrated this by a Zen koan. The Zen master asked his student to go to the nearby mountain and bring him the top mile. The student went to the master’s study and brought him his pipe.

  “What,” my friend asked me, “is a mu answer to, ‘Are you still beating your wife?’ ”

  “I’m cooking chicken for dinner,” I said.

  And I thought that there are times in any marriage when, if one partner asks the other, “Do you love me?” neither yes nor no is a true reply. There are times when I don’t love my husband. On the other hand, I don’t not love him.

  And there are times when that question should not be asked!

  Jesus gave mu answers. When he was asked whether or not it was proper to pay tribute to Caesar, he said, “Bring me a coin.”

  A scribe said to Jesus,

  “Master, I will follow you wherever you go.”

  A binary answer would have been, “Come with me,” or “Go home.” Jesus’ trinary answer was

  “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has no place to lay his head.”

  Occasionally other people responded to Jesus with trinary answers. He was brought a child who was possessed of an unclean spirit, and when the father begged for help, Jesus said,

  “If you can believe, all things are possible if you believe.”

  And the child’s father answered,

  “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

  When the disciples quarrelled over who was greatest among them, Jesus reached out and pulled a small child onto his lap.

  When Nicodemus asked him, “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus told the story of the man set upon by thieves.

  A man said to Jesus,

  “Master, speak to my brother and make him divide our inheritance with me.” And Jesus said, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?”

  When the scribes and elders asked Jesus by whose authority he was preaching, he answered with another question,

  “The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?”

  (Oriental or occidental?)

  Mu responses.

  Often he replied with a story, and a story is usually mu. This is not an either/or, a yes/no. It is both/and/maybe.

  Surely when Jacob fled from Esau’s anger, and was given a vision of angels, that was not the yes or no that we human beings tend to expect. Angels, too, are mu.

  A mu answer is redemptive, never destructive. It opens our eyes and ears. It helps us to be willing to move out of our comfortable rut, and to go out into the wilderness of questions which have no easy answers. How we long for easy answers and blanket statements. If we can label all problems, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, then we can safely refrain from thinking about the people who are suffering from these problems. Jesus made no blanket statements about social or political issues. Each person he met was given his focussed attention—the person, rather than the problem.

  If you can label things, make blanket statements to cover all contingencies, you don’t need symbols. Story is an alternative to labelling. Story is symbol.

  Perhaps we human beings with our desire to label are very strange particles indeed. We live in a new world of radical change which is, nevertheless, as primitive in its own way as the world where Jacob poured oil on the stone he had used for a pillow, and proclaimed it to be the house of God.

  Sometimes a new awareness of symbols is given along with small, unspectacular events. I spent a day with a group of men and women who had been through seminary and were ready to be ordained. One man, in his thirties, had read the Time Trilogy the week before, and wanted to know why I had used so many occult references.

  Occult references? I was baffled and a little shocked. I asked him to explain.

  He mentioned the three Mrs W, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. Especially Mrs Which. But�
�I thought the text made it quite clear that she (like the other two) is a guardian angel, and the name is a pun on which and witch, a play on words, and a deeper understanding of the godly possibility of the word. It has nothing to do with black magic or witchcraft. As Mrs Which herself remarks, when things are desperate we need to keep a sense of humour.

  The young man thought the way I described Progo, the cherubim, as quirky and sometimes irritable might disturb people. But Progo is a very scriptural cherubim as I describe him, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if those cherubim guarding the gates of Eden didn’t get irritable on occasion. Was this young man thinking of renaissance cherubs, little baby heads with small, ineffectual wings? Hadn’t he read (for instance) Ezekiel lately?

  Then he asked me why I had used the dog, Ananda, as a familiar. Again, I was shocked. A familiar is an animal companion to a witch or warlock, frequently a black cat which talks, and gives the owner Satanic information. Ananda a familiar? Horrors! Ananda, who is joy, God’s joy, could never be a familiar in the sense that the young man was using the word. That it was even possible for him to so misinterpret the story that he could think of a Satanic familiar in connection with this loving dog was appalling to me.

  We do have a loving, kything relation with dogs; Ananda is not unlike one of our family dogs, Tyrrell, half golden retriever, half shepherd, who had an unerring understanding of people. She was gentle, loving, affectionate. Like most golden retrievers she had a dolphin’s smile. But she could smell wrongness. One time in the Cathedral Library I was introduced to a personable young man who was going to be working in the mail room. As he approached me, Tyrrell’s hair bristled, and I heard a low, warning growl. Within the week the young man had stolen all the Cathedral keys and a large sum of money. I said, “Whenever Tyrrell is suspicious of someone, take the dog seriously.” Tyrrell was a dog, a friend of human beings, guarding her people as best she could. She was not a “familiar.”

  Doc, my present golden retriever companion, has Tyrrell’s nose for the psychotic. A cathedral attracts people with problems and if Doc does not want someone to come into the library, and stays pressed close against me, I know that whoever it is has problems beyond my competence to handle. Often a listening ear is enough. Doc lets me know when more professional help is needed. Doc is a hurtling, golden rocket of love. She is not a “familiar.”

  Within the past year I have seen several articles on the need for many people to have pets, and that when someone with high blood pressure strokes a dog or a cat, the blood pressure is lowered. When the young man saw occult meanings in the Time Trilogy, what was he looking for?

  Someone else in the group remarked that “occult” is not necessarily a bad word. It simply means “hidden.”

  It would certainly be possible to call the Revelation of Saint John the Divine “occult,” for there is much in that extraordinary last book of the Bible that is hidden, and we show no evidence that we have come near to plumbing its depths.

  I said that perhaps what I was inadvertently doing was hoping to redeem the symbols. The powers of darkness have no need to come where evil already is, but try to pervert the good. So I pray that my symbols were referring to the original good.

  That is what we need to look for, the good in what God has created.

  There is much that is hidden, and much of it is good and lovely and true. There is much in the life of Jesus that is hidden. We know almost nothing about him from the time when he spoke with the elders in the temple at the age of twelve, to the time when he began his adult ministry. There is much in our own selves, our own spirits, which is hidden, which only God knows. And there is much that we can understand only symbolically.

  The new symbols created by the new physics are helpful to me in keeping my doors open. The butterfly effect; strange particles; or even particles that have a tendency to life (how alive are we?) and that are called virtual particles. And I do not want to forget the particles with the unusually long life span of one millionth of a second.

  The new symbols do not replace the old, but give them renewed vitality, so that they continue to inform my faith. Christ, small as a child, sitting on King David’s lap. The small cross of the African bushman. The cup of salvation. Once again chronos and karos intersect in the cross.

  And yet, what about the cross? More and more crosses are being found today in churches where they would not have been tolerated a few decades ago. At the same time, the symbol has been weakened. The sign of the cross used to make the Devil take flight. A church was a sacred place of sanctuary. A thief who would rob a great house without compunction would not go into a church and touch the sacred vessels. Not so anymore. At “my” Cathedral in New York, all the valuable crosses and candle sticks have had to be replaced with wood or ceramic ones, to prevent continuing theft. Great tapestries have been ripped from the high walls. Stones have been thrown through windows.

  How do we reawaken a sense of the sacred?

  First of all, we must look for it. Jacob fled Esau, and was given a vision of God. He was realistic about people, including himself, but he did not look for evil. So he was given the greatest good.

  What are we looking for? For God and love and hope? Or for wrongness and evil and sin?

  If the totally interdependent, interconnected world of physics is true, then this oneness affects the way we look at everything—books, people, symbols. It radically affects the way we look at the cross. Jesus on the cross was at-one with God, and with the infinite mind, in which Creation is held. The anguish on the cross has to do with this at-one-ment in a way which a forensic definition of atonement cannot even begin to comprehend.

  For Jesus, at-one-ment was not being at-one only with the glory of the stars, or the first daffodil in the spring, or a baby’s laugh. He was also at-one with all the pain and suffering that ever was, is, or will be. On the cross Jesus was at-one with the young boy with cancer, the young mother hemorrhaging, the raped girl. And perhaps the most terrible anguish came from being at-one with the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the death chambers at Belsen, the horrors of radiation in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It came from being at-one with the megalomania of the terrorist, the coldness of heart of “good” people, or even the callous arrogance of the two men in criminal court.

  We can withdraw, even in our prayers, from the intensity of suffering. Jesus, on the cross, experienced it all. When I touch the small cross I wear, that, then, is the meaning of the symbol.

  May the Holy Spirit come and help all our symbols to be redeemed.

  On the cross Jesus was at one with God and the holy angels and rainbows and butterflies. And he was also, to his anguish, at one with Satan and all the fallen angels, with those who would viciously destroy what God has made with love and joy, with those whose pride is even greater than that of the terrorist. Because Jesus took into himself on the cross every evil and every sin and every brokenness to come upon this planet, there is the fragile but living hope that one day even Satan may once again join the sons of God when they gather round their Maker, and that he will beg to be allowed once again to carry the light. For, as Saint Paul wrote to the people of Philippi,

  Every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.

  We know that the redemption of the cosmos is no easy matter. The actions of the dark angels are visible throughout Scripture, and even the protagonists of the stories bear the taint. They lied; they cheated. They made great, inordinate demands of God, and in turn accepted the great and inordinate demands God threw at them. They looked at the stars and were given great promises, and their response may have been incredulity, but never indifference or smugness. They did wonderful things, and they did terrible things.

  One of the stories related to that of Jacob which we seldom hear is the story of his daughter, Dinah. It is not a pleasant story, and we would rather forget it. But there it is.

  Dinah, the daught
er of Leah, the tender-eyed,

  went out to meet the daughters of the land…in Shalem, a city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan…where Jacob, her father, had pitched his tent.

  According to some translations, she was raped by Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country. However, the King James translation says that when Shechem saw her,

  he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her. And his soul clave unto Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel.

  That does not sound like rape. Shechem wanted to marry Dinah, because he loved her so much, and it would appear that Dinah wanted to marry him. However, no matter how it happened, he had defiled Dinah by lying with her before they were married, and her brothers were angry.

  But Shechem told his father, the prince of the country, that he loved Dinah, and wanted her for his wife, and Hamor went to the sons of Jacob, saying,

  “The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. I pray you, give her to him as wife, and all of you make marriages with us, and give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. And you shall dwell with us, and our land shall be yours.”

  And Shechem said to Dinah’s father, Jacob, and to her brothers,

  “Ask me for anything you want, and I will give you whatever it is you ask, only give me Dinah for my wife.”

  The sons of Jacob were still outraged because Shechem had defiled their sister, and they answered him deceitfully, telling him that they would give Dinah to him only if the Hivites would become as the Hebrews, and would circumcise every one of the males of their tribe.

  The Jerusalem Bible says that Shechem

  was the most important person in his father’s household,

  and that he agreed to the circumcision. The King James translation reads,

  And the young man deferred not to do this thing, because he had delight in Jacob’s daughter, and he was more honourable than all the house of his father.