A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  I like to think that Shechem, despite his rash act, was a man of honour.

  At any rate, all the male Hivites were circumcised, and on the third day, when they were still sore and in pain, Simeon and Levi, two of Leah’s sons (and therefore Dinah’s full brothers) took their swords and slew all the male Hivites. They killed Hamor and Shechem, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house. Then all the sons of Jacob pillaged the town and took everything—flocks, cattle, donkeys, children, wives (in that order).

  Jacob was very upset by all of this, not so much the massacre, as the effect it would have on his reputation. He said to Simeon and Levi,

  You have done me harm, making me stink among the people of this land. There are many of them, and I have few in number, and they will gather themselves together against me, and slay me, and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.

  And Dinah’s brother said, “Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?”

  And God said to Jacob, “Get up. Go to Beth-el [where Jacob had seen the ladder of angels uniting heaven and earth] and dwell there, and make there an altar [another altar!] unto God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother, Esau.”

  And Jacob told his household, “Get rid of all the strange gods you have with you, and wash, and change your clothes, and we will go to Beth-el.”

  And they gave Jacob all their strange gods. And all their earrings.

  It would still be a long time before El Shaddai would truly be understood as the God Who is One, the God Who is All.

  It will still be a long time before we who call ourselves Christians will understand that God is One, that God is All, because we still worship many strange gods. When we set ourselves up as being the only people in Creation who have the truth and who will inherit the kingdom, we are worshipping the little god of our own pride.

  When we greedily and proudly count the money we have taken in on a Sunday at church, or pride ourselves on the funds that we have sent into the mission field, we are in danger of worshipping the little gods of money and our own superiority.

  When we divide ourselves into us and them, we court disaster.

  I may be horrified and outraged when an assassination is committed in the name of religion, and when I discover a way of looking at God which is not mine, but I still may not separate myself from this horror with any sense of my own virtue. The butterfly’s wings quiver with pain, and distant galaxies are shaken.

  Is the killing of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John or Robert Kennedy so different in essence from the killing of Hamor or Shechem?

  There it is, the story of Dinah and her brothers, those brothers who would head the tribes of Israel. I don’t know what to make of it, but I have to accept that it is part of the story—and that there is much to be learned from it.

  This is all we know about Dinah. We are given no hint as to how she felt. Was she in love with Shechem? Between the lines, I sense that she was. But she, along with Shechem, had broken the taboo, and retribution followed.

  Later on in history, when Moses the lawgiver came into the story, a woman who had committed adultery was to be stoned—stoned to death. The fault, according to the law, seemed to lie more with the woman than with the man. At least Dinah was spared stoning.

  When Joseph first learned that Mary was pregnant, he should have given her over to be stoned to death, according to the law. What an extraordinary man he was! He was willing to bypass the law by putting Mary away quietly. And then, even more remarkable, he was able to accept the words of the angel, that the child—the holy seed—in Mary’s womb had been sown there by the Holy Spirit.

  What was Joseph looking for? Not anger, not retribution, not even justice, but love.

  “What are you looking for?” Jesus asked the people.

  There are, praise the Lord, only a few Christians who are hoping to find those who are less Christian than they are, in order to feel superior by contrast. There are only a few people who are reading books looking for pornography, or counting the number of dirty words rather than reading the story. There are far many more people who are truly looking for God, however and wherever the Creator may choose to reveal the divine nature. There are many more people who are looking for the revelation of infinite compassion in Christ.

  We do find what we look for. Or do we? In a way, yes. But it’s not quite that easy. Pilgrim struggled a long way from the wicket gate to the Celestial City. If we are looking for love, that is what we will find. But love never promised there would be no suffering. Love never promised to stop all the attacks of the echthroi. Love led Jesus to the cross, rather than sparing him.

  Echthroi is a word which I first used in the Time Trilogy. It is a Greek word, meaning the enemy. It is an enemy-sounding word. Echthroi is the plural noun; echthros is the singular. The echthroi are those who would separate us from the stars and each other, un-Name, annihilate. The fallen angels are echthroi, and so are disease and famine and hate and vanity and a host of other little nasty things. The echthroi would teach us despair, indifference, would have us believe that unmerited suffering is deliberately inflicted on the creature by an angry Creator. The echthroi are forensic. They are powerful. But love is greater.

  I spent nearly a week at Holy Cross monastery, to teach a writers’ workshop, followed by a weekend retreat. At the end of a hard day’s work, my old bones need to soak in a hot tub. Because the only room in the monastery with a tub, not a shower, is in the monastic enclosure, I was allowed to sleep there. Was I the first female to sleep in this all male bastion? The cell I was in has been slept in by bishops, missionaries, preachers, from all over the world. It is likely that many spiritual battles have been fought within its white walls.

  I was struggling with something minor, a nasty cold which had been hanging on for weeks, giving me a bronchial cough and fever, and I was finally on antibiotics to help me through the workshop and the retreat. Kind people gave me cough drops and vitamin C, and one of the monks loaned me a heavy cape in which to wrap myself, and another gave me his bottle of cough medicine.

  The third night I was there I had a dream in the early hours of the morning. It was very cold, and the cold had wakened me, and I lay there, trying to warm up and go back to sleep, saying the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Then there was a sense of pressure by me, of someone, something on the bed, and then there was a feeling of terrible evils battling, and I clung frantically to the Jesus Prayer, calling it out, over and over: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Then it seemed to me that although I was caught in the great winds of horrible evil, I was not the target, I was simply in the path of the storm, and I kept calling out the prayer, until the storm was over. In my dream a monk came in, which seemed quite natural, and pointed out the evidence of the storm. The wallpaper had been stripped from the far wall, and the plaster beneath was violently pockmarked.

  What I told the monk was that this horrible episode proved to me that my faith in Jesus Christ was really real, and that had I not been holding on to the name of Jesus, the storm of evil would have killed me, and Christ truly was, is, salvation.

  This was Epiphany Eve—when Christians celebrate God’s revelation of love to all humankind. What a marvellous showing forth!

  The transition from sleeplessness to the dream was seamless, and so was the transition from the dream to being awake, alone in an untouched room. So real had it been that it took a while for me to realize that it had been a dream. I looked at the far wall, and there was no wallpaper, only smooth, unpocked plaster.

  The amazing thing is that as I looked back at the dream it was not a “bad” dream, or a nightmare; it was a glorious affirmation of the power of Christ. The storm of evil had not only not put out the light, it was proof that the light was there and the light could not be extinguished.

  The echthroi, quite logically, attack the Good. Saint Anthony in the desert (the same desert on which Jacob pitched his tent) was attacked by all kinds of venomous demons. In the pa
st year or so the attacks seem to have become more frequent and more vicious all over the world. Drawing back in fear is more dangerous than staying in the vanguard, but that does not make the echthroid attacks any less terrible.

  In the past few months I have had more calls than I want to count asking for prayers—prayers for good people who have been stricken with cancer, multiple sclerosis, terrible accidents. Why?

  Why, if we find what we look for, why do terrible things happen to people who are looking for good, and who serve the good?

  That question has never been answered. It is asked, one way or another, all through the Old Testament. The entire Book of Job grapples with it, but gives no definitive answer. Yet, underlying the lack of an answer is an unspoken affirmation that ultimately all shall be well.

  God is still the author of the story, and even if the echthroi tear and crumple the pages, or smudge the ink, it is still God’s story, and the Author will correct, revise, retype, redeem, as necessary. Meanwhile, we are part of the story, and we may not know what the lines we are given mean, why we suffer, bleed, die. Perhaps what we see as death is really necessary for rebirth.

  Recently I was negotiating a contract for a movie of one of my books, The Arm of the Starfish. The problem with the standard Hollywood contract is that it has a clause giving the producer freedom to change character and theme. Not only can I not sign that clause, the contract must reverse it. I became aware of the absurdity of the Hollywood legal mind when, in the contract for A Wrinkle in Time (where that nasty clause had been reversed), I was to grant rights to the work in perpetuity throughout the universe! I took a red pen, made a *, and wrote, “with the exception of Sagittarius and the Andromeda galaxy.” They actually accepted it. And I was told later that there was considerable discussion about this. Could I possibly know something about Sagittarius and the Andromeda galaxy that they didn’t know?

  Will Wrinkle be made into a movie? Supposedly. But there are times when I think it is more likely to happen on Andromeda galaxy than here. We’ll see.

  Meanwhile, in discussions with the potential producers of Starfish, we had to make clear what I would and what I would not allow to be changed. We all agreed that it needs updating. The world of the eighties is very different from the world of the sixties, when the book was written.

  It was suggested that Adam, the young protagonist, would not be apt to carry secret papers; it would more likely be some kind of microchip. All right.

  “What about Adam and Kali?” I was asked. “Wouldn’t their relationship go a little further?”

  I had to agree that now, twenty years later, it probably would. The word relationship wasn’t even in our vocabulary twenty years ago. We used to have friendship, and love.

  “Does Joshua have to die?” I was then asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what happened,” I said firmly.

  “But Joshua was good.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “But doesn’t good imply protection?”

  “No,” I said. No. And then it came to me that the only one who has ever offered protection is Satan. That was one of the temptations given to Jesus on the mountain after his baptism. Worship me, Satan urged him, and you can have it all free, no being deserted by the disciples you had counted on to stay with you, no cross, no pain, no suffering. I will protect you.

  But does the God of love not offer that kind of protection?

  Again I am caught in paradox and contradiction.

  I have on occasion been blessed by extraordinary miracles of healing. At other times, not. Why does God miraculously cure one person, and allow another to die in agony? Why does one child appear to be under the protection, while another is struck by a drunken driver?

  Why? There are no easy answers. The easy answers, such as a predetermined universe, do not seem compatible with a God of love.

  And yet—

  I have been offered prayers of protection, and I believe in them. But they are not magic. Magic is manipulation. Prayers for protection are not.

  It helps a little if I think of myself as a human parent. My deepest desire is to protect my children. My lioness instinct toward my cubs is great. But I cannot offer my children complete protection. We may want to make everything all right for our children, but we cannot. All we can do is love them, and help them grow up. We have to let the baby struggle to its feet and fall, and stand again, and fall again, as it learns to walk. All during our children’s lives we have to let them learn to walk alone, to let go the hand. The overprotected child becomes incapable of growing into a mature human being. We must allow our children to be themselves, not manipulated appendages of their parents. We can try to give them standards, to teach by example, and we hope they will use the standards in resisting the many temptations they will be offered, but we can’t resist the temptations for them; they have to resist for themselves. God did not resist the temptations for Jesus; Jesus had to confront Satan alone.

  Satan, Lord of the echthroi. The enemy of Christ. The enemy of each one of us. Of the cosmos.

  But Satan did not come from outside the cosmos. He was one of the sons who met with God at the beginning of the Book of Job. He was the beautiful angel Lucifer—the light-bearer—who thought he could do it all better than God. Just look at life here on this planet; what a mess it is! Christians killing in the name of Christ, hardness of heart, famine, drought, greed, filth, inequity, imbalance. Don’t we all think we could have done a better job of it? Satan certainly thought he could. And he is tempting us, assuring us, “You are better than the others, better than them,” and we fall for it all too often.

  “It must have been so hard on Michael,” my friend Sister Mary Michael said, “when he had to fight Lucifer, because they were best friends.”

  Is it possible for them to be best friends again, at the end of time, when Satan no longer wants to do it all himself, and is willing to return to the joy of interdependence? That is what I hope for and desire. I equally hope for reconciliation for many estranged friends, parents and children, brothers and sisters, for churches split apart by discord over trivialities, for races isolated from each other because of a sense of superiority. And there is hope. Listen to Saint Paul again, in Colossians 1:

  For in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth, or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death.

  Sometimes when I am working my way through a Bach fugue I hear strange dissonances before ultimately the theme emerges, triumphant. The dissonances, rather than spoiling the fugue, make the working out of the theme more beautiful. Bach was criticized for some of the strange discordancies in his music, but the ending always resolved all discord into harmony.

  If it is difficult to understand that sin and evil come from within Creation, rather than from without, a look at our own bodies, our own inner selves, can be helpful. Few of us have bodies of flawless perfection, yet we would not throw away the body because of nearsighted eyes, weak ankles. When I have a fever or hurt myself, I pray for my body’s healing. Our thoughts are not always pure and loving, but when I feel resentful or self-pitying, these unhappy qualities come from within me, not without me. And I pray that my ill feelings will be turned to healthy, loving ones. At the Second Coming, when all things are redeemed, then we, like all of creation, will know wholeness and holiness through Christ, “who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, in the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself”—Paul’s radical affirmation.

  Meanwhile we pray that we will be given our own parts to play in healing the fragments which separate us dis-astrously. In anguish we pray for the healing of the universe, for as long as any part of Creation is in rebellion, all of it cries in pain. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if
one member is honoured, all rejoice together.” And then Paul moves into “a still more excellent way,” the way of Love in his first letter to the people of Corinth. It is not easy to understand that love is the most powerful of all weapons, love in its very weakness.

  How do we bless the echthroi? When they attack (and surely they have been attacking) I call on the angels.

  When Jacob wrestled with the angel he understood that the angel was not only a messenger of God, but an aspect of God. When I call on the angels, I feel that I am calling on Christ, in whose service the angels perform their works.

  Jesus taught us that God is love; so what am I calling the angels to do when the enemy attacks, leaving pain and grief and bitter tears?

  I have had to move from thinking that the echthroi have to be killed by God’s avenging angels, to wondering whether they, like the rest of creation, may be redeemed and blessed. Turned from despair to hope. Changed even more radically than Paul was changed, so that they may no longer be destroying angels, but angels of light. The symbol of the avenging angel itself has to be transformed. The two-edged sword is no longer a weapon of death, but of healing.

  Big words. Yes. And I mean these big words. But how? It would be obscene to get sentimental about the “poor” echthroi, poor though they may be.

  It is not difficult for me to want those two defendants, whom I observed while I was on jury duty, to be healed and redeemed from their own evil. After all, they didn’t hurt me. This hope for a blessing might not even be too difficult for the feisty old woman they’d attacked; after all, they had succeeded only in nicking her with their knives.

  But what about the parents whose only daughter has been raped and then stabbed to death? Granted, the “Christian duty” is for them to pray for the murderer’s redemption. But this kind of holiness doesn’t come without terrible anger to be gone through, without terrible pain. “Though we went through fire and water,” the psalmist sings to the Lord, “we have not forgotten you.” Was such anger and pain the fire and water to which the psalmist referred?