A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  Esau has something to teach us here.

  “Bless me, too, oh, my father, bless me, too.”

  And he walked through fire and water and forgave Jacob.

  What greater grief could any woman have than Eve? Her younger son, Abel, was dead. Her elder son, Cain, had killed him. With all the empathy of which I am capable, I cannot imagine the intensity of such anguish.

  And yet God came into this world as one of us, not to destroy, but to heal. To redeem. To bless.

  A friend of mine in the Midwest showed me an article on a possible new and very different way of treating cancer. Instead of trying to kill the cancer cells, the new hope of cure is to turn the malignant cells back into normal, benign cells, to change them from being destroyers into cells which once again play their own essential interdependent part in the functioning of the body. If Paul Brand is right in saying that cancer cells are the only cells in the body which insist on being autonomous, with no concern for the other cells they destroy, then our hope is that it will ultimately be possible for them to be transformed, and returned to the creative inter-dependence of normal cells.

  So we must seek to change the echthroi from being destroyers, as cancer cells are destroyers; we must hope to see them changed into holy angels once again, each with a unique but interdependent role in the working out of the fulfillment of the cosmos.

  How do we very human creatures help change the fallen angels into the radiance of love again? Of course, it is nothing we can do of ourselves at all, but the more we open ourselves to the holy angels, the less room there is for the fallen ones.

  If I remain stuck in a groove of self-pity, if I insist on vindication, I am opening myself to the echthroi. We all want justice, but if we demand it at the price of love it will be dark justice indeed. I pray, fumblingly, for those who have hurt me, for those I have hurt, for those who have been attacked by the echthroi. Not a demanding prayer, just an offering of a timid hope of love. Neither coercion nor manipulation are effective in turning anyone toward Christ. Coercion and manipulation only add to the pain of the cross. My prayer is simply a holding out of whoever it is, friend or foe, to the love of God. That implies that I am willing, reluctantly or no, to accept some of the cross. If I hold out in prayer a teenage boy dying of leukemia, I cannot do it without accepting some of the anguish of the parents, the confusion of the siblings, the thrust toward life and then the letting go of the boy himself.

  If I try to hold up in prayer the friend whose life is radically changed because of a love shattered and killed, I cannot do it without being part of the wounds and the anger. To hold someone lovingly in my hands, my hands held out to God, is to share, even in an infinitesimally tiny way, some of the agony of the cross. Blessing is not easy, and it cannot be reversed.

  The promise is that not only can we bear the dark night, but that dawn will come.

  For, as Paul said to the people of Rome,

  the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God….We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves….But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

  And then it is time to move from those close to me, or known to me personally, to the powers of darkness themselves.

  Bless the bastard.

  Bless the echthroi…

  How? By holding them out to the love of God.

  Make no mistake. This is no permissive, wishy-washy, cozy love. The best of us will be burned by it. Malachi warned that this love

  is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap; and…shall…purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.

  It may take eons before self-will is diminished enough so that we want this terrible purging. And for the echthroi, the fallen angels, it will be terrible indeed.

  But that is God’s part in it. What is ours?

  Simply to bless, no matter how ungraciously. To begin with blessing the easily identified echthroi: disease, terrorists, rapists, powermongers. Then keep coming in closer. Hold out to the love of God those who have hurt us. Those who have let us down. Who, for one reason or another, slap out at us, put us down, reject us. Those whose forgiveness we must accept when we have done any of these things ourselves.

  Those we encounter in our daily lives, family, friends, people we pass on the street. And I had to think about those two defendants on the jury duty case whose clever lawyers managed to dance legalistic circles around the more straightforward assistant district attorney. Those two men were guilty, but they were charged with more injury than they actually inflicted. The intent to injure or kill was there but the result was not. Therefore, according to the law, and according to the charge, the assistant district attorney did not prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  We jurors spent at least an hour during our deliberation trying to find a loophole in the defending lawyers’ cleverness, to find a way where we could legitimately avoid saying Not Guilty but, according to the law, we could not. The judge had told us that in England a jury can bring in a verdict of “Not proven guilty,” and that is what we would like to have done. But we had to say “Not Guilty,” because this is the American way, and we felt heavy about it, but not nearly as heavy as we would have felt in a judicial system where guilt is assumed, rather than having to be proved.

  Bless the brutes. With the blessing, help them to see that their brutality hurts them as much as the old woman they attacked. Bless them so that they may turn from the echthroi, turn their anger and violence and resentment to the light of love for healing.

  “God bless you, sir,” Jerome Hines said to Khrushchev.

  Oh, God will indeed bless, but we must play our own part in the blessing.

  Pope John Paul II played his part when he was willing to talk, lovingly, with his would-be assassin.

  Saint Stephen played his part when he asked that his murderers’ action not be held against them.

  Mozart, composing the grief-filled and yet joyous Requiem Mass, was playing his part.

  —

  Then it’s time to move in even closer. To call on God to bless and transform the enemy within ourselves. (Remembering that a blessing once given can never be retracted.)

  Only if I am able to bless the parts of myself which are furthest from God’s image, are these objectionable parts redeemable. How do I go about this blessing? It is not easy, I am often too hurt or too angry to have the least desire to bless. Yet, ultimately, I know that the blessing must be given in a context of love, not my own love, but that of other people, my husband, my family, my friends, who allow me to be complex and contradictory. Who thereby bless me. I cannot do it myself! I can only pray that it will be done.

  —

  Are there people who have been so damaged by lack of having been given love, or having been so manipulated or corrupted by the self-serving sham that masquerades as love, that they are beyond the possibility of blessing, or knowing themselves blessed?

  I’m not sure. At least, there are those who, in this life, are wounded spiritually beyond relief. But God will not give up. Nor need we, though we must bless with a full awareness that we may not succeed. In the view of the world, Jesus did not succeed. But the world, and often the church, puts expectations of success on us which are such burdens that they can become a form of cursing. It should be only the echthroi who tempt us by making us believe that our love, in human terms, ought not to fail. But it does—often it does. Yet that need not stop love from growing.

  Those echthroi within us: Can I always tell what they are? Sometimes it’s easy. Self-pity, jealousy, resentment, are echthroid. But often it is not possible to tell whether something is good or bad, virtue or vice. We cannot take a pad and draw a line down the middle, and then list our good qualities on one side, our bad on the other. What is good in one situation may not be good at all in another. And vice
versa. I am very stubborn, nay, pigheaded, which can be very hard on those I love. On the other hand, during those long years of rejection slips for writing that I believed in, it was that very pigheadedness which kept me going. It has helped me “hang in there” in other times of crisis, too. So the very flaw of stubbornness can be a blessing. And ultimately, all shall be blessed, all the wounds and cracks in the universe.

  There is an enormous difference between wallowing in our own brokenness and sense of sin, and in accepting it, and then turning to the Lamb for a transfusion. There is an enormous difference between seeing ourselves as virtuous and morally correct, so that therefore anything we do is permissible and innocent, and recognizing ourselves as God’s children, loved simply because we are.

  I suspect that those who would look for Satan-worshippers instead of fellow companions journeying to Christ, that the terrorists with their holy fanaticism, that those who would curse, wipe out, unName, do other than bless, are all caught in chronos, bound by time. When Lucifer and the fallen angels refused to bear the light, they also refused God’s time, kairos. The prince of this world and his cohorts reign in time, limited time. They are fearful, for the winds of the Holy Spirit are blowing, and so the attack is accelerating. As we look around our war-torn planet, our own disturbed and dissatisfied country, the echthroi appear to be making more progress than the angels.

  But they are not. They are not.

  They have been around the planet ever since the serpent offered Eve the apple. But their victories are hollow.

  Terrible things happen, as in the story of Dinah and her brothers, in which the echthroi surely had their part, but God’s blessing is more powerful than the echthroi’s cursing.

  This is something we cannot truly know until it has been tested.

  Did I really mean it when I told the movie producer that being good implies no protection? Yes. Accepting Christ as Lord implies no protection, not in mortal terms. Nothing is guaranteed. No one is immune.

  I was told a horrible story about a good Christian family. One afternoon the mother is giving the baby a bath. The doorbell downstairs rings, shrilly, urgently. She rushes to answer it. Her older child follows her, trips, falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. She opens the door to be told that her husband has just been killed in an accident at work. Upstairs the baby drowns in the tub.

  How can we react to such horrors except “curse God and die”?

  Why don’t we?

  I have been praying during these past months for several people with multiple tragedies. Ma Katzenjammer in the old comics used to say, “Too much is enough.” It seems not to be so.

  In my own small way—and it is very small, merely inconvenient, not tragic—I am witness to the fact that we cannot say when enough becomes too much. 1984 was not a good year for my body. In January, I came down with shingles. One does not wish shingles on one’s worst enemy. This was followed by a crashing fall on Broadway, when I tripped over a puppy who was terrified of city noises and ran between my legs. As my face hit the sidewalk, my dark glasses frame hit my cheekbone, and I had a hematoma which would make Lon Chaney in one of his worst roles look pretty. Hugh said, “If this was TV, they’d send you to makeup to take some off.”

  Then there was a weird virus which manifested itself with stabbing pains in the head, and finally, after giving me a couple of weeks of acute discomfort, faded away. Then there was the aeromonas with its painful cramping and bleeding. And then, when my body’s resistance was low because I was just off steroids for the aeromonas, I came down with the current bronchial cold which continued all through December and into January. But it was last year’s cold. I couldn’t blame it on the new year, 1985, which I superstitiously counted on to do better by me.

  On the second Sunday of January, I went for a walk in the woods around Crosswicks with three young friends. I knew that there was ice under the snow, so I wore my stoutest boots, took a stick, and my friends confirmed the fact that I was being very careful indeed. Careful or no, all of a sudden my feet went out from under me, and I crashed down on a rock.

  One young friend said, later, “When you just lay there and didn’t move, I knew something bad had happened.”

  It had. I’d broken my right shoulder. We were quite a distance from home, and I said, “Don’t touch me, please. Don’t touch my arm. Just let it hang.” That, it happened, was the best thing I could have done, because the weight of the arm provided its own traction, and by the time it was x-rayed in the hospital, the bones were in place. It also happened that the orthopedist I wanted was on call that Sunday.

  In the emergency room I said to him, “In just over a week I have to be in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Then he proceeded to truss me up in a shoulder-immobilizer.

  Shoulder-immobilizers were designed by a man, for people with flat chests. If anybody wants to get rich and retire early, I suggest designing a female shoulder-immobilizer for people like me, who do not have flat chests.

  I went home, helpless and hurting. And angry. I had not been careless. I had not caused myself to fall. I called my friend Tallis and told him that I had been pushed by an echthros, and no, I was not trying to be funny.

  Nevertheless, is there anything to do except laugh? Such an accumulation inevitably becomes comic. I, however, did not find it humourous in the least. For the first few days the pain was excruciating (people who have had shingles get the idea when I tell them that it hurt worse than shingles).

  I wept.

  Who was I to think that a year of bodily vicissitudes was enough? Very clever, echthroi, tempting me into this kind of superstition. Very funny, tripping me up like that.

  No, I don’t think God willed my broken shoulder. God does not want pain for his creatures. But whatever happens, God will come into it and use it for good. I cried a lot the first couple of days. I hurt a lot. But it wasn’t long before I began to see God’s blessing in the midst of the pain of the shoulder and the discomfort of the masculine shoulder-immobilizer, which still makes me growl.

  To keep myself sane, I struggled to type with my left hand. Holding a pen or pencil was impossible. But, even the day after the accident, I could sit at the typewriter for short periods of time, the electronic typewriter so sensitive to touch that it calls for almost no muscle expenditure. Of course I made all kinds of typographical errors with my clumsy left hand, but at least I could do a little work, and that was a needed affirmation. The echthroi hadn’t completely conquered me; I was still human.

  When I wasn’t attempting to type with the left hand, I lay in bed, propped high on pillows, so that gravity could continue to provide traction for the broken humerus and shoulder. Usually I sleep flat, but I had to learn to sleep sitting up.

  Now that we live in New York for much of the year, we can no longer take an active part in village life. I go to the church where once I directed the choir. But I am not there regularly enough even to sing in the choir. We left our tight-knit little community twenty-five years ago when we moved from the village back to New York.

  But the day after I broke my shoulder I discovered that the old support system was still there, and still working. Somehow or other, as happens in a village, news of my fall got around. The phone rang. It was Eunice. “I’m sending dinner over tonight. Bernie will bring your dinner tomorrow.” Martha, recovering from a serious operation, called to see how I was.

  After twenty-five years!

  And once again I was part of the church at work.

  And the bride was beautiful.

  After all, I did go to Chapel Hill, to Aqueduct Conference Center, started by the evangelist, Tommy Tyson, who quickly became a healing friend. Tommy has a strong healing ministry, and the first evening he anointed me with oil, put his hands on me, and prayed for healing. I think he was a little disappointed the next morning that there was no dramatic and visible result. But I told him, truthfully, that indeed I could feel healing.

  And the truth of t
his was borne out six months later. I had been warned by my doctor that the break was so severe that I would not regain the full mobility and strength of the right arm. At the final visit he had me raising both arms, reaching behind my back, moving in every direction, and at last he said, “Which shoulder was it?” And then, “I wouldn’t have believed it!”

  Progress came in steps: The first joy was when I could hold a pen in my hand and write. The second was when I began to play the piano for therapy, at first miserably, but then with more and more freedom. And a great day came when I could fasten my bra in back again!

  Granted, I worked very hard at rehabilitation, but I did it at home. I did not have physiotherapy, because the doctor said that I was doing the exercises myself. I met two women who had broken their shoulders and had not regained their mobility and were unable to carry anything heavy, and I was determined I was not going to have a crippled arm. But all the determination in the world cannot do everything. I had Tommy’s prayers, and I had the prayers of other loving friends. And I am grateful. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you, Spirit of Love.

  Hugh was free to go to North Carolina with me, otherwise I could not have made it. I was, indeed, physically helpless. I could talk, which was the main thing expected of me at Aqueduct, but that’s about all. Believe me, a broken shoulder doesn’t immobilize only the shoulder. It was painfully difficult for me to get on and particularly off the toilet, so the doctor suggested a toilet seat extender, a large plastic insert which raises the seat six or so inches, and which made an incredible amount of difference. I told Hugh, wistfully, that I would really need this plastic extender in North Carolina, so he went back to the store where he had bought it, and asked for a cardboard box. The only available box was marked in large black letters: ADULT INCONTINENT PADS. So off we went to the airport with a suitcase, and a large cardboard box packed with the toilet seat extender, books, and clothes.