A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  Ever since Hugh retired from his TV show I had been trying unsuccessfully to get him to do readings with me. I think he realized that being nothing but a nursemaid at Aqueduct wouldn’t be a good idea, so he agreed to do the readings, and we started each session with dramatic readings from one or another of my books, and he was a tremendous success. Everybody thought he was marvellous—as indeed he was.

  We were together on our 39th anniversary on January 26th, 1985, only because he was with me at the conference. In the morning he was washing me, since I still couldn’t do even that much for myself, and he remarked, “Who would have thought, thirty-nine years ago, that this is what we’d be doing today!”

  One morning Carolyn, the hostess at the conference center, brought me in a cup of coffee. Hugh was sacrificing himself by eating in the dining hall with all the women, and Hugh is not chatty in the morning, and the acoustics emphasized his deafness. But he went, and he was gracious, and loved. And I said, “Carolyn, all kinds of blessings have come about because Hugh is at this conference with me, but did God need to break my shoulder to do this?”

  Carolyn simply smiled and said, “Madeleine, God didn’t break your shoulder. He’s just using it.”

  Of course. But at that moment I needed blessed Carolyn to articulate it for me. God does not cause any of the bad things that happen, but God can take anything and redeem it. We still ask why terrible things happen to good people, why a loving God can allow war and illness and accident and death. We still grapple with the thorny problem of a loving God who has given his people the terrible gift of free will. Over and over again we abuse that gift, but God can come into whatever it is, and make it new.

  God didn’t cause me to fall and break my shoulder. I didn’t cause it, either. It was an accident. It happened. And God came into it and used it for good.

  Not long after the week in North Carolina, the United States Information Agency had made plans to send me, as a cultural representative, across Egypt and Austria. By then I was able to do a little bit more for myself, but not much, and I certainly couldn’t have travelled alone, so Hugh went with me, and again, we did readings, to all kinds of groups, in Cairo and Heliopolis and Alexandria, in Vienna and Klagenfurt and Salzburg, a fascinating experience for both of us. What we were aiming for with our readings and our conversations was to make connections, to affirm that the things which unite human beings are more central than the things which separate us, and we did indeed make connections, and find at-one-ness, and we made friends—friends to be treasured all our lives. And we have continued to give readings together.

  Someone said to me, “It was worth breaking your shoulder, wasn’t it?”

  And I replied, “Well, I can’t quite go that far.” But many blessings came out of the pain and the helplessness. And a new understanding of God’s loving concern for us, the children.

  This loving concern did not spare Jesus from the temptations. God did not stop the disciples from betraying him, or the Romans from crucifying him. But God offered Jesus, and offers us, the one protection that Satan does not give: God is in it with us. The God of love, unlike Satan, does not stand aside and look on suffering, unmoved. God is part of it, and because of that, we are given strength to bear things we did not think we could possibly bear. And because God is in it with us, our souls are helped to grow strong and to mature.

  God does not want, or cause, the bad things to happen. But with God’s patient and unfaltering love, they can be redeemed.

  —

  So did I really mean it when I said in the discussion of a movie of The Arm of the Starfish that there is, in mortal terms, no protection?

  Yes. Only Satan can give us mortal protection, but what kind of protection is that? Satan can offer great length of years, but only in these mortal bodies. He cannot offer us the real body, the pre-Fall body, the resurrection body. Satan can probably find us parking places, keep us from getting colds, even protect us from bullets, and bombs, and cancer. But the only protection worth having is something Satan cannot give: oneness with God.

  Satan fractured the original oneness when he took himself and his fellow echthroi and rebelled against Love. Even when, on the surface, Satan protects, his chief mission is to continue to break, fragment, separate. Satan never offers himself, except as an object for abject worship.

  If our worship of God means anything at all, it must be voluntary not coerced. Satan will bargain with us. God (as Jacob discovered) will not. What God does offer is the Presence itself. Whatever it is, God is part of it, working to heal that which is broken, put together all the shards and fragments. God is with us in all our pain and grief and confusion, sharing, being, redeeming. This love does not stop with our deaths. That is the Christian affirmation. We do not ever stop being part of God’s plan, part of the Unity, part of the work of the coming of the Kingdom, when all shall be made new.

  I need to reiterate here what is a basic affirmation for me. When the world was created, as the story is told in the beginning of Genesis, God did not say, “It is finished.” That did not come until the Cross. What God said after making the world was, “It is Good. It is very Good.”

  In March I saw my newborn grandson, a gorgeous, beautiful baby. Complete. Perfect. But finished? No! Anything but finished!

  As this baby’s parents are going to have the joy of watching him grow and develop and mature, so it is God’s joy still to be part of Creation. And it is our calling to share in that loving creativity, to be willing to be open to change, to new revelation, new growth, as we are offered opportunities to go on with the work of that Creation which is called very good. I do not know why these opportunities are so often given us through the things which hurt us, or even kill us, but God knows, and that is all that is necessary.

  When I receive Communion, when I am given the strengthening bread, the transfusion of the wine, this is the great symbol of God’s oneness with Creation, the ultimate protection, God in us; we in God.

  It is enough.

  —

  Immediately after his sons’ horrible slaughter of Shechem and the Hivites, Jacob left that place, and went to

  Luz, which is in the land of Canaan, that is, Beth-el (where he had seen the glorious ladder), he and all the people that were with him. And he built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el, because there God appeared unto him.

  Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died (she must have been very old), and was buried there under an oak tree.

  And God appeared unto Jacob again, and blessed him.

  And God said to him, “Your name is Jacob; you shall not be called Jacob anymore, but Israel shall be your name.”

  So they moved from Beth-el toward Ephrath, and were nearly there, nearly to the place which would later be identified with Bethlehem,

  and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.

  In giving birth to Benjamin, Rachel died, and was buried on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.

  And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave, and that is the pillar of Rachel’s grave to this day.

  Next we come to another difficult part of the story. Reuben, Jacob’s eldest son,

  went and lay with Bilhah, his father’s concubine.

  Bilhah was one of the maids who had given sons to Jacob—Bilhah, Rachel’s maid. Jacob heard what Reuben, his son, had done. It was the breaking of a taboo, and Reuben was to suffer for it. Yet it was Reuben who prevented the rest of the brothers from killing their braggart younger brother, Joseph. Reuben, like all scriptural heroes, was complex. But he had compassion, and for that I like him.

  Jacob returned at last to Isaac, his father.

  And chronology shudders.

  When Jacob stole Esau’s blessing from his father, the old man seemed to have been on his deathbed, his eyesight gone with age, urging his son to come to him with a savoury stew to give him strength that he might give his blessing before he died. And here it was, more than twenty years later. Either the biblical narrator is playing very free a
nd easy with chronology, or Isaac had the longest deathbed scene in history. But biblical time is not linear, like our chronology in the Western world. If King David could hold Christ on his lap (and of course he could) why shouldn’t Isaac be alive when the narrator needs him?

  Isaac was one hundred and four score years, and he gave up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people, being full of days, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.

  And though Jacob and Esau were thoroughly reconciled, they had both acquired so many flocks and herds that the land could not support them both, so they parted their ways.

  Jacob, through tears and laughter, had learned something of God’s promise. He had demanded a blessing; he had demanded protection. And God had blessed him, but had not given him the protection Jacob had tried to bargain for. God blessed Jacob and made him vulnerable. His beloved Rachel died in childbirth. His elder son betrayed him with Rachel’s maid, Bilhah, who had given him children. He was to think for many years that his favourite son, Joseph, was dead.

  Still he loved God, although he never understood the nature of El Shaddai, but that didn’t seem to matter very much.

  He learned not only that God gives us the gift of vulnerability, but also the gift of pain, instead of the affliction of the absence of pain.

  How do we tell the echthroi from the true angel (like the great one who wrestled with Jacob all night)? How do we join with God’s holy angels in loving the fallen ones so that they may become light-bearers again? How do we continue the blessing of Jacob through our own lives?

  Jesus came into the world to save sinners, to look for the lost sheep, to heal the blind, and deaf, and dumb, and leprous, and those possessed by demons, to give hope to the wounded and bleeding and broken. And Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy and go to the Cross and break the barriers of time and space in the mighty act of at-one-ment with all of Creation.

  God does not promise us protection any more than he promised it to Jesus. Or Jacob. We are not given protection. We are given vulnerability.

  We are promised not the absence of pain, but the blessed warning of pain.

  We are promised not that we won’t be wounded, that we won’t bleed, but that we will be transfused.

  We are promised not that we won’t die, but that we shall live.

  —

  What must Jacob have felt, after Rachel’s death, when he held baby Benjamin in his arms, the baby whose birthing had caused his beloved wife’s death? Opposing waves of anguish and love must have rolled over him. But he did not deny God because there was no justice in a woman’s death in childbirth. He did not try to make things right by his own actions; he knew that he could not.

  To know that we need to be transfused with the blood of the Lamb is not to succumb to illness, but to move toward health. Along with the revivifying transfusion is given an understanding that we are all part of the butterfly effect. As long as there is any pain in the universe, the Creator is part of that pain, and we bear our own small part in carrying it. It is bearable as long as the burden is shared.

  And if in the fullness of God’s time, Lucifer and Michael are again friends, there will be no more echthroi.

  No echthroi. I think of those two men in criminal court, and pray for their healing. For my own letting go of residual anger and hurt, and my acceptance that I have often been betrayer rather than betrayed. Perfection of virtue is not required of me. Perfection of love is, and that is a very different thing.

  Jesus said,

  “What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.”

  How wonderful! Christ did not come into the world to save the virtuous, but to save you, and me, and Jacob (lying with his head pillowed on a stone), and Ikhnaton, with his psalms of praise for the One God, and all of us who turn to the Source of all love, knowing that we need to be transfused.

  Jacob was weak and he knew that he was weak; nevertheless, he would not leave off wrestling until the angel blessed him with the wound of love.

  God’s angel wrestles with us, and we cry out, “Bless me!” And God will bless us and we, like the baboons, will clap our hands and cry out our joy as we join in the glorious music of the spheres. In this harmony we will no longer be separated from the stars, and we will be at-one, too, with the infinitely small things of creation. In this communion we will be blessed indeed.

  A JURY ROOM IN MANHATTAN’S CRIMINAL COURT,

  JANUARY, 1984

  WHEATON, ILLINOIS, OCTOBER, 1985

  Chapter 1: Separation from the Stars

  1. What is a “forensic” view of God? Why does L’Engle think this view of God is inaccurate? What does she suggest our view of God should be instead?

  2. This book examines the story of Jacob, who was, in the author’s words, “a liar and a cheat.” Yet, Jacob received God’s blessing. Does this story comfort you? Confuse you? Encourage you?

  3. When you think of the house of God, do you think of it as a physical place, such as a church or specific location? Or do you think of it as something else? The author says “that wherever I call upon my maker is always God’s house.” What does this mean to you?

  4. Here, just as she did in And It Was Good, the author chooses to use the Hebrew “el” instead of a genderized pronoun (he/she) when referring to God. She argues that our society is a “genitally-oriented culture.” She says, “In a universe which is becoming more and more varied as we discover more of the glories of the macrocosm and the infinite variety of the microcosm…this preoccupation with God’s sex seems amazingly primitive.” Do you believe prescribing God a gender with our language is distracting or even primitive? How does the use of the he/she pronouns impede or enhance your relationship with God?

  5. The author examines the makeup of the word disaster as “dis, which means separation, and aster, which means star. So dis-aster is separation from the stars.” How is separation in general detrimental to our spiritual and emotional health? Have you ever considered separation from something such as the stars a bad thing? Why or why not?

  6. L’Engle says, “If we assume that we are virtuous, particularly when we set our virtue against someone else’s sin, we are proclaiming a forensic, crime-and-punishment theology, not a theology of love.” How does this statement challenge you? In what ways do we tend to hold up our virtue against another’s sin? How can you live, instead, a theology of love?

  Chapter 2: The Butterfly Effect

  1. Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? If so, reflect on your memories of that time. Did the experience teach you anything about God? About yourself?

  2. After a tornado tore through her family property, the author found herself grappling with deep questions that “do not have logical answers.” Questions of mystery, of meaning in tragedy, of love and hate. She says, “As always when I struggle to find the truth of something, I turn to story for illumination.” To what do you turn when you find yourself wrestling with questions that do not have logical answers? How do you wrestle with God, as Jacob did?

  3. This chapter opens with a discussion about the difficulty of family, and the complexities therein. Reflect on your own family. How does your family challenge you? Has your family caused you to question your relationship with God? In what ways has your faith grown because of—or despite—your family?

  4. Are you, like the author, uncomfortable with the God of the Old Testament, who often led the Israelites in the slaughter of other peoples? Is it hard for you to reconcile that God with the God of the New Testament? How do you account for these seemingly opposing natures of God?

  5. How does tribalism manifest today? Does society still function with an “ ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ” mindset? L’Engle says that this mindset “is a violation of Creation.” What does she mean by this? How can we work to transform tribalism into community? What is the difference between the two?

  6. L’Engle compares division within the church to malignancy. She says, “The only cells [in the human body] which insist on being independent and autonomous are
cancer cells.” Think about this analogy within today’s church culture. How is the church acting independently when it could be striving for connectedness? In what ways can we work toward unity?

  Chapter 3: Let the Floods Clap Their Hands

  1. This chapter acknowledges some of the less celebrated aspects of Jacob’s character. What are some of the characteristics of Jacob that are surprising? Why are they important?

  2. “Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves….God loves us in our complete isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.” Do you agree? Do you ever expect others or yourself to be perfectly virtuous, and forget God’s unqualified love?

  3. Throughout the book, the author reiterates that the world is not fair. Do you struggle with the idea of fairness? Can the desire for fairness become crippling, as L’Engle suggests? How so? Does L’Engle believe fairness should be desired?

  4. L’Engle claims that we must move beyond the desire for vengeance which is so prevalent in the Psalms. Jesus, she says, challenges us to forgive even the most monstrous, even the deepest offense. She says, “Hate the sin and love the sinner is too easy. As long as there is any hate in us we are not ready for heaven, not as long as we are shutting the golden doors on anyone else.” Have you ever struggled to forgive someone? Do you wrestle with the common idea—hate the sin, love the sinner? Is it, as she says, “too easy”? Why or why not?

  5. What does L’Engle say about forgiveness in this chapter? What is powerful about this idea? L’Engle cites Esau, acknowledging his anger at having unjustly lost his birthright, but pointing out that he did not bear a grudge. Have you ever held on to a grudge? Were you able to let it go? How?