Sold into Egypt

by Madeleine L'engle

  But we keep losing it. It’s all too complex. Life is unjust. Illness and death strike seemingly at random. Our planet reels dizzily, rocked by war and suspicion and hate—hate like that of Levi for Shechem. How do we make any reasonable sense of the big things, the little things, of Levi slaughtering Shechem?

  A flicker of understanding came to me many years ago when Hugh and I were living on a small dairy farm and raising our children. We went through several years when we, and the village, had more death and tragedy than is statistically normal. The theologians I was reading didn’t help me, but the small community of our Congregational Church did. Anglican Madeleine and Baptist Hugh found a loving church home in the white spired church across the street from the General Store. But I was still asking a lot of big, cosmic questions to which I was finding no satisfactory answers.

  Was it a coincidence that just as I was ready to start writing A Wrinkle in Time I came across a book of Einstein’s and discovered the new physics? Einstein, with his theories of relativity, Planck, with his quantum theory, the astrophysicists and particle physicists opened for me a new world in which I glimpsed the glory of God.

  I’m often asked about my great science background. My great science background is zilch. When I was in school and college the scientists were pretty arrogant. Adam’s and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was about to pay off. What we didn’t know, we would know shortly. Most scientists found science and religion as irreconcilable as did most religionists. I took as little science as I possibly could. In high school I had to take chemistry in order to get into college. Our chemistry lab was an old greenhouse, and one day I was pretending I was Madame Curie and blew the place up. That was the most exciting thing that happened to me in chemistry. In college we had to take a science course, so I took psychology.

  But then we penetrated to the heart of the atom and the scientists discovered that they really didn’t know very much after all. For every question they answered, two more questions arose.

  As I began to read more and more of the world of particle physics I found myself more and more willing to ask questions. I had been trying to understand and to define God and the marvellous mystery of the Incarnation with my intellect. But that doesn’t work. The Incarnation is God’s act of total love for us, but it is not to be understood as algebra is understood. It is in the realm of faith, and faith is not for the provable, but for that which is beyond proof.

  I was nourished by the vision of the universe as being totally interrelated, with nothing happening in isolation. Everything affects everything else. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Indeed, we live in a universe.

  The theologians I was reading were not the right ones for me, with their proofs of the unprovable, their isolationism, their judgmentalism. Granted, I was reading the wrong theologians. But I began to find my theology in my reading of the physicists. These men and women, studying the makeup of the universe as it has developed through the billennia, see it as designed in such a way that life, sentient life, is inevitable, is part of a plan (God’s plan), not an accidental occurrence in the development of our galaxy. Of course, we’ve known that all along, as have Bach and John the Evangelist and Lady Julian of Norwich and the other rejoicers, but it seems a new thought to the physicists. I’m pleased that they’ve caught up with it.

  These ideas are beautifully expressed in one of my favourite hymns, an ancient one from the fourth century,

  Of the father’s love begotten

  E’er the worlds began to be,

  He is Alpha and Omega,

  He the source, the ending he,

  Of the things that are, that have been,

  And that future years shall see,

  Evermore and evermore.

  John Wheeler, one of the important physicists of this century, suggests that the principles of quantum mechanics point to a need for the universe to produce a phenomenon like us human creatures to observe and contemplate all that has been created.

  To observe and to contemplate! Indeed, that seems as much a theological as a scientific thought. The great mystics throughout the centuries have been observers and contemplators of God’s glory. The psalmist asks in Psalm 113,

  “Who is like our God?” and it is answered, “Who humbles himself to behold [observe and contemplate] the things that are in heaven and in the earth.”

  It takes humility for us to stop and behold, to observe and contemplate. Humility, and courage.

  What we observe changes us, and we change what we observe. I think of the game we used to play, of looking steadily at someone’s foot, in a classroom, on the subway. After a short time the foot would begin to move.

  The physicists tell us that objectivity is an illusion. We cannot observe anything objectively, because to observe something is to change it. And, often, to be changed.

  So what does our calling to be observers and contemplators imply? Does the universe really need us? Is this truly part of God’s plan for Creation? Doesn’t it plummet us right back into the ego-centered, planet-centered universe that Copernicus and Bruno and Galileo overturned?

  Well, no, not necessarily. But it does bring up old questions I haven’t thought about since college: When a tree falls in the forest, if nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  Of course it makes a sound, I said. The tree falls, and sound waves are made, whether they are heard or not. But according to the new physics the sound waves have to be realized by being heard.

  In the survey of philosophy I took freshman year, we read some of Bishop Berkeley, and his theory that the stairs outside his study weren’t there if he didn’t know that they were there. Things have to be apprehended in order to be.

  During the years when I was writing and not getting published I had the feeling that a book could not be born until it was read and responded to. The reader has to create along with the writer if the book is to come to life.

  And what about we, ourselves? I have seen myself growing and changing and developing as my husband and children drew me out of my shell and into being. Surely forty years with Hugh have changed me beyond recognition from the shy, gawky girl he married. Surely his death is going to push me into further growing, further understanding.

  If we are responsible for the being of things, if we are, as this new theory implies, co-creators with God, this gives the sentient, questioning human being an enormous responsibility. Rather than swelling our egos, it should awaken in us an awed sense of vocation. We human creatures are called to be the eyes and ears and nose and mouth and fingers of this planet. We are called to observe all that is around us, to contemplate it, and to make it real.

  Martin Buber expresses it this way:

  The world is not something which must be overcome. It is created reality, but reality created to be hallowed. Everything created has a need to be hallowed and is capable of receiving it: all created corporeality, all created urges and elemental forces of the body. Hallowing enables the body to fulfill the meaning for which it was created.

  Hallowing means being made whole and holy by the grace of the Holy Spirit, not by our own effort. It is heaven’s gift. So our observing and contemplating needs to be hallowed, or we will fail in that for which we have been called.

  This hallowing enables us to have a sense of our planet’s place in the universe, to understand that it is part of a magnificent whole, part of the microscopic world of subatomic particles, part of the macrocosmic world of galaxies, and that everything in Creation affects the whole. If we are willing to contemplate all that is around us, to love it, to help make it real, we are adding to the health and beauty and reality of the entire universe.

  But we live in a society which seems less and less concerned with reality. True and enduring love is replaced by multiple marriages or the shallow pursuit of physical pleasure. Our standards fall. And as I think of the word standards I think of a knight on his horse, holding aloft his standard.

&
nbsp; Probably the worst thing that has happened to our understanding of reality has been our acceptance of ourselves as consumers. Our greed is consuming the planet, so that we may quite easily kill this beautiful earth by daily pollution without ever having nuclear warfare. Sex without love consumes, making another person an object, not a subject. Can we change our vocabulary and our thinking? To do so may well be a matter of life and death. Consumers do not understand that we must live not by greed and self-indulgence but by observing and contemplating the wonder of God’s universe as it is continually being revealed to us.

  Joseph and his brothers lived in a small universe. There was no church establishment, no educational establishment, no scientific establishment. Establishments, by their very nature, resist change. The Church resisted the change from the ego-centered view of the universe, and I am not sure that our broken Christendom has yet come to terms with this. Nor has the educational establishment of today come to terms with the fact that it is currently inadequate, and that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation. The scientific establishment only a few years ago drew back in shock and resistance to the idea of plate tectonics and continental drift, which seems so obvious now.

  But Joseph and his brothers had no such institutions to grapple with. Their God was with them, and they were with God, although there is little mention of God or what they thought of the Creator in the early chapters of Joseph’s story.

  Did Simeon and Levi have any compunction about their slaughter of Shechem and his people? Did it worry them that they were murderers? Did they care about what God thought of what they had done? We don’t know. We are not told. We do know that when Jacob, on his deathbed, gave out his blessings to his sons, Simeon and Levi were condemned. Actions have consequences.

  Jacob’s words to them were:

  Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations….Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel….I will scatter them in Israel.

  Harsh words from Jacob. But they were fulfilled; the tribes of both Simeon and Levi were scattered. We don’t even know what happened to the tribe of Simeon. And the Levites became not a tribe but a priestly clan.

  Dinah, the only female in the family, is not included in Jacob’s deathbed blessing.

  How did Dinah feel about all this, Dinah who had not been a woman for long when she met Shechem?

  DINAH

  Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a woman.

  Oh, yes, that is their favourite benediction, my father and my twelve brothers. You can guess how that makes me feel, the one girl child. After she had me, my mother didn’t have any more children. She had, after all, given my father six sons. So there I was, the youngest for a while, the eleventh child for my father, the seventh for my mother, but I was anything but special in her eyes. Or anybody’s.

  It wasn’t that I had an unhappy childhood. We lived with my Grandfather Laban, my mother’s and Aunt Rachel’s father. We were well fed and cared for, and the older brothers played with me, especially Reuben, and made me feel that they were fond of me, even if my father and his wives and concubines had little use for a girl in their male-oriented world. And then Joseph was born, and then Benjamin, and I wasn’t the baby anymore.

  By the time Benjamin was born I hadn’t been a baby for a long time. I had given myself to a man and seen him and his father and all the people of their tribe murdered in front of my eyes, by two of my brothers, my real brothers, my own mother’s sons. They were defending my honour, they said. They didn’t want me treated like a whore, they said. Did anybody ask me how I felt, or if I had been treated like a whore? Did anybody ask me whether I wanted to marry Shechem (Oh, my beautiful Shechem)? No. Nobody asked me. They cut him down and I flung myself on his bleeding body, and I don’t think they even noticed me, they were so busy slaughtering everybody else.

  The ground shrieks with his blood. If they were, as they say, obeying the will of their God, I want no part of that God.

  Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe who hast not made me a woman.

  They can have their god, their bloody god. Bloody as far back as I can remember. I think of my grandfather, Isaac. His father was willing to sacrifice his only child, his son, in a holocaust on Mount Moriah. Even if there was a reprieve at the last minute, a ram to be substituted in Isaac’s place, what kind of an erratic and unreasonable god would have made such a demand in the first place? Bloody. Greedy. Only a man would order or carry out that kind of sacrifice.

  Where can I turn?

  I am lonely. Lonely on earth. In heaven.

  How can I turn to my father’s and brothers’ god?

  As for my father, he was still terrified, twenty years after he had foxed him, of Uncle Esau. We were leaving Grandfather Laban’s, to go who knows where, nobody told me. Father separated us into two groups so that if Uncle Esau should attack us—if he should, after all these years, still want vengeance—at least half of us might escape. And he, my father, stood alone near the river Jabbok, and someone—God, he said—jumped on him and started wrestling with him. Why? They wrestled, the two of them, all night, and neither one won over the other. If it had really been God, wouldn’t God have won?

  Anyhow, whoever he was, he gave in to my father’s insistence that he be blessed, and for this blessing wounded him on the thigh. My father limps from it still, and will always limp.

  Why did this God-creature attack my father, and ask him, “What is your name?” It makes no sense.

  They fought all night and nobody won and my father was still terrified of his brother. Why be afraid of Uncle Esau, funny-looking, and hairy, but kind? I didn’t meet my uncle until he came to Grandfather Isaac’s deathbed. Grandfather Isaac was my father’s father, and I never really knew him, not the way I knew Grandfather Laban, with whom I grew up. We all grew up with Grandfather Laban, except Benjamin, who was born on the road between grandfather and grandfather. A bloody road, with my Aunt Rachel bleeding to death after the baby’s birth. We could not stop the blood. The ground was red.

  I was not close to my Aunt Rachel, though I took after her in looks, rather than my mother. I had my mother’s long eyelashes, but I had my Aunt Rachel’s beauty, and more, because I was younger. She did not care for me. But it was still a terrible thing to watch the blood gush from her.

  I took the baby, tiny, scrawny, red. One of our slave girls was nearly ready to wean her son, and she took Benjamin to nurse. But I rocked him and sang to him, wanting to and not being able to give him for love what she could give for duty.

  If only Shechem’s seed had flowered within me. Would my brothers have tried to kill that child, too?

  He was gentle with me, Shechem, far gentler than my brothers, the gentlest man I’d ever met. The customs of his tribe were different from ours. He wanted to marry me. I would have married him and taken his god for mine, though he and all his tribe were dead before I ever found out about Shechem’s god, dead because my brothers said that Shechem could have me for his wife only if he and his father and all the men of his tribe would agree to be circumcised, as my father’s and brothers’ god requires.

  More bloodiness. But Shechem wanted me that much. And so it was done, and while Shechem and the other men were sore and weak my brothers slaughtered them before my eyes.

  My father was not pleased.

  Oh, no, he was not concerned for me, grieving, weeping my anguish. He was concerned for his own reputation. He said my brothers’ murdering ways would make him stink. And we had to leave that place, take up our tents and move. My father’s god told him to go to Beth-el, that strange place of his dream of angels. Too many dreams my father had; now Joseph is dreaming, too.

  I had dreams, but no one cared.

  I would not move from Shechem’s body.

  Simeon and Levi came to me, those murderers, and I screamed and spat and scratched until they left me alone.

  Reuben, the kinde
st of all my brothers, came quietly and lifted me in his arms and took me away. My mother and Aunt Rachel (who would die so soon) and the concubines washed Shechem’s blood from me. It was all that I had of him. Oh, I would that his seed had flowered, would that it had flowered…

  We journeyed, and Rachel’s old nurse died along the way, and then Rachel, and at last we came to Hebron, and I saw my grandfather Isaac, old and dying; and Esau, Uncle Esau, came to help my father bury him.

  Uncle Esau was red of hair, on his head, his beard, his body. He wept as he greeted my father and my brothers, and then he came to me and touched my cheek and said, “Do not be sad. He was full of days, my father. It is time for him to be gathered to his people.”

  How could I be sad for this grandfather I had never known?

  Why should I weep for the death of an old man who has lived a life full of years? I weep for Shechem. I weep for the children we will never have (and I would they had been girls). I weep for myself and for my lost life because now, my brothers say, no man will ever want me. Very well. I want no man, not with their bloody gods.

  Where are Shechem’s gods? If I knew who they were I would turn to them, and perhaps find more gentleness. Were they—are they—gods of war, gods of anger? I think they could not have been, or perhaps they would have protected Shechem and his people.

  I would rather have a helpless god than a bloody one.

  Unknown gods, I call on you. I do not ask you to do anything to change that which has been done. It has been done.

  But would you love me, please? Would you love me?

  Judah thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee.

  Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?