Sold into Egypt

by Madeleine L'engle

  The evening meal, the table set with the best china and crystal, and lit by candles, has always been sacramental for me, the focal point of the day. It is when the family gathers together, shares the day’s events, and God’s bounty. When our children were little I did not mind when we ate as long as we ate together. If Hugh was previewing a Broadway play we sometimes ate at five o’clock. If someone had an after-school project we ate at eight or eight thirty. The family dinner table is no longer tradition in many families today; it is a great loss.

  Now the dinner table is very different. In New York, where I stay during the academic year, I am living with my granddaughter, Charlotte, who is in college. Often one of her friends is living with us, too, for months at a time. But the dinner table, the candles, the food prepared with love, are still important.

  When I am at Crosswicks, my son, Bion, is the cook. His wife, Laurie, is a busy physician and never knows when she is going to get home, so Bion has taken over the cooking, and a marvellous and inventive cook he is, coming up with delicious new recipes for the late summer overflow from the garden. As the days grow shorter toward summer’s end we still eat out, by kerosene lamp light, and we stay out to watch the stars. Across the fields are the woods and then the ancient hills—“from whence cometh my help.”

  When I was in Jerusalem it was the hills which deeply moved me, helping me to understand better than ever before Psalm 121. How many people throughout the centuries have looked toward the hills for help, hills that are a metaphor of the strong, steadfast love of God. Hills are also a metaphor for the right and proper expression of grief, of directing our loss and anguish to God. All during my life I have slowly learned about grief, and the appropriate expression of it. Wearing mourning in the old days was not such a bad idea, because it took into visible account the fact of death, which we now try to hide (even in the Church we try to hide it) so that it won’t embarrass others.

  Joseph, despite all his power and prestige, despite his Egyptian wife, still had loss and grief to work through. He was still far from home and family, and from the familiar. He had had to learn a new language, a new way of daily living, which included being isolated when he ate. In spite of all his power and wealth, there was still discrimination, for the Egyptians would not eat with a Hebrew. How lonely for him to have to eat alone, always alone! Is this not something like Southerners allowing their children to be suckled by a black wet nurse, and yet refusing to eat at the same table with the woman who nourished their little ones?

  Perhaps this is one reason that Joseph’s immense secular power did not go to his head. Perhaps, despite wealth and luxury, he knew moments of feeling forsaken. Like all the biblical heroes (like all of us human creatures) he was complex, capable of feeling opposite emotions simultaneously.

  Meanwhile there were, as Joseph had told Pharaoh there would be, seven years of plenty, and during this time of prosperity Joseph laid up food from the countryside for all the cities, storing it so that there would be enough laid by for the seven years of famine. Certainly he had enough work to do, and little time to brood. We are not told a great deal about his home life, whether or not he loved and was loved by the wife Pharaoh had chosen for him. Despite the love stories of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, arranged marriages were then the custom for both Hebrew and Egyptian. Joseph had two sons by Asenath; the first son was called Manasseh, who remains a mysterious character throughout Scripture. The second son Joseph named Ephraim, saying,

  “For God has called me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.”

  So, even in the midst of his worldly success, Joseph still thought of Egypt as the land of his affliction. Did he ever, on the journey into Egypt, or during his years in prison, cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”? That has been the human cry of anguish throughout the centuries. The psalmist cries it in Psalm 22. Jesus cried it out on the cross, and in so doing freed us all to cry it in moments of deepest pain and loss.

  The night of the day we learned that Hugh had cancer I turned, as always, to the strength-giving of Evening Prayer, and the first Psalm for that evening was the 22nd,

  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  I was not at home, but a few miles away, at a conference center. The onset of Hugh’s illness was so sudden that there was no time to find a replacement for me, and the center was close enough to the hospital that I could commute. But the blow that it was cancer had come only that afternoon, and I felt raw with shock. I read those anguished words in a strange room, with my world turned upside down, those words that Jesus, too, cried out. And so, despite the pain, they brought me strength.

  The words of the psalmist. The words of Jesus. They are incredibly personal words, and they cannot be spoken by one who is not there.

  But Joseph, as far as we know, did not question but accepted the afflictions that came upon him as he accepted the power. So he laid up provision for the time of dearth, knew his wife, begat sons, ate alone, did what had to be done.

  And the seven years of plenteousness in the land of Egypt were ended. And the seven years of dearth began to come, as Joseph had said they would, but in all the land of Egypt there was bread.

  And when all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to Pharaoh for bread, and Pharaoh said to all the Egyptians, “Go to Joseph and do whatever he tells you to do.”

  And the famine was over all the face of the earth, and Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians. And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn, because the famine was terrible in all lands.

  Our planet is once again suffering from famine. Not only is there drought and famine in Africa, with the dry sand of the Sahara gradually taking over more and more of the fertile land, but our own southeast and western states have experienced terrible drought. We may not have had a Joseph, but perhaps he taught us something, for, in a gesture of fraternal compassion, farmers whose crops produced grain and wheat in abundance sent to those whose crops were withering. The response of the world to the horrible plight of the Armenians after the earthquake and to Bangladesh after its flood, is proof that our human hearts are still warm, despite the coldness which presses in on every side.

  Famine and disease. Yes, there was famine, but there is little mention of disease in Genesis. People died of old age; women too often died in childbirth. There is no mention of cancer, or even of head colds. Men and women were sexually and healthily active, enjoying each other into old age.

  But today AIDS is reaching disastrously epidemic proportions in Africa, hitting men, women, children. Someone told me that the virus has been found in mosquitoes—a terrifying thought. It is increasing in this country. Although contaminated hypodermic needles account for many cases, the most common cause is intercourse.

  The sexual revolution has backfired. We needed to move from the old repressions, the unscriptural idea that nice women did not enjoy sex, and that therefore men had to have a separate standard. But, as almost always happens, the pendulum has swung too far, swinging from repression to undisciplined lust.

  How do we find love, that love which God showed us in Jesus? How do we return to ourselves as observers and contemplators of God’s Creation? Not only can men not have a separate standard, but not one of us can separate ourselves from any part of God’s Creation.

  Perhaps the Egypt into which Joseph was sold needed a new morality as much as we do, but it must be a new morality, not a return to the old, which wasn’t very moral. Some pretty scandalous things happened among those eminent Victorians. And in our own time scandal has soiled the souls and reputations of prominent Christians. We need to understand that love never treats subject as object. Indeed, treating subject as object is the beginning of pornography.

  As I observe and contemplate love, it is never self-righteous. It does not condemn. It is a sacrifice, a sacred and hallowed giving. I have received this love and been allowed to give it, and this is why, rather than by accident of birth, I am a C
hristian.

  And Joseph, despite the pantheon of gods with which he was surrounded, was able to retain his faith in the One God of his people.

  But such faith is a mystery. The phrase about God which means the most to me is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It doesn’t translate well: the tremendous and fascinating mystery. It does better in Latin.

  Joseph, having been purged in the fire, knew God to be a total mystery. There was a purity, a directness, to faith in the Creator before the coming of the Law; it was a smaller world than that of the Exodus and the journey to the Promised Land. And by the time of Jesus both the world and the law had become overcomplicated. The law was by now so cumbersome that it was almost impossible to get through a day without inadvertently breaking some jot or tittle of it, and John the Baptist, with his cry for repentance, was offering relief from the tangled web of Law that had become laws.

  But for Joseph there were the stars at night, the sands of the desert, the wild winds, and mystery. We, too, are mysteries, and we cannot be explained, we creatures who are born to observe and contemplate, any more than the Maker of it all can be explained.

  Hugo Rahner writes,

  Without mystery all religion must wither into barren rationalism. The church alone has retained the element of mystery: by her sacraments she has consecrated sun, moon, water, bread, wine, and oil, and also the love of the flesh, nor will it ever be permitted to her to cease teaching mankind that behind the veils of the visible the eternal secrets lie concealed, and that it is only through the word of God which lives on in the church that we can recognize the true meaning of earthly things.

  Because I do not believe that Jesus ever had denominations or a divided Christendom in mind, when I speak of “the Church” I refer to all of us, from the sects to the fundamentalists to the Pentecostals to the mainline Protestants to the Catholics to—to all of us. That we are still one Church despite all our divisions is also a mystery.

  Unless we are able to accept mystery we will not be able to move beyond literalism into a living faith, a trusting that a God of love will not create and then abandon or annihilate.

  Carrying my babies was a marvellous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly and the delightful stirrings within. Death is an even greater mystery.

  After Hugh’s death many people asked me if I still talk to him. And my reply is always, “No, I don’t want to hold him back.” For I think we can do that, clinging to the beloved who has died, rather than allowing freedom to go on and do whatever it is that God has waiting and prepared for husband, or wife, or child, or friend.

  Hugh will always be with me, part of me. There is no way I can talk without including him. Inevitably he comes up in daily conversation. There is no way I can talk without including him. We were together for well over half our lives. But his mortal body is gone and I don’t know what God has in store for him now.

  But it is even more mysterious than that. In God’s universe we are never completely separated from any part of it.

  So while I do not want to hold Hugh back (from whatever God is calling him to do and be and become) so I also know that he is still part of God’s purpose.

  On the anniversary of his death I was carefully scheduled to be away from home, having accepted three speaking jobs in Michigan. This, I hoped, would keep my children from worrying about me, and I knew that I would be better off if I was busy, and doing work I hoped had some value.

  The first stop was Calvin College. My friend Marilyn from Niles, Michigan, was with me, and we were put up in the Harley Hotel in Grand Rapids, where there were real glasses to drink out of, not plastic, and good quality tissues. I stay in many hotels on my travels and that is one way of grading them.

  The second stop, the “two-night stand,” was Spring Arbor College, and we were put up at a Knight’s Inn in Jackson. Marilyn got out of her car, went into the room she had been assigned, and came out with a strange look on her face. Then she went into my room, which was next door, and came out, still with that strange look, and called me to come.

  I went into a room smelling heavily of sweetish antiseptic. There was bright red carpeting on the floor, a bright purple velvet bedspread on the bed, bright purple velvet curtains at the windows, and on the walls were murals of windows with chartreuse shutters. Marilyn assured me that her room was identical. There were only two things to do in that room when we weren’t at the college: sleep, and write. I had with me the manuscript of this book, and I was working on it dutifully, and without enthusiasm. I had promised the book to Luci Shaw, and I care about keeping promises. But working without enthusiasm is not my usual way.

  And then it was as though I heard Hugh saying to me, “You know you don’t want to work on Sold into Egypt right now. What you want to work on is that fantasy you’ve been thinking about. Go ahead and write it.” So I put Sold into Egypt aside, and that day, and the next, I wrote at white heat whenever I was free to be in the room. I wrote twenty-eight pages. And continued when we went on to Sturgess and were radically upgraded to a Holiday Inn.

  An Acceptable Time was the book I had to write then.

  I didn’t hear Hugh’s physical voice. I didn’t see him. But I felt him, his isness, with me, at a time when my grief was raw. The night before, sitting in that red and purple room and reading Evening Prayer with Marilyn, the words of the Psalms almost made me break down. My body, my spirit, all of me was aware of and open to Hugh. I don’t want to make too much of this. All I know was that it happened and it was a great and beneficent gift.

  Perhaps a mere year after my husband’s death was too soon for me to be thinking about all the theological issues of life and death that the story of Joseph demands. Certainly I believed that Hugh still was, is, and I still believe that. Perhaps I needed to work on the fantasy, with its themes of love and sacrifice, to help me understand Joseph, and to relax in the promise of Jesus’ love and sacrifice.

  Several people said to me, “At least you know that Hugh is happy now.”

  How do I know that? Happiness is not always for our greatest good. It may be that God has more joyful—or more difficult—or more challenging and wonderful work for Hugh to do. I don’t have to know whether or not Hugh is happy. I need to know only that he is growing in God’s love.

  This past year almost everywhere I have spoken, someone has asked me, “What do you think of reincarnation?” The question is asked sometimes with fear, sometimes with hope, sometimes accusingly.

  Perhaps the question of reincarnation has come to the forefront of people’s thinking about life and death because the Church has held back, unable to move from the thinking of my forbears in Saint Margaret’s graveyard on Fleming’s Island in north Florida. Some churches remain stuck in the old literal representations of heaven and hell, so graphically painted by Hieronymus Bosch. They are still good metaphors, but no longer to be taken literally, any more than the Aristotelian sandwich of heaven, earth, hell, is to be taken literally.

  When the Church is silent, other voices inevitably are heard.

  Thoughts about what life after death holds for us should never be a refuge from the fear of death. Who knows what the God of love has in store for us? There are many important lessons to be learned before we are ready for the unveiled glory of the Presence.

  But is this one life we are given not enough? Hugh lived the biblical three score years and ten. Surely we need not ask for more. But what about God’s children who do not have lives of any real quality? What about the ten-year-old OD’d on drugs? The raped and murdered adolescent? The children starving in Africa, or India, or South America? Or the little ones in Saint Margaret’s graveyard, dead at only a few years of age from scarlet fever or diphtheria? Doesn’t God want more for them than that?

  In Psalm 22 we read,

  To him [God] alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before him.

  So even in the dust of the grave we worship God. What God cr
eated will not be left unfinished.

  Why are so many Christians afraid of the idea that the God of love will continue to care for us? There are hints all through Scripture. In the Psalms:

  “Before you were formed in the womb I knew you,” (echoing Jeremiah).

  “In my house are many mansions,”

  Jesus assured, each one prepared to meet the need of each person after death. There is nothing inconsistent with Christianity in such considerations as long as we don’t fall into idolatry.

  I hope this does not sound like what is called New Age-ism, of which many Christians seem to be terribly afraid. I am not a New Ager, and I don’t know a great deal about this movement. The chief problem seems to me to be that old heresy, Pelagianism—thinking we can do it all ourselves. At its worst it is the belief that because we can do it ourselves we don’t need God.

  And it is, perhaps, an indictment of the Church which has allowed God’s wonder to be tarnished, which is fearful rather than joyful, and which has forgotten the wonderful wildness of Jesus, who could spit on the dust and make a blind man see, who could tell a little girl to arise from death, and who loved his disciples despite their betrayal of him, as Joseph also was called to love his brothers.

  I know that I need God, and that if we are to care for the precarious ecology of this planet it will only be with our hands in the hand of God. That we do nothing, accomplish nothing, without God. After I had spent several days speaking in Fort Wayne, Indiana, first for the Friends of the Library, then for the Episcopal Church, a man who had not come to any of my talks wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper accusing me of being “a self-professed New Ager.” What made him tell this bald-faced lie, after which he went on to accuse my books (without having read them) of being unChristian, leading children down the path to perdition? What is this fear that causes “Christians” to vilify and attack other Christians blindly? Aren’t Christians supposed to act out of love, not fear? Aren’t we supposed to be recognized by our love for one another? Does not our faith in the Lord of the universe keep us safe in Christ? Does not perfect love banish fear?