The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  We are meant to be whole creatures, we human beings, but mostly we are no more than fragments of what we ought to be. One of the great evils of twentieth-century civilization is the rift which has come between our conscious and our intuitive minds, a rift which has been slowly widening for thousands of years, so that now it seems as unbridgeable as the chasm which separated Dives, suffering the torments of hell, from Lazarus, resting on Abraham’s bosom.

  And this gap, separating intellect from intuition, mind from heart, is so frightening to some people that they won’t admit that it exists. I heard an otherwise intelligent man announce belligerently that there was no gap whatsoever between his conscious and below-conscious mind; his conscious mind was in complete control of his unconscious mind, thank you very much.

  We haven’t learned much since Paul of Tarsus admitted quite openly that his conscious mind was not successful in dictating to his below-the-surface self. If anything, the gap between consciousness and super- sub- or un-consciousness is even wider now than it was then. How can we possibly bridge the chasm? How can we become free?

  I turn again to the night sky, this time to a planet, one of the planets in our own solar system, the planet Mercury. Mercury revolves around our mutual parent sun in such a way that one face is always turned toward the sun and is brilliantly lit and burningly hot; and the other side is always turned toward the cold dark of interstellar space. But Mercury oscillates slightly on its axis, and thereby sunside and nightside are integrated by a temperate zone which knows both heat and cold, light and dark. So the two disparate sides of Mercury are not separated by a chasm; the temperate zone mediates.

  Where, in ourselves, can we find this temperate zone which will integrate and free us? The words freedom and liberation have been used frequently during the last decade, and this would certainly seem to imply that we are less free, less liberated, than we want to admit. People who are already free don’t need to talk about liberation. It is a great mistake to equate freedom with anarchy, liberation with chaos. It has been my experience that freedom comes as the temperate zone integrates sunside and nightside, thereby making wholeness instead of brokenness.

  Art is for me the great integrater, and I understand Christianity as I understand art. I understand Christmas as I understand Bach’s Sleepers Awake or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring; as I understand Braque’s clowns, Blake’s poetry. And I understand it when I am able to pray with the mind in the heart, as Theophan the Recluse advised. When we pray with the mind in the heart, sunside and nightside are integrated, we begin to heal, and we come close to the kind of understanding which can accept an unacceptable Christianity. When I am able to pray with the mind in the heart, I am joyfully able to affirm the irrationality of Christmas.

  As I grow older

  I get surer

  Man’s heart is colder,

  His life no purer.

  As I grow steadily

  More austere

  I come less readily

  To Christmas each year.

  I can’t keep taking

  Without a thought

  Forced merrymaking

  And presents bought

  In crowds and jostling.

  Alas, there’s naught

  In empty wassailing

  Where oblivion’s sought.

  Oh, I’d be waiting

  With quiet fasting

  Anticipating

  A joy more lasting.

  And so I rhyme

  With no apology

  During this time

  Of eschatology:

  Judgment and warning

  Come like thunder.

  But now is the hour

  When I remember

  An infant’s power

  On a cold December.

  Midnight is dawning

  And the birth of wonder.

  But what is that wonder? The marvel of Christianity is its particularity, and if I am to say anything about Christmas it must be through the particular, so let me tell the story of one particular Christmas.

  The Thanksgiving before, we were expecting our usual mob for dinner. I dressed the turkey and put it in the oven, and lay down for a brief nap. But I couldn’t rest and after a while I wandered back out to the kitchen to baste the turkey. I opened the oven door and was met with a fading glow of dying heat. The oven had gone off with the turkey not half cooked. We took the oven apart, but the gas pilot light would not relight. We called the ‘super,’ apologetically, explaining that it really was an emergency, and he left his own Thanksgiving dinner and came up. But it was quickly apparent that the problem with the oven was not a minor one, and we were not going to be able to finish cooking our turkey in the oven that day.

  “But we have twenty people coming for dinner!” I cried in horror.

  There was nothing the ‘super’ could do except go downstairs to his own dinner, explaining that his oven wasn’t large enough for our turkey.

  So we began calling friends in our apartment building. Some were away—we got no answer; others still had their own turkeys in the oven. Finally we got friends who had just started to carve their turkey and immediately offered to let us finish cooking ours in their oven.

  On one of our various trips up and down the back stairs between apartments, I remarked to our son, Bion, home from college for vacation, “Oh, well, it’s just another typical Thanksgiving at the Franklins’.”

  So if I say that the Christmas I am about to describe was ‘typical,’ it was not that the events themselves were typical, but that this Christmas evoked in me that response which makes me continue to struggle to understand, with the mind in the heart, the love of God for his creation, a love which expressed itself in the Incarnation. That tiny, helpless baby whose birth we honor contained the Power behind the universe, helpless, at the mercy of its own creation.

  We had our usual full house of family and friends. Bion was again home from college. Our second daughter and son-in-law, Maria and Peter, were home from England, where Peter has a research job in theoretical chemistry at the University of Warwick. Our elder daughter and son-in-law, Josephine and Alan, had recently moved into a large and comfortable apartment at the General Theological Seminary, where Alan is associate professor of ascetical theology, and there was a good deal of going back and forth between the two households.

  Maria and Peter had not expected to come home for Christmas; it seemed an unwarranted expense. But when Peter’s mother, Dorothy, had a heart attack they came immediately. We all visited Dorothy in the hospital, Peter and his sisters daily, and she expected to be home shortly after Christmas, though she told all of us firmly that when she did die she wanted to be buried alongside her parents in an Orthodox Jewish Cemetery. But the present anxiety seemed to be over, so the weekend before Christmas Peter went to Poughkeepsie to visit cousins.

  Saturday night the rest of our household went to bed rather late, after a lovely long evening of conversation. We were deep in sleep when the phone rang; it was one of Peter’s sisters. One of the hospital nurses had gone to check on Dorothy and found her dead in her sleep.

  Maria and Bion stayed up to wait for Peter while he drove from Poughkeepsie. Hugh and I felt that we would be more useful the next day if we got some sleep, so we turned out the light with heavy hearts.

  In the morning I was awake before Hugh, so I slipped out quietly. Maria’s and Peter’s door was open and their lights on, so I knocked and went in. Peter was lying in bed, looking drawn and dry-eyed, although Bion and Maria told me later that he had done a lot of crying the night before, which relieved me, and I knew that he would need to do more crying later.

  I sat beside him and took his hand.

  “Madeleine, are you going to church this morning?”

  “No, Peter, I want to stay here with you.”

  Peter, as head of the family, was in charge of his mother’s funeral. Immediately he said that he wanted Alan to do as much as possible, but since Dorothy would be buried in a Jewish cemetery, the
service would have to be led by a rabbi, so Peter asked me to call one of the rabbis from the temple where I recently had been the lay Christian on a panel about Christians and Jews. I did so, and everything was arranged for the following morning, Christmas Eve.

  Peter was very torn within himself about his mother’s funeral, and Christmas the next day. The loss of a mother is always a grief, but Dorothy had lived her life, and had died as she would have wished to die, with none of the pain and terror she had dreaded. So I put my arms about Peter and said, “On Christmas Day I think it’s all right for you to relax and enjoy being with so many people you love, and to help us all make it a happy day for Léna and Charlotte.” Peter is very fond of his two little Anglican nieces, and his misconceptions of Christianity had by and large disappeared. He agreed willingly.

  Was that advice to a bereaved son all right? Is it proper to grieve and rejoice simultaneously?

  If the love I define in my own heart as Christian love means anything at all; yes. If the birth of Christ as Jesus of Nazareth means anything at all; yes.

  I don’t think any of us will ever forget that Christmas Eve. We sat around the apartment in the morning drinking coffee and waiting for time to go to the funeral parlor.

  I have an inordinate dread of funeral parlors. A horror of great darkness falls on me, and I feel further from home than did Abraham; I no longer even know where home is. In a funeral-parlor service I feel dragged into an ultimate pit of darkness. This is an irrational reaction, but I am convinced that the undertakers’ lobby is personally led by Satan, who has as chief helpers a group of priests, rabbis, and ministers.

  I didn’t mention my dread. Instead, I dressed in my most elegant black, and wore high-heeled black pumps in order to please Peter and Maria. Then it was time to go to the funeral parlor with Alan and Josephine. Alan had got out of a sickbed and looked pale and half ill; he had a bad sore throat and he was to preach the midnight Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s Chapel.

  Peter’s family, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, started arriving. The rabbi spent half an hour with Peter and his sisters before the service, while the rest of us chatted in the desultory and fragmentary way of such places.

  I felt cold and isolated from reality during the service, which the rabbi conducted with as much dignity as possible, given the setting. Then we got into funeral cars to drive to the cemetery in New Jersey. The rabbi couldn’t come, but the cantor did, and Alan was to say the prayers for the dead at the graveside.

  The traffic was heavy and we crawled slowly through a chill grey day. When we finally reached the cemetery I was appalled to see a carpet of fake green grass carefully covering the good earth which had been dug to make Dorothy’s grave. This isn’t a Jewish custom; the phony green is seen in Christian cemeteries, too, trying to conceal the reality of dust to dust. It is a travesty of truth and only makes death more brutal. What it is covering is earth, clean earth, real earth, which is going to cover the coffin. Grass will grow out of it again, and it will be real grass, not plastic.

  If the Word coming to dwell in human flesh means anything, it means that Dorothy’s flesh is real flesh, that it will now decay; it must be buried, as the seed is buried, before the flower, the plant, the tree, the true flesh, can be born.

  We stood in a small circle around the grave while the cantor and Alan recited the service. When it came to the Kaddish—the beautiful Hebrew prayer for the dead—Alan was able to read and recite it in Hebrew. These rich, extraordinarily beautiful syllables moved me to the heart and were, for me, the reality of this other mother’s funeral.

  When we got back to the city it was time for me to dash down to the seminary, pick up my little grandaughters, and bring them all the way back uptown for the blessing of the crib at the convent of the Sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit, who run the school where they were in kindergarten, and from which their mother was graduated.

  The chapel is small, and in this smallness, holding Charlotte in my arms, with Léna leaning against me, I began to move into Christmas. The Sisters sang Solemn Vespers for Christmas Eve, and their high, clear voices, moving antiphonally back and forth across the chapel, contained for me the same reality I felt in the strong words of the Kaddish. Then we all gathered round the crèche, the children on tiptoe to see the shepherds, the animals, Mary and Joseph and the infant in the crib, the helpless thing containing the brilliance of the galaxies and the shadow of the cross.

  It was impossible, but for the moment I was the White Queen, and the loving and beautiful bodies of my grandaughters made it possible for me to believe: they have not been created to be discarded like dross; the baby lying between the ox and ass affirms the ultimate value of all life.

  After the blessing of the crib there was a party: hot cider and cookies and homemade lemon bread. I had to hurry the little girls into their snowsuits and away from this warmth of love and laughter, and then we almost ran home so that I could cook dinner quickly, and once again it was all the way back downtown to the seminary, where Hugh baby-sat so that the rest of us could go to St. Paul’s. Peter spent the evening with his sisters, but Maria came with us to church.

  And there, in the peace and quiet, Christmas came into even clearer focus for me. We were very early because of Alan, and it was a strangely solemn joy for me to sit there in silence in the beautiful gold and white church where George Washington came to pray after his Inauguration.

  The service began with a concert of chamber music, played on ancient instruments. I closed my eyes as the music wove gently about me. My thoughts wove along with the loveliness of sound. I was sitting between my two daughters in an extraordinary clarity of love, having buried so short a time ago the mortal remains of another mother who had beheld with joy her first-born babe. And the memory was vivid that two thousand years ago a young girl bore a child as helpless as any child, a child who would show us that the greatest power is in weakness, the greatest majesty in meekness, a child whose growing up was then, and always will be, out of tune with the tenor of the times.

  The birth of my own babies (every woman’s Christmas) shows me that the power which staggers with its splendor is a power of love, particular love. Surely it takes no more creative concentration to make a galaxy than a baby. And surely the greatest strength of all is this loving willingness to be weak, to share, to give utterly.

  Oh, yes, according to Scripture the Lord throws a few thunderbolts when he is angry, but by now we must have angered him so much that it’s a wonder he hasn’t wiped us out entirely, at least on this recalcitrant planet. We are surely one of his failures. He loved us enough to come to us, and we didn’t want him, and this incredible visit ended in total failure, and this failure gives me cause to question all failure, and all success.

  And even after failure he continues to be concerned for us. We can, if we will, recognize him as he is manifested in love, total, giving love. And I believe that in one way or another we are all meant to receive him as Mary did.

  The church is quiet. There is no room for sentimentality here after Dorothy’s funeral in the sterile atmosphere of the mortuary. It would be easy now for me to close off, to say no, no, to the pain. But the name of the pain is love, love so great that it was willing to share and redeem our living and dying. It was a very small gift that God gave us for Christmas two thousand years ago: only a baby: only himself.

  In the funeral parlor that morning I had been alienated from myself in cold and darkness; now I was thrown into myself in a loveliness of light.

  When Alan got up into the white and gold pulpit to preach, his voice was hoarse—it was the beginning of an abcess on his tonsils—but his words were clear and part of the light; and the meaning of the Word made flesh was itself the light.

  As we got back to the seminary we sat down to relax and have a drink together, and Hugh said that when he had been putting the children to bed Léna had turned to him and said, “You know, Gum, sometimes I forget to tell you how much I love you, but I do.”


  And that, too, was Christmas.

  This is the irrational season

  When love blooms bright and wild.

  Had Mary been filled with reason

  There’d have been no room for the child.

  3 … Rachel Weeping

  The days between Christmas and Epiphany slide by too quickly. We eat turkey sandwiches and cold stuffing—almost the best part of the turkey. The living room is full of the fragrance of the tree.

  Every day is a festival. The twenty-sixth is St. Stephen’s Day (I find it impossible to think of Stephen as someone who wasn’t quite bright enough to go on beyond the diaconate and make it to the priesthood). The twenty-seventh is the feast of St. John, John who speaks most closely to my understanding, who helps put the mind in the heart to bring wholeness.

  And on the twenty-eighth of December, Holy Innocents’ Day. Holy Innocents’ Day is a stumbling block for me. This is a festival? this remembering the slaughter of all those babies under two years of age whose only wrong was to have been born at a time when three Wise Men came out of the East to worship a great King; and Herod, in panic lest his earthly power be taken away from him by this unknown infant potentate, ordered the execution of all the children who might grow up to dethrone him.

  Jesus grew up to heal and preach at the expense of all those little ones, and I have sometimes wondered if his loving gentleness with small children may not have had something to do with this incredible price. And it causes me to ask painful questions about the love of God.

  St. Catherine of Siena said, “Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the cross, had not love kept him there.”

  What kind of love was that? More like folly. All the disciples except John had abandoned him. His mother was there and a few women as usual, and a gaping mob, also as usual, and some jeering soldiers. That’s all. The cross represented the failure of his earthly mission. God came to the world and the world didn’t want him and threw him out by crucifying him like a common criminal. God—God the Father—loved the world he had created so much that he sent his only son—that spoken Word who called forth something from nothing, galaxies from chaos—he sent him to dwell in human flesh, to accept all earthly limitations, to confine himself in mortal time; and when this beloved son begged in agony that he might be spared the cross, what did the Father do? No thunderbolts, no lightning flash. Silence was the answer to the prayer. NO was the answer. And Jesus of Nazareth died in agony on the cross; the love of God echoing back into the silence of God.