Miracle on 10th Street
Page 5
and make worlds, too,
along with you.
The Light of the Stars
One time, when I was little more than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors, where I had my first look at the stars.
It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.” The night sky, the constant rolling of breakers against the shore, the stupendous light of the stars—all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small child’s world which was all that I had known thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation; I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension, beyond any human comprehension.
This early experience was freeing, rather than daunting, and since it was the first, it has been the foundation for all other such glimpses of glory. And it is probably why the sound of the ocean and the sight of the stars give me more healing, more whole-ing, than anything else.
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.
An Icon of Creation
Stars have always been an icon of creation for me. During my high school years, when I was at my grandmother’s beach cottage for vacations, I loved to lie on a sand dune and watch the stars come out over the ocean, often focusing on the brilliant grace of one particular star. Back in school, I wrote these lines:
I gaze upon the steady star
That comes from where I cannot see,
And something from that distant far
Pierces the waiting core of me
And fills me with an aweful pain
That I must count not loss but gain.
If something from infinity
Can touch and strike my very soul,
Does that which comes from out of me
Reach and pierce its far off goal?
Very young verses, but they contain the germ of an understanding of the interdependence of all Creation.
A Deepening Vision
During those weeks in Chamonix we went everywhere on skis, the simplest method of moving on the snow-packed streets, and I learned more complex skiing on the slopes above the villa. We spent a memorable day on the Mer de Glace, and those hours of walking over a sea of ice were a revelation of a cold and unearthly beauty I had never before seen. My own vision was deepened because I saw the beauty through the eyes of my parents; their wholehearted response took us all beyond the pain and confusion which were ever present in the villa. One night we rode for an hour in a horse-drawn sleigh, snow beneath us, moonlight and starlight above us, the horse’s mane streaming coldly in the wind, while we were kept warm under fur robes. Father hardly coughed at all; Mother relaxed and enjoyed the beauty and the speed. I moved back into my dream world during that ride, not as an escape, but as a respite; I did not try to take the fairy tale with me back into the villa.
Revealing Structure
Strangely I have found in my own life that it is only through a wintry spirituality that I am able to affirm summer and sunshine. A friend wrote me recently, “Winter reveals structure.” Only as the structure is firmly there are we able to dress it with the lovely trappings of spring, budding leaves, rosy blossoms. Winter is the quiet, fallow time when the earth prepares for the rebirth of spring. Unless the seed is put into the ground to die, it cannot be born.
A Promise of Spring
It’s cold and clear, but there’s a promise of spring as I look out the window and down the street where the trees in Riverside Park are faintly blurred against the sky as they are losing their winter starkness and are preparing to bud. I’m ready for new green and warmer breezes. Bion tells me that at Crosswicks the green shoots of daffodils have pushed up through the snow.
“Anesthetics”
Our youngest child, when he first became conscious of vocabulary, often did violence to words in absurd little ways which delighted us. Hugh and I listened seriously, lest we make him self-conscious or think we were laughing at him. We needn’t have worried; he plunged into vocabulary like a seagull into water, entirely fascinated with whatever he came up with. Even the laughter of his elder siblings did not deter him, and he is now happily malapropping in Latin, French, and German. One day, aged seven, he came home from school highly indignant because the boys’ gym period had been curtailed. “We only had ten minutes of gym,” he said, “and that was all anesthetics.”
This was not just something to laugh at; it sent me back to my own, dreaded gym periods where anesthetics rather than calisthenics would have been more than welcome. Any team I was on lost automatically; when teams were chosen, mine was the last name to be reluctantly called out, and the team which had the bad luck to get me let out uninhibited groans. I now have this emotion at my fingertips if I need it for a story I’m writing; or if I need it to comfort some child who is going through a similar experience. It does us good to listen to things differently.
I remember “anesthetics” not only because it reminded me of my own pains over gym but because this small, delectable laugh came while I was in the middle of a very bad period, literarily speaking, and needed any reason for laughter, no matter how trivial. A Wrinkle in Time was on its long search for a publisher. Finally one, who had kept the manuscript for three months, turned it down on the Monday before Christmas. I remember sitting on the foot of our bed, tying up Christmas presents, and feeling cold and numb: anesthetized. I was congratulating myself on being controlled and grown-up, and found out only later that I’d made a mess of the Christmas presents; I’d sent some heady perfume to a confirmed bachelor, and a sober necktie to a sixteen-year-old girl. So I called Theron, my agent: “Send the manuscript back to me. Nobody’s ever going to take it, it’s too peculiar, and it just isn’t fair to the family.” He didn’t want to send it back, but I was cold and stubborn, and finally he gave in.
My mother was with us for the holidays, and shortly after Christmas I had a small party for her with some of her old friends. One of them, Hester Stover, more than ever dear to me now, said, “Madeleine, you must meet my friend, John Farrar.” I made some kind of disgruntled noise, because I never wanted to see another publisher; I was back to thinking I ought to learn to bake cherry pie. But Hester, going to a good deal of trouble, insisted on setting up an appointment, and I took the subway down to John Farrar’s office. I just happened to have that rather bulky manuscript under my arm.
He couldn’t have been kinder or warmer. He knew some of my other work and was generous enough to say that he liked it, and he asked me what I was up to now. I ex
plained that I had a book that I kind of liked, but nobody else did, or if they did, they were afraid of it.
I left it with him. Within two weeks I was having lunch with him and Hal Vursell, and signing a contract. “But don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t do well,” they told me. “We’re publishing it because we love it.”
It is a right and proper Cinderella story. And I’m sure Cinderella appreciated her ball gown more because she’d been forced to sit by the ashes in rags for a long time before her fairy godmother arrived.
One king’s epiphany
I shall miss the stars.
Not that I shall stop looking
as they pattern their wild wills each night
across an inchoate sky, but I must see them with a different awe.
If I trace their flames’ ascending and descending—
relationships and correspondences—
then I deny what they have just revealed.
The sum of their oppositions, juxtapositions,
led me to the end of all sums:
a long journey, cold, dark, and uncertain,
toward the ultimate equation.
How can I understand? If I turn back from this,
compelled to seek all answers in the stars,
then this—Who—they have led me to
is not the One they said: they will have lied.
No stars are liars!
My life on their truth!
If they had lied about this
I could never trust their power again.
But I believe they showed the truth,
truth breathing,
truth Whom I have touched with my own hands,
worshipped with my gifts.
If I have bowed, made
obeisance to this final arithmetic,
I cannot ask the future from the stars without betraying
the One whom they have led me to.
It will be hard not to ask, just once again,
to see by mathematical forecast where he will grow,
where go, what kingdom conquer, what crown wear.
But would it not be going beyond truth
(the obscene reductio ad absurdum)
to lose my faith in truth once, and once for all
revealed in the full dayspring of the sun?
I cannot go back to night.
O Truth, O small and unexpected thing,
You have taken so much from me.
How can I bear wisdom’s pain?
But I have been shown: and I have seen.
Yes. I shall miss the stars.
GLORIOUS MYSTERY
Who is that tiny baby? Even the Creator, almighty and terrible and incomprehensible!…Whose arms encircled the world with…grace.
—from “Falling into Sentimentality” and “Mary speaks”
The ordinary so extraordinary
He came, quietly impossible,
Out of a young girl’s womb,
A love as amazingly marvelous
As his bursting from the tomb.
This child was fully human,
This child was wholly God.
The hands of All Love fashioned him
Of mortal flesh and bone and blood,
The ordinary so extraordinary
The stars shook in the sky
As the Lord of all the universe
Was born to live, to love, to die.
He came, quietly impossible:
Nothing will ever be the same:
Jesus, the Light of every heart—
The God we know by Name.
The Glorious Mystery
Rise up, with willing feet
Go forth, the Bridegroom meet:
Alleluia!
Bear through the night
Your well-trimmed light,
Speed forth to join the marriage rite.
All hail, Incarnate Lord,
Our crown, and our reward!
Alleluia!
We haste along,
In pomp of song,
And gladsome join the marriage throng.
Lamb of God, the heav’ns adore thee,
And men and angels sing before thee,
With harp and cymbal’s clearest tone.
By the pearly gates in wonder
We stand, and swell the voice of thunder
That echoes round thy dazzling throne.
No vision ever brought,
No ear hath ever caught
Such rejoicing:
We raise the song, We swell the throng,
To praise thee ages all along. Amen.
—“Wachet Auf (Sleepers, Wake)” by Philip Nicolai; translated by Catherine Winkworth
You shall know him when he comes
Not by any din of drums
Nor by the vantage of His airs
Nor by anything he wears—
Neither by his crown—
Nor his gown—
For his Presence known shall be
By the Holy Harmony
That His coming makes in thee.
—Unknown 15th-century writer
Who was he, this tiny babe whose birth we celebrate at Christmastime, whose Resurrection lightens our hearts at Easter, and whose coming in glory we await?
He was born, as we are all born, of water and blood, of a human mother, a young girl whose courage is awesome. It was a difficult birth in those days when often women and infants did not survive childbirth. Mary was not able to have her baby at home. Her mother was not able to be with her, to comfort her. There was no trained midwife or doctor. She lived in a small country, an outpost in the Roman Empire, and when Rome declared a census, there was no excuse: Mary and Joseph were required to go to Bethlehem and register, because Joseph was of the house of David.
The closest we can come to understanding what it is like to be controlled by an alien power is to think of Poland or France under Nazi domination; of countries such as Albania, taken over by the Soviet Union. The ordinary people, living and working and loving and birthing, don’t get consulted on these matters.
Mary and Joseph were just such ordinary people. Joseph was a carpenter, and solidly middle class. And when Rome said, “Come and be counted,” they had no choice.
And so, as the Gospel of Luke tells us, it was while they were in Bethlehem, that the time came for Mary to deliver. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
The manger was likely in a cave in the hills, rather than in the kind of barn we see today. When I was in Jerusalem, I saw similar caves for domestic animals, built into the hillside, and outlined with the golden stones of that blue and gold land.
Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere 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!
O that birth forever blessed,
When the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bore the Saviour of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed his sacred face,
Evermore and evermore!
O ye heights of heav’n adore him;
Angel hosts, his praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before him,
And extol our God and King;
Let no tongue on earth
be silent,
Every voice in concert ring,
Evermore and evermore!
Thee let old men, thee let young men,
Thee let boys in chorus sing;
Matrons, virgins, little maidens,
With glad voices answering:
Let their guileless songs re-echo,
And the heart its music bring,
Evermore and evermore!
Christ, to thee with God the Father,
And, O Holy Ghost, to thee,
Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving,
And unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory,
Evermore and evermore!
—Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius; translated by John Mason Neale, Henry Williams Baker
This ancient hymn, written in the early centuries of Christendom, makes it very clear that Christ always was. He didn’t suddenly appear in a manger in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. He was. He is. He will be. This total isness is more than our finite minds can readily understand. It is nothing that can be comprehended in the language of literal thinking. But in his Gospel, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, I thank you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them to children.
If we turn away from the child, the poet, the artist in ourselves, we lose the ability to believe the glorious mysteries that lift us from being nothing more than a few nearly valueless molecules to children of light, creatures called to create along with our Creator.
So we rejoice in the mystery of this tiny baby. We give presents to each other as reminders of his great gift of himself to us. We trim the Christmas tree, although the Christmas tree was not originally a Christian symbol, but came out of northern Europe and the worship of different gods. But any affirmation of love and beauty can become Christian, because Christianity is totally committed to incarnation. The decorated tree may have secular origins, but if we truly believe in incarnation, then everything secular can also be sacred. So we trim our trees and make them sparkle with light as a symbol that light is stronger than darkness, and even in a world as dark as ours, the light still shines, and cannot be extinguished.