The Irrational Season

by Madeleine L'engle

  At that time I was unmarried. So, yes, I would be free to act according to my belief in what was right, and probably die for it—if I had the courage, the poverty of spirit.

  But if I were married and had children? Would I have the same freedom? Would I have the right to endanger their lives for what I believed was right? I didn’t know the answer then and I don’t know it now; I only know that there is no easy, unequivocal answer. I did learn that celibacy gives a freedom to take mortal risk which is not as easily open to those with families.

  I haven’t often been tested on poverty of spirit. It was easier to be poor in spirit in the early days of the years of our Lord when all Christians were daily tested in their beliefs. Once Christianity became acceptable, and even mandatory, it lost the early poverty of spirit which sustained it when any group gathered together for bread and wine in his Name had to have one ear open for the knock on the door.

  But don’t we ever have opportunities for poverty of spirit, we middle-class, comfortable Americans?

  We do, though what is asked of us is not as spectacular or as dangerous as what was asked of the first Christians. But it is our response to the small things which conditions our response to the large. If I am unable to be poor in spirit in the small tests, I will be equally unable in the great.

  There’s one time I’m sure about, though I didn’t know it while it was going on. It was while our children were little and we were living year round in Crosswicks, and earning our bread and butter—and not much else—running the General Store in the center of the village.

  Hugh’s parents’ golden wedding anniversary came in late August, and the year of this great occasion we left our butcher and the postmistress in charge of the store, and flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a week of family gathering and festivities. We were to stay with Hugh’s parents, and the big old house was going to be stretched to the limits with our family; with Hugh’s sister and brother-in-law, with their two children; and his brother and sister-in-law.

  I knew to my rue that I would not have been my mother-in-law’s choice of a wife for her beloved baby boy. Hugh had, without consultation, chosen to marry a young woman living alone in Greenwich Village in New York, a ‘bachelor girl’ who had already had two books published and was working in the theatre. Added to which, we had been married quietly, without what was in those days considered a proper wedding, and although we were married in church it was in an Episcopal church with the oddly un-Protestant name of St. Chrysostom’s, and this was probably the worst blow of all to my devout Baptist mother-in-law.

  It is easier for daughters-in-law to get on with fathers-in-law. I adored my distinguished father-in-law, known to many who admired him as “Old Judge Franklin,” or “Uncle Ben.” He had white hair and fine-boned features and it was apparent that Hugh was going to look very much like him as he grew older. I had no trouble in loving and being loved by this gentle man.

  But with my mother-in-law I felt inadequate. She already knew that I could not iron a man’s shirt so that it would be fit to wear. I was clumsy and inept as a housekeeper. I knew that I could not begin to come up to her requirements for a wife for her baby, and most of the qualities which had drawn Hugh to me were the very ones she approved of least. And so I tended to be awkward and defensive.

  When we set off for Tulsa I had decided within myself that I was going to do everything possible to make this a happy time for my parents-in-law, both of them. After all, a golden anniversary is a special occasion. So, from the moment we arrived, I really knocked myself out to be pleasant and helpful. I enjoyed my sister-in-law, and we drank countless cups of coffee over breakfast as we planned the rest of the meals for the day. I may not be able to iron a man’s shirt, but I’m a good cook, and cooking is the one part of housekeeping I actively enjoy.

  Our children were having a marvelous time playing with the numerous children on the block. We hardly had to think about them, whereas at home playmates had to be fetched and carried, and this freedom to run out to find someone to play with, without pre-planning, was delightful and new. The older children took care of our three-year-old son, so I was free to cook and do dishes and make beds and kaffee-klatsch.

  It was an eminently successful week. The great day came and went and I was deeply moved by the joy of these two old people who had lived together for fifty years, and whose love for each other was the brightest gift of that golden day.

  When we were on the plane on the way home I suddenly realized that I had been intensely happy all week. Somehow or other I had been given the grace to get out of my own way; all my activities had been unselfconscious; and so, all during that week, I had been given the gift of poverty of spirit without even realizing it.

  And there in Tulsa, in a world in which I felt myself to be inadequate and inept, I was given a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.

  I am slow to understand the obvious. I have been saying the Lord’s Prayer for lo these many years, and only recently did the words thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven click in my mind so that I understood that whenever, somehow or other, we manage to do God’s will, there is the Kingdom of Heaven, right here and now.

  So I am taught by the first of the Beatitudes and move on to the second: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

  Everything in the secular world tries to keep us from the essential comfort of mourning. Even comfort has been diluted to mean coziness, rather than comfort, with strength.

  My English boarding school trained me to feel that any show of emotion is bad form; no matter what has happened, we must keep a stiff upper lip. Tears, from either the male or the female of the species, are to be repressed.

  When my father died, my last year in boarding school, I was true to this training. After all, I was president of my class and president of Student Council. I had a position to uphold, and uphold it I did. I was much too brave to shed tears.

  It was a long time before I could write the following lines, on the anniversary of my father’s death:

  Boarding school: someone cried jubilantly,

  “There’s a letter for you! Didn’t you see it?”

  The letter was from my mother. My father

  was in the hospital with pneumonia.

  This was the autumn before the miracle drugs were discovered.

  In any case, his lungs were already half eaten away from mustard gas.

  I did not tell anyone. I tried to pray. Perhaps I knew how better then than now.

  I only whispered God’s name; then, Father; then, God.

  In the evenings we did our lessons in a basement room with many desks,

  and windows looking out on the Charleston street.

  Little black boys with wildly painted faces and bobbing jack-o’lanterns

  peered in on us and shrieked, and their laughter

  is all I remember of Hallowe’en.

  I sent Father a poem, knowing it would not reach him in time.

  The next afternoon the headmistress sent for me; my father was very ill.

  I was to take the train right after the evening meal.

  It was the night when the Head Girl was to say grace. How odd

  that I should remember it, and that all that seemed important

  was that my voice be steady.

  One of the teachers took me to the train.

  I tried to read Jane Eyre.

  When my parents had put me on the train for school

  my last words as I climbed up the high step onto the train were to

  my father:

  “Be good.” I remember: the last words, and my father standing

  on the station platform in a rain-darkened trench coat, and the rain

  beating on the dirty glass of the station roof

  so that we saw each other only darkly.

  I tried to read Jane Eyre and to pray to the rhythm of the wheels:

  Please, God, do whatever is best for Father. Please, God, do whatever

  is best

/>   please

  God

  My two Godmothers met me. I asked, “How is Father?”

  It took the whole drive home before they told me.

  I was taken to see my father in the manner of the times.

  I did not know him.

  I closed my eyes and stood there

  seeing him better, then.

  My mother and I talked quite calmly

  about things like toothpaste.

  I remember that. I did not cry.

  It was thought that I did not care.

  I was a human being and a young one.

  We cannot always cry at the right time

  and who is to say which time is right?

  I did not cry till three years later

  when I first fell, most inappropriately,

  in love.

  But I began, after the tears,

  to know my father.

  When we are grown up enough

  compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses

  that we are not afraid of tears

  then at last

  we can say

  Father

  I love you

  Father.

  It would have been better for both Mother and me if we had been able to break down, to hold each other and weep out our grief. Perhaps Mother was able to cry when she sent me back to school—I was home only a few days, and I was uncomfortably grateful to escape back to the familiar structure of boarding-school life where I was expected to be controlled and brave and could thus repress the grief with which eventually I had to come to terms. Because of this escape into repression, I went through a very dark period which might have been avoided had my training allowed me to grieve at the appropriate time.

  Odd: my training was nominally Christian; my boarding schools were Anglican, and in the English school there was daily Morning and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. So why was I discouraged from natural grief? My grief was for myself, for my mother, not for my father. Father had been ill and in pain for a long time. Father, I somehow knew, was all right. But Mother’s life, and mine, had been totally disrupted. Mother no longer had the delightful companion with whom she had traveled all over the world for nearly thirty years. I no longer had the father whose intellect and honor I totally trusted.

  So perhaps it was not strange, when I went to college the following autumn, that I was through with the organized religious establishment. It really hadn’t given me any help in time of crisis.

  Freshman year at college was all right. Everything was new. I enjoyed my studies and the intellectual stimulation with which I was surrounded. I made casual friends. But I do not think that I felt anything. Mother and I spent the summer following freshman year at a rented cottage on the beach, for the old beach house which was so important to me had had to be sold after Father’s death. It was a good summer. I worked on a novel, and walked for hours on the beach at night with the companion who is still my friend of the right hand, or canoed with her in the dark lagoons, rejoicing in her knowledge of the flora and fauna of the subtropics. It was a happy summer but there was a seed of unease under the happiness.

  Sophomore year came and I was doing well at college, though I had warnings which I did not understand and so could not heed. But I remember one or two of them. As a newly elected class officer I had to make a long list of phone calls, and as I stood there by the phone in the dorm hall, I thought to myself,—I am calling all these people, and that means that I am real.

  An even stronger warning came during my daily hour in one of the piano practice rooms. I was working on a Mozart sonata and it became a compulsion with me that I play it through without striking a false note. I had to play it through without making a mistake or I would die.

  I must have been in a deep depression for some time before I realized what was happening. My panic fear of death alternated with a state of deadly despair when I would sit and stare into nothing and think nothing and feel nothing. On the surface I was functional, and nobody noticed anything.

  I knew nothing about psychiatrists, despite the fact that I was taking a psychology course, and it never occurred to me to go anywhere to ask for help. After all, my Establishment training had taught me to Be Brave, and Do It Myself. I had not yet come across Dean Inge’s marvelous saying: God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.

  I’m not sure what got me out of the dark pit. Writing helped. I moved, that year, into a new vein in my work, writing more out of my own experience than I ever had before, and becoming conscious of style and structure. And I fell most inappropriately in love, and loving and being loved freed me to weep. At last I was able to shed the tears which I had been repressing for so long. By springtime when I went to my practice room in Sage Hall I no longer felt the bony hand of death at my throat if I made a mistake in the Mozart sonata, and I had emerged from that black, killing depression I can never forget. And I was no longer ashamed of legitimate tears—never tears used as blackmail, or tears of self-pity, but tears when it is proper for a human being to cry.

  I’m a little better about mourning, now, though not enough. There never seems to be a right time to cry, and then emotion builds up, and suddenly something inappropriate will cause it to overflow, and there I am with tears uncontrollably welling up at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

  I pray for courage to mourn so that I may be strengthened. There is much to mourn, for we feel grief not only for the physical death of one we love or admire. I mourn for the loss of dreams and the presence of nightmare. On a small freighter, passing the Statue of Liberty (‘with her crown of thorns,’ a friend of mine commented), I mourned the loss of the dream which was responsible for the presence of that great lady. When I was a little girl I loved hearing of all the French children saving their pennies; the Statue of Liberty was dreamed of and paid for by children who were enthralled by the idea of a country which welcomed all the poor of the world and gave them opportunities which could not be found anywhere else.

  Until I can mourn the loss of a dream I cannot be comforted enough to have vision for a fresh one. I have not often mourned well, and here again my children teach me. Hugh says that when I have finished a book I can no longer separate what is imaginary in it and what is fact, and he’s largely right. There is a brief sequence in Meet the Austins which came from experience, but for a few years we had a statistically horrendous number of deaths to mourn, and I’m not sure whose this was—but Rob’s prayer is exactly as it was in real life.

  The voice is Vicky’s, and I am Vicky, far more than Mrs. Austin, who is a much better mother than I could ever hope to be.

  “When Mother closed the book, we turned out the lights and said prayers. We have a couple of family prayers and Our Father and then we each say our own God Bless. Rob is very personal about his God Bless. He puts in anything he feels like, and Mother and Daddy had to scold Suzy to stop her from teasing him about it. Last Christmas, for instance, in the middle of his God Bless, he said, ‘Oh, God bless Santa Claus, and bless you, too, God.’” (See what I mean?) “So I guess that night we were all waiting for him to say something about Uncle Hal. I was afraid maybe he wouldn’t, and I wanted him to, badly.

  “‘God bless Mother and Daddy and John and Vicky and Suzy,’ he said, ‘and Mr. Rochester and Colette and Grandfather and all the cats and Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and. Uncle Hal and …’ and then he stopped and said, ‘and all the cats and Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and Uncle Hal,’ and then he stopped again and said, ‘and especially Uncle Hal, God, and make his plane have taken him to another planet to live so he’s all right because you can do that, God, John says you can, and we all want him to be all right because we love him, and God bless me and make me a good boy.’”

  At the age of four he had gone through the acceptance of grief; it was not easy for him to keep Uncle Hal in his prayers that night, with sudden death having taken Uncle Hal out of his grasp; it would have been easier to have left h
im out of the prayer entirely, and I was afraid he was going to. But he had the courage to mourn and be comforted, and so I was comforted, too.

  The following conversation also is a literal reproduction of an actual one.

  “Rob slowly got out of my bed. He stood up on the foot of it and said to Mother, ‘Do you ever cry?’

  “‘Of course, Rob,’ Mother said. ‘I cry just like anybody else.’

  “‘But I never see you cry,’ Rob said.

  “‘Mothers have to try not to cry,’ Mother said. ‘Now run along to your own room.’”

  I suppose Mothers do have to try not to cry. But never to say that they don’t cry. Would it have been better or worse for the children if I had cried in front of them at this death? I don’t know. They did know that it mattered to me, though. I didn’t try to hide that. And as always whenever anything big happened to us, good or bad, I piled everybody and the dogs into the car and drove up to the top of Mohawk Mountain, four miles away, to watch the stars come out and talk. I hope that it helped the children. I know that it helped me.

  Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

  The meek? Meekness is not a quality we value much nowadays. People of my generation think of Mr. Milquetoast, and I just checked with a high-school senior and she laughed and said yes, that’s her idea of meekness. It goes along with being a coward, and if you turn the other cheek it’s because you don’t dare fight back, not because you’re strong enough to have the courage to turn and let someone hit you again.

  Is this what the Beatitudes are talking about? I looked up meek in a theological dictionary, and all it had was meek vs pride, but I found that in itself helpful.

  It was pride which caused the fall of man, that hubris which was the tragic flaw in all the heroes in Greek drama. And in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, too. Faust in Western literature has become the prototype of the prideful man, and fascinated Goethe as much as he did Marlowe or Boito or.… Shakespeare understood hubris with the mind in the heart. Macbeth, Mark Antony, Prince Hal—all are potentially warrior saints who are felled by pride.