The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  That is love? How can we understand it? Do we even want it?

  I sometimes get very angry at God, and I do not feel guilty about it, because the anger is an affirmation of faith. You cannot get angry at someone who is not there. So the raging is for me a necessary step toward accepting that God’s way of loving is more real than man’s, that this irrational, seemingly unsuccessful love is what it’s all about, is what created the galaxies, is what keeps the stars in their courses, is what gives all life value and meaning.

  But what kind of meaning? It’s not a meaning that makes any sense in a world geared to success and self-fulfillment.

  Remember the children in the school bus hit by a train? Remember the Vietnamese orphans dying in a flaming plane? What about all the holy innocents throughout time? It was this extraordinary God of love who personally killed all the first-born of the Egyptians in order to belabor a point which surely should have been obvious long before.

  First God changed the waters of the Egyptians’ river into blood; then he sent a plague of frogs which weakened Pharaoh’s nerve considerably so that he almost let Moses and the Israelites go; then God sent mosquitoes against the Egyptians, and then gadflies, and then he killed all the Egyptians’ livestock, but spared the beasts of the children of Israel. Then God sent boils to torment the Egyptians, and Pharaoh said, “Go ahead, leave in safety,” and God, mind you, God, hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he changed his mind and would not let the people go.

  The boils were followed by hail, and Pharaoh begged Moses to stop the thunder and hail and he would let them go, and God stopped the storm and then he hardened Pharaoh’s heart again. And this kept right on. Next God sent locusts, and next he blotted out the light of the sun and sent darkness over the Egyptians, and whenever Pharaoh was ready to let the children of Israel go, God hardened his heart again, so that God could send one more horrible plague, and the worst of these was the death of the first-born children of the Egyptians, and these children were no more sinful or guilty than the children in the school bus or in the huge plane or the children under two years of age slaughtered by Herod.

  Only a story? But there is no better way to search for the truth of history than to look in poetry and story.

  This story really bothers me. I struggle with it.

  Sometimes in this groping dark of knowing my not-knowing

  I am exhausted with the struggle to believe in you, O God.

  Your ways are not our ways. You sent evil angels to the Egyptians

  and killed countless babies in order that Pharaoh—

  whose heart was hardened by you (that worries me, Lord)

  might be slow to let the Hebrew children go.

  You turned back the waters of the Red Sea

  and your Chosen People went through on dry land

  and the Egyptians were drowned, men with wives and children,

  young men with mothers and fathers (your ways are not our ways),

  and there was much rejoicing, and the angels laughed and sang

  and you stopped them, saying, “How can you laugh

  when my children are drowning?”

  When your people reached Mount Sinai you warned Moses

  not to let any of them near you lest you break forth and kill them.

  You are love—if you are God—and you command us to love,

  and yet you yourself turn men to evil, and you wipe out nations

  with one sweep of the hand—the Amorites and the Hittites and the

  Perizzites—

  gone, gone, all gone. Sometimes it seems that any means will do.

  And yet—all these things are but stories told about you by fallen man,

  and they are part of the story—for your ways are not our ways—

  but they are not the whole story. You are our author,

  and we try to listen and set down what you say, but we all suffer

  from faulty hearing and we get the words wrong.

  One small enormous thing: you came to us as one of us

  and lived with us and died for us and descended into hell for us

  and burst out into life for us—:

  and now do you hold Pharaoh in your arms?

  The love of God reveals itself in extraordinary ways. What kind of love kept him nailed to the cross? What kind of a Father did Jesus of Nazareth have?

  Are we too intellectual and too reasonable to understand? Jesus said, “I bless you, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.”

  We’re a learned and clever generation, we of the late twentieth century. Those of us with the heritage of the Anglican Communion are a learned and clever group of people. Did those first-born of the Egyptians, those Holy Innocents in Bethlehem, those Vietnamese orphans in the flaming plane know something that God is deliberately hiding from us? Why would a God of love do such things, permit such things? What does all this teach us about how we are to love one another?

  For some time my husband played the father in The Diary of Anne Frank, the father who was the only one of the group of people hiding from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam who survived concentration camp. One evening while they were still in hiding, they heard a terrible crash downstairs, and they thought the Nazis had found them, and they held their breaths in terror. Nothing. Silence.

  So the father goes downstairs to investigate, and they all know that he may never come back. While they are in an agony of waiting, the mother drops to her knees and says the 121st Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.… She says it all, all those comforting words: The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth and even forevermore. But the Lord didn’t preserve them. He let the Nazis find them and send them to concentration camp and they all died there except the father, a whole group of innocent people guilty of nothing except being chosen of God. The mother who had cried for help died. Anne, the innocent child, died. God, the God they trusted, let it happen. In human terms it would seem evident that the love and faith of the mother who cried out for help was far greater than the love of God.

  Do I want this kind of God? Until I saw my husband in The Diary of Anne Frank—and I saw it several times—the 121st Psalm used to be strong and comforting to me. Now I say it daily with a kind of terror. Hugh’s performance in that play brought about a crisis in my understanding of the love of God, and the saying of the Psalm is a cry in the dark that I still affirm that God’s love is more real than mine.

  For men make the cozy and comfy promises; not God.

  Yes, but how can a God of love stand by and let Anne Frank die, and all the holy innocents in the children’s leukemia wards and in rat-infested tenements? Why doesn’t he stop the slaughter? If he’s God, he can do anything. What kind of love is this?

  Okay, Madeleine, but if God interferes every time we do wrong, where’s our free will?

  But Anne Frank didn’t do wrong.

  But the Nazis did. When they built concentration camps that was a very big wrong and a lot of innocent people suffered. But it was man who did the wrong, not God.

  But he could have stopped it.

  And if he did? Do I want to adore a God who allows me no free will, and therefore no potential for either evil or good? Do I want a cosmic dictator, ruling a closed, finished cosmos?

  Sometimes when I think of our battlefields and slums and insane asylums, I’m not sure, and I ask: why does God treat in such a peculiar way the creatures he loves so much that he sent his own Son to them?

  And what about that son whose love kept him on the cross?

  Deep in our hearts most of us really wish that Jesus hadn’t resisted the temptations; if he had only been a reasonable son of man and turned those stones into bread, then all the poor of the earth could be fed and we wouldn’t have inner cities or ghettos in this country, or children with bloated bellies dying of starvation in India or Cambodia or Venezuela. If he had only come down from the cros
s in a blaze of power, then we wouldn’t have any trouble understanding the Resurrection—why did he have to be so quiet about it?—and we wouldn’t be afraid of death. If he had only worshipped the prince of this world, he could have ruled and ordered the earth, and legislated our lives so that we needn’t make decisions, and he could have taken away all pain (there is no coming to life without pain) and organized our old age so that we could be senior citizens in some happy home, going on happy buses for happy excursions.… Our churches and government agencies think that this kind of manipulation is a good thing, and so they’re trying to do it themselves, since Jesus failed to take the opportunity offered him.

  Why, why did he turn it down?

  All those innocent little children …

  All the hungry …

  All the old men and women struggling to live alone and being mugged as they bring in their inadequate groceries (we see it on television every night), little girls raped and murdered, little boys mutilated …

  cancer and blindness and senility …

  battlefields and slums and insane asylums …

  He could have stopped it all if only he’d listened to Satan in the wilderness. What kind of love is he teaching us? And who are we in the Church listening to? The tempter, or the one who put the temptations behind him? Oh, he healed a few blind people and lepers, but certainly not all, and he drove out a few unclean spirits, but not all, and he announced that the poor will be always with us.

  No wonder the Church often thinks that he was wrong and turns, with ardent social activism, to the promises of Satan. But why hasn’t the social activism worked? It ought to have worked. But the social activism of the sixties has, after all, produced the seventies, which are galloping to their anguished end. Have we, then, failed—because we’ve fed only a few starving children, rescued only a few war orphans, taken care, like Mother Thersa of Calcutta, of only a few indigent dying people?

  And who is this Church I keep referring to? It is not limited to my own denomination, or even the Anglican Communion. When I talk of the Church I mean all of us—Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, all, all of the denominations and all of the sects, all who in any organized way call themselves Christians.

  St. Paul said, “I was given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to beat me and stop me from getting too proud. About this thing, I have pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave me, but he has said, ‘My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness.’”

  And there, for me, is a clue, another tiny piece in the incomprehensible puzzle. Man’s pride and God’s weakness. And if this is to make any sense to me at all, it must be in terms of my own experience, not what I read about, see on television, but what touches me personally.

  Of course, that’s what this book is about. It may be a small and inadequate response of experience, but it’s my own. My profession is writing—stories, novels, fantasy, poetry, thoughts. Writing is not just my job, but a vocation, a total commitment. I started to write when I was five, and as I look back on fifty years of this work, I am forced to accept that my best work has been born from pain; I am forced to see that my own continuing development involves pain. It is pain and weakness and constant failures which keep me from pride and help me to grow. The power of God is to be found in weakness, but it is God’s power.

  He has a strange way of loving; it is not man’s way, but I find evidence in my own experience that it is better than man’s way, and that it leads to fuller life, and to extraordinary joy.

  Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed to the cross had not love kept him there.

  Because I am a writer I live by symbol, and because I was born in the Western World my symbolism is largely Judaeo-Christian, and I find it valid, and the symbol which gives me most strength is that of bread and wine. Through the darkness of my uncomprehending, through my pain and weakness, only thus may I try to become open to God’s love as I move to the altar to receive the body and blood, and accept with friend and neighbor, foe and stranger, the tangible assurance that this love is real.

  It is real, but it is not like our love.

  I keep thinking about those Holy Innocents, all those little ones who died that Jesus might live.

  And one night I woke up thinking about the nobleman from Capernaum whose son Jesus saved from death, and I wondered if perhaps this man’s first-born son might not have been one of the slaughtered little ones, and the memory of that death would stay with him as long as he lived, even if he became a very old man.…

  … AND THE OLD MAN BECAME AS A LITTLE CHILD …

  He could not sleep.

  The tomb was dark, and the stone heavy that sealed it.

  He could not sleep for all the innocent blood he had seen shed.

  He was an old man. Too old for tears.

  Not yet young enough for sleep. He waited and watched.

  Thrice he had spoken to him whose body had been sealed

  within the tomb, thrice had the old man spoken,

  he who was a disciple, but not one of the twelve,

  older, gentler in all ways,

  and tired, worn with time and experience and the shedding of blood.

  He came from Capernaum

  and after that his son

  who touched the edge of death

  was drawn back from the pit

  and made whole,

  the old man returned to Jesus and said,

  “O thou, who hast today been the consolation of my household,

  wast also its desolation.

  Because of you my first-born died

  in that great shedding of innocent blood.

  Nevertheless, I believe

  though I know not what

  or how or why

  for it has not been revealed to me.

  I only know that one manchild was slain

  and one made to live.”

  And a second time he spoke

  when the Lord kept the children beside him

  and suffered them not to be taken away:

  “These are the ones that are left us,

  but where, Lord, is the Kingdom of Heaven?

  Where, Lord, are the others?

  What of them? What of them?”

  And he wept.

  And a third time he spoke

  when the Lord turned to Jerusalem

  and laughter turned to steel

  and he moved gravely

  towards the hour that was prepared

  and the bitterness of the cup:

  then the old man said,

  “All your years you have lived

  under the burden of their blood.

  Their life was the price of yours.

  Have you borne the knowledge and the cost?

  During those times

  when you have gone silent in the midst of laughter

  have you remembered all the innocence

  slaughtered that you might be with us now?

  When you have gone up into the mountain apart to pray,

  have you remembered that their lives were cut down

  for your life, and so ours?

  Rachel’s screams still shatter the silence

  and I cannot sleep at night for remembering.

  Do you ever forget your children that sleep?

  When will you bring them out of the sides of the earth

  and show mercy unto them?

  Who will embrace them until you come?

  I cannot sleep.

  But because I have already tasted of the cup

  I cannot turn from you now.

  I, who live, praise you.

  Can those who have gone before you into the pit

  celebrate you or hope for your truth?

  Tell me, tell me, for I am an old man

  and lost in the dark cloud of my ignorance.

  Nevertheless, blessed is he

  whom thou hast chosen and taken, O Lord.”

  He did not speak again.<
br />
  But he was there when the rocks were rent

  the veil of the temple torn in twain

  the sun blackened by clouds

  the earth quaked with darkness

  the sky was white and utterly empty.

  The city gaped with loss.

  Then, out of the silence,

  the Lord went

  bearing the marks of nails and spear

  moving swiftly through the darkness

  into the yawning night of the pit.

  There he sought first

  not as one might have supposed

  for Moses or Elias

  but for the children

  who had been waiting for him.

  So, seeking, he was met

  by the three Holy Children

  the Young Men

  burning bright

  transforming the fire into dew as they cried:

  “Blessed art thou, O Lord God, forevermore.”

  And all the children came running

  and offering to him their blood

  and singing: “With sevenfold heat

  did the Chaldean tyrant in his rage

  cause the furnace to be heated

  for the Godly Ones

  who wiped our blood like tears

  when we were thrust here

  lost and unknowing.

  The Holy Three

  waited here to receive us

  and to teach us to sing your coming

  forasmuch as thou art pitiful

  and lovest mankind.”

  So they held his hand

  and gave him their kisses and their blood

  and, laughing, led him by the dragon

  who could not bear their innocence

  and thrashed with his tail

  so that the pit trembled with his rage.

  But even his roaring could not drown their song:

  “For unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship,