The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  Home!

  Our tongues and our muscles were suddenly freed and we piled out of the car and in through the garage and into the house, into the kitchen.

  It was home and I remembered it with every bit of me, and yet in a funny way it was completely different. I can’t quite explain. Sizes weren’t the same. When I first looked at things they seemed smaller, and yet when I came back to them and looked at them again they seemed the same size they ought to be, and it would be as though we’d never been away at all….

  And then we were dashing all over the house to our special places….We ran all the way around the house, looking at it from all four points of the compass, and then back into the house again, and Mother had a record on the phonograph, and the phone kept ringing, all the kids to ask us about our vacation, and the office phone, because Daddy’s patients knew he was home again.

  Mother called us to help, and she was getting dinner and we realized that it was dinner time and we were all starved, so we set the table and I mashed the potatoes and Suzy cut up the tomatoes for salad and Rob went around the table giving everybody three napkins. Then we were all around the table holding hands to say grace, and we said the kind of grace we always do on special occasions, each of us in turn saying our own, and when it came to Rob he said, “Thank you God that we are home, and thank you for my good dinner, for the meat and mashed potatoes and gravy and ’sparagus, oh, no, God, I forgot I don’t like ’sparagus, and thank you for the milk and rolls and butter. Amen.”

  I don’t think any writer could make up that particular grace, and indeed it is a homecoming grace said by my son when he was seven.

  Home. And Vicky was right. Things look smaller. They aren’t quite the same. And then we readjust to them as they are. Why do things look smaller? What does our memory of home do to us?

  There is a theory that angelic events in the heavens are re-enacted in a smaller way on earth. Angels, of course, are larger than we are, and the biblical angels are not pretty little females with feathered wings. Angels are always home. They have never left—except for the fallen angels, of course, and their homesickness must be devastating.

  In the beginning of the Book of Job, the sons of God are gathered, and Satan is one of them, and God asks him what he is doing, and Satan replies, “Oh, walking to and fro on the earth seeing what I can do” (1:7, adapted). Satan has left heaven, has fought with the archangel Michael, has fallen, plummeting, to the earth (Jesus says, in the tenth chapter of Luke, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” What does that do to ordinary chronological time?) and yet when the sons of God are gathered together, Satan is still one of them. And that must make his homesickness even more terrible.

  Despite our clumsy efforts at inclusive language, Scripture was written in a masculine world, which is a sign of things skewed and out of order. Where were the daughters of God? But we can’t rewrite Scripture, though there have been some forlorn attempts to do so. The God of Scripture is seen through male eyes (Jacob, Moses, David), so what we are given is only a partial vision of God.

  Jesus gave us the full vision. In his lifetime he astoundingly reconciled male and female, harmonizing all aspects of the human being. This terrified the religious leaders of his day, and still seems to terrify many people. Will we be ready for home before we human beings, male and female, know each other as our Creator intended when, in verse 24ff. of the first chapter of Genesis,

  God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.”…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

  Male and female, made to love each other. That’s the first story of the creation of us human beings, male and female created simultaneously to be the image of God. Eve coming from Adam’s rib is a completely different story and perhaps more pleasing to male vanity and the desire to dominate. I prefer the first version.

  My bishop told me that when the wise men gave their gifts to the Christ child, they were giving him their magic; they were magi; magicians; alchemists; and they gave up their power to the one they recognized as Lord. At the same time that I heard this, I was reading a novel in which alchemy played an important part, and which postulated that for the true alchemist what was far more important than turning base metal into gold was reconciling male and female, what was called “the chymical wedding.”

  So that, too, was part of the gift of the magi, and Jesus accepted it and, in turn, gave it to us. His treatment of women was extraordinary for his day, when women were defined entirely by the male. If two people were caught in adultery, it was the woman who was punished by being stoned to death. It takes two to commit adultery, but the man was not considered the wrongdoer. Women had no rights; their husbands could—until Jesus changed it—write them a letter and divorce them and keep all their property. Jesus broke all the patriarchal rules of his society. Not only that, his close friends were women, Mary of Magdala and Mary of Bethany. Martha of Bethany, like the woman at the well, like Peter, also recognized Jesus as the Promised One. As we view Mary and Martha in Scripture we might have expected it to be Mary who recognized the Messiah, but it was Martha (see John 11).

  The world of Jesus’ time, as the world now, could not believe in the reconciliation of male and female, and we still are struggling to learn the lessons Jesus taught, recognizing the male and female in each of us, and in all the people we meet. Marriage should be, and seldom is, an icon of reconciliation. So should friendship. And when we are reconciled we are close to being home. But most of the time we are homesick.

  * * *

  —

  Our homesickness is alleviated only by love, that love that transcends our self-centeredness, our pettiness. And love, of course, is a word that has been dwindled and diminished so that to many people it means nothing more than sex. Sex is, of course, a part of it, but only a part. Another of our confusions about love is that it is a feeling. Sometimes it is. It is very nice when it is a pleasant feeling. But it isn’t always pleasant. Love is not so much what you feel as what you do, as I have learned in my own life, and often to my rue. When I am enabled to act with love, God will take care of my feelings.

  When we are truly in love, not in the sense of romantic, erotic love, but in the sense of God’s love for all that the Power of Love created, then our homesickness is alleviated. When we are in love we are no longer homesick, for Love is home.

  And where is this home that we long for? I lay in my hospital bed and wondered. Surely I was alive because of the skill and immediate care of fine doctors. But ultimately my life was beyond their skill. God calls on us to collaborate with the divine purpose. I believe that the Spirit can guide the doctors’ minds and hands. I believe that I was called on to be willing to die, and then, to be willing to live, and that willingness included work, moving my bladder and my bowels on my own once the tubes were out, walking down the corridor, pushing my IV stand and, later, pushing a wheelchair to keep my balance. God urges us to collaborate. But we cannot do it ourselves. We need the everlasting love pushing, nudging, if not outright shoving.

  So my question was: What, dear Lord, is your purpose for my life? Where, during the rest of my mortal years, is home? Ultimately it is with you, Lord, but meanwhile I believe that I am to make a home in the strange island of Manhattan for my granddaughters, who have been so good for me as they have been in college in New York, teaching me, pushing me, not allowing me to get into any kind of rut. I believe, too, that our home is to be an open one, so that friends who are called to be briefly in the city have a welcoming place to stay.

  But where, ultimately, is that home that we long for? It is not the Garden, for we cannot go back to the Garden. When the human beings left the Garden, it was forever. So where is the home for which we are so homesick? It is something tha
t is still to come; it is that towards which all Creation is groaning in travail. It is the kingdom of God that will be ready when Christ comes again, not only to us on our little planet, but to all of Creation. We are homesick not so much for something that was, and was lost, as for something that will be, and is to be found.

  We get foretastes of the kingdom, of the City of God, in myth and dream and fairy tale, and occasionally in our own lives. My granddaughters and I live on the Upper West Side of New York, one of the most polyglot neighborhoods in that great city. I was born in Manhattan, and it is still home for me, despite all the changes. But it is far from being the City of God. It is sometimes referred to as Sodom and Gomorrah, and perhaps some of it is. There are several million more people living in the same amount of space than there were when I was born. There is drug addiction among young business executives as well as among the poor and destitute. There is prostitution and perversion of all kinds.

  But there are also people trying to live quiet, decent lives. I go to church with a lot of them. An island cannot expand outwards, spatially; it can only expand up. So my city is crowded, and the split between the very rich and the very poor gets larger every year. It is a dirty city, and this realization hits me anew whenever I am in a European city full of flowers and trees and clean streets. My husband’s theory about the filth of Manhattan was that most people who live there have not been born there. It is not home to them, and so they take no pride in it.

  As the city gets more crowded, people get more angry; consequently, there is more crime. As the city gets more difficult to live in, people search frantically for some way to ease their pain, with the resulting abuse of alcohol and drugs. My neighborhood is one of the dumping grounds for mentally disturbed people who have been tossed out of the mental institutions. It makes the statistics look good, but most of the people wandering the streets screaming out curses, or singing, or dancing are incapable of caring for themselves. In the past couple of years the number of homeless and panhandlers has increased radically. In this affluent nation, people starve, and sometimes die of cold on the streets of New York. This is not the only city or town with such problems.

  Some of the difficulties are desperately real, but there are also scams, and some of them are so odd they almost make me laugh. A friend of mine was approached by a man begging for food. He happened to have a bagel with him, so he gave it to the man, who took it, looked at it, and said, “What! No cream cheese?”

  The homeless, the hungry, the lost—the city is full of them. How, with this image for city constantly in front of me, can I envision the City of God, that city where no one is hungry, everyone is home, and all our homesickness is over?

  I find it difficult, but the City of God has been a metaphor for many centuries.

  Perhaps the City of God is not so much a place in space, as a place in the heart.

  Sometimes, even in the middle of Manhattan, I get glimpses of this as I walk home with my dog and someone calls out, “That’s a beautiful dog!” (He is.) At home, I set the table, and sometimes two tables, for a group of friends of all ages—my friends, my granddaughters’ friends, and people of all ages in between. As we hold hands for grace I am grateful for this tiny foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

  Last winter my granddaughter Lena decided that on Sunday afternoons we would “do culture.” For one of our culture afternoons we went to the Frick Museum, a marvelous small museum in an old mansion on Fifth Avenue, intimate enough so that it can be comfortably seen in a couple of hours. It happened that there was an all-Bach concert that afternoon, to be played on period instruments. We were too late to buy tickets, but we were told that we could sit in the garden and listen. While we were waiting in the lovely, glass-covered room full of green plants and the smell of growing things, Lena pulled out of her capacious handbag an old copy of Idylls of the King that had been mine as a child, and we took turns reading aloud to each other. When the music started, Lena put the book away, and this college senior leaned her head against my shoulder with the affectionate trust of a small child. And it was indeed a foretaste of heaven.

  * * *

  —

  One of my favorite books is the Book of Daniel, and one of my favorite parts of Daniel is the story of the three young men in the fiery furnace. The song of the three young men, or the Benedicite Omnia Opera, is a great paean of praise of all Creation singing its joy to the Creator and being exactly what it was created to be. When what is, is totally fulfilled, totally itself, then there is joy, no matter what the outer circumstances, and where there is true joy, there is home. (Were Lena and I being fully what we were created to be when we sat together in the museum garden, listening to the great music of Bach?)

  The three young men in the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (or, in Greek, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael), sang for all of Creation.

  O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O ye angels of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O ye Heavens, O ye waters, O all ye powers of the Lord, O ye Sun and Moon, O ye stars of Heaven, O ye showers and Dew, O ye whales…(The Book of Common Prayer, 1928)

  And so it goes, all of Creation singing its praise of the Lord from the place of joy, which is home.

  And where were the three young men singing this paean of praise? In the fiery furnace, in the heart of the flames. They sang with joy within the fire, for the fire was being fully fire, and they, the three young men, were being fully human; there was no conflict between them.

  * * *

  —

  Joy is often at its deepest when it comes in time of trial and pain. At the time of the story of Daniel and the three young men, Nebuchadnezzar had taken Jerusalem; the Jews were once again in captivity; the society surrounding them was as secular as is society today and, as always in such times, the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor; the wicked flourished and the innocent suffered.

  It was not an easy world for the young man, Daniel, and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

  Nevertheless, they refused to eat meat sacrificed to idols (a practice the Babylonians followed), and they continued to live according to the commandments of their God, who was One, who was All in All.

  Because Daniel and his friends lived as God created them to live, because they were at home even in captivity, they became the object of suspicion and the cause of bitter jealousy. Things would have gone far worse for them had not Daniel been able to tell dreams—not just to interpret dreams, like Joseph, but to tell Nebuchadnezzar what his dream had been and then to interpret it. This was a feat that impressed the king, and so he had Daniel and his friends treated kindly.

  But then Nebuchadnezzar built a golden image, a man-made god, not an icon created to the glory of the One True God, but an idol to the glory of the king. All the people of Babylon at the sound of the trumpet were to bow down and worship it, but Daniel and the three young men refused to bow down to this idol.

  Obviously, someone found great satisfaction in reporting their disobedience to the king, and Nebuchadnezzar was so furious that he ordered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be thrown into a fiery furnace.

  Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, their faith in the Maker of the Universe unshaken, stood there in the midst of the flames, and from their lips came the song of praise for all of Creation, fire and ice and beasts and trees and stars and birds and whales and all that is, singing the joy of their being and their praise of the Lord of all. Out of the depths, out of the fire, all being cried joy:

  O ye Mountains and Hills, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever, O all ye Green Things upon the earth, O ye Wells, O ye Seas and Floods, O ye Whales, and all that move in the water, O all ye Fowls of the air, O all ye Beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. (The Book of Common Prayer, 1928)

 
King Nebuchadnezzar was astounded, astounded that the young men were alive and singing, and he asked his courtiers,

  “Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?” They answered and said unto the king, “True, O king.” He answered and said, “Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” (King James Version)

  And that is the most astounding part of the whole story. Who was the fourth man in the fiery furnace? Christ! God did not take the three young men out of the flames; God was in the fire with them, the fire that is so hot that it scorched and killed the men who lit it.

  Christ in the Old Testament? Indeed, yes! Paul talks about the Rock that went before his people on their journey to the Promised Land, and affirms, “That rock was Christ.” Only one small country and only a few people therein knew Jesus, but Christ always was, is, and will be, and no one, at any time, or in any place, is denied the love of the Word. Christ, if we look, is all through the Old Testament.

  And Christ was with me in my sheet of flame in the hospital in San Diego, even when I was too ill to be aware of the loving Presence.

  If we cannot sing for ourselves, the song is there for us:

  O ye people of God, men and women everywhere, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O ye priests and servants of the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O ye spirits and Souls of the Righteous, O ye who are holy and humble of heart, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O let us bless the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, praise him and magnify him forever. In the firmament of his power glorify the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. (The Book of Common Prayer, adapted)