The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” and it was his own people who could not accept the message of truth and love and forgiveness he offered all of us. They wanted, instead, to know why he healed on the Sabbath, why he ate with sinners, and he told them that he was looking for compassion, not legalism, and that those who are well do not need a doctor, but those who are ill, and he had come for those who knew they were broken and needed healing.

  Perhaps our true prophets today, our unrecognized prophets, are people like us, who do not go on television to speak to millions, and do not make grand statements about controversial subjects. Jesus did not start a lepers’ rights organization or a lepers’ liberation group or make categorical pronouncements about why some people were afflicted with demons. Instead, he touched people, one by one, forgave them, and healed them.

  Can we be healed until we are willing to accept forgiveness? My forgiveness of that truck driver, and even God’s, will do him little good unless he is willing to understand that he needs forgiveness and accepts it. But that is between the truck driver and God. If I am to be able to accept forgiveness, I must first accept that I need it.

  God’s forgiveness is, I believe, always available. Was it truly God who would not forgive Saul? Or was it Samuel?

  Saul, it seems, was surprised at being chosen king for a people who had never before had a king. And then Saul was disobedient, and the prophet Samuel roundly blamed God for choosing Saul. Samuel condemned Saul utterly.

  Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned….Now I beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me, so that I may worship the LORD.”

  But Samuel’s harsh reply was, “I will not go back with you. You have rejected the word of the LORD, and the LORD has rejected you as king over Israel!” And neither Samuel nor the Lord ever spoke to Saul again.

  Grandpa Bowman, in Certain Women, felt that Saul was full of pride, that he disobeyed the injunction to kill everybody—and all the animals—out of pride, not compassion. Certainly he became a mentally sick man, what we might today call manic depressive. But as the story unrolls he is a pitiable figure.

  God then sends the prophet Samuel to Bethlehem to Jesse, and he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice. And when Samuel saw Eliab, Jesse’s eldest son, he said,

  “Surely the LORD’s anointed stands here before the LORD.”

  But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”

  Surely Saul had been chosen by Samuel because of his outward appearance! Then Jesse called Abinadab and had him pass in front of Samuel. But Samuel said, “The LORD has not chosen this one either.” And so it went, until seven of Jesse’s sons had been rejected and turned away, and Samuel asked Jesse if these were all the sons he had. And Jesse admitted that there was still the youngest son, but he was out, keeping the sheep.

  David was sent for, and Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers. Saul was still king, remember, and Samuel anointed David. Two kings at once? No wonder there was trouble ahead.

  * * *

  —

  Whose idea was it to anoint two kings? Samuel would say that it was the Lord’s. But what kind of a Maker did Samuel understand? He lived approximately three thousand years ago in a universe that was much smaller than ours. The stars were heavenly lights, as were the sun and the moon, all put there for our benefit. The planet was sparsely inhabited (compared with today’s population). And backwards, according to our standards. Bathing was occasional. People probably smelled rank. There was no plumbing. No toilet paper. No electricity. But they had the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they knew the story of Creation, and at least some of the time they knew that the Creator, their God, was the God of the entire universe. The prophets talked, personally, with the Creator, and if they sometimes imposed their own will on what they assumed to be God’s, that’s what we still tend to do today. Samuel’s God was sometimes a projection of Samuel. And there are people today whose image of God is not unlike an image of the prophet Samuel, with his white robes and flowing beard and fierce expression.

  What image of God do we have?

  It is usually formed early in our lives, and it is not easy to change. I am daily grateful that the God shown me by my parents was a God of love and a God of story. Both my parents came from devoutly Episcopal families, and in those days (is it still true today?) Episcopalians were Bible readers, daily Bible readers. My mother grew up in a household where there was daily family prayer. On Sundays the only game the children were allowed to play was the Bible game; they really knew the Bible.

  And they knew that God loved them, and they told me stories of God’s love.

  One of the stories they told me, a parable we’ve heard so often that it tends to get blunted, is the parable of the Prodigal Son and the elder brother. We pay so much attention to the Prodigal Son that we forget that the parable is equally about the elder brother, a brother who is not forgiving or loving and who does not want his father to throw a party for the younger brother, who’s gone off and had fun while the elder brother has stayed home and worked. He is dutiful but also judgmental and humorless and hard of heart.

  This is a parable that does not end. The father goes out and tries to persuade the elder brother to come in, and the story stops there. Last winter I heard an end to it which moved me profoundly. The elder brother is so angry that he refuses to heed his father. He not only will not join the festivities, he leaves home in anger and goes to the city. Because he is intelligent and diligent he starts a successful business. He makes lots of money and has fine houses and clothes and jewelry and all the creature comforts and luxuries anybody could want. But after a while his riches begin to seem thin. He realizes that he is lonely. So he turns and makes his way home. And there is the father, grown old and tired, but still waiting lovingly for the elder brother just as he had waited for the Prodigal Son.

  And that’s what it’s all about: God’s love. God’s unmerited, unqualified love, waiting for us. We don’t have to deserve that love which is ours, ours whether we want it or not. If we don’t want it, that love can be terrible indeed. But if we reach out for God with love, God’s love will surround us. God made us, made us in love, and that love will never falter. Wherever we are, whatever we do, God’s love for us is there, firm, steadfast, forever, and shown us in the love that came to us in Jesus Christ, in whose resurrection we are all newly born and fully alive.

  4

  STORY AS THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

  Truth is frightening. Pontius Pilate knew that, and washed his hands of truth when he washed his hands of Jesus.

  Truth is demanding. It won’t let us sit comfortably. It knocks out our cozy smugness and casual condemnation. It makes us move. It? It? For truth we can read Jesus. Jesus is truth. If we accept that Jesus is truth, we accept an enormous demand: Jesus is wholly God, and Jesus is wholly human. Dare we believe that? If we believe in Jesus, we must. And immediately that takes truth out of the limited realm of literalism.

  But a lot of the world, including the Christian world (sometimes I think especially the Christian world), is hung up on literalism, and therefore confuses truth and fact. Perhaps that’s why someone caught reading a novel frequently looks embarrassed, and tries to hide the book, pretending that what he’s really reading is a book on how to fix his lawn mower or take out his own appendix. Is this rather general fear of story not so much a fear that story is not true, as that it might actually be true? And what about the word fiction? For many people it means something that is made up, is not true.

  Karl Barth wrote that he took the Bible far too seriously to take it literally. Why is that statement frightening to some people? There is no way that you can re
ad the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.

  People have always told stories as they searched for truth. As our ancient ancestors sat around the campfire in front of their caves, they told the stories of their day in order to try to understand what their day had meant, what the truth of the mammoth hunt was, or the roar of the cave lion, or the falling in love of two young people. Bards and troubadours throughout the centuries have sung stories in order to give meaning to the events of human life. We read novels, go to the movies, watch television, in order to find out more about the human endeavor. As a child I read avidly and in stories I found truths which were not available in history or geography or social studies.

  There is a prevalent illusion that nonfiction is factual and objective, and that when we read history we can find out what really happened. Not so! My mother was a Southerner and my father was a damnyankee, and I got two totally different versions of “the wa-ah,” as my mother called what my father referred to as the Civil War. It was two very different wars, depending on the point of view.

  After the “wa-ah” all anybody in my mother’s family had was story. They had lost husbands and sons and homes and all worldly goods. They did not have enough to eat. Their houses had been burned. I have some of the family silver because it was buried under a live oak tree, and I have some of the portraits because they were cut out of the frames and buried, too. On one of my walls is an indifferent oil painting on wood of a landscape with a windmill. It is fascinating to me because there is a slash across the top made by a Yankee saber, and on the back is a crude chess or checkers board painted by the invading soldiers.

  And I have stories. My great-grandmother, the first Madeleine L’Engle, had been her father’s hostess when he was ambassador to Spain. After the war the young widow cut up her velvet and brocade ball gowns to make trousers for her little sons and dresses for her daughter; there was no material to buy, and no money to buy it with had there been. I have her Bible, with her markings, and occasional spots from tears, and they, too, tell the story of her long, full life, going from riches to rags, grieving for the death of her young husband. She is remembered with great affection by all who knew her, as a merry person, full of vitality, but my mother, who adored her, told me that after her husband was killed she never wore anything but black or white for the rest of her long life.

  Would I want to do that? I miss my husband daily, but I live in a very different world from that of the first Madeleine L’Engle.

  Her mother-in-law, my great-great-grandmother, was a storyteller, too. She wrote her memoirs for her descendants, a delightful treasure. One of my favorite stories is that of her friendship with an African princess. Greatie, as my mother called her great-grandmother, was the princess’ only champion and friend. This African woman had been brought to Florida by a slave trader and set up in a house on Fort George Island, off Jacksonville, where she was isolated and desperately homesick. Greatie did what she believed to be right, whether it was considered proper or not. Once a week she had herself rowed down the river to spend the day with the princess, and they became intimate friends. It is from the stories of both Greatie and Madeleine L’Engle that I drew the background for my novel The Other Side of the Sun. Is the novel true? I believe that it is. Much of it is not factual; indeed, there are many facts I would have no way of knowing. It is indeed a work of fiction. But it is, for me, true.

  “But what,” asked Pilate of Jesus, “is truth?”

  William Blake writes, “Self-evident truth is one thing, and Truth the result of reasoning is another thing. Rational truth is not the truth of Christ, but the truth of Pilate.”

  For much of our lives we do need rational truth, the truth of Pilate. But we don’t give our lives for it. History would be very different if Pilate had been willing to give his life for truth. But he was not. It was Jesus who willingly gave his life for truth, the truth of Love, the truth that goes beyond reason, through reason, and out on the other side. Such truth does not deny reason, but reason alone is not enough.

  If truth and reason appear to be in conflict, then both must be re-examined, and scientists are as reluctant to do this tough work as are theologians. When the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift was first put forward (and how reasonable it seems now), the scientists got as upset as the theologians did when planet earth was displaced as the center of the universe. And as for those seven days of creation, nothing whatsoever is said in Genesis about God creating in human time. Isn’t it rather arrogant of us to think that God had to use our ordinary, daily, wristwatch time? Scripture does make it clear that God’s time and our time are not the same. The old hymn “a thousand ages in thy sight are but a moment past” reprises this. So why get so upset about the idea that God might have created in divine time, not human? What kind of a fact is this that people get so upset about? Facts are static, even comfortable, even when they are wrong! Truth pushes us to look at these facts in a new way, and that is not comfortable, so it usually meets with resistance.

  * * *

  —

  And how reasonable are we, with all our best efforts, able to be? Read two straightforward histories of any war, and you’ll get two different wars, with the protagonists and antagonists reversed. No matter how objective the historian tries to be, personal bias will slip in, willy-nilly.

  The Bible is not objective. Its stories are passionate, searching for truth (rather than fact), and searching most deeply in story. The story of David is one of the most complex and fascinating in the Bible, with its many prefigurings of Jesus. In working on Certain Women I discovered many more contradictions than I had remembered—two different ways of bringing David himself into the story, two different versions of Saul’s death, for instance. But what the biblical narrator is trying to do is tell us the truth about King David, and the truth is more important than facts.

  One of the major discoveries of the post-Newtonian sciences is that objectivity is, in fact, impossible. To look at something is to change it and to be changed by it.

  Nevertheless there is still the common misconception, the illusion, that fact and truth are the same thing. No! We do not need faith for facts; we do need faith for truth. In his letter to Titus, Paul speaks of the mystery of faith, and in Hebrews 11:1 he writes, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (KJV).

  The Bible has always challenged my imagination. But there have been many other stories that have opened doors and windows for me. The Greek and Roman myths I read when I was a child deal with basic truths that help illuminate my own problems. The myth of Sisyphus, for instance: there are many days when I feel like Sisyphus pushing that heavy rock up the mountainside, panting, sweating, as I heave it up, up, get it almost to the top, only to have it slip out of my grasp and roll all the way back down the mountain so that I have to start over again. Such myths have lasted because they are true to our human condition.

  And because when I read I read with my Christian bias, whether I want to or not, the myth of Sisyphus offers me another truth. Sisyphus had to push that rock up the mountain over and over again. Jesus had to carry the cross only once. When it was done, it was done.

  Jesus, the storyteller, told of a man who had a plank of wood in his eye and yet criticized another man for having a speck of dust in his eye. “You hypocrite,” he said, “first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” This parable, like most of Jesus’ stories, is true. Why must it be factual? Are we supposed to think that a man actually had a large plank of wood in his eye? The parable is, instead, a true story about our unwillingness to see our own enormous faults, and our eagerness to point out much smaller faults in other people. However, it’s a lot eas
ier to see this story as factual rather than true. If we can make ourselves believe that the man had a beam of wood in his eye, literally, then we don’t have to look at our own faults, be challenged by Jesus’ story, or maybe even feel that we have to do something about our faults. Literalism is a terrible crippler, but it does tend to let us off the hook. Or do I mean the cross?

  A Zen story which makes much the same point as the parable of the plank and the speck concerns two Buddhist monks returning from a pilgrimage. It is spring, and the rains have fallen, and they come to a river which is swollen and running swiftly, so that the stepping stones are covered with water. A young girl stands by the river, afraid to cross, and the senior monk simply picks her up, sloshes across, sets her down on the other side, and continues on his way. About an hour later the younger monk speaks. “Forgive me, I know you are older and wiser than I, and have been longer in the religious life, but do you really think that it was right for you, a celibate monk, to pick up that young girl in your arms and carry her that way?” And the older monk replied, “Oh, my son, are you still carrying her?”

  How easy it is for us to project our own weaknesses onto other people.

  I was once criticized for telling this story because it is a Buddhist story and therefore had to contradict Christianity. But does it? Should we not learn from each other? Jesus lived in a small world with many nations, and in his stories there are not only Samaritans, but Syro-Phoenicians, Romans—and many others. The stories of all nations I read as a child helped me to understand—intuitively rather than consciously—my own development as a human being, a Christian human being. And perhaps I learned even more from the stories I wrote.