The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  The first great story in the Bible, after the wonderful paean of praise to Creation, is a story of separation from God, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. It doesn’t really matter who was the first to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is important is that in going against God’s wishes, they separated themselves from their Maker. Both of them.

  Like many of the tales in Scripture, the story of the expulsion of the human beings from the Garden is an ambiguous one. It is a story not of punishment, but of separation, the two human beings’ separation from God, and separation from their own natures. Suddenly Adam and Eve became aware of knowledge—intellectual knowledge, and they weren’t yet ready for all that they learned. It was out of chronology and inconsistent with God’s time. Perhaps, in God’s time, when Adam and Eve were ready, God would have called them to the tree and said, “Eat.” But they took matters into their own hands and ate too soon. Their intellectual and spiritual development was sundered.

  We are still paying for that sundering. We know with our intellects far more than we know with our spirits. We know how to make war and to kill; how to build factories and make slaves of those who work in them; how to allow immense wealth and terrible poverty side by side; how to be judgmental and intolerant and exclusive and unforgiving.

  And so Adam and Eve were prematurely expelled from the Garden. I suspect that sooner or later they would have had to leave, that God would have gently shoved them out, as the mother bird pushes the fledgling from the nest. But the timing would have been right. They would have been ready to fly.

  But, prodded by the serpent, they took time into their own hands and broke it. When we look for a way to heal this brokenness, God offers us story, and sometimes the story is so extraordinary that it is difficult for us to understand, especially if we try to understand, as Adam and Eve did after they had left the Garden, with mind alone, and not with heart and spirit.

  After the first separation from God in the Garden, the next story is of an even more terrible separation: murder. Cain killed Abel. And this kind of separation has gone on ever since. At its worst this sin of separation is murder, literal murder; occasionally it is hysterical folly. Last summer before going to Oxford for a conference I reread Elizabeth Goudge’s Towers in the Mist, set in Oxford at the time of Queen Elizabeth, and I had forgotten the terrible things Protestants and Catholics did to each other, each group as brutal as the other, depending on which was politically in power.

  The story of Romeo and Juliet is a story about this kind of irrational separation, as are the Narnia Chronicles, as is The Brothers Karamazov. As we read of the pain caused by separation, we are offered healing. And that is why I love the stories in Scripture, for they are prescriptions for healing, even when they are incomprehensible, such as this marvelous passage from Ezekiel:

  I looked, and I saw beside the cherubim four wheels, one beside each of the cherubim…the four of them looked alike; each was like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the cherubim faced….Their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels….Each of the cherubim had four faces: One face was that of a cherub, the second the face of a man, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

  This is from the tenth chapter of Ezekiel, and the cherubim, man, lion, and eagle are reprised in John’s Revelation. What are we to make of these extraordinary wheels? Of the glorious cherubim? There are many marvels in this book as well as terrible prophecies of doom and destruction and, ultimately, God’s promise of love, forgiveness, and regeneration. In chapter 37 the Lord says to Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Dry, dead bones, with no life in them. Ezekiel answers, “O Sovereign LORD, you alone know.” Then the Lord says to Ezekiel,

  Prophesy to these bones and say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.”

  And the Lord God lays sinews upon the bones, and flesh, and skin, and they live again.

  This is strong stuff. This is mythic stuff, great creative story that moves beyond fact into the redemptive truth of myth.

  Elijah, like Ezekiel, is a mythic figure, larger than life. He challenges the gods of Baal laughing their prophets to scorn when Baal cannot kindle a fire, whereas Elijah’s God ignites wood over which buckets of water have been poured until it is soaked, saturated. And Elijah’s fire blazes and burns brilliantly. Then Elijah slays, single-handedly, all the prophets of Baal.

  Later, the Lord God tells Elijah:

  “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

  Or, as the King James Version has it: a still small voice. We have to listen if we want to hear God, to listen through all the noise and the storm and the turmoil, to hear that still small voice.

  At the end of Elijah’s life, a chariot of fire appears, and horses of fire, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. What a wonder!

  Strong stuff. Mythic stuff.

  It is all through both Testaments, this wondrous creative wildness of God, this strong stuff not to be understood in the pale language of provable fact. Jesus, like Elijah, stands on the mountain in the presence of the LORD and takes with him Peter and James and John, and extraordinary things, incomprehensible things, come to pass. Jesus’ clothing becomes shining, and Elijah himself appears to Jesus in the brilliance, and so does Moses, and the three talk together, breaking ordinary chronology into a million fragments. And then a cloud over-shadows them, as it over-shadowed Moses on the mount, and the voice of God thunders out of the cloud.

  Strong stuff. Mythic stuff. Story. True story.

  A misinterpretation of Peter’s Epistle sees him as warning us against myth, or what he calls cleverly invented stories, and he tells us that he saw what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration; he was an eyewitness, and he himself heard the voice of God coming out of the cloud. True. But he didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on, as Mark reminds us: He did not know what to say, they were so frightened. And in his bewilderment he wanted to build three tabernacles, to put Jesus, Elijah, and Moses into boxes where they would be safe. But safety was not the reality of the Transfiguration. Glory was.

  Yea, verily! Those who are terrified of story jump on that one line of Peter, out of context, and cry out: “Beware! Stories are lies! If you can’t prove it, literally, don’t believe it.”

  But faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The language of proof is needed for knowing how much money we need to buy our food for the week or what our rent is. It is necessary, but it is not for our faith, for the wondrous joy we live by. Most of what makes life worth living lies beyond the world of provable fact. God can be neither proved nor disproved. Did God make the universe? While in the language of provable fact we have neither proof nor disproof, in the promise of Scripture we can cry out a resounding Yes!

  Yes, indeed, let us beware of the cleverly invented stories that we see in television commercials every day, and let us look for that truth that will make us free, and that is frequently expressed in myth—true myth, not the cunningly devised fables (KJV) of floor waxes that are better than other floor waxes, or painkillers that will deaden all our physical aches, or all the other false promises that are constantly being offered a gullible public, and that the public (including Christians) far too often swallows wholesale. Why do we swallow those false promises given us by the media and yet
boggle at the truth of Ezekiel, or Elijah, or the unreasonable, overwhelming Love of God in Christ Jesus?

  Just as we are losing vocabulary in these last years of the twentieth century, we are losing myth and the creativity of myth—myth as truth, not lie; myth as that truth promised by Jesus to make us free.

  Rollo May in his book The Cry for Myth tells us that it is myths that give us our sense of identity. They make possible our sense of community. They undergird our moral values (and this is particularly important if we truly want to understand what moral values mean). And they are our way of dealing with the inscrutable mystery of Creation.

  May continues,

  Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home….To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths….[In church, our] rituals and myths supply fixed points in a world of bewildering change and disappointment.

  Conversely, the current “clinging to cults and our neurotic passion to make money is a flight from our anxiety, which comes in part from our mythlessness.”

  We have a deep need for heroes in this anxious age where drug use has increased to epidemic proportions. Rollo May points out that we have confused celebrities with heroes, and that is disastrous. David was a hero, not a celebrity.

  And what about Jesus? He was certainly not a celebrity! He shunned everything that would have marked him as a celebrity. Satan offered to make Jesus a celebrity. But Jesus showed us true heroism. And how did he teach? Yes, once again: Jesus taught by telling stories, parables, myths, and his stories were true, though not everybody could hear them. Jesus came to show us through his stories what it is to be human and what it is to be heroic and to understand heroes. He told stories to show us how to counteract our sins and imperfections with love, rather than anger; to show us how to rejoice, to laugh, to heal; and the world couldn’t stand true humanness, and tried to kill it.

  If Jesus came today, would we be any braver, any more open, any more willing to give ourselves to his love, than were those who cried out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”? Would we be any more willing today to allow him to love all kinds of people, even those we don’t much care about?

  That, of course, was part of the problem—Jesus’ friends. They were not the right people. He went to the wrong dinner parties (his first miracle took place at a big party). He loved children, and let them climb all over him with their sticky little hands and dirty little feet. He even told us that we had to be like little children ourselves if we wanted to understand God, and yet the world (and too often the church) taught then, and still teaches, that we have to outgrow our childhood love of story, of imagination, of creativity, of fun, and so we blunder into the grown-up world of literalism.

  Literalism kills the stories of Jesus, and comes close to killing us. Literalism makes no demands of us, asks of us no faith, does not cause us to grow. Story pushes and shoves us and then helps us out of the mud puddle. Sometimes I remind myself of the little boy who was going to be late for school for the third day in a row, and he set off in a total panic, running as fast as he could, and panting out, “God help me! God help me!” He stumbled and fell into a mud puddle, and he looked up to heaven and said, “I didn’t say push!”

  God pushes, and often pushes through story.

  God also pushes through our prayers, and for me the disciplines of writing and praying are ever closer and closer together, each a letting go of our own will and an opening up to the power of God’s will. We pray that our own will may reflect God’s will and that we will be given the discernment to know when it does not.

  When I listen to a story, trying to set it down faithfully, the two disparate parts of myself, the mind and the heart, the intellect and the intuition, the conscious and the subconscious mind, stop fighting each other and begin to collaborate. They know each other, as two people who love each other know each other. And as the love of two people is a gift—a totally unmerited, incomprehensible gift—so is the union of mind and heart.

  The storyteller knows complete dependence on listening to the story. One of the current buzz words today is codependence which means, as far as I can tell, that you have to get your sense of self from someone else, rather than from God’s image within you.

  Codependence is certainly to be avoided, but sometimes fear of it leads people to be wary of any kind of dependence. Once again I remember Dean Inge of Saint Paul’s saying, “God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.” The freer I am, the more I am aware of my interdependence, with my family, my friends, the people I sit near in church, or even those I pass on the street. And I am dependent on faith in God, who pushes me in my work, sends me to places I am not at all sure I want to go.

  I listen to my stories; they are given to me, but they don’t come without a price. We do have to pay, with hours of work that ends up in the wastepaper basket, with intense loneliness, with a vulnerability that often causes us to be hurt. And I’m not sure that it’s a choice. If we’re given a gift—and the size of the gift, small or great, does not matter—then we are required to serve it, like it or not, ready or not. Most of us, that is, because I have seen people of great talent who have done nothing with their talent, who mutter about “When there’s time…,” or who bury their talent because it’s too risky to use.

  Yes, it is risky. We may not hear the story well. We may be like faulty radios, transmitting only static and words out of context. But I believe that it is a risk we have to take. And it is worth it, because the story knows more than the artist knows.

  It is nothing short of miraculous that I am so often given, during the composition of a story, just what I need at the very moment that I need it. When I was roughing out A Swiftly Tilting Planet, trying to find a structure for the family, home for Thanksgiving and facing a nuclear war, I opened the mail one day and there was a card from the holy island of Iona, in Scotland, with the words of Patrick’s Rune, that glorious rune that became the structure of the book. It led me to a lot of research I hadn’t expected, and it was hard work, but it was also exhilarating, a lot of fun.

  I can’t explain how these gifts come to me—at least not in the language of provable fact, but that is the language of human control, not the language of faith. And acceptance of the wonder of such gifts helps me to understand what Ezekiel is saying, or Daniel, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! I read their stories with sublime wonder, with rapturous joy, acknowledging that reality cannot be organized by us human creatures. It can only be lived. Indifference goes along with perfectionism and literalism as a great killer of story, and perhaps indifference is nothing more than a buffer against fear.

  When I was in Egypt I asked the guide why there were so many cobras, crocodiles, vultures, in the temples. The reply was, “The people worshiped what they feared.”

  This same kind of fear is behind much bibliolatry today. Many fundamentalists—not all, thank God, but some—worship the Bible, which is largely terrifying, and so they try to tame it by putting it into their temple, as the Egyptians did with the cobras, crocodiles, vultures. How are we to understand Elijah’s ascending into heaven in chariots of fire drawn by horses of fire? Has anyone ever seen such a thing? How is it to be believed? What are we to make of Jesus in a blaze of blinding glory on the Mount of Transfiguration? Or Moses with his face shining so brilliantly after he has talked with God on another mount that the people can’t bear to look at him? These marvelous mysteries cannot be understood in the language of literalism or inerrancy, and all such attempts to tame and restrict the glory are deadly. Deadly indeed.

  How can we understand in terms of literalism the glory of the Creation of the universe, Jonah in the belly of the large fish, Daniel in the lions’ den, or angels coming to unsuspecting, ordinary people and crying out, “Fear not!”

  Literalism is a vain attempt to cope with fear by quelling Scripture, at
tempting to make it more palatable, less wild and wonderful. Would the angels cry out “Fear not!” if there were nothing to fear?

  Story makes us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. It is we humans who either help bring about, or hinder the coming of the kingdom. We look at the world around us, and it is a complex world, full of incomprehensible greed (why are we continuing to cut down our great forests that supply our planet with so much of its oxygen?), irrationality, brutality, war, terrorism—but also self-sacrifice, honor, dignity—and in all of this we look for, and usually find, pattern, structure, meaning. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

  In a recent article in a medical journal (given me by my friend, Pat, the physician), Dr. Richard F. Ott writes that “throughout time, myths have provided meaning for the life of the individual and his society. They have also provided the ability for people to experience the mystery of life by participating in the rituals of myth.” How marvelous is the ritual of the Holy Mysteries, the Eucharist, where we joyfully eat Love! For me, one of the most potent phrases in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is “in the mystery of the Word made flesh…” It is a mystery that cannot be understood in terms of provable fact or the jargon of the media. Mystery, unlike magic, can be understood only mythically.