The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe. Dr. Ott points out that “our sense of self-worth has become based on what we possess, and our language has evolved to reflect this. We not only have material possessions, we have children. When we cannot sleep, we have insomnia. We have even replaced ‘my head hurts’ with ‘I have a headache.’ ” We have sex rather than making love. We even “have” the Bible.

  How do we get rid of this “have, have, have” mentality and return to “I am, I will be, I am hopeful, I love, I am joyful”? The “I have” complex has led to a litigious society in which malpractice suits are crippling medicine. Why was it necessary for my family to employ a lawyer in San Diego before the insurance company of the truck driver who ran the red light was willing to pay even the minimum he was insured for? Dr. Ott says that—

  the Japanese have a fraction of the numbers of lawyers that we have because the myths behind their culture have meaning to them. We need not contrast their [scientific] successes in the last 20 years, as it is common knowledge. Yet the Western mind seems incapable of understanding what lies behind these successes.

  Jesus was not a Westerner. He did not have a Western mind, which is perhaps why he is so frequently misunderstood by the Western mind today. He was not interested in the righteous and morally upright people whom he saw to be also hard of heart and judgmental; he devoted himself to those who knew they were sinners and broken, and who came to him for healing. His birth was heralded by angels and visited by adoring shepherds, and it horrifically resulted in the slaughter of all Jewish infants under the age of two.

  If Jesus was a threat to Herod two thousand years ago, he is still a threat today, because he demands that we see ourselves as we really are, that we drop our smug, self-protective devices, that we become willing to live the abundant life he calls us to live. It’s too strong, so we react by trying to turn him into a wimp come to protect us from an angry Father God who wants us punished for our sins: not forgiven, but punished. And our response of fear hasn’t worked, and we’re left even more frightened and even more grasping and even more judgmental.

  Let’s recover our story because we’ll die without it. It’s a life-giving story—this magnificent narrative we find in Scripture—if we are willing to read openly and to read all of Scripture, not just passages selected to help us prove our point. The God of Scripture can sometimes seem brutal, seen through the eyes of the early biblical narrator, who is looking at the Creator through crudely primitive eyes. But the God of Scripture is also the God who refused to nuke Nineveh, even though that’s what Jonah wanted; who forgave David for a really staggering list of wrongdoings; who wants only for us stiff-necked people to repent and come home; who goes out into the stormy night for the one lost black sheep; who throws a party when the Prodigal Son returns; who loves us so much that God did indeed send his only begotten Son to come live with us, as one of us, to help us understand our stories—each one unique, infinitely valuable, irreplaceable.

  Jesus. The God who came to us as one of us and told us stories. How marvelous! The life of Jesus has been called the greatest story ever told, and that is true, but one of Satan’s cleverest successes has been to make us distrust story. But God’s stories are great gifts to us, gifts to help us understand what it is that the Creator wants of us.

  God wants a lot. Satan is much more easily pleased, or that’s what he’d have us believe. God wants everything, and calls us to have faith in what, if we are truly Christian, is impossible—at least in terms of morals or perfectionism or qualifications. It is not only secular humanists who have trouble believing in the Incarnation. Honest struggle with the truth of the Incarnation is more creative than taking it for granted. How can we smugly accept, without feeling wondrous awe, the infinitely small seed within Mary that grew, as all of us grow in our mother’s wombs, until it was ready to be born as a human baby?

  In the fascinating study of modern physics we learn that energy and matter are interchangeable. So the sheer energy of Christ, for love of us, put on the matter of Jesus—ordinary human matter. What love! It is beyond all our puny efforts in clay, or stone, or music, or paint, or ink, but that love is behind our artistic endeavors, no matter how insignificant.

  The Incarnation hallows our human lives. We’ve heard the story of Jesus so often that our ears have become blunted. Story reawakens us to truth, the truth that will set us free. Jesus, the Story, taught by telling stories, quite a few of which on the surface would appear to be pretty secular, but all of which lead us, if we will listen, to a deeper truth than we have been willing to hear before.

  I suspect that the story about President Coolidge and sin is factual as well as true; I think it probably really happened. But it’s the truth of the story that matters. Yes, we’re “agin” sin, and we know ourselves to be sinners, but forgiven sinners, sinners loved by God.

  John writes in his first Epistle,

  How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!…Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

  What a wonderful story! What wonderful good news! Let us respond by looking fearlessly at our own stories, so that we may, with God’s help, create a story that will be pleasing to our Maker.

  Once upon a time…And it came to pass…Yes! We are about to hear a story; we are about to be part of the great creative action of the universe.

  11

  STORY AS A REDEMPTIVE ACT

  When my father died I was seventeen and still too young to understand this complex man who had struggled valiantly with illness during my entire lifetime. I never knew the vibrant person whose life was smashed by World War I when his lungs were irrevocably damaged by mustard gas. I knew a few marvelous stories about him. One of my favorites concerns a print of Castle Conway in Wales, which was on the hall of my parents’ apartment in New York and which is now on my living room wall. One hot summer evening before that terrible war broke the back of this century, my mother looked at my father, sighed, and said wistfully, “Oh Charles, it’s so hot! I wish we could go to Castle Conway.”

  “Come on!” My father took my mother’s hand, led her out the door, into a taxi, down the docks, and onto a ship, without so much as a toothbrush.

  The father I knew lived with pain, physical pain, and the pain of being unable to do the work he loved, traveling all over the world as a foreign correspondent. When his last attack of pneumonia finally killed him, I was stunned, but somehow not surprised. I had known, when he and my mother put me on the train from Jacksonville to Charleston to start my senior year at Ashley Hall, that my father was more frail than I had ever known him, that his coughing was worse, that the pain in his eyes was dark and deep.

  I recorded this death in my journal. Straight. “Father died.”

  Later I wrote it as a story, very much out of my own experience of this death.

  Still later, after I had graduated from college and began to recognize in myself characteristics of my father, I wrote about it again, in the death of the mother of the protagonist of my first novel, The Small Rain, far from the facts of this death, but close to the truth of what it meant to me.

  That was the first, though certainly not the last time that God has helped me redeem pain through story.

  Writing A Wrinkle in Time was a redemptive experience for me, a working out of a great deal of pain from a decade that had been extraordinarily difficult. It was my first effort in a genre now called “science fantasy,” and science fantasy is not far from fairy tale, that world which delves deep into the human psyche, struggling to find out at least a little more of what we are all about. We are indeed mysterious creatures, and the more rational we think we are, the more irrational we are likely to be, for we are not made up of reason alone. Reason alone
produces characters like IT, the archetypal villain in Wrinkle, IT, who is brain alone, with no heart, no imagination, no mystery.

  In fairy tales there are doors that should not be opened, boxes that must remain closed. And human curiosity being what it is, we open doors, like Bluebeard’s wife; and we open boxes, like Pandora; and we eat forbidden fruit, like Eve. Now we have to live in a world that is irrevocably changed by what was in those secret rooms and what has escaped from the mysterious closed boxes and by the loneliness that came from being forever expelled from the Garden.

  When we human creatures opened the heart of the atom we opened ourselves to the possibility of terrible destruction, but also—and we tend to forget this—to a vision of interrelatedness and unity that can provide a theology for us to live by.

  My daughter-in-law’s uncle was one of the scientists in New Mexico who exploded that first test atom bomb on the desert sands. When they did this they did not know—they truly did not know—whether or not it was going to start a chain reaction that would just go on and on until it ended up destroying the entire planet. With incredible courage—or was it foolhardiness?—they exploded that first atomic device and saw the first mushroom cloud. And the planet will never be the same again.

  The discoveries made since the heart of the atom was opened have changed our view of the universe and of Creation. Our great radio telescopes are picking up echoes of that primal opening which expanded into all the stars in their courses. The universe is far greater and grander and less predictable than anyone realized, and one reaction to this is to turn our back on the glory and settle for a small, tribal god who forbids questions of any kind. Another reaction is to feel so small and valueless in comparison to the enormity of the universe that it becomes impossible to believe in a God who can be bothered with us tiny, finite creatures with life spans no longer than the blink of an eye. Or we can simply rejoice in a God who is beyond our comprehension but who comprehends us and cares about us.

  It is easier for a single human being to be open and willing to change than it is for an institution, but if enough of us single creatures are open to God’s amazing revelations, our institutions will ultimately come along with us. Long before the church institution was ready, many individuals were willing to accept that the earth is round and is a planet circling a parent sun in one of countless galaxies. An institution, be it religious, medical, legal, or educational, tends to move very slowly, holding on to the status quo, afraid of rocking the boat, loath to accept that familiar ideas may have to be left behind. We shouldn’t wait for the institutions to do the changing, but be willing to change ourselves, for in the end it is we who make up the institution, and if we become more open, more loving, more interdependent through the lavishness of God’s love, then we can and will make a difference.

  The universe as we are beginning to understand it is far stranger than we could have imagined. Much of it is dark matter, which we cannot see, and about which we can only speculate. Perhaps this dark matter is the galactic equivalent of the dark side of the human soul. This invisible, dark world is the natural world of the storyteller. In the beginning of King Lear, the old king ignores his darknesses completely, and the rest of the play deals with his moving more and more deeply into the shadows, and finally out into the light. Lear, like The Tempest, is a fairy tale, with scenes of ominous skies with brilliant light occasionally breaking through. Fairy tales, if we are not afraid to translate them, show us the night side of ourselves and what happens if we ignore it. Bruno Bettelheim has shown us the Freudian aspect of these tales, but there are other and even deeper levels. Wouldn’t we all have opened the forbidden door, the box that held so many terrible things, but which also contained much good? Would we have closed our ears to the serpent and refused to eat the fruit?

  The secrets of the atom are not unlike Pandora’s box, and what we must look for and hold on to is not the destructive power but the vision of interrelatedness that is desperately needed on this fragmented planet. We are indeed part of a universe. We belong to each other; the fall of every sparrow is noted, every tear we shed is collected in the Creator’s bottle.

  In the fairy tale we find hope of interrelatedness, and sometimes this hope comes because fairy tales deal forthrightly with brokenness. One reason that children are given fewer fairy tales today than when I was little is that many fairy tales are violent, and they involve risk. Why we shudder at the violence in fairy tales rather than the violence of everyday life at the end of this century is beyond me. The violence in fairy tales pales beside the violence that children watch daily on television. Yes, the fairy tales offer risk, but “no risk, no fairy tale.” Failure is not only possible, it often strikes. And even when the poor peasant boy or the lovely stepchild succeeds, there is risk first. The young man may not make his way safely through the magic thicket. The power of the evil fairy may be stronger than that of the benevolent godmother. If the princess kisses the beast, he may devour her. Will the frog really be saved from the wicked spell and turn into a prince?

  In fairy tales, and in life, there is risk—risk of failure, of horror, of death. But there is no despair. Rather, there is an unspoken affirmation of the ultimate happy ending.

  But before we can affirm this all-rightness, we must first deal with all-wrongness. It is in these dark and unknown waters that fairy tales have their home. Although we tend to think of fairy tales as light and crystal clear—glass slippers, enchanted mirrors, vast parties in great ballrooms—they speak to us, ultimately, of dark things. No one is more aware of the disastrous aspects of overweening human pride than the teller of fairy tales. No one is more aware of our inevitable insecurity, loneliness, horror. But the teller of fairy tales, ancient or modern, is also aware of the infinite value of the human being, of the extraordinary fact that we often accomplish the impossible.

  Therefore, the fairy-tale teller must convey a far deeper sense of verisimilitude than the writer of slice-of-life stories which deal with a much more limited reality. In George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie we believe that the stairs in the castle which Irene must climb to her godmother are there, that they would be there even if George MacDonald had never written about them; we must believe it is quite possible that one day we may be asked to plunge our own hands into that terrible, burning fire of roses. The fairy-tale writer tells about a world more real than that of every day. When I am deep in a story and am interrupted, I am jerked out of the “real” world into a much more shadowy world.

  It is only recently that fairy tale, fantasy, myth, have been thought of as being exclusively for children. Originally they were not written for children at all. Myth is the foundation of conceptual thought. These so-called children’s stories are aware of what many adults have forgotten—that the daily, time-bound world of provable fact is the secondary world, the shadow world, and it is story, painting, song, which give us our glimpses of reality.

  When the beautiful princess who has slept within the enchanted castle for a hundred years is roused from her sleep, we are given a hint of resurrection. Before resurrection comes sleep (as the Christians in Acts called death) and darkness. And then comes the call, “Sleepers, awake!”

  Jung talks about a memory which is more than our own, private memory, which reaches out and touches the memory of many centuries, and fairy tales reveal this universal memory. If we didn’t, all of us, share in the memory of our ancestors, every generation would have to invent the wheel and the needle all over again. We are human animals because of the extraordinary but little-appreciated fact that we can look back to our past, unlike the other beasts, and we can look forward to our future.

  In folklore it is usually accepted that infants in their cradles understand the language of angels and fairies and all supernatural beings, and that as they grow up they lose this gift, except in rare cases. The seventh son of a seventh son may keep this gift and then will often have to hide it. But it is freel
y acknowledged that there is something rare and lovely about a princess who can actually walk through the forest speaking to the animals and trees. Perhaps she awakens our sleeping memories of Eve.

  True story calls us to be part of the universe as it heals us. When I am feeling wounded and broken I do not turn to do-it-yourself books or self-help books or even inspirational books, but to story. During my lonely childhood I learned about myself and those I encountered through fairy tale. In a fairy tale, animals may talk, princes may be turned into frogs, princesses may sleep for a hundred years, but we must believe the story, and believe not only with our conscious minds, but with all of ourselves, with our intuition as well as our intellect, our hearts as well as our minds.

  All the elements of the fairy tale are waiting within us: the quest; the younger son; the true princess; the benevolent king; the elder brothers (or sisters); the witch, or wizard; the wise old woman; beasts and monsters; the happy ending. The fairy tale reveals a truly nonsexist world, because we are all, male and female, both the younger son and the true princess—as well as the monster we’d rather not recognize.

  At our birth we are all, willy-nilly, started on the Quest, our quest for being, for the meaning of our own particular life. Why are we here at this moment in time, in this particular geographical space? What direction should we take? Dare we go into the dark woods? What is the meaning of the quest? What is our task? What is the value of our life? Does it matter? Does anybody care?

  These are questions all adolescents ask, and they are questions we should never stop asking. But the questions come more easily if we are prepared for them in childhood by fairy tale, fantasy, myth.

  Who am I? is one of the most painful and penetrating questions.

  And the fairy tale assures us, regardless of our gender, “You are the younger son. You are the true princess. You are the enchanted beast. You are more than you know.”