The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  It was also our privilege to witness to this truth in the hotels where we stayed and to have it joyfully received. We had brought Bibles, Russian Bibles, and our only problem was to make sure they were given to people who were hungry and thirsty for the truth of Scripture and not to people who wanted to sell Bibles for gain.

  One of the loveliest of many lovely experiences came to me in our hotel in Moscow. In Odessa we had been put by Intourist into a marvelous old nineteenth-century hotel that had once been a bordello for officers! My room still had ancient flowered wallpaper on the walls and a balcony that looked very unsafe. I went out on it only after the power went off while I was reading my evening Scripture, and I wanted to make sure the power failure was just in the hotel and not all of Odessa. It seemed that in our hotel there was the equivalent of a disco with strobe lights, and whenever the strobe lights went on, the power went off.

  In Moscow, where we went from Odessa, we were put up in one of these enormous cinder-block modern Soviet hotels, convenient, reasonably comfortable, but lacking the glamour of the old hotels. On each floor near the elevator was a desk with a key lady. When you needed to go to your room she would give you your key. When you left, you would turn your key in to her.

  The first night we were there I left my key at the desk. I was wearing a Swedish silver cross that Luci Shaw had given me at the time my nine-year-old granddaughter had been hit by a truck and we did not know what the outcome was going to be. (Lena is now one of the wonderful college-age young women who has been sharing my apartment, so the story had a happy ending, and Luci’s cross is very precious to me.)

  The key lady saw the cross and pointed to it. I held it out to her so she could see it. She followed me out to the elevator so she could touch it. Had it not been that very special cross I would have taken it off my neck and given it to her. But I couldn’t. However, I was determined that I would get a cross for her, and at St. Danilov’s monastery I found one I could afford.

  Our last night in Moscow when I went up to bed and put the key down on her desk, I said, “Sprakoine noiche”—peaceful night—and placed the cross, wrapped in paper, beside it, and went on to my room. A moment later there was a knock on the door and she stood there, laughing, crying, pointing to her neck and showing me where she would wear the cross. I embraced her and it was a wonderful affirmation of our mutual faith, a faith that she was just beginning to be allowed to express publicly.

  After such experiences, the failed coup and all that has happened since have not surprised me as much as they would have otherwise. You cannot force people to be atheists.

  Neither can you force people to be Christians. Story does not force. Facts are the merest beginning of my understanding of the Christian story. That there was indeed a man named Jesus who lived around two thousand years ago and who was crucified is about the only fact that we are assured of. That fact is far less important than the story, and that fact will be of little importance unless I have love in my heart and take that love into the world with me wherever I go.

  Truth, love, and joy go together, as do faith, hope, and charity. Faith is for the love deep in our hearts that can cause us to cry out, “He is risen indeed!” in an atheist country. Faith is behind my understanding that this marvelous universe was created by a God of love, a God who is not going to fail with Creation, no matter how much we falter, fail, sin.

  When Jesus came to the disciples after the Resurrection, he did not say, “Why did you all abandon me? Why weren’t you with me when I needed you most?” No. He said, “Peace be with you.” Not one word of recrimination, but words of peace, comfort, and joy.

  What do you suppose would happen to Paul if he came before a calling committee for a church looking for a new minister? He probably wouldn’t make it through the first interview. Maybe we should look more carefully—look for the people God chooses rather than the people we would choose. What this tells me is that I must heed Jesus’ warning: Judge not, that you be not judged. It’s far too easy to see people’s faults, to see their lack of qualifications, rather than to understand that these may be people particularly called by God. Sometimes we are called to make judgments—which is different from judging, from being judgmental—but it’s a deep responsibility and must never be done from fear, but with awe and humility. If we are people of the Resurrection—and as Christians that is what we are called to be—we are people who know that God is perfect love, and Jesus promises us that perfect love casts out fear. When I am afraid, I am failing in my calling as a child of God and of the Resurrection.

  One of the hardest lessons I have to learn is how not to be judgmental about people who are judgmental. When I see how wrong somebody is—how shallow it is to look at the Resurrection as a mere, explainable fact—when I see only the mistakenness of others, then I am blinded to their being children of God, who are just as valued and treasured as are those who more nearly agree with me. James warns us in his Epistle,

  Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

  I try to receive that word each morning and evening as I begin and end the day with Scripture, and this is a saving grace. It helps me to stay close to the God of love who leads us into all truth, and to shun Satan, the imitator, who is very clever at selling us lies, and who often wins us over by flattery. God never flatters, never tells us what good Christians we are and how bad others are. God did not make it easy for Jesus, and el will not make it easy for us, but the joy of the Resurrection transcends all the pain.

  Is it too much to ask that we pray for each other even when we disagree with each other? Perhaps God uses different means with each one of us to further the coming of the kingdom. So let us leave the judgment to God.

  God made us all unique, each one different, no two alike, just as there are no two maple leaves exactly alike, and no two snowflakes exactly alike. We need to learn to glory in both our similarities and our differences. A maple leaf is a maple leaf and not a snowflake, and we are human creatures, each one sharing in our humanness, but each one also uniquely different. As Christians we are alike in being people of the Resurrection, but we are also different in our ways of glorifying God. I grew up in the Episcopal Church with its liturgy and stained-glass windows and formal, beautiful language, and my husband grew up in the Southern Baptist Church with its gospel singing and spontaneous praying, and we both learned from each other’s treasures. By God’s grace it did not separate us, but forged a deeper bond between us, and that is for me a wonderful example, an affirmation that we can be one despite our differences.

  I have learned a great deal about prayer, praying for other people when the need arises, spontaneously and immediately, from my evangelical friends, and this is a lesson I treasure. Some of my friends have learned something about symbols as open windows to God from me and other sacramentalists. We can share with each other without being threatened by each other’s differences because we know that we are united by Christ and that this union is a union of love and not of fear.

  Love makes no false promises. I have known for a long time that God does not interfere with the free will given us human creatures, does not stop a driver from running through a red light.

  One night last spring I had one of my unusual dreams. In it I was one of two small fish in a very large ocean. We were being instructed in life, law, faith, everything, by a very large and wise old shark. When he had finished instructing us, he ate us. When I protested, the shark said, “Not being eaten was never part of the promise.”

  I woke up and lay there thinking that the dream had deep theological import. It was not an unpleasant dream. In fact, I lay there thinking about it quite happily. Indeed, not being eaten never was part of the promise. (It was the first
time I have dreamed that I was a fish!)

  But the story that is part of the promise is revealed to me in the story of Jesus, a story that can be abused and distorted but not destroyed. I think of the faith in Russia that could not be quenched and of the priest in Red Square responding to the atheist speaker with three words only, CHRIST IS RISEN, and the thousands of people responding with deep joy,

  “HE IS RISEN INDEED.”

  * * *

  —

  That is the promise that sustains us.

  When that truck went through the red light on July 28, I was well aware that not being eaten is not part of the promise.

  When I went under anesthesia I willingly said good-bye to this life of seventy-two years full of love and laughter, grief and joy.

  But now I am seventy-three, and I am still here.

  “Did you have a life-after-death experience?” I have been asked.

  No. Not then. I’ve had what seems to me to be the equivalent of those transcendent experiences at other times when I was nowhere near death, as far as I know. The opening out of God’s Creation into something wonderful beyond description has come, for instance, in the back seat of a car at night, holding a sleeping grandbaby as we drove across England. It has come while I was walking home from church on a warm July afternoon in the country, picking wildflowers and simply taking time to be, when suddenly that being became something richer and deeper and more marvelous than can even be remembered once it has faded.

  I am a little disappointed that I’m still the same old me. Have I learned anything?

  I have to believe that I am wiser, that no experience is wasted. And if I haven’t become a saint, at any rate I’m a little more aware of my failings, those things God still wants me to work on and has given me a chance to do so. Evidently there are still a few chapters to write of my story.

  It is still winter. Today has seen a quick flurry of snow followed by blue skies and sunshine. We are moving towards Lent and then the glory of Easter, that most marvelous holy day that radiantly bursts through the limitations of fact. This affirmation shines through the slogging along with the city routine, meetings at church as we try to hold a congregation together while we wait and search for a new rector. After dark I no longer walk the twenty-five blocks home. There are no safe places left on the planet, at least none available to me, but the cities are the most difficult.

  But even at Crosswicks we lock up, mostly against teenagers who don’t have enough to do. Now that the small dairy farms are giving up, one by one, teenagers no longer have chores to keep them busy, and so the opportunities for mischief multiply. It is, however, less frightening than the problems of the city, and on the rare occasions when I can get to Crosswicks for a winter weekend I am free to walk where I like as long as I watch for ice. In New York City I have to watch for muggers as well as ice.

  My apartment faces west, and when I go to bed at night and turn out the lights I can see across the great Hudson River to the lights of New Jersey. I can often see the planes coming in, en route to La Guardia Airport, looking like moving stars, though even when the sky is clear there are few real stars visible because of the city lights that burn all night. I think of the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, about four light years away—about twenty-three million million miles. The rare stars I see may be three hundred light years away, and three thousand light years away, and three million. When we human creatures look up at the night sky we are able to see into the furthest reaches of time.

  Not only time, but space—vast distances. Galaxies trillions of light years across. Suns so enormous that they make our own sun a mere pinprick.

  Time runs more slowly when it is near a massive body like the earth than it does when it is further away. The theory of relativity tells us that there is no unique, absolute time, but instead each one of us has a personal measure of time that depends on where we are and whether or not we are moving.

  As one grows older, why does everything slow down except one’s conception of the passage of time? And even this, as I found out last August in the hospital, can alter. Time, instead of racing, slowed to a crawl. I was told of one procedure that would have to be done before noon, and when I remarked to a nurse that the clock on the wall read eleven-thirty, she said, gently, “Eleven-thirty at night.” I was convinced that so much time had passed that it had to be twelve hours later. This stretching out of time like an old rubber band continued until well after I was recuperating at Crosswicks. Now time is back to its usual gallop.

  I continue my reading in the area of particle physics. Many sentences seem to be in the language of fairy tale. “A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, one of each color. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark; a neutron contains two down and one up.” The words up and down do not mean what we mean by up and down. Quarks also have color, but their color isn’t what we mean by color. This strange world of particle physics is as much tinier than each of us single human beings as galaxies are larger than we are.

  I lie in bed and my heart turns again to the prophecy of Isaiah. See, God promises in this great book, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

  God is a great storyteller, and the Bible is the greatest of all storybooks. The early protagonists of the biblical stories had a directness in their encounters with God that was, perhaps, simpler in their simpler world than it is for us in our far more complex universe. Abraham dared to correct God: “Shall not the Master of the Universe do right?” he demanded. Moses talked with the God of light so intimately that it was contagious—his face shone. And Moses, like many of us, wanted to know what God looks like and was bold enough to ask to see God. God informed Moses that no one can look at the Lord of the Universe and live, and in one of the most extraordinary passages in Scripture, he put Moses in the cleft of a rock and protected him with his hand, and out of the corner of his eye Moses glimpsed God’s “hindquarters” as he passed by.

  I do not believe that we’re meant to take this passage literally. It does emphasize the fact that we human beings with our human limitations cannot see, with our finite eyes, what the infinite Creator looks like. The God whom Moses ultimately saw with Resurrection eyes was different from the God whose hindquarters he saw as God passed by.

  When I sit quietly in my room to read Evening Prayer and Compline I can see pictures of my husband, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle, after whom I am named. They are now part of the Resurrection life. When I see them again I will know them, though perhaps not by sight, as the risen Christ was not known by sight. Their stories are part of my story, and part of the great story that God started in the beginning when God made our universe and called it good.

  God’s story is true. We know that God’s story is true because God gave us his Word—that Word who came to us, as one of us, and died for us, and descended into hell for us, and rose again from the dead for us, and ascended into heaven for us. The Word became the living truth for us, the only truth that can make us free. Part of that freedom is mortification. Part of that freedom is the Cross, for without the Cross there can be no Resurrection.

  When was the last time anybody asked you, “Do I have your word?” Or when was the last time anybody said to you, “I give you my word,” and you knew that you could trust that word, absolutely? How many times in the last few decades have we watched and listened to a political figure on television and heard him say, “I give you my word…” and shortly thereafter that word has been proven false. In the past year alone, how many people have perjured themselves publicly? Sworn on the Bible, given their word, and that word has been a lie? Words of honor are broken casually today, as though they don’t matter.

  Small wonder that when God tells us, “I give you my Word,” few people take him seriously.

  “I give you my Word,” said God, and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace an
d truth.

  God did not break his Word, we did. Caiaphas thought he was doing the right thing. This man Jesus was breaking the law; the Roman overlords were getting uneasy, and if Jesus wasn’t stopped the Romans would set their soldiers against decent, law-abiding Jews. “Certainly,” said Caiaphas (with all the good will in the world), “it is expedient that one man die for the good of the nation.”

  And so Caiaphas, not Jesus, was the one who broke the law, one of those mysterious laws we grope to understand and which govern the stars in their courses.

  I will turn my ear to a proverb, said the psalmist, with the harp I will expound my riddle.

  Balaam, when confronted with two opposing commands (“Curse the children of Israel,” said King Balak. “Bless them,” said the Lord.), according to the King James translation, took up his parable. A parable can be a heavy thing, a burden. I wonder what Simon of Cyrene thought as he picked up Jesus’ cross and bore it? Like Balaam, he took up his parable, and like many of the dark parables it became clear only in the light of the empty cross, the opened tomb.

  I give you my Word, God said, and I believe it. That is what enables me to cry out, in the darkness as well as in the light, He is risen indeed!

  Reader’s Guide

  by Lindsay Lackey

  As I was reading The Rock That Is Higher and writing this discussion guide, an extraordinary event was happening in the world—and indeed, in the universe. SpaceX, a private American company, launched the world’s most technologically advanced rocket, the Falcon Heavy. This rocket is the first major step toward humanity’s colonization of space. It also had a unique payload: a Tesla Roadster in midnight cherry red, containing a spacesuit-clad human figure affectionately named Starman. Now, as you read these words, there is a car in space, orbiting the sun on a path that will intersect with the orbit of Mars.