And It Was Good

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And It Was Good Page 6

by Madeleine L'engle


  So they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the timing was all off; they weren’t ready, and so the result was confusion.

  Ever since that first disastrous mistiming, we have grown in knowledge without being aware that we have not grown equally in spirit. Children are pushed, and themselves push, to grow up earlier and earlier. We have forgotten that time is a creature like us, and that our relation with time is of the utmost importance. Adam and Eve knew too much before they had grown enough to be ready for knowledge. It was something like offering a double martini to a two-year-old; urging a five-year-old to read Freud; giving unleashed electricity to a ten-year-old. Adam and Eve were incapable of assimilating all that they suddenly knew. They saw that they were naked, and in their beautiful, created bodies they were embarrassed, not because they were cold, but because without preparation they suddenly knew more than they could possibly understand. And of course Satan sees pornography everywhere.

  He must have known that when they ate the forbidden fruit they weren’t going to be like God at all. They weren’t even going to be like the human beings they were.

  How was it that the Prince of Light became the Prince of Darkness?

  We are all meant to be light-bearers, but for Lucifer it was not enough to bear the light. Long before the Garden, Lucifer wanted to be the Light, and, in that passionate desire he lost the light by falling into the darkness of hubris. Now there is a touch of it in all of us, for we bear, as a wound, the sins of our ancestors.

  We are not willing to bear the light. We want to be the Light. We want to be God. But what kind of God? Like Lucifer? Full of earthly power and grandeur, able to wave wands and work magic, reaching out greedily for the things of this world?

  This is the god that Jesus rejected when the Holy Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tempted. And so he went not to a royal, temporal throne, but to the cross.

  Adam and Eve did not live long enough to understand that the cross is the gateway to heaven. Most of us don’t understand that, either, and so, like Adam and Eve, we bicker, we quarrel, we alibi, we jostle for power and glory.

  A news letter was distributed on our freighter every morning, and every morning it was bad news, hijackers, assassinations, wars accumulating all over the planet in the name of religion: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Communism…

  There is little difference between communism and some of the extreme sects which demand the total subservience of their followers. Questions are forbidden. Life is easier when no questions are asked, when all behavioral patterns are dictated. Within the structure that restricts rather than the structure that frees we lose our ability to make choices. But if we make no choices, we lose our creativity, we lose touch with real life, we lose more of the image of God, we abdicate our own human nature.

  Granted, the ability to make choices does not automatically mean that we will make the right choices, otherwise what kind of real choice would it be? Since that first wrong choice made by Adam and Eve, when the timing of the human psyche got out of sync, we have continued to make disastrously wrong choices. For all our technocratic advances we have not been able to control terrorism, which grows worse daily. We have not stopped war. We see all around us the results of corruption and greed.

  Sometimes we see in small ways, almost more clearly than in the great, the sick results of the accumulation of wrong choices. When I am in New York I start the day by filling my thermos with coffee, taking my old Irish setter, Timothy, and heading for the Cathedral library. As I walk I say my memorized alphabet of prayers, which helps clear my mind of trivialities. In the morning as I come to the words “…because in the mystery of the Word made flesh…” I look at whomever is nearest me so that I may see in that person, for that moment, Christ. The upper west side of Broadway is a heterogeneous neighbourhood, and I may see a wino, a child going to school, the young, the old, the indigent.

  That morning I saw an old black man carrying a large, plastic bag. When he saw me and my dog, this “Christ” took the plastic bag and began hitting at the dog and me with it. I said, as I might have said to one of my children, “Please, don’t do that,” and then, in a loud voice, without thinking, just saying it, “Christ help you.” At that point his bag broke and bottles flew all over the sidewalk, shattering, and he careened away from the frightened dog and me. I walked on, soothing the quivering setter, my legs stinging from the assault, and a doorman, who was out hosing his sidewalk and who had been about to intervene, asked, “Is he mad?”

  “Out of his mind,” I replied, and walked on, too shaken even to talk. But, no matter how crazed he was, that man had to be Christ for me. If I cannot see Christ in the maimed, in those possessed by devils, I cannot see Christ in the whole and holy. But that was, in its own way, a small act of terrorism. And the greater acts of terrorism increase, too, as all the little gods in South America or South Africa or behind the iron curtain or in our own country play the game of god more and more frantically.

  We can’t undo what Adam and Eve did. We have more knowledge than the human mind can cope with, and we can’t make it go away—and we don’t want it to go away. It is not the knowledge which is the problem, but our misuse of it.

  How ironic it is that we’re still far from having the knowledge of good and evil, and it is more difficult to distinguish between them today than it was in Eden. Daily the nations’ leaders, and we ourselves in smaller ways, are faced with decisions, with choices where there is no clear-cut answer. Should a baby conceived in rape be carried to term or aborted? To the fourteen-year-old girl who has been brutally raped, is the psychological damage greater if she has to carry the child of this horror for nine months, or if it is taken from her body as soon as possible? Abortion is murder, but there are times when the death of the fetus would seem to bring less evil than if it were not sent back to God as quickly as possible.

  Children are always hurt by divorce. Yet sometimes they are more hurt if parents with an unendurable marriage stay together. There are no easy answers. Often we are put in positions where all of our choices are wrong; there is no right thing to do. At that point we must pray that we choose that which is least evil, and then ask for forgiveness for that inevitable evil which we have done.

  Satan cannot make us like God. He promised it in Eden, he promises it now, but he cannot fulfill that promise. He can only make us like himself, carrying hell with him, being, in himself, hell.

  We are not meant to be like Satan; we are meant to be like God, to be God’s creatures, bearing el’s image, making that image visible as we come together in community, the community of friendship, of marriage, of the church—the body of Christ. We are far more than we know, and even when we fall desperately short of that which we were meant to be, we are children by adoption and grace. When Adam and Eve left Eden, they were God’s children. Even bickering, blaming each other, rationalizing and alibiing, they were still God’s children. They could no longer walk and talk with their maker when el walked in the evening in the cool of the Garden; but even though they could not see el, the Lord was there, watching them, caring.

  Knowledge without wisdom can be a terrible thing. Now when Adam and Eve knew each other, they knew that they knew.

  They knew each other, and Eve became pregnant and bore Cain.

  That first birth has always fascinated me. When I was just out of college and living alone in Greenwich Village in New York, struggling to make a living as a writer and making it mostly as a general understudy and assistant stage manager in the theatre, I wrote the following tale:

  THE FIRST BIRTH

  “Adam,” she said, “I’m afraid. Something strange has happened to me.” She lay under the tree, staring up into his eyes. The roots of the tree were old and round, and seemed to be holding her body in strong, impersonal arms.

  Adam dropped to his knees and held out a handful of berries. “Eat. Maybe you’ll feel better then.”

  She sighed deeply in her fear and shook her head a
t the berries. “I’m not hungry. Only thirsty. What I want is some coconut milk. Would you…”

  Still down on his knees Adam looked at her. “You forget,” he said. “There are no coconut trees here. Only there…”

  “But I want coconut milk. If only I had some I think I’d feel better.”

  “It’s not my fault you can’t have coconut milk, you know,” Adam said.

  Tears welled in her eyes; her fingers tightened on the round coarse arm of tree root; she dug her toes into the rough, dry moss. For some reason she did not want Adam to see her cry. After a long time, when she was sure her voice would come steadily, she said, “Something very strange has happened to me. Something I don’t understand. Something we didn’t learn when we had to leave home. Perhaps this is learning about death. I don’t want to learn about death.”

  Adam bent over her, slipping his fingers under the antelope skin she was wearing, and felt her round, distended stomach. “It seems even larger,” he said.

  “Sometimes when I am holding it I feel something moving inside, as though something were striking me. Is this another way of His showing His anger?”

  “No,” Adam said. “I don’t think He would punish us twice for one thing.”

  “Please, Adam,” she whispered, “if I could only have some coconut milk.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll try. I’ll try and slip in somehow. But if I don’t get back you’ll know He has killed me.”

  “Don’t get killed, Adam!” she almost shrieked, clutching at his tunic of elk-hide and pulling him toward her.

  “You can be so unreasonable…” he sighed. “First you want me to go get you coconut milk then you don’t want me to get killed when you know perfectly well what He said about our trying to get back. Well, I’ll try to get the coconut milk and I’ll try not to get killed, and if that doesn’t satisfy you I don’t know what will.” And he got up from his knees, the little bits of moss and twig sticking to them making a fine tracery on his brown skin. But before he had gone more than a few yards he turned and came back. She was lying there with her eyes closed, paying no attention to a dry green leaf of the tree that had floated down and lay tickling against her bare right shoulder. Tears were slowly streaming from under her heavy lids. Again Adam got down onto his knees, bent over her, and pressed his lips against hers. Without opening her eyes she reached out and held him to her, her fingers as strong as though she were clutching him in pain.

  “I hurt,” she whispered.

  Against his tongue he tasted the salt wetness of her tears. Her hair was moist where the tears had rolled unchecked, and he pushed it back from her face, clumsily, trying to dry her cheeks with the palm of his hand, but succeeding only in leaving streaks of dirt. “I’ll hurry,” he said, stood up, and ran off through the trees.

  After the trees came a field of waving yellow grasses and after the grasses a river. This he swam, then clambered up a stony hill. Up, up, until the stones gave way to green clumps of bushes, until the bushes gave way to stones again, and the stones in their place to snow. From the top of the hill where ice cold rock had taken the place of the snow he could see their old home. A pang of desire went into his heart that was similar to the pang he had felt when his lips first touched Eve’s that night they left home; and they had fallen together, rolling over and over on the ground. That had been a feeling that had momentarily made them forget that they must leave their home forever, that had made their life as eternal refugees seem bearable and even preferable to the old. Now as he saw the green peace of home again he forgot everything else, forgot even Eve, forgot everything but the great tidal wave of homesickness that swept over him and threw him down sobbing on the icy grey coldness of rock. The rock was so cold that it froze his sobs in his throat, kept the tears from coming out of his anguished eyes. He pulled himself up onto his knees, stretched his arms out until every muscle in his body was tightened to its utmost extreme, and cried out in a voice so deep that if he had been able to hear it, it would have made him afraid, “Please!” Then with a great struggle he managed to scramble back onto his feet and start running, tumbling, plunging down the mountainside.

  But when he had come near enough to home to feel in his lungs and against his cheek the difference in the air, to smell and almost to taste the difference, he saw, in a great flash of lightning, the angel with the flaming sword at the gates. Then there was a crash of thunder and he was flat on the ground, the dirt grinding against his teeth. When the thunder finally stopped reverberating in his ears he realized that he was in darkness such as he had never known. This was not the darkness he and Eve had found the night they left home and lay in each other’s arms the whole of that first night. This was not a darkness tempered by stars, or even a night of clouds with a moon hidden somewhere in the depths. This was not a night of fireflies darting or of glow worms’ slow light. This was a darkness such as he had never known. If it had not been for the taste of dirt in his mouth he would not have known that it was the familiar earth that he was lying on; he would have thought that this darkness that was so intense somehow had shape and solidity, had the power to hold him up; or perhaps he was falling through it, plunging downwards headlong like an unlighted comet. Only the grating of dirt against his teeth reassured him that the world was still there, that he was still alive. Even if the sun or moon or stars had been near he felt that their light could not possibly have penetrated this darkness that lay upon him with such heaviness that it seemed as though it was breaking his bones, pressing his ribs together.

  Nothing could pierce this darkness but sound, and out of its depths came a voice:

  “Move On!”

  It was a voice of many trumpets, a voice of the singing of stars, of the clashing of armies, and storms of the skies, a voice that was light dispelling the darkness.

  At first as the blackness was slow in lifting he crawled along on his stomach like the snake. Then as he began to see through a thick grey fog, on his hands and knees; and at last as he neared the top of the mountain on his homeward journey and the sky lay streaked with blood on the horizon, he stood and began to run.

  When he got back Eve was still lying under the tree, dirt streaked on her face where he had tried to dry her tears; but she was no longer on her back in languid weariness. She had rolled onto her side; with her hands she was clutching the tree roots and she was writhing back and forth, moaning.

  Adam dropped beside her. He did not tell her of the angel with the flaming sword or the night that had come on him like a thunder clap. “I couldn’t get the coconut milk.”

  But she had forgotten the coconut milk. When she realized that he was there she loosed her grasp on the tree roots and transferred it to him. Once he felt her teeth sink into his shoulder but somehow it didn’t hurt and he felt only a strange satisfaction as he saw the red blood running down his arm. Then her grip slowly relaxed and she lay exhausted in his arms. Her antelope skin was wringing with cold sweat and when he laid his hand on her distended stomach she screamed because the pains were starting again.

  They had never seen a baby before. It lay there between them in a bed shaped by the roots of the tree, and screamed at them angrily. It was very red and wrinkled. Its open mouth from which issued such ferocious yowls held no teeth. The eyelids which were squeezed close shut were seamed with a thousand wrinkles. They knew that it looked older than anything they had ever seen before.

  “This is what we will look like when we are to learn about death,” Adam whispered.

  Eve suddenly snatched up the little starfish and held it to her. She had lost the antelope skin somewhere in the midst of her pains but she was unconscious of this now. She only knew that she must hold this little thing to her and somehow keep it safe.

  “But what is it?” Adam whispered.

  “I don’t know, but you had better go get it a skin to keep it warm at night.”

  Adam stood undecidedly looking down at them. “You don’t hurt anymore?”

  She laughed. �
�I had forgotten all about it!”

  “You had forgotten!” he exclaimed in astonishment. He could never forget the feeling of her teeth sinking into his shoulder, her antelope skin wringing wet with cold, her face dead white with a circle of transparent green about the mouth, the nostrils pinched, the eyes glazed and sightless, and bestial animal sounds issuing from deep in her throat. All this he would remember when he was an old man with white hair.

  “I had forgotten all about it!” she laughed. “And then said in a voice that was tremulous with ecstasy, “But Adam, it was wonderful! I would do it again!”

  He looked at her, disgust and anger rising in him. “You hurt and you forget it,” he said heavily. “Something that it seems to me must be bad you say is good. How can something good come of hurt and badness?”

  She laughed again. “I don’t know, but this is good.”

  He scowled down at the little thing in her arms and strode off. Eve hardly noticed his going. She sat there, leaning back against the trunk of the tree, for she was exhausted with an exhaustion she had never known before, quite different from the feeling she had had the night they left home and set out to find a new place for themselves. This was an exhaustion that was wholly pleasant. She lay back against the tree, and the little screaming starfish in her arms suddenly became quiet and relaxed, drooping against her. She rocked it back and forth, her eyes closed, singing, murmuring over and over again, “Little old age, little old Adam, little knowledge of death,” without realizing that she was using words or tune.

  By and by she became conscious of a hissing. Opening her eyes slowly she saw the serpent, his hood spread, his little forked tongue quivering, stretching toward her. She snatched her child away, but not before the serpent had licked one small hand with its tongue, leaving a long red mark. Terror sprang into her heart.

  “You go away!”

 

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