And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  and I will praise you without ceasing all the days of my life.

  For all the powers of heaven sing your praises,

  and yours is the glory to ages of ages. Amen.

  How wonderful to know that God forgives us when we come to ourselves and understand whatever it is that we have done and ask for forgiveness. Perhaps it is the quality of repentance which counts, not the magnitude of the sin. I must bend the knee of my heart and beg God’s forgiveness as fervently as did the Prodigal Son, though my sins may be far less flamboyant. Perhaps the Sodomites had gone, in this life, beyond repentance. In any case, Lot probably felt that they got no more than their due.

  But that’s the elder brother syndrome. And it’s a disease, a contagious disease.

  So there’s no avoiding my bumping headlong into the accusation of universalism.

  And I am not, repeat, am not a universalist.

  I used to think, when people worried about whether or not I am a universalist, that a universalist was someone who believes that Jesus is good, and Buddha is good, and Mohammed is good, and that all ways to Heaven are equal, and I wondered where on earth they had got this odd idea about me.

  It took me nearly five years to figure this out. As far as I can gather, universalism means that all of a sudden, and for no particular reason, God is going to wave a magic wand, and say, “Okay, everybody, out of hell. Home free.”

  Now that I know what it means, I can, and do, reply, “No, I am certainly not a universalist. That plays trivially with free will.” And about God’s great and terrible gift of free will I feel very strongly indeed.

  At one southern university one young man, who had asked the inevitable question, pushed me further. “But you do seem to indicate, in your writing, that you believe in God’s forgiveness?”

  That seemed to me an extraordinary question, considering that it came from a student in a Christian college.

  Fortunately, he qualified it. “You seem to believe that ultimately God is going to forgive everybody?”

  I said, “I don’t believe that God is going to fail with el’s creation. I don’t worship a failing God. Do you want God to fail?”

  He said, “But there has to be absolute justice.”

  “You’re maybe nineteen or twenty years old. When you die, is that what you want—absolute justice? Don’t you want the teeniest, weeniest bit of mercy? Me, I want lots and lots of mercy. Don’t you feel that you’re going to need any mercy at all?”

  That had not occurred to him. So he started to quote Scripture. I stopped him. “I can quote Scripture, too. Let’s start with Ezekiel. In the thirty-third chapter, the tenth verse, Ezekiel says:

  ‘Son of man, say to the House of Israel, “You are continually saying: Our sins and crimes weigh heavily on us; we are wasting away because of them. How are we to go on living?” Say to them, “As I live—it is the Lord who speaks—I take pleasure, not in the death of a wicked man, but in the turning back of a wicked man who changes his ways to win life. Come back, come back from your evil ways. Why are you so anxious to die, House of Israel?”

  ‘And you, son of man, say to the members of your nation, “The integrity of an upright man will not save him once he has chosen to sin; the wickedness of a wicked man will no longer condemn him once he renounces his wickedness….All his precious sins will no longer be remembered….

  ‘The members of your nation object: “What the Lord does is unjust;” but it is what you do that is unjust. When an upright man renounces his integrity and commits sin, he dies for it. And when a wicked man renounces his wickedness and does what is lawful and right, because of this he lives.’ ”

  These must have been comfortable words to Paul, who surely would not have done well when judged by men’s standards of absolute justice. He had cheered on the stoning of Stephen; he had caused many Christians to be put to death. He had a great deal of blood on his hands. But he repented. He turned around completely, and served the Lord he had been denying and denouncing.

  So I suggested to the young man that he go to Scripture, to Genesis 1, and read straight through to the end of John’s revelation, and set down on a pad all that speaks of God’s mercy and loving forgiveness versus all that shows el’s anger and wrath, and see which came out most clearly. The sulkiness of the elder brother is pointed out to us again and again as being the opposite of God’s loving forgiveness.

  I don’t know when or how it is going to happen, but don’t give up on me: God is not finished with me yet. Nor with you. Nor—whether we like it or not, for we have hard hearts—the Sodomites. Nor any part of creation. For we are God’s, a part of creation, a part of that which God made and called good. The story of Adam and Eve, and all the stories which follow, show us what we have done to that good, fouled and desecrated it; but that which God created is good, and, as John points out:

  Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love. God’s love for us was revealed when God sent the world his only Son so that we could have life through him; this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.

  God’s love is not easy for us elder brothers to accept. A party for the sinner! Horrors!

  When I do something which is less than God expects of me, I am miserable. Accepting that I have done wrong is excruciatingly painful. Often it is even more difficult for me to forgive myself than it is to accept God’s forgiveness for me. My own acknowledgment of my wrongdoing is the most difficult punishment possible. Repentance is neither easy nor cheap. It hurts. It costs us all our pride and self-will. It means letting go completely and handing ourselves back to God. To hand God our sins is far more difficult than any other kind of prayer, and yet it is one of the most important parts of prayer. And when I can completely let it go, let God take it, and redeem it, and transform it, then I, too, am ready for a party!

  It is difficult to express a seriously thought-out point of view in an area where there are no final answers, without appearing to make a final answer, a definitive and lasting judgment. No one of us can read the mind of God. I know only that through a lifetime of reading and rereading Scripture I have come to believe that “mercy and truth have kissed each other” and that God’s love is beyond our puny comprehension.

  Job asked God the finite questions we all ask, and God replied,

  “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you understand it. Who measured it out, and stretched the line upon it? Where are the foundations of the earth? Who laid the cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all God’s children shouted for joy?”

  That was not the answer Job was looking for, but it was the answer God gave.

  If eternal damnation is part of our mindset, it is far too easy to wonder if part of the joy of the saved in heaven is looking down on the tortures of the damned. How unlike the shepherd who left the ninety-nine saved sheep and went in search of the single one who was lost!

  Most of the passages in the New Testament which imply eternal damnation (Dives and Lazarus, the wheat and the tares) are in parables, and parables are stories. Jesus often used hyperbole when he wanted to make a point. Are we to believe that someone actually had a plank of wood in his eyes, or that Jesus really recommended the dishonest wheeling and dealing of the unjust steward? Did he really expect a father to consider giving a scorpion instead of an egg to his child? “But if you, who are only a human father, are good to your children, how much more loving is the heavenly Father!”

  Jesus did not speak in the language of proof, but in the language of story. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. But if we examine human perception of God as it is revealed, bit by bit, through Scripture, the unqualified love of the Creator for creation and for all of us creatures is paramount. Is it unfair for me to equate the mind that looks for porn with the mind that looks for damnation? I’d much rather look for wonder and salvation! Is Gandhi to be excluded
from heaven because he never made a formal commitment to Christ? Gandhi, who was thrown out of a Christian church because his skin was not the “right” colour? We have much to answer for, we Christians, and excluding part of God’s family from God’s church is a big problem. How do we solve it?

  Jesus walked and talked with those who, like Gandhi, were considered not quite good enough for the establishment of his day: the Samaritans, the wretchedly poor and ill, fallen women, lepers. It was of such “disqualified” people that Jesus said, “I have come not to heal those who are well, but those who are ill.”

  I am a flawed human being in need of this healing. I dread to think what I would be like if I felt much more saved than other people (often people far better than I, but who have not accepted Christ), that I could think I had a greater right to heaven than they. And those who are worse. I have never raped, murdered, committed adultery, the more spectacular sins. I think of God’s words to Job, to Jonah. I think of the Good Shepherd who cannot rest until he has found the one lost sheep. I think of the Prodigal Son who ultimately repented of his folly, of his own free will. Perhaps he repented only because he was starving and thought of all the food his father’s servants had to eat, but repent he did, and his father threw a party, and his elder brother stamped his foot and sulked because this repentant sinner was admitted to heaven.

  Knowing that we cannot define God, why do we try to put limits on el? How can we limit el’s love? It is we who are limited, not God. I cannot believe that God’s unlimited love (and that limitlessness is shown in the incarnation), will not outlast all our rebellion and anger and independence and brutality and indifference and hubris and all that keeps us from turning to him.

  I suggest Jonah as bedtime reading every night for a month or so. Jonah doesn’t want God to save the enemy, the Ninevites, who aren’t on “our side,” even if they repent of their sins. And God reminds Jonah that Jonah spared a worm, so why should el not spare the Ninevites who do not know their left hand from their right, and also much cattle?

  —

  After the destruction of Sodom nobody is ready for a party. The scene is grim indeed. And then follows a passage so shocking it is often deleted, for public reading. Lot and his daughters

  moved up into the hills and lived in a cave. The elder daughter said to her sister, “Our father is getting old, and there are no men in the whole world to marry us so that we can have children. Come on, let’s make our father drunk, so that we can sleep with him and have children by him.”

  That’s the Good News Bible. The King James Version has it:

  “Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father.”

  “Preserving the seed” is closer to the intent of the thinking of the time. At moments of devastation the old taboos break down. The instinct for survival, for the propagation of the species, is stronger than the taboo. In our generation we remember the plane which crashed in the snow, high up in the Andes; the starving survivors ultimately had to eat the bodies of their dead companions to avoid starvation. Again, under such extreme circumstances the taboo no longer held.

  So

  That night Lot’s daughters gave him wine to drink, and the older daughter had intercourse with him. But he was so drunk that he didn’t know it.

  I was in Covington, Louisiana, while I was reading about Lot and meditating upon his story, so I’ll stay with the Bible in my room there, the Good News Bible, for a while.

  The next day the elder daughter said to her sister, “I slept with him last night. Now let’s make him drunk again tonight, and you sleep with him. Then each of us will have a child by our father.”

  Pragmatic, practical young women, like their great-uncle Abraham. They both had sons, who became the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, and we remember the Moabites because of the story of Ruth, who was from Moab, and through whom Jesus’ genealogy is traced.

  But where are the Moabites now? War. Holocaust. Genocide. What has happened to the Moabites and the Ammonites, the Hittites and the Amalakites? Gone, gone without a trace; a sad reminder that throughout earth’s history civilizations rise and fall. Ozymandias is an example of the consequence of human pride.

  —

  One of the most fascinating aspects of reading the Old Testament is to see the perception of God changing throughout the ages, so that the Abba to whom Jesus prayed is seen as different from the tribal god who helped Israel’s kings destroy entire nations and peoples in order to give the land to the Israelites. (Are most wars over land boundaries?)

  God’s anger with David for not killing everybody has always bothered me, and the explanation that it was necessary to keep the children of Israel from worshiping the gods of the enemy has never seemed quite satisfactory. Then I remember that people were then, as now, struggling with finite minds to comprehend an infinite God. Anything we can say about God is going to be inadequate, a groping for truths beyond our limited capacities.

  And (paradox again) I believe in the Bible as the living Word of God. But this faith involves an acceptance that the Bible is not static, that at different times the living Word can speak in different ways to different ears, and that even the Bible itself can never fully express or manifest the glory of the Creator. That does not make it any less the living Word. It is because it lives that it moves.

  Listen: This is the song of the great prophet, Moses:

  The Lord is a mighty warrior;

  The chariots of Pharaoh and his army has he hurled into the sea;

  the finest of those who bear armour have been drowned in the Red Sea.

  The fathomless deep has overwhelmed them; they sank into the depths like a stone.

  Your right hand, O Lord, is glorious in might; your right hand, O Lord, has overthrown the enemy.

  You stretched forth your right hand; the earth swallowed them up.

  “Is that vengeful God the Lord whom Jesus called Abba, and was faithful to?” I was asked.

  Well, the song of triumph over the death of enemies, the praise to the Lord for killing our oppressors, upset even the oppressed, the children of Israel who were so ill-treated by Pharaoh and the Egyptians.

  And, as usual, when something is beyond us, we try to look for understanding in story. This one comes, I think, out of the Hassidic tradition, but it says everything that needs to be said about the Song of Moses:

  The Israelites flee Egypt, and the waters of the Red Sea open, and they go through on dry land, and are safe on the other side. The Egyptians in their chariots pursue them, and dash into the open path where the waters have rolled back, and as soon as they are all in the sea, the waters close over them, and they all drown.

  And in heaven, joyful at the narrow escape of the Jewish people, the angels start to sing. And God stops them, saying:

  “How can you sing when my children are dying?”

  —

  We must try to keep our receivers tuned finely so that we will not drown out revelation with static, and thus set our perception of God in concrete, unable to change.

  The revelation given me when the words, “My religion is subject to change without notice,” came unbidden from my lips, was not trivial. For this openness is what we should practice, with religion as well as science. Abraham and Sarah lived with this childlike ability to change, to leave the known, to go out into the wilderness, and God didn’t give them much notice.

  The discoveries of the quantum physicists have done nothing to change the nature of the universe, but they have changed, radically, our way of perceiving the universe. There is nothing static. We change each other simply by observing each other. We are all part of something far greater than we can begin to comprehend, and to be part of the changing melody and the complexity of the dance is part of our vocation as co-creators.

  In both Old and New Testaments, the institution of slavery is taken for granted. Now we could consider it intolerable in God’s eyes, so far has our perception of God chan
ged. We have moved from seeing God as one who favours one part of creation over the rest of it, to a God who is Lord of all.

  In this century we are moving from an impassible God who cannot suffer to an Abba who shares all our pain with us, who hurts when we hurt, who not only notes but feels the fall of every sparrow. And who steadily and gently guides us to a wider understanding of love.

  As our love for our Maker grows, so does our love for each other. In our society we can no longer tolerate having indentured servants. The idea of the “white man’s burden” seems arrogant and self-serving, though there are still many who treat people of other races not only as inferiors, but as less important in God’s eyes than they themselves are. We know that greed makes the skies and the seas more polluted than they need be, though we know how to clean up our wastes, since we have brought a dead Great Lake and the great Hudson River back to life. Why do things have to reach a desperate state before we do anything about them? In many ways we are as inturned and shortsighted as the captains and crews of the great whaling ships, though we see the wrong they did better than we see our own wrongdoing. We can guess that later generations will see our sins more clearly than they see their own. We all get trapped in chronology.

  But in God’s time, in kairos, all is now, is present. Part of the joy of silence, of meditation and contemplation, is to touch on this is-ness. In God’s mind, nothing is lost. All acts of love are eternally present. And all that is not love can be redeemed and changed by that Love which created all.

  —

  Sometimes we human beings are allowed to touch on kairos.

  While I was in Covington, reading the story of Lot, then moving on to Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, I was given one of these revelations of divine love. It came in a dream, the kind I call a Special Dream.

  There are, by and large, three kinds of dreams. There is the dream which is easy to translate, which comes from something we have eaten, or some recent event. Then there is the regular dream, which is more difficult to understand. Dreams do have messages for us, which we do well to take seriously, but I don’t want to get faddish about them. If I wake from a dream in the night and think it may have something to say to me, I ask my subconscious mind to surface it for me in the morning, and it usually does.